In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  The reason for such strictly regulated, small contributions is evident just outside the station. In the muddy plot before its entrance lie scores of crippled, dying people. Bihar, India’s poorest state, is an area of unallayed suffering. It is dead winter now and the heat is still immense. At night the temperature drops down fast, killing hundreds who have only straw to cover themselves. In summer, thermometers regularly exceed 100 degrees, sunstroke killing hundreds again. Today it is overcast, stultifying. Earlier it has rained, and the station yard is soaked with puddles, the mud between them littered with red-stained leaves from the paan of betel-nut chewers, banana peels, orange rinds, bidi wrappers and the short green-tipped sticks used by the poor for brushing their teeth. Horse, dog and, in the corners by the walls, human feces sit amidst pools of urine, emitting a foul stench. Everything, fruit, paper and excrement, is coated with flies. Skeletal dogs, devoured by mange, their skin bearing only a patch or two of remaining fur, bolt about, rummaging through the grime. At the far end of the yard stand a row of horses harnessed to dusty black canvas-covered carriages, their thin spines and bloated bellies covered with sores. Between them and the station entrance an army of homeless beggars has come to camp. But they are not beggars in contrast to a markedly franchised population. They are the population itself, or so much of it that those who own homes—who have somewhere to go—look only slightly more purposeful as they move through the crowd. The worst have been literally broken in pieces. An old gray-bearded man, legless and crazed, pulls his cropped torso in circles near the building’s walls, ranging from one piece of refuse to another, talking to each. About him wander those slightly better off: the blind, empty sockets exposed in their heads; young men, legs permanently wrapped around each other, swinging their wriggled bodies like buckets between the support of double crutches; middle-aged lepers, ears, noses and cheeks deeply pocked, filthy rags twisted around the stumps of missing fingers and toes; others with elephantiasis, dragging alien pillows of flesh, grown from their arms and legs, across the ground. These luckier ones, still ambulatory, move to the files of travelers going in and out and bet their morning meal, eyes frozen with ingrained anxiety. Among the travelers, not even those who carry bags and have the price of a train ticket wear shoes. They slip from the station trying to avoid the beggars while dodging the larger puddles of urine and trash.

  The Dalai Lama and his retinue emerge from the building to a line of cars parked by the station entrance headed by a police jeep. Without waiting for the baggage, which will follow, they strike out of the yard at the deadly speed which, peppered with horn blasts, can alone clear the roads of people and animals.

  With a population of 40,000, Gaya is a large town. But poverty has kept it gray and silent; unmechanized, buried in the past, buried in dust, its houses built from emollient mud and warped beams polished by the centuries into the dark likeness of glass. Its silent streets are powdered up to their enclosing porches with dust, each house tottering toward its neighbor across four yards of bleak, chalky road. Around this still web revolve thousands of bicycle rickshaws, spinning brief trails in the smooth ground, the myriad tingling of their bells melting into the walls on either side. Small fires have been made on the roofed-in porches; they deliver smoke to the buildings’ upper reaches where the dust can’t rise. In the haze, shrouded women emerge, trance-like, from low doorways, peer into the fires and stir a copper pot over the flame.

  As the last eddy of rickshaws washes to either side, the column of cars is released from the gloom of Gaya and passes into a radiant green countryside. There is air, sky and light. Stalwart pipal and palm trees line the road. Children and farm animals animate the land. The bleak ghost city fades. Bodh Gaya appears in the distance and, with it, the mood dramatically alters.

  A regnant note, resounding like a great ship’s horn, rises from two ten-foot thungchen or Tibetan long horns, signaling, from the roof of the Japanese monastery on the outskirts of town, the Dalai Lama’s approach. As the column speeds over an open plain, a second group of horns, at the ready before the Thai temple, takes up the call. Now the 180-foot-tall stone Temple marking the Bodhi Tree, under which the Buddha became enlightened, looms ahead. Around it a third clarion call—this one shrill and sour—is produced by hand-held silver gyaling or short horns played, beyond the Chinese monastery, from the roof of the Tibetan Gonpa, closest of all to the temple’s block-wide base. The column slows under the overhanging branches of the trees at Bodh Gaya’s edge. The sounds of drums and cymbals become audible among the horns, and then, on the left, the entrance to the Tibetan monastery appears, where 4,000 people, held back by police wielding bamboo staves, wait to greet the Dalai Lama.

