by John Avedon
Wishing to assist East Pakistan in a bid for secession from its western twin, New Delhi settled on 22 as the perfect unit for the job. It was not a part of the regular army, and its shadowy existence and unique racial makeup provided perfect cover for a covert attack. Roughly 5,000 troops—half the force—were committed to the operation, an elite corps which opened the Bangladesh war with a surprise attack on a key Pakistani base. Labeled by the Indian press Mukti Bahini or Freedom Fighters, 22 went on to capture the city of Chittagong, Pakistan’s main forward position, earning a reputation in the upper echelons of India’s defense establishment as being among the country’s best troops. Thereafter, 22 returned to its bases. During the 1977 election that ended the Republic’s state of emergency, it received a new notoriety as Indira Gandhi’s “own force.” As was later revealed, the Congress Party leader planned to rely on its troops to suppress opposition party riots if they developed. She also kept an AN12 aircraft on constant alert at the SFF paratrooper base, Sarsawa, with instructions to fly her to Mauritius if her life was threatened. Following the Janata Party victory, 22’s prize anti-terrorist squad was posted to duty at Palam Airport in New Delhi. The rest of the Special Frontier Force, however, remained on its high-altitude bases helpless as before, unable to fulfill its ultimate mission.
THE GUERRILLAS’ DEMISE, combined with 22’s ineffectuality, reinforced the exile youths’ conviction that the fight for Tibet had devolved on them. “We realized that independence wouldn’t come on a plate,” said Tempa Tsering, describing the Youth Congress’s projected turn to terrorism. “It had to be fought for and won. In a fight, whether we would succeed or not was a different question. But at least we had to be prepared. If you aren’t ready, even if an opportunity arises, you can’t seize it.” In a series of meetings Tempa and the other members of Centrex discussed two potential scenarios, either of which, they believed, could serve as a suitable platform for regaining Tibet: war between China and India or the Soviet Union, or an internal collapse on the mainland itself, such as had occurred in 1911. The potential for the first existed almost daily, there having been numerous volatile incidents on both the Sino-Soviet and Sino-Indian borders. With Moscow tied to New Delhi against Peking and Islamabad in the current Central Asian power configuration, there was a direct link between the struggle of the two Communist giants, that of India and Pakistan and the question of Tibetan independence. The PRC’s collapse from internal division was equally plausible as China’s Communists were apparently helplessly bound to a cycle of devastating power struggles such as those that had erupted following the Hundred Flowers Movement, the Great Leap Forward and during the decade-long Cultural Revolution.
Late in 1977, the Youth Congress laid plans to develop a freedom-fighting wing. While encouraging all graduates of the Tibetan schools to enlist for a tour of duty in the Special Frontier Force, it resolved that an elite group of Congress militants should engage directly in terrorist activities against Chinese embassies and personnel abroad. Arrangements for their training, to be conducted under the guise of a mountaineering institute, were explored. “From the moment Yasir Arafat was invited to the UN and given a standing ovation, we had begun debating the use of terrorism,” said Tempa. “It was clear the world had come to this: you kill and commit destruction and you are listened to. You appeal for justice for your people and you are ignored. When we finally went ahead with the plans, though, it was only on a very selective basis. This type of action is contrary to the Tibetan character. So to begin with, we carefully sought to determine whether or not even the training itself would produce negative results among our young people.”
TYC instruction in guerrilla warfare, using wooden guns manufactured in settlement workshops, got underway by early 1978. Morning calisthenics programs were organized, bringing young men and women alike into the fields, wearing “Fight for Tibet” T-shirts. Carefully screened groups were given more sophisticated instruction for extended periods in the jungles surrounding the larger settlements. The Youth Congress also expanded its existing ties with the underground groups in Tibet, while publicly, at least, welcoming the possibility of non-binding support from Moscow, whose overtures to Tibetan exiles had increased since the mid-sixties. But the question of violence, outside the setting of an actual war, remained a delicate point for most Tibetans, putting a brake on the Congress’s efforts. As the Dalai Lama, whose leadership the Youth Congress charter swore to uphold, stated: “In theory violence and religious views can be combined, but only if a person’s motivation, as well as the result of his actions, are solely for the benefit of the majority of the people. Under these circumstances and if there is no other alternative, then it is permissible. Now, regarding Tibet, I believe that a militant attitude is helpful for maintaining morale among our youth, but a military movement itself is not feasible. It would be suicidal.”
