By Michael Browning
Ribbons of color, streaming against cobalt skies: Every house, every mountain pass, every monastery in Tibet bears fluttering flags known as r’ung r’ta, “wind horses,” upon whose colorful fabrics prayers are written. With every gust of wind, these flags flutter, sending millions of prayers to heaven daily.
No country is as openly prayerful as Tibet. None has greater need of prayers. Since the Chinese absorbed it in 1950 and quashed a revolt there bloodily in 1959, Tibet’s modern history has been largely tragic. Atheism has here collided with religion, and atheism happened to have superior firepower.
The 14th (and possibly the last) Dalai Lama, who begins a five-day visit to South Florida today, has led a life largely in exile. He is part pope, part king, part mendicant, part living antique. For the past half-century, he has been reliant on the kindness of strangers.
Yet he is still venerated, adored, missed in Tibet.
When I visited Lhasa with a group of foreign journalists in August 1983, we were led on strictly supervised tours, aimed to show that Tibet now loved China and that China ruled Tibet compassionately.
It was largely a hoax. I managed to slip away, climb one of the long staircases leading up to the top stories of the Potala Palace, where an elderly monk invited me indoors. He was some sort of caretaker. We were divided by language. So he used gestures. He pointed down to various ruins, he took me into crumbling chambers of dark wood, the cells of former monks.
And he made a pistol with his thumb and forefinger and fired it against his head, wincing. “Lama! Lama! Lama!” he groaned, toting up the vanished victims of a massacre.
‘Old Tibet very good. China very bad.’
Another Tibetan stopped me in the Parkhor, the sacred octagonal street surrounding the Jokhang Monastery, Tibet’s holiest, in the gloom of evening.
Pilgrims shuffled past, praying their rosaries, humming their prayers. They lapped out their tongues at me, a friendly form of greeting in Tibet. Great bales of juniper-wood incense burned daylong outside the monastery, and worshipers prostrated themselves on the glassy-smooth paving stones, polished by hundreds of thousands of pious foreheads. A low hum, as of bees, rose around the place.
“You journal, you tell: ‘Old Tibet very good. China very bad. Dalai Lama very good. New Tibet very bad,’ ” he said to me quietly in broken English.
They aren’t all living saints. During another visit in 1985, I saw a huge Tibetan Kham break a big green beer bottle over the head of an enemy during a real dust-up, Wild West brawl right outside the sacred Jokhang Monastery, in broad daylight. Alcohol has come into Tibet with the Chinese, and the Tibetans don’t handle it well. The average life span is about 58.
Lines of outdoor dentists, operating their drills with foot-driven treadles like sewing machines, attested to the prevalence of tooth decay. People sat down stoically in their chairs and tried not to scream as their rotten crowns were augured away painfully.
Dogs wandered everywhere, ferocious, fluffy, dirty and cowardly. At the end of a session, the dentist would slap the patient on his or her back, by way of congratulations, and a puff of floury dust would rise up at the hand-whap, fine as talcum powder.
The environs of Lhasa looked like the jagged rim of a broken bowl, low peaks on all sides, brown and purple and lilac under cloudless skies. Bits of slate were for sale for pennies near the Potala, each inscribed with the Sanskrit prayer: Om mani padme hum, “Hail, Jewel in the Lotus!”
In exile since 1959
Tenzin Gyatso, the current, has lived in exile since the night he fled from his Norbulingka Palace, aged 24, and sought refuge in India. We were shown his bed, “the bed from which he fled,” in a little room with an old phonograph and radio in the “Jewel Park” palace, with its wilted flowers drooping about the compound. It was a sad, forsaken, rather small building.
The Dalai Lama, now 69, gives a series of lectures on peace and Buddhist doctrine today through Wednesday at Nova Southeastern University in Davie, Office Depot Center in Sunrise, Florida International University and the University of Miami. He was last in South Florida in 1999 for a lecture at FIU.
He has not set foot in his homeland since 1959.