  “Our Warmest Welcome to H.H. the Dalai Lama” reads a banner draped across a gate, bearing on pink lotuses down its side the Eight Noble Ornaments of the Dharma. And as the Dalai Lama’s car leads the others slowly through, thousands of hands fold in prayer, heads bow and eyes reverentially look up at the Precious Protector. His own hands joined in greeting, Tenzin Gyatso smiles with disarming informality from the back seat of his car. Incense billows from a chimney atop the monastery and a second gate is passed, crowned by the cardinal Buddhist emblem, two deer peacefully attending to a gold eight-spoked wheel in their midst, the wheel of the Dharma. Within the monastery’s courtyard stands a crush of Tibetan and Western onlookers, many in the robes of the Tibetan monkhood. The Dalai Lama’s car passes them and halts before the temple’s white portico, where seventy monks holding silk victory banners, their 1,000-string crested hats resembling the helmets of the ancient Greeks, chant a liturgy. He emerges and is formally greeted by a group of high incarnates in their ceremonial robes. Among them stands the small figure of Thubten Tharpa Liushar, Tibet’s last Foreign Minister and lay sponsor for the Dalai Lama’s teachings, to be offered beneath the Bodhi Tree during the upcoming week. The drums, cymbals and chanting continue, while the Dalai Lama is shown to his rooms on the second floor. With his departure, the crowd, electrified, disperses to the sprawling tent city it has pitched behind the monastery’s walls. Like Christmas or Easter in the West, the pilgrimage season, looked forward to by Tibetans as the most sacred and happy time in life, has opened.

  The Dalai Lama takes a small meal of bread, jam and butter tea in his suite. He is joined by Kyabjé Ling Rinpoché, his senior tutor. Because he is the abbot of the Bodh Gaya monastery, Ling Rinpoché’s quarters share the second floor with those of the Dalai Lama. Between them stands the monastery’s main shrine room, in front of which small groups of lamas and lay people are already gathering. Welcomed in hushed tones by Ngari Rinpoché and the Dalai Lama’s chief attendant, Lobsang Gawa, they wait to be ushered into his presence. Within half an hour of his arrival, Tenzin Gyatso has already begun a nonstop round of audiences, blessings, teachings and ordinations, which will fill without break the next seven days.

  The monastery sits on the west side of Bodh Gaya, less than a hundred yards from the walled compound surrounding the Mahabodhi Temple and the Bodhi Tree. In an open field behind it, the Tibetan tent encampment stretches toward the horizon. A maze of sunken dirt pathways join the tents in an intricate weave, spilling in the rear onto a rocky flat used, out of necessity, as an open-air toilet. Ladakhis, Monpas and Sherpas, pilgrims from Kulu, Manali, Spiti, Lahul and Dolpo, Mustang, Sikkim and Bhutan compose the crowd, each group declaring its identity by appearance. The Bhutanese dress in orange, red and purple checkerboard robes; the ladies’ hair is cropped short; the men sport knee socks. Women from the northwestern Himalayan valleys, clad in heavy poncho-like woolen garments, wear rings the full length of the earlobe. Wild, fierce-looking men from Dolpo—at 16,000 feet, the highest inhabited region on earth—dress in coarse black soot-stained chubas and tall felt boots, their daggers temporarily put away.