By the late 1970s the Dalai Lama’s own plans for Tibetan independence had in many respects already ripened. Refugee society was thriving. Economically, culturally and politically—it had matured into a cohesive whole, precisely the situation he had hoped to create two decades earlier. No longer able to count on the exiles’ disintegration, Peking, he was confident, would soon be forced to terms. Convinced that success was near, the Dalai Lama set about reawakening international interest in Tibet through a series of trips across Asia and the West. Undertaken for religious purposes (hundreds of Tibetan Buddhist center having cropped up around the world during the 1970s), the trips were also guaranteed to affect China which, since the early 1960s had been demonstrably sensitive to international opinion on the legitimacy of its occupation. And as the liberalization following Mao Zedong’s death took root and developed novel Chinese initiatives in foreign affairs, Dharamsala became—if as yet for no concrete reason—newly optimistic.
Tempa’s beliefs also underwent change. In 1978, after four years in the Information Office, he was promoted to the post of deputy secretary. Three years later, in the spring of 1981, he suddenly received word to report for duty at Thekchen Chöling, the Dalai Lama’s residence. The chief secretary of the foreign wing of the Dalai Lama’s private office had to leave his post temporarily and Tempa had been chosen to fill it. “When I first heard this news I was worried that I was too inexperienced to work in such a high position. I didn’t have the confidence,” said Tempa. “But then I considered carefully. For my whole life my only hope has been to one day go back to an independent Tibet. This is the one thing for which I’ve struggled. Naturally, the closer you are to His Holiness, the better you’d feel. But whatever I’m doing I know I am serving him and my people. So in this respect I decided it doesn’t make very much difference, and I could take the change in a normal way. But about my inexperience, I was quite concerned.”
Within the year Tempa was wholly absorbed in being one of the Dalai Lama’s closest assistants. Placed in charge of all correspondence between the private office and non-Tibetan world, he also translated each afternoon at the Dalai Lama’s regular round of audiences with foreigners, while overseeing numerous projects with the government’s Foreign Offices. At the age of 32 he looked back from his new position on his time in India. Recalling the death of his younger sister in the mountains above Bhutan, his second sister’s demise from dysentery at Missamari and his mother’s death in the tent by the road camp at Bawarna, he recognized how much his own survival, as well as that of the nation, had been the product of the Dalai Lama’s peaceful efforts at reconstruction. Traveling with the Tibetan leader through Asia, Europe, the Soviet Union, Mongolia and the United States, Tempa, and through him many of his colleagues in the Youth Congress, became convinced that Tibet’s unique hope lay not where the guerrillas had failed, but in the strength of the traditional society, now rebuilt and entering the world at large.
III
6
Tibetan Medicine
THE SCIENCE OF HEALING
DR. YESHI DHONDEN pressed the three middle fingers of his right hand gently along the inside
of William Schneider’s left wrist, bowed his head and listened. The fifty-two-year-old patient smiled, perplexed. The physician before him wore neither a white coat nor a name tag. He asked no questions and carried no charts or instruments. Dressed in maroon robes, head shaved, a turquoise-studded charm box bulging beneath his orange shirt, Dr. Dhonden remained motionless, deep in concentration. A minute later, he took the patient’s right arm and briefly pressed the radial artery as if to confirm his findings. Ushering Mr. Schneider into an adjacent room, the doctor gestured for him to undress, whereupon he pressed selected points along his spine. With each touch, Mr. Schneider cried out in pain. Dr. Dhonden nodded sympathetically and told him to get dressed.
