In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  Benares station, the Tito Gate, January 19, 6:10 a.m. The Dalai Lama’s saloon, disconnected from the Gaya train, slides into a private siding beyond the terminal. After breakfast Tenzin Gyatso walks down the narrow corridor to wash in the bathroom at the rear of the car. His fellow travelers are busy unpacking clothes to store in the saloon before commencing the next stage of pilgrimage.

  Outside, three Ambassadors, their drivers polishing the hoods, wait beside the track. Samdong Rinpoché, the erudite principal of the Institute of Higher Buddhist Studies in nearby Sarnath, waits, kata in hand, to welcome the Dalai Lama. Around him stand the usual rifle-toting police, heads wrapped in scarves against the early-morning chill. Beyond, the pale yellow domes of the Benares station, one of the more dramatic legacies of the British Raj, rise in the gray light, the halls beneath filled at this hour with files of sleeping travelers, wrapped in blankets, against the walls. Between them meander white, slack-jawed, sloe-eyed Brahmin cows. Benares is the Holy City, and the sacred animals, better fed than people, wander about freely, defecating in sloppy wet piles on the marble floor. The acrid stench of their urine wreathes the station. Beside the Dalai Lama’s car, a lone beggar scans the track picking half-consumed refuse cast from trains. The shrill whistle of an approaching steam engine stabs the silence.

  The Dalai Lama exits the saloon. Greeting Samdong Rinpoché, he strides across the platform to the lead Ambassador, a squat dark gray sedan, its windows tinted brown, the rear one draped by pink curtains. Dawa Bhotia, chief of security, joins the driver. Comfortably adjusted, he is rammed to the middle of the seat by the abrupt entrance of a Tibetan bodyguard—an ex-trooper of the Special Frontier Force. Mr. Dhawan, Delhi’s liaison officer, joins the Dalai Lama in the back. The two other Ambassadors, both cream-colored, fill quickly. A jeep full of police, rifles bristling from its open sides, pulls behind the Dalai Lama’s car as the column heads for the station’s gate.

  The drive goes due north from Benares. Here, in the Gangetic plain, lies the very cradle of classical Indian civilization. Forests of banyan, coconut, ebony, date palm and acacia once canopied the land. Six rivers, flowing down from the Himalayas to join the Ganges, produced a zone of unmatched fertility, giving rise, in turn, to India’s ancient city-states. As centers of commerce, arts, politics and philosophy, their urban milieus were the prime setting for the Buddha’s teaching. Following his first discourse, delivered in the Deer Park at Sarnath, five miles outside of Benares, he engendered a revolution in thought. Crippling the Brahminical system of worship and prevailing over the theistic and non-theistic philosophical sects alike, he won the adherence of virtually all the region’s chief powers to his new science of mind, crowning India’s golden age. What remains in present-day Uttar Pradesh can hardly resemble its glorious antecedents.

  Trees tell the whole story. Almost none are left. Not just on the flat, expressionless land, but even by the roadside. Here, as across all India, whitewashed tree trunks mark the highway. Yet, an hour out of the city, the law against harming them is flagrantly broken. Hacked, mutilated stumps appear to either side, fitfully attacked, swatches of their bark randomly stripped off, branches shredded and torn, chopped halfway down their length. Throughout, armies of road workers are camped in low, smoke-blackened tents. Every five miles a new colony appears, the road beside it ripped into long rocky stretches. In its midst sit women and children, breaking large pink and gray stones into smaller stones, and these into gravel, their piles often stretching four feet high up to a quarter of a mile in length. The men dig and carry dirt, creating a new roadbed. This is the same work that the Tibetans have done, though in the case of Indian laborers, born to a lifetime of such toil, it seems a far bleaker fate. Driving through the road work is tortuous. The cars proceed at no more than thirty miles an hour, swerving between boulders and ditches. Despite their tightly shut windows, a choking skein of dust coats the inside. Allergic to dust, the Dalai Lama holds his outer robe across his face for the entire journey. After two hours he suggests a rest stop for the drivers in a small village. All save himself get out to stretch, relieve themselves—as everyone in India does, by the side of the road—and order a quick cup of sweet tea from a ramshackle mud-and-straw stall. At a second stop an hour later, the Dalai Lama asks Mr. Dhawan to buy oranges and apples for the party. The column continues on, joined by a new police jeep, the escort changing at each district border. A dead cow is passed; a dog has been run over, its intestines spilled onto the road. By the bank of a stagnant river, a group of villagers sit silently before a rectangular pyre bearing a white-shrouded corpse being consumed in bright flames, a tall plume of smoke rising skyward. The marshy field behind them is strewn with a dozen more corpses, bound in muslin, waiting their turn.