  Evening. The Dalai Lama has retired for the night, and Ngari Rinpoché is off duty. After a quick meal in the monastery’s dining room, he heads out into the dark. Passing the parked buses of Indian tou
rists, whose passengers, preparing to sleep on straw beds within, have strung their wash between the windows and nearby trees, he enters the main road and walks to the gate of the Mahabodhi Society, the international Buddhist organization in charge of maintaining the temple’s precincts. There he is met by Bikku Gian Jagat, an Indian monk and chief caretaker of the temple grounds. Bikku Jagat has a most singular Brahmanical face—a long beaked nose, pointed ears with translucent tips, deep-sunken eyes and a slow, gelatinous voice. He wears the burnt-orange robes of a Hinayana monk over a yellow wool turtleneck sweater and a pumpkin-colored scarf, all elegantly arranged. His refined gestures and cultured bearing denote a worldly past; like all Indian monks, Buddhism having only recently been revived in its homeland, he has joined the Sangha late in life. Ngari Rinpoché, on the other hand, has given up the monkhood since his arrival in India and now wears gray slacks and a green army jacket, a legacy, though he denies it, of his days as a paratrooper in the Special Frontier Force.

  “We will go to a very mystic place,” says the Bikku with a wry, glinting smile. “I promise you will like it.” Shutting the shoulder-high gate of his residence, he leads the way into the center of town. Much of the day’s commotion has subsided. A shooting gallery with red and white balloons tied to its rear wall attracts the sole crowd: a few Indian boys and Tibetan sweater sellers, who, hoping that their pilgrimage will pay for itself, have opened shop along the pavement lining the temple’s wall. Bikku Jagat walks past them and turns down a wide avenue leading to the front gate of the precincts. He nods to the ticket taker in his little house and ushers the way in, stopping for a moment at the top of three long flights of stairs. Before him the colossal edifice towers skyward. Begun by the great Buddhist king Ashoka in the third century B.C., two hundred years after the Buddha’s death, it sits at the center of a giant square of land sunk fifty feet in the earth. In the gardens at its base grow majestic pipal trees, fringed by flowering bushes and interspersed with clusters of small stupas and shrines, feretories, that house the relics of Buddhist arhats or saints. Bounded by four lesser buildings joined by a wide terrace, the spire tapers upward, every inch of its exterior thickly carved in geometric patterns, culminating, like the flame of a monumental stone torch, in a twenty-five-foot-high round capstan.

  “Just for one man to change one bulb costs fifty rupees,” says Bikku Jagat, staring woefully at the four weak halogen lights illuminating the spire. “Nobody wants to climb up there. If they fall, that’s it.” Leading the way down the stairs, he tells of his efforts to restore the ancient shrine. “Until just a few years back everything here was very wild. Jungle grew all about. Four hundred huts stood around the tank in which the Buddha bathed. Cows grazed right up to the inner retaining wall. During the warm months you couldn’t even come close,” he concludes, covering his nose with his handkerchief to illustrate the point. “Quiet! Quiet, you boys!” he yells in Hindi at a group of teen-agers racing around the upper balcony of the temple. “No smoking,” he admonishes another on the path. “They have good hearts,” he says, turning to Ngari Rinpoché with a self-deprecating wink. “They just don’t know how to behave.”

  In a low stone building before the entrance, Tibetans are performing prostrations. Descending onto well-worn boards, wearing knee pads and special gloves with wooden bottoms, they touch their hands in prayer to the crown of the head, forehead, throat and heart before stretching face down full length toward the shrine. The sound of their breathing, heavy from exertion, fills the night. At the monument itself, others are saying prayers, lighting candles and placing them with flowers and incense along the ledges to the left of the interior temple’s door. Inside lies a hallowed image of the Buddha, said to be his actual likeness as approved by an old woman who had seen him. The statue sits on a golden throne under a midnight-blue canopy at the rear of three small rooms whose glossy orange walls, illuminated by hundreds of candles, glow serenely. Its half-closed eyes and composed expression exude tranquillity. “We believe the place in which a person attains a high level of spiritual development has been blessed by him,” explained the Dalai Lama. “Just as an ordinary man or woman creates a certain atmosphere in a room in which they live, so have great beings in holy places. As you can draw conclusions about a person from the atmosphere in his room, so you can in Bodh Gaya about the Buddha himself. This is the basis for making pilgrimage: to draw some positive force from a blessed place, so that one’s own merit—the store of good qualities within one’s mind—will increase.”

