by Iyer, Pico
You have ended up, you may well imagine, in some wild bazaar of the sacred and the profane. Notices around town advertise “Traditional Tibetan Universal Massage,” remind you that “Harmonising with the Moon Courses Are Taking Place at House Om Tara,” ask for news of a man from near Seattle who’s gone missing. The British alighted on Dharamsala in 1849 and set up the little Anglican church, the army cantonment, the cottages called Ivanhoe and Eagle’s Nest, which are still the first things you see if you arrive by bus. But an earthquake destroyed the settlement in 1905, and hardly had it begun to recover than Partition, in 1947, sent up to 70 percent of its people away. McLeod Ganj, the area the Tibetans have settled, at fifty-four hundred feet, a few miles above the everyday little Indian town of Dharamsala, was a ghost town when the Dalai Lama and his family arrived here in 1960, and to this day many people believe that Prime Minister Nehru offered it to the exiled Tibetans as a way to put them out of view, only three hundred miles from Delhi on the map but, in practice, tucked away in another universe.
The town that has arisen around the Tibetan leader has the feeling, therefore, like so much in the Tibetan situation, of an inner diagram or an extended symbol. You hear that inscriptions mentioning a Buddhist monastery from more than two thousand years ago have been found in the Kangra Valley below; when the Chinese traveler Hsuan Tsang passed through in the year 635, he reported seeing fifty monasteries, with two thousand monks in them. You learn that the very word “Dharamsala” means, too fittingly, “a place of shelter,” often for pilgrims. You gather that the house where the Dalai Lama first lived when he arrived here, alert for visitations of bears and leopards and deer, is now, too perfectly, a “mountaineering institute.” But what hits you most about this highly improvised, unorthodox assemblage of houses and hopes is that it seems to stand for so much else. Foreigners like to call it “Little Lhasa” and come here in search of the Tibetan wisdom that had never been available to the world till it came out of China in 1959 and landed in this neglected area. Tibetans struggle across the Himalayas and settle here because it is the home of their beloved leader and, therefore, the home of their hearts, the next best thing until Tibet itself can be recovered. Indian holiday makers and honeymooners flock into the flimsy, many-storied, wedding-cake new Indian hotels perched on slopes because they have heard it is a cool place where they can get a whiff of both West and East.
Dharamsala, built, in effect, by a man who is talking about the impermanence of everything and the folly of desire, can seem very much like a community founded on longing, on homesickness and restlessness and dreams. The Tibetans who live here to some degree wish, more than anything, that, like a sand mandala, it can be dissolved and they can return to the place of which it is a mere replica; many foreigners who visit are exiles of a deeper kind who hope to make a home in this foreign culture, surrounded by customs that are not their own. The Tibetans look to the Westerners, often, as emissaries from the land of abundance and freedom they dream of; the Westerners gather around the Tibetans to hear about antiquity and mysticism.
To get almost anywhere in Dharamsala, you have to scramble up steep, steep slopes made of nothing but mud and jagged rocks and cow dung, so dark after nightfall that even a flashlight or small candle does not prevent you from falling on your face or lurching suddenly into a ditch. Pathways twist around the side of mountains, over pieces of industrial piping, through small forests where, it is whispered, women often get attacked or confronted by exhibitionists. And the weather changes precipitously, as if, in the classic Buddhist metaphor, standing for the mind (different, shifting clouds in front, and deep blue sky always within).
Dharamsala is the single rainiest spot in all of monsoonal India, and in the summer it is notoriously sludgy, the unstinting downpours turning everything into a damp cave of sorts; in winter, snow and ice lie on the ground, and the little lanes are dark and forlorn for much of the day. And then, out of nowhere, the sun begins to shine and picks out the marigolds outside the bright houses, the flowering honeysuckle in the spring, the gold turrets and yellow walls of the temples set on hillsides and in valleys, and you can easily feel as if you have landed in a realm of enchantment.
The Tibetans are an outdoors people, coming from a land where temperatures may differ by forty degrees Fahrenheit in the shadows and under the high Himalayan sun. They love to congregate on lawns for picnics, to climb up to their rooftops, to sit on terraces; they decorate their homes and temples in festive, fresh shades of gold and white and blue. Dogs yap from the open spaces of the roofs, nuns sit in the sunlight shaving one another’s heads or studying sutras, games of basketball start up in one of the settlement’s many courts. Anything seems possible in the clarifying mountain light.
Optimists note that the sun always breaks through again, especially in April, May, and October, and few places are better suited to the light than these mountain settlements of long views and open space. Pessimists note that every breakthrough of the sun—of course—is followed, out of nowhere, by another torrential downpour that knocks out all the lights across the valley, renders phones mute, and takes you, in effect, back to a world that seems medieval. Both notice that getting anywhere here—to the temple, post office, or meditation center—involves the conquest of a lot of obstacles.