  After four hours the cars pass quickly through a nondescript town, take a right turn off the main road and drive past a large grove of tall, leafless trees, standing like burnt-out candles around a gentle knoll topped by a faded building; a sad, disheartening sight: the second stop on the pilgrimage, Kushinagar, scene of the Buddha’s parinirvana or death.

  A bright blue and orange Ashoka Travelers Lodge, its giant heart-shaped doorway looking like the entrance to a “tunnel of love,” faces the grounds. Surprisingly clean and modern, it is surrounded by a neatly manicured lawn, dotted by palm trees. Beneath the entrance wait the manager and his aides, ties and jackets yanked tight, twitching with nerves. A platoon of red-turbaned police, bayonets fixed on their rifles, shuffle anxiously about. A bulbous officer, holster jauntily angled at his side, peaked cap glinting in the midday sun, swagger stick tapping the palm of his hand, barks out a command. As the Dalai Lama emerges from his car, rifles are jammed into the right shoulder, heels clicked, backs and eyes frozen. Led by the manager past the salute, the Dalai Lama is taken around the outside of the building, where, unprepared for an inspection, the rest of the shambling platoon seem to blush, gulp and shrivel inwards. Their fellows, freed from attention, do their best not to buckle, the rush of released tension visibly loosening their knees. The Dalai Lama is shown into the last room in a line opening on a shared veranda, and suddenly the excitement is over. It’s just noon. For the first time since the pilgrimage began more than a week before, there is a free moment. A lone policeman is posted at permanent salute before the veranda; one of the Tibetan bodyguards pulls up a chair beneath the Dalai Lama’s pastel-blue window frame. The entourage moves into adjacent quarters to unpack. The remaining police, their officer and a group of district officials who have arrived too late for the greeting, stand with the hotel staff, gawking at the Dalai Lama’s door and the rather stern face of the bodyguard, plainly expressing that the show is over. But nothing, obviously, has happened in Kushinagar in a long while, and even if the honored guest is hidden from view, his very presence, merely yards away, is ample reason to stay and stare—as everyone does—for almost an hour more.

  With the afternoon open ahead of them, Ngari Rinpoché, Dawa Bhotia and Mr. Dhawan pull up chairs in the warm sunlight before the porch. Towels and undershirts are placed close by to dry, following a quick washing. Newspapers are brought from the hotel lounge, among them a traveler’s magazine, its cover featuring an article on Tibet. The photo depicts one of the handful of new white Toyota minibuses the Chinese have shipped to the country in their attempt, begun the previous year, to stimulate a tourist trade. This one, though, is stuck in the mud. Twenty-five ragged, poverty-stricken Tibetans, plainly recruited out of an adjacent field, are pushing it—a picture evidently not meant to be taken, much less used for a magazine cover. Ngari Rinpoché can’t help but chuckle over the contradictions of the image, so symbolic, he feels, of his nation’s fate. Silently he scans the article, the usual account of a Chinese show tour, conducted through a handful of recently refurbished monasteries in Lhasa. When he finishes reading he sits contemplatively and stares a hundred yards across the lawn and road to the grove of trees and the Parinirvana Temple in their midst.

  The afternoon passes
and, as the sun starts to set, a mist rises. It seeps from the moist earth, smudging the juncture of sky and land. Kushinagar, it seems, is grieving still. A burnt scent, conveyed in the smoke from nearby cooking fires, cloaks the grove where the Buddha died. The urgent, ascending wail of a lone bird contorts the silence. A waxing moon rises slowly over the temple and hangs there, its pallid light evanescent and mournful.

  Three months prior to dying, the Buddha informed his disciples that his life’s work was complete. At the close of the rainy-season retreat, he led them to Kushinagar, a small wattle-and-daub town in the jungle. There, lying on a couch between twin sal trees, he urged the order to ask any questions they yet had concerning his teaching. When none was forthcoming, he entered meditation and opened his eyes again in the third watch of the night only to deliver his final words: “I exhort you, brethren,” he is reported to have said. “Decay is inherent in all component things. Work out your own salvation with diligence.” Wrapped in new-spun cloth, the Buddha’s corpse was cremated in an iron vessel on a pyre of fragrant wood decked with offerings by the people of Kushinagar. His remains were then divided among a group of eight kingdoms, republics and other claimants, each building, along with one for the vessel and another for the fire’s embers, a commemorative stupa or cairn in their region.