  At day’s end, three people, seated apart on rugs covering the floor, remain absorbed in meditation. In a corner beside the altar, a uniformed policeman, holding a rifle with a fixed bayonet, scrupulously eyes the devotees. On the occasion of his first visit to Bodh Gaya in 1956, the Dalai Lama offered a large butter lamp of pure gold to the temple. Normally kept in an underground vault in Gaya, it has made the journey to the temple for the week of pilgrimage, where its flame shines among all the others. Its presence, however, necessitates a platoon of ten guards camped out like a similar contingent at the Tibetan monastery, just beyond the shrine room.

  Bikku Jagat leaves the temple and walks through the gardens. On their far side he halts by a large body of water sunk in a grassy basin, a tree at one end, a few red lotus growing by the shoreline. “Here,” he says, widening his eyes with subdued glee, “our mystical place. The place Lord Buddha bathed after his enlightenment.” There is no one about. The sky is shrouded. The still water looks flat and timeless, just as it might have two and a half millennia before. “The Buddha was a prince who had been kept in the palace, never seeing the world beyond,” continues Bikku Jagat, “but on four occasions he stole out. The first time he saw a sick man, the next a dead man. Then he saw an old man. And then again, a recluse. And he simply thought, ‘Is it the fate of man that he should be born, be sick and die, or is there anything greater than these flickering things?’ These are the four signs which led him to ponder the world. They are not supernatural, just human and natural.”

  Born in the sixth century B.C., Siddhartha Gautama, as the Buddha was known before his enlightenment, began life as a prince of the small semi-monarchic Shakyan republic located 130 miles north of Benares at the foot of the Himalayas. He was raised in the capital city of Kapilavastu, a bustling center of politics and trade filled with merchants, bards and soldiers, the council hall of the Shakyan elders at its center, a twenty-seven-foot wall with towers enclosing the whole. Warned by an astrologer that his son would become either a world emperor or a Buddha, an “Awakened One,” King Suddhodana sought to ensure the former by keeping the prince sequestered within the palace, removed from any influence but his own. In his twenty-ninth year, however, Siddhartha became so disturbed by his view of life on four forays into the city that, abandoning his wife, newborn son and kingdom-to-be, he fled Kapilavastu by night, shed his royal clothes, shaved his head and became a wandering mendicant. Traveling south, he studied with the most renowned philosophers of the time, the six great cities of Madhyadesa, like contemporary Greece, then in the midst of a great flowering of metaphysical thought. None, though, satisfied him. Reaching the village of Dungeshwari on the Naranjana River, some 225 miles southeast of his home, Siddhartha resolved to engage in unbroken meditation, mortifying the flesh, until he experienced direct realization of the ultimate nature of reality. For six years he practiced austerities without result. Then one day, while drinking from the river, he fell in, no longer able to hold himself up. Forced to discontinue his meditation, he journeyed with great effort two miles south to the outskirts of a village called Bakraur, where a young woman named Sujata gradually nursed him back to health. Once recovered, he forded the Naranjana in the full moon of May and, locating a large pipal tree a few hundred feet beyond the western bank, sat in meditation at its base until, at dawn the following day, he obtained enlightenment. The Buddha spent the next seven weeks alone in the environs of the tree, pondering how to explain the nature of his realization to others. He then
walked a hundred miles west to Benares to begin the forty-five-year task of founding the first of the world’s great pan-national faiths. With the Buddhist Sangha or clergy well established, patronized by the two greatest kings of Madhyadesa, he died at the age of eighty in the small town of Kushinagar, fifty miles from his birthplace.

  “Now we must go this way,” says Bikku Jagat, turning abruptly from the tank and walking back toward the temple. Between the silent masses of stone reliquaries and pink flowering bushes, a small light glows from candles lit at the base of the Bodhi Tree, the third living descendant of the original, rooted on the exact spot where the Buddha attained enlightenment. Bikku Jagat pauses briefly before it to say a prayer.