Whenever I am staying in Dharamsala, I wake up just before dawn and go out into the blue-black night, the only sound at that hour wild dogs barking along the muddy lanes, and perhaps a few domestic dogs answering their barks from indoors. Very few lights are visible in the Dharamsala night, and what one feels more than houses are the presences of the mountains above, the untamed nature of the entire region. A few figures will be proceeding along the main road past the central temple already, and on some days I follow along with them, walking past the entrance to that temple and down to a path that cuts between the pines. The people all around me in the dark are generally the same I’d see in Lhasa—small Tibetan women with gray braids and weathered faces, toothless smiles, their brothers or husbands beside them in strong mountain gear—all of them spinning prayer wheels and murmuring constantly as they take the Lingkhor, or roughly mile-long pilgrims’ path, around the hill on which the Dalai Lama lives.
Along the tiny path saddhus are sometimes sitting, Indian holy men in tangerine robes, looking for alms, and a man seated in a little makeshift cave carving mani stones, or small rocks on which auspicious messages and prayers are painted in yellow and white and orange. Cows sometimes drift up from the trees below, and after light has begun to show above the mountains, white butterflies twirl in the brightening air. In one place, the hill leading up to where the Dalai Lama sleeps (and now is meditating) is crisscrossed with rows of prayer flags, generating their good wishes into the increasingly blue skies; juniper is being burned inside two large, kiva-like white stupas, and three monks are sitting in a row outside a little chapel full of candles, reciting prayers for the Dalai Lama’s long life.
In Lhasa, three such pilgrimage circuits traversed the holy places of the city, and here in exile the Tibetans who remember Tibet are doing what they can to keep the old rites going. Around the temple itself, on the top of the hill, monks and old men and lots of Tibetan kids are circumambulating along a smaller circuit, chatting with friends as they go, reciting sutras, hardly stopping, as the tourists do, to admire the new light catching the windows of the hotels along the ridge. And every Wednesday, as well as every day when the Dalai Lama is not in town, the petitioners walking along the outside circuit, perhaps sixty of them in all, stop by the stupa, and the men sit down and join in with the chants, for an hour or longer, and then everyone gets up and stands in a line, facing the hill and the leader’s house, and sings the country’s national anthem. Then they all stand still and quietly recite a prayer for the Dalai Lama’s long life and good health, before throwing tsampa, or Tibetan barley, up into the sky, to bring health and blessings to their leader.
As I walk along this course early one morning, I notice, pressed amon
g the stones, not far from where someone has had the U.N. resolutions about Tibet from forty years ago painted onto mani stones, a little picture, the size of a place mat, of the Potala Palace in Lhasa. It is already wrinkled, and the wind flaps it this way and that as it flutters between the rocks. The next day, when I go, it is still there, but more crumpled still. The next day, I wonder if it will tear.
Up above, in the main temple, where young monks debate, is another painting of the former home of the Dalai Lama, the classic centerpiece of Tibet, in all its glory, sitting above the tumbling, whitewashed town of Tibetan Lhasa. In the antechamber to the Dalai Lama’s audience room, there is, more realistically, a picture of Lhasa today, in which the Potala hovers, contextless, among the shopping malls and nightclubs and Jeans West outlets of a high-rising Chinese town.
As you begin to walk around Dharamsala and to grow familiar with its features, a pattern slowly emerges from the mess of scrambly, irregular paths that zigzag crazily over rough slopes and between the pines and around ridges that look down on monasteries. You realize that there is, in fact, an order, a vision, hiding out inside the seeming chaos, which comes to float above it a little like the classic Buddhist image of the lotus in the mud. The official center of the settlement, the first sight most visitors come across, is a dusty, bleary little square, just large enough for a filthy bus to drop off passengers, turn around, and then head down the hill again into the plains, a perfect, cacophonous model of the muddle of streets, pizza parlors, low-speed Internet caves, souvenir shops, and bookstores squeezed into every last corner and back alleyway of the spaced-out village. But as you stand amid this crush of enticements and desperate hopes, you can see that you are at the center of a mandala of sorts (though not, these days, the swirling mandala of monks that Thomas Merton registered).
Six little roads splay out from the clamorous little square. If you follow one of them, up through the pine forests, you come to a lake and, above it, the Tibetan Children’s Village, a sprawling compound of houses and buildings that stands as the formal center of Tibetan education today, the reason many children come all the way from Tibet in order to be schooled in their traditional culture. If you take the next road up, you arrive at the gold-roofed temple, as it seems, that houses the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, where classical Tibetan folk opera and dance—as well as modern theater—are taught and performed to keep these forms alive. The next road along will take you to a waterfall, past a Hindu temple, and to a clump of houses scattered across the hills where global villagers enjoy a homemade Shangri-La amid some German bakeries and wood-fire pizza joints.
A fourth road, if followed along for fifteen or twenty minutes, will take you to the center of official Tibet lore, the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, where many of Tibet’s old books and treasures reside amid the higgledy-piggledy little offices that represent the government in exile (with the state oracle’s temple at one side of the cluster). Not far away is the Tibetan Medical and Astrological Institute. And another road will lead in ten minutes to the Dalai Lama’s own house; the central Thekchen Choeling temple beside it; his own private Namgyal temple, with 175 monks inside it, as it used to be around him in the Potala Palace; and his Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, housing some of Tibetan Buddhism’s greatest philosophical masters, who thrash out the nature of being in something akin to an Institute of Advanced Studies in the West.