In his guest suite at the University of Virginia, Dr. Yeshi Dhonden offered his diagnosis of William Schneider, a man he knew nothing of and had met only minutes before. “Many years ago you lifted a heavy object,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. “At that time you damaged a channel in the vicinity of your right kidney, blocking the normal flow of wind through your back. The wind has accumulated outside the channel, there is bone deterioration and the disease has become quite severe.” Mr. Schneider was stunned. For three years, he confirmed, he had suffered from acute arthritis along the neck and lower back. The illness had caused incapacitating pain, and he had been forced to give up his job. But he was even more astonished at Dr. Dhonden’s ability to reconstruct his past. “In 1946,” he recalled, “I injured my back lifting a milk can out of a cooler. I was in bed a week, and as soon as I got up I reinjured it and was bed-ridden again. That must have been the start of the whole problem.”
It was a diagnosis that Western physicians could arrive at simply by using an X ray, but Dr. Yeshi Dhonden, the Dalai Lama’s personal physician, sent by him in the winter of 1980 to introduce Tibetan medicine to the West, enthralled American doctors and patients alike with his unique skills. “It’s quite conceivable that in our attempt to be scientific, some of our powers of observation have atrophied,” said Dr. Gerald Goldstein, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Medical Oncology Department, who worked closely with the Tibetan physician during his stay. “Dr. Dhonden, on the other hand, is totally attuned to everything that is going on. He uses all of his senses as his medical instrument. Our patients have been very impressed.” Dr. Richard Selzer, assistant professor of surgery at Yale University, met Yeshi Dhonden in 1974 on his first visit to the United States. “I went to observe Dr. Dhonden with some healthy skepticism,” he recounted. “I was surprised and elated by what I found. It was as if he was a human electrocardiogram machine interpreting the component parts of the pulse. We have nothing like it in the West. It’s a dimension of medicine that we have not yet realized.” “Western scientific documentation of Tibetan claims is nonexistent,” observed Dr. Herbert Benson, leader of a team of Harvard researchers that visited the Tibetan Medical Center in 1981. “It would be nice, though, to discover the worth of what they have developed over thousands of years. If their claims are only partly true they would be worthy of investigation. Therefore, can we really afford to ignore this?”
To test the efficacy of Tibetan drugs by laboratory standards, Yeshi Dhonden agreed, while in Virginia, to engage in an experiment with cancerous mice. On the basis of a visual examination alone, he prescribed a general Tibetan cancer drug, comprised of over sixty ingredients, for nine tumor-implanted mice in a lab in the University of Virginia’s vivarium. Six mice refused the medicine and died within thirty-five days. Three mice accepted it and survived up to fifty-three days. A second experiment involving sixteen animals confirmed the findings, producing the most successful results since work with the particular tumor involved began in 1967. Of even greater interest, though, was the fact that Dr. Dhonden had no knowledge of the nature of the cancer he was dealing with. “There are literally hundreds of kinds of tumors,” commented Dr. Donald Baker, the researcher in charge of the experiment. “How often has Dr. Dhonden encountered a KHT anaplastic sarcoma growing in a highly inbred strain of 3CH/HEJ female mice? It would be utterly unreasonable to ask him to decide what would be the best treatment. If he had been familiar with these conditions he might well have effected a complete cure.” “There is no question that this is a very fertile area for cancer quacks,” added Dr. Goldstein. “In the end, though, things either work or they don’t work. Dr. Dhonden has things that work.”
Sitting cross-legged over a cup of butter tea in his Virginia apartment, Dr. Dhonden offered a brief description of cancer in Tibetan terms. “I’ve treated perhaps one thousand cancer patients of which sixty to seventy percent have been cured,” he maintained. “Our medical texts specify fifty-four types of tumors which appear at eighteen places in the body in one of three forms. We consider cancer to be a disease of the blood. It begins with pollutants in the environment. These, in turn, affect seven types of sentient beings in the body, two of which are most susceptible. They are extremely minute, but if you could see them, they would be round, red and flat. They can travel through the bloodstream in an instant, are formed with the embryo in the womb and normally function to maintain strength. In general the Buddha predicted that eighteen diseases would become prevalent in our time due to two causes, low moral conduct and pollution. Cancer is one of the eighteen.”