  The following morning the Dalai Lama wakes at five to meditate. After making offerings and prostrating to the image of the Buddha on the makeshift altar in his room, he sits on a cushion and assumes the prescribed position: legs crossed, eyes half-closed, tongue lightly resting behind the inside upper row of teeth. With one palm placed over the other in his lap, the tips of either thumb gently touching, he sets the Mahayana motive to obtain Buddhahood in order to benefit all beings. Like every Buddhist practitioner, he then contemplates the cardinal themes of his religion: the precious nature of a human life, impermanence, the inevitable unfolding of cause and effect, and voidness. As a tantric lama, however, his efforts soon turn to the advanced techniques that afford Tibetan Buddhism its reputation for possessing the world’s most complex spiritual practices. By various procedures he endeavors to strip away the outer, more coarse levels of consciousness to expose the fundamental essence of mind: Clear Light. Once it is manifest, he focuses this most refined state of mind on emptiness, thereby beginning to eliminate the innate misconceptions of concrete existence, as well as their latencies or underlying traces, which together obscure omniscience. At the same time the Dalai Lama uses the energy of the Clear Light to generate a subtle body, capable of passing through matter unobstructed and multiplying itself infinitely to bring about benefit to beings throughout the cosmos. In this way he practices to attain both the mind and body of Buddha together, remaining absorbed in meditation for an hour and a half. Once finished, he dedicates the merit gained to the welfare of all sentient beings, prostrates once more and shortly, upon hearing a soft knock on the door, admits Lobsang Gawa, who bears his breakfast on a covered tray.

  At nine o’clock the Dalai Lama visits the Parinirvana Temple. As he steps from his room, a squad of police present arms. This time Tenzin Gyatso slows his pace, gives the men a piercing look, walks in formal review down their length and at the end of the line actually salutes them. Entering his Ambassador, he is whisked across the street to where 200 Tibetans—also on pilgrimage—are lined up, katas in hand. Around them lie a maze of ruins: the ruddy brick walls of ancient monasteries and temples. Ahead, on the highest ground, stands the temple, a pale yellow oval building newly built for the 2,500th celebration of the Buddha’s birth in 1956. At its door, the Dalai Lama takes off his shoes, dons his formal robe and, entering, prostrates three times on a red and gold cloth placed by an attendant on the marble floor. Six feet away, running the length of the room, lies a fifth-century statue depicting the Buddha at the moment of his death, reclining on his right side, head supported by the palm of one hand. It is believed to lie over the exact spot where he died. The Dalai Lama approaches and helps to drape a splendid fifteen-foot silk scarf in offering across the statue’s upper shoulder and back. Circumambulating once, he returns to the front of the narrow room, touches his forehead in homage to the base of the statue and then, joined by the monks accompanying him, sits to recite the Heart Sutra and seven-limb puja, the two short but, for Tibetans, most popular Mahayana Buddhist prayers. The brief commemoration done, he leaves.

  Outside, explosions rend the air, crows cawing frantically after each. A celebration is in progress and the thunderous noise comes from fireworks. Three thousand Indian Buddhists have convened to unveil a statue of a Burmese monk who lived and recently died in Kushinagar. After a brief stop at the small Tibetan monastery staffed by a lone monk, south of the temple, the Dalai Lama is driven over to address them.

  From its start, the gathering has been in a semi-delirious state. Far into the previous night the celebrants blasted Indian film music over a public-address system erected under a billowing red tent, suspended by a forest of old bamboo poles. The bodyguards turned uneasily in bed, their shoulder holsters creaking. There was a good deal of rustling in the other rooms until finally, incredulous, Ngari Rinpoché strode through the “tunnel of love” and across the street to request silence. The organizers insisted they had only meant to express their joy at the Dalai Lama’s presence, but early the next morning, irrepressibly, the commotion picked up again, with cherry bombs booming across the countryside and a flushed skinny man zealously exhorting the crowd, in the style of Indian political rallies, to cheer for the Dalai Lama. Thus, along with breakfast, “Dalai Lama Khi Jai!” and “Buddha Bhagavan!” (“Long live the Dalai Lama!” and “The Buddha is Victorious!”) are pelted over the P.A. in crescendoing waves, continuing right through to the Dalai Lama’s arrival hours later, the haranguer still at his fearsome task, now hoarsely leading the frenzy while jumping about onstage, gesticulating wildly, his microphone jammed every few moments into an armpit to permit him the requisite round of applause topping each cheer. Like most Indian Buddhists, the people are members of the “scheduled classes” or “untouchables,” millions of whom converted to Buddhism in the mid-fifties without any knowledge of the religion, simply to escape their caste designation.

