As the Dalai Lama arrives in Canada today, many of us will ponder the captive land he fled. MARK ABLEY offers essential works on the sad fate of the Buddhist country
By MARK ABLEY
Some nations excite our imagination by the magnificence of their landscape, the splendour of their culture or even their sheer remoteness. Other nations trouble our conscience like an open wound. Only Tibet does both. Only Tibet seems to embody both exoticism and betrayal.
This is not a fate any Tibetan would desire. But since 1959, when the young Dalai Lama and tens of thousands of his people fled across the Himalayas into India, Tibet has simultaneously endured grievous suffering and worldwide fame. The suffering is due to the oppressive policies of China, which appears determined to grind Tibet down to a karaoke province inhabited largely by Chinese immigrants. The fame is due mainly to Tibet’s exiled leader, the 14th Dalai Lama.
Over the past half-century, he has matured into a global statesman and flourished as a media superstar – a man whose wisdom, intelligence and charisma put other political leaders into deep shade. There was something unseemly about Paul Martin dithering about whether he should even meet the Dalai Lama; it suggested a warthog debating if it would be beneath his dignity to notice a passing elephant.
But what was the culture from which the Dalai Lama emerged? And how did Tibet fall into such desperate straits?
To answer the first question, we need to understand Tibet as it was before the troops of Mao Tsetung set out to “liberate” that isolated Buddhist land. The best-known text on the subject is Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet, which became a mediocre film starring Brad Pitt (the Andes did a better job playing the Himalayas). But a more revealing book, I think, is Secret Tibet, by Fosco Maraini (Viking, 1952; reissued by Harvill, 2000).
As a young man, Maraini took part in two Italian expeditions to Tibet, one just before the Second World War, the other just after. He spoke enough Tibetan to communicate with ordinary people, rather than relying on a translator. Maraini had a weakness for theorizing but, more important, he displayed a sly sense of humour, an intuitive sympathy and an eye for detail. To him, Tibet’s three defining features were butter, bones and silence.
The Tibet he saw — and as a non-Buddhist, he wasn’t allowed into the capital, Lhasa — had developed an extraordinary, complex culture imbued at every level with the intricacies of Tantric Buddhism. In spiritual and artistic terms, it was wealthy. In economic terms, it was not. The harshness of the environment (Tibet is a semi-desert, thousands of metres above sea level) precluded the growth of a big population. Accordingly, hundreds of thousands of people became monks and nuns.
Some writers about Tibet have romanticized the monasteries. Maraini did not. He grasped their limitations and abuses: in particular, the corrosive political infighting at the heart of a system with little social mobility. Yet he concluded that while “Tibetan life, viewed as a whole, is typically medieval . . . the Tibetans seem to be really happy people, so far as people can be happy on this Earth.”
There would be little joy once the Chinese Communists asserted their country’s ancient claim to sovereignty over Tibet. (If the loose authority that Beijing emperors once exercised over Tibet entitled Mao to invade in the 1950s, then China also has a right to occupy Korea, Mongolia and Vietnam.) The history of that invasion and its sad aftermath has been told many times, but perhaps never with so much lucid passion as in John Avedon’s In Exile from the Land of Snows (Knopf, 1984).
If the story is one of duplicity and brute power on the Chinese side, it was one of confusion and incompetence on the Tibetan. Such was, perhaps, the inevitable result of a unique system in which for many years power theoretically resided in a small boy. The 13th Dalai Lama had died in 1933; his reincarnation was discovered four years later in a tiny village. When the Chinese troops marched into Tibet, he was still a teenager, endlessly curious, fond of movies and telescopes. He knew his country needed modernizing, and at first he had high hopes for the Chinese.
Those hopes were soon dashed. Avedon’s most painful chapter is called Tibet Enslaved, and the cruelties he catalogues are on a par with those inflicted by Stalin’s minions in the Soviet Union. It’s often forgotten that in 1960 the International Commission of Jurists accused China of perpetrating genocide in Tibet. How does a writer prevent his readers from abandoning such a chronicle in glazed dismay? Avedon works on two levels: by evoking the achievements of Tibetans in exile, and also by describing a few men and women who survived imprisonment and torture at home.
Avedon is a partisan for Tibet. Does that make him an unreliable narrator, someone whose personal commitment overrides his duty to tell the truth? Patrick French would say so. French is a talented English writer whose recent Tibet, Tibet (Knopf, 2003) attacks not only the Chinese invaders but also the foreign “Tibetophiles” who practise “Dalaidolatry.” French speaks from experience: A former director of the Free Tibet campaign in London, he named his son Tenzin in honour of the Dalai Lama.
Like Maraini, he visited Tibet twice. A trip in the 1980s, when he was a student, led him to work for Tibetan freedom. A longer visit in the late ’90s brought disillusionment. French now believes that Tibet will never again be independent; that the statistics used by pro-Tibet campaigners are often unreliable; and “that the Dalai Lama had lost the battle, and had probably missed the slender chances offered to him for a settlement with China.”
His book is a nuanced and challenging portrait of the country. He interviewed people whom other authors tend to shun, such as a once idealistic Chinese Communist who sincerely believed he and his comrades were freeing a backward province. Yet French ends up — like virtually every other writer on Tibet – in a state of mingled admiration and grief.
Tibet’s fate is bitterly unjust. Can anything or anyone help bring justice or healing to what remains of a great civilization?
Mark Abley is a writer living in Montreal. In 1987 he was a founding member of the Canada-Tibet Committee.