Based on the results of his first experiment those physicians working with Yeshi Dhonden hoped to initiate a broader study of Tibetan medicine in the West. Dr. Dhonden, too, was eager to undertake an in-depth exchange of medical lore. “If Western medicine can come to understand the Tibetan view of the human organism,” he commented toward the close of his stay in Virginia, “I feel it will be of inestimable value. Our medicine has many cures for diseases which Western doctors currently don’t understand or have incorrectly identified. We successfully treat diabetes, various forms of coronary disease, arthritis, hepatitis, Parkinson’s disease, cancers, ulcers and the common cold. We have difficulty treating epilepsy and paralysis. But because the Tibetan system is scientific, Western physicians, as scientists, will see what is of value and what is not.” To illuminate an ancient science hidden behind the Himalayas for over two thousand years, Yeshi Dhonden described his own life and training as a Tibetan doctor.
DR. DHONDEN was born in 1929 into a wealthy family of farmers living in the small village of Namro, south of the Tsangpo River, one day’s ride from Lhasa. Much of the land surrounding Namro belonged to the Dhonden family and their relatives. Five thousand sheep, yaks and horses and many fields of chingko or mountain barley were owned by Yeshi Dhonden’s aunt and uncle, who, not having a male child, assumed he would grow up to run the estate. Dr. Dhonden’s parents, however, felt differently. As their only child, they decided that Yeshi Dhonden should devote his life to the Dharma. Accordingly, at the age of six, their son left his home and traveled a short way up the mountain behind Namro, to be accepted as a novice monk in the local monastery of Shedrup Ling. “I remember it all,” recollected Dr. Dhonden. “Becoming a monk, entering into the comfort of the group, living with my teacher. I had a strong wish to learn quickly and my mind was very clear. I could memorize four of our long pages in a single day.” Yeshi Dhonden’s facility for memorization earned him a high position among his peers, on the basis of which he was selected at the age of eleven to represent Shedrup Ling at Mendzekhang, the larger of Lhasa’s two state-run medical colleges. Like all monasteries, district headquarters and military camps, Shedrup Ling was required by the government to send medical students to Lhasa. Upon the completion of their training, they would then return to practice in their region. But while the monastery’s superiors were not averse to receiving the government salary paid to them for their students’ attendance, the four hundred monks were less than enthusiastic at the prospect of medical studies. “Everyone in the monastery was afraid that he would be selected,” recalled Dr. Dhonden, laughing. “No one wanted to become a doctor. You have to spend at least eleven years in classes and there is a tremendous amount of memorization. But because I li
ked to memorize, when my parents told me that I had been chosen, I was eager to go.”
The medical system Yeshi Dhonden was to study had begun as one of the ten branches of learning originally pursued by all Mahayana Buddhist monks. It flourished for over a thousand years in the great monastic universities of northern India, from whence it was taken to Tibet by two Indian pandits in the first century B.C. Thereafter, it was the province for almost seven hundred years of a single family of physicians attendant on the Royal Tibetan Court. With the introduction of over a hundred Buddhist medical texts in the sixth century, however, it grew into a widespread practice and was ultimately acclaimed by a conference of physicians from nine nations convened in Tibet, as the preeminent medical science of its time. Subsequently, Tibet’s first medical college, called Melung or “Country of Medicine,” was built in the eighth century by King Trisong Detsen in Kongpo, south of Lhasa. Melung inspired the founding of scores of medical schools, most contained in dratsangs or colleges appended to the country’s larger monasteries. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Fifth Dalai Lama built Tibet’s second medical college, called Chokpori, atop Iron Hill, just across from the Potala. There, doctors from all across Tibet and Mongolia were trained to practice a composite of the various schools of medicine that had developed over the years. The need for more physicians in modern times resulted in the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s construction of Tibet’s most recent central medical college, Mendzekhang or “Medicine House,” in 1916.