  As the Dalai Lama begins his speech, a troop of Indian monks dressed in a motley array of yellow, orange, tangerine and maroon robes, all wearing sunglasses, doze in the heat at the back of the stage. “Yellow Robbers—none of them study, they just live off the people,” observed a disgruntled Western pilgrim earlier in the day. “Did you see those sleeping idiots?” he offers later, still disgusted by the often less than spiritual incentives for a religious vocation in India. “Not one of them knew the words to the prayer. Don’t they even know monks look terrible in sunglasses?” he adds, flabbergasted. Meanwhile, during the Dalai Lama’s speech, large portions of the crowd, like overexcited children at a party, boisterously exit the tent, their declaimer madly policing the aisles to force them back to their seats. When the Dalai Lama departs, the man hurtles to the stage to set off more cheers, which, however, never come. The crowd has found better sport. With the honored guest in their midst, they mob his party, not so much for blessings, as to be compressed with the object of their passions in the ultimate climax to their festival. After a great deal of trampling and commotion, the Dalai Lama finally arrives at his car and drives away, the mob scene behind oddly unchanged from the squabbling over the Buddha’s remains reported to have occurred after his demise two and a half millennia before.

  An hour and a half later, Tenzin Gyatso enters a large auditorium. A thousand professors and graduate students, members of the Nagarjuna Buddhist Society (one of the foremost Indian academic groups researching original Buddhist texts), convened at the University of Gorakhpur, give him a standing ovation. Speaking extemporaneously, the Dalai Lama reflects on the relation of scholarship to Buddhism, noting that despite India’s fervid desire to import scientific knowledge from the West, it must not forfeit its ancient learning. It is not a religious seminary. I
t is a large university, yet virtually all of the introductory speeches refer to the Dalai Lama as the living manifestation of the Buddha, unselfconsciously joining intellect and faith. When the talk is over, the Dalai Lama receives a long line of well-wishers in an adjacent room; hundreds, though, ignore him completely. Compelled by a greater force, apparently, than reverence, they descend on the long tables of chipped teacups and plates adorned with free cakes and sandwiches. The professors, in fact, act as though they are half starved. After ten minutes of unabated gulping and chewing, the food and drink has vanished. Conditions in Gorakhpur—the city of almost 300,000 in which the next two nights will be spent—illustrate why.

  Though no one is dying in the streets, clearly, very little food is available. The best restaurant in town caters to the Dalai Lama’s entourage. On both days the menu is identical: cauliflower, rice, a bony meat dish and, for dessert, rice pudding, invariably coated with insecticide. The diet for those unable to eat such relatively resplendent fare is a lifelong pinwheel of rice, bread and dhal broken only by an occasional egg or fish caught from the flat soupy waters of a nearby river. Here is India’s major problem, not the burgeoning famine of Bihar, but chronic malnutrition affecting hundreds of millions, shortening lives and abetting disease. Gorakhpur is not a happy place. In particular, it evinces the ever-increasing implosion of people that is consuming all India’s cities. And with a spiraling population pollution is legion. A thirty-foot-thick canopy of pungent smoke, spewed from tens of thousands of cooking and coal fires, wraps the town, so dense that at night headlights penetrate no more than a dozen yards through the gloom. A continual citywide conflagration seems to be in progress. At its very center, not far from the train station, the party is boarded in two government guest houses. Their staff is bemused and venal both; alternately in awe of the guests and vicious to one another when work must be done. It is clear in the murderous grimace of the manager and the craven, half-fed slouch of his assistants what price a life of deprivation extracts from the human character; the impulse to put self before others is a constant prerequisite for survival. Their antagonistic inertia, too, is a form of endurance, so much so that, with the first guest house filled, Mr. Dhawan himself has to organize relocation for half the party to a second.