He was recognized as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama at the age of 2. He was shown two identical rosaries, two drums and two walking sticks. He correctly chose the rosary and the drum used by the 13th Dalai Lama, but he initially picked the wrong walking stick. It turned out that his predecessor had touched both walking sticks, but had used one more than the other. The child then seized the right stick.
His line reaches back to the 14th century. When he dies, Tibet’s last link with its religious past may be snapped.
Now, karaoke bars and hotels and restaurants enliven Lhasa’s night life, Chinese-run for the most part. Wealthy tourists are shepherded around the Drepung and Sera monasteries, to see the religious dog-and-pony show of piety.
A huge new police station has been built downtown, in traditional Tibetan architectural shape, to handle riots ever since the Tibetans rose up at the 1987 Moinlam Chenmo prayer festival, attacked the Chinese dignitaries and threw a Chinese policeman out of a second-story window in the Jokhang, killing him. Hundreds were arrested. Some were shot out of hand. Tibet stubbornly refuses to be digested and absorbed by China.
Celebrated in novels, films
Over the past two centuries, Tibet has become a magical mindscape in Western eyes, celebrated in novels, films, tales of exploration and even in some blatant literary forgeries as a mystical place, a place in close touch with heaven, where religion is realer than reality.
Why? Mainly because it is so high, so inaccessible. Downtown Lhasa is 12,268 feet above sea level. The average altitude on the Tibetan plateau is 15,000 feet. The holy mountain, Kailas, in western Tibet rises to 22,028 feet, its peak seeming a snowy crystal tetrahedron coming to a pyramidal point. Passes into the country range from 13,000 to 17,000 feet. Mount Everest, the world’s tallest, rises on the southern border, between Tibet and Nepal. One early traveler spoke of wearing “a shawl of icicles,” while crossing into Tibet.
Second, it is relatively empty. There are only about 1.8 million Tibetans in Tibet proper, though the population has been artificially swollen by an influx of Chinese settlers and soldiers. The Swedish explorer, Sven Hedin, crossed the icy western Chang Thang plateau in the early years of the last century, and saw no living soul, apart from the men in his own caravan, for 81 days. His pages in Trans-Himalaya sometimes possess the frightful emptiness of a journey in outer space.
Third, the Tibetans wanted it that way. They shunned and forcibly ejected would-be visitors through most of the 19th and 20th centuries. As China’s Qing dynasty crumbled, and Britain and Russia jockeyed for control of Asia and India, China and Tibet turned inward, fearfully.
Hundreds of books have been written about Tibet, and their titles glitter with mystery: On Top of the World, The Unveiling of Lhasa, The Jewel in the Lotus, The Third Eye, Lost Tibet, Jump to the Land of God and In Exile from the Land of Snows.
Tibet obviously sells. The first paperback in U.S. printing history was James Hilton’s 1933 Lost Horizon, later made into a film by Frank Capra. The novel described the remote Tibetan paradise valley of Shangri-La (after which a U.S. aircraft carrier was later named), where people aged more slowly, living for centuries, free from the cares of the wider world.
It was as if the hectic soul of Europe might find peace at last in Tibet. Heinrich Harrer, an escaped German POW whose book, Seven Years in Tibet, has been made into a movie with Brad Pitt, summed up the experience nostalgically:
“Part of my being is indissolubly linked with that dear country,” Harrer wrote. “Wherever I live, I shall feel homesick for Tibet. I often think I can still hear the wild cries of geese and cranes, and the beating of their wings as they fly over Lhasa in the clear, cold moonlight.”
Visits dash expectations
But before the early 19th century, Tibet was fairly open to outsiders willing to make the climb. Quite a few did. Later, more foreigners tried to get in, often elaborately disguised, but nearly all were turned back. Some died in the attempt.
Among those travelers who succeeded in making it, there was an almost schizophrenic mind-set: Frantic hope and impossibly high expectations before they arrived. Disgust and chagrin when they finally achieved their goal.
Ekai Kawaguchi, a fussy, fastidious Japanese Buddhist who slipped in and spent three years there from 1899 to 1901, wrote: “The Tibetans may indeed be regarded as devils that live on dung, being the most filthy race of all the people I have ever seen or heard of.”