The Dalai Lama sits, metaphorically, at the center of the settlement, you soon see, “His Holiness” coming up in almost every conversation, his face beaming down from even the grocery shops of Indians and the carpet emporia of Kashmiris. He is very much the presence around which everything turns. And when you get off the bus into the clangor of competing dreams (the Eagles’ “Lyin’ Eyes” floating down from the McLlo café above you, tapes and cakes offered at the Rajneesh shop a few feet away, one of Dharamsala’s many dirty little dives offering Diary of a Mad Black Woman and Be Cool on its DVD screen, in a tiny, ill-smelling dark room, and Nowrojee General Merchants, the one store here since 1860, still selling Andrews Liver Salt and Pears’ soap, as if Lord Curzon was on his way), you realize that this is the rare city that has come up from scratch, according to a plan.
Almost as soon as he came into exile, in 1959, the Dalai Lama seized the chance to get rid of much of the red tape and serfdom that had beset Tibet in the past, and treating his new home as a tabula rasa on which to sketch a kind of new, improved Tibet—a Tibet 2.0, it can sometimes seem—that would draw upon what was best in its past, jettison the rest, and, most important, learn from its mistakes by schooling itself in the ways of the world (and of the modern, changing world at that). He set up a nursery school in his first year in exile (his commitment always to the future, which can be changed, and not to the past, which cannot), and after a while the policy was introduced that all children in exiled Tibet’s elaborate network of schools would take classes in Tibetan till the age of ten or so, so they would be deeply connected with their original source, and then English thereafter, so they would be in tune with the wider world.
He oversaw the formation of a global network of settlements and monasteries and tried to urge his monks to put behind them the often poisonous animosities and rivalries that contributed, many believe, to Tibet’s downfall in the past (different regions and different Buddhist schools quarreling with one another or only protecting their own, instead of presenting a united front to resist Chinese or other intruders). He began slowly, as intimated earlier, to give women, for example, opportunities they had not had before (to the point where nuns in Dharamsala can now earn doctoral degrees and are allowed to become abbots, as they never could in Tibet, and a woman was appointed for the first time to the Cabinet). And, most of all, he started trying to give up power so that his people would (true to Buddhist philosophy) rule themselves. The very year he arrived in Dharamsala, he began drafting a charter for a new democratic Tibet, and even when Thomas Merton met him, forty years ago, he was saying that he wished he had more time for the spiritual, not the political, side of his life.
The Assembly of Tibetan People’s Deputies was set up, roughly along the lines of the House of Commons, with three men and one woman from every province of Tibet, a representative from each of the main four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, and a representative of the Bon religion, as well as one person designated by the Dalai Lama as a spokesman of the arts and sciences. In 1990 he pushed the democratic process further by extending the Assembly to forty-six members, and in 2001 Tibetans enjoyed the first democratic election in their history as exiles in thirty-seven countries voted for a new prime minister to be the official head of their aspirations, choosing the gentle scholar-monk Samdhong Rinpoche. (In practice, of course, much of this is notional, since the Dalai Lama remains, quite literally, a god for the Tibetans, beyond reproach and challenge, and his prime minister can be no more, really, than his agent in the assembly of people’s deputies.)
Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama seemed to be saying, would be the center of a new kind of experiment. So long as Tibetans could not enjoy freedom of worship or speech or movement in Tibet itself, they would create a new Tibet around the world, upgraded in certain ways and to some extent linked not by common soil but common purposes, a community of vision. Creating new forms as he went along, he was building up, out of necessity, a kind of virtual Tibet, a new global settlement in which people would be gathered not around a single campfire or village green but around shared hopes and a linked sense of responsibility. If it achieved anything at all, this experiment could offer a new, more positive way of thinking about their destinies for the Palestinians, the Kurds, the Uighurs, and the ever increasing number of exile groups around the world who do not have a charismatic leader and a colorful history to recommend them to the world’s attention. In a way, propelled by calamity—having had to run out of the burning house that was his homeland—the Dalai Lama was suggesting that community and neighborhood could, even should, be constructed inwardly.
&
nbsp; Centered in a ramshackle collection of huts remote even by Indian standards, joining together a group of people (no more than 150,000 worldwide) smaller than the citizenry of a typical Los Angeles suburb, Tibet in exile can at best only whisper a new possibility to the world, though the outsized popularity of its leader and the longtime talismanic appeal of the culture itself have given it a much larger appeal than it would have otherwise. The Dalai Lama’s first priority always has been (and will continue to be, if there is another Dalai Lama) the protection of his people in Tibet, who still represent 98 percent of the Tibetans in existence, and who cannot, yet, participate in his democratic experiment at all. But so long as he cannot get to them, he will bring Tibet into the world and offer a Buddhist vision of policy making: reform Tibet by reforming the inner heart of Tibet.