British army Capt. Edmund Candler, who accompanied the 1904 military expedition to Lhasa under Col. Francis Younghusband, found Lhasa to be “squalid and filthy beyond description, undrained and unpaved. Not a single house looked clean or cared for.”
Even the Potala, one of the world’s most majestic buildings viewed from without, is a dismal, sooty warren of dark rooms, greasy, steep staircases and corridors glistening with the light of thousands of yak-butter candles within.
Tibetans chopped up their dead to putrid mashes and fed the bits to lammergeier vultures in a ritual known as “sky burial.” Ritual trumpets were made from human leg bones, drinking cups from skulls. Smallpox victims were flung into rivers, to rid the land of contagion. Bathing in this cold climate was a luxury few Tibetans dared enjoy. Huts in the Muslim butchers’ quarter of Lhasa were actually built of animal bones.
You can still see the corpse-and-bone-mashing slab outside Lhasa, near the Sera monastery, with large concave pockmarks sunk into its gritty surface, worn hollow by long years of pulverizing rocks. Vultures perch on nearby peaks every morning, awaiting a feast of dead flesh.
Missionaries bewildered
Yet the Tibetans were extremely likable: “Their movements are cadenced and easy. As they walk about, they are always humming some psalm or popular song; generosity and frankness enter largely into their character; brave in war, they face death fearlessly,” wrote Catholic missionary Evariste-Regis Huc in Lhasa in 1842.
Huc wasn’t the first Catholic missionary to visit Tibet. In 1624, the Jesuit Father Antonio Andrade visited western Tibet, and in 1707, the Capuchin Fathers Francois de Tours and Giuseppe d’Ascoli came, followed by Domenico di Fano in 1709. They set up a mission in Lhasa, which closed in 1711 from lack of funds. Their successor, Father Ippolito Desideri, was the first Westerner to attempt to understand and describe Tibetan culture sympathetically. He left Lhasa in 1721, but his accounts remained buried in Rome until they were rediscovered in the 1950s.
The missionaries were bewildered. Tibetan religion seemed to resemble Catholicism uncannily: The same thrumming prayer-songs, the same dark temples, the same glittering candles and statues. They wondered if they had at last found long-lost brethren.
They hadn’t. Tibetans proved very devoted to Buddhism. In all, the early Catholics only made 27 converts in Tibet.
The communists have done rather better, using blunter instruments. Current Chinese President Hu Jintao is a former Communist Party secretary for the so-called “Tibetan Autonomous Region,” which the Chinese don’t even call “Tibet.” They call it “Xizang,” or “Western Treasure House,” and have treated it pretty much as they liked, half as a piggy-bank to be looted of its natural resources, half as a theme park to be nurtured for the tourist dollars it generates.
The 1966-76 “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” fell like a hammer on defenseless Tibet. Monks and nuns were kicked out of monasteries, which were then dynamited.
Red Guards rampaged in the streets, often shabbily abetted by the lowest elements of Tibetan society in a wholesale pogrom against the “Four Olds,” (Old Thoughts, Old Customs, Old Habits, Old Ideas). The enormous Ganden monastery, which held the body of the great 15th-century saint, Tsongkapa, was blasted to smithereens. Sacred Buddhist texts, called sutras, were used for toilet paper.
In 1985, I visited a ruined inner courtyard of the great Drepung Monastery outside Lhasa, whose name means “Heap of Rice” in Tibetan. It had been raining heavily. A curious artifact glinted among the paving stones.
It was a brass shell casing from a Chinese automatic rifle. It had the numbers 31 and 57 incised on its cylindrical base. It may have washed down from a roof or rolled out of a corner. Monks didn’t own automatic weapons. The shell casing was vivid witness of what had happened here.
The Dalai Lama has become half of the old moral question of Might vs. Right, religion vs. materialism. He has won the Nobel Peace Prize, but he cannot return to his country.
Yet at the same time, he has managed to keep Tibet alive in exile. Idols have been smashed, monks shot, monasteries exploded. But the Buddhist message of peace, with its offered hope of eventual enlightenment, has outlived the worst political excesses of Maoist China, and is still alive today.
