By Douglas Wissing
Last summer as our bus approached the deep tunnel the Chinese had bored through Sichuan’s Erlang Mountain to ensure access to Tibet’s restive Kham region, a phalanx of People’s Liberation Army trucks blocked the way. Public Security officers boiled out of sport-utility vehicles (SUVs). A stern-faced soldier waved us to the side of the road.
Tsering, a young Tibetan man beside me on the bus, sat up. “Police, many police,” he said, looking around with concern.
Helmeted troops with semi-automatic rifles dog-trotted into the tunnel as others secured the entrance. Public Security men smoked cigarettes and stared up the road until a convoy of black SUVs with tinted windows finally rushed past. A Tibetan woman called from the back of the bus. “Panchen Lama,” Tsering reported. “The fake one. Going to Kham.”
In November 1995, the Chinese communists had announced the discovery of the 11th reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, considered second only to the Dalai Lama as Tibet’s most important spiritual leader. According to the Chinese, the new Panchen Lama was a six-year-old Tibetan boy named Gyaltsen Norbu. The announcement created a firestorm in the Tibetan community – six months earlier, the exiled 14th Dalai Lama had recognized another six-year-old Tibetan boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, as the new reincarnation of the Panchen Lama.
As both the Tibet-in-exile and Chinese communist governments mounted major propaganda campaigns to defend their choice of reincarnations, the agitated Tibetan regions of the People’s Republic of China bubbled with political turmoil. After quickly abducting Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, communist officials spent the next 10 years insisting that Gyaltsen Norbu, ensconced in China, was the true Panchen Lama. The Tibetan-rights community clamored that the Dalai Lama’s Panchen Lama, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, still sequestered by the communists, was “the world’s youngest political prisoner”.
In the decade following his designation, the Tibetans had widely resisted the communists’ choice of the 11th Panchen Lama. A long-faced Tibetan man in the next bus seat said that when the communists brought their Panchen Lama to Yaoching, the Tibetans wouldn’t turn out, calling him Panchen Zuma (Fake Panchen).
There were reports of bombs planted in northern Tibet, and protests at the massive monasteries of Kumbum and Ganden, which were followed by expulsions and arrests. Some lamas fled into exile rather than accede to the communists’ choice. Even in Shigatse, home of the Panchen Lama’s Tashilhunpo Monastery, there were demonstrations against the Beijing-backed Panchen Lama.
As the speeding caravan vanished into the Himalayan mountain tunnel last June, I was witnessing one of the initial communist forays into Tibet with their now-16-year-old Panchen Lama. Part of a two-week junket in the eastern ethnic-Tibetan region of Kham, the convoy was headed to a rally in Kangding, Tibet’s ancient tea-trading portal and capital of western Sichuan’s Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Region.
Soul boys
Tibetans revered the 10th Panchen Lama for his spiritual stature and outspoken support of Tibetan rights in the face of official persecution. His mysterious death in 1989 set loose a convulsive power struggle between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama’s government-in-exile – a surreal tale of medieval magical intrigue mixed with adamantine post-modern realpolitik, replete with Tibetan state oracle divinations and communist reincarnation regulations.
The concept of human reincarnation has a long history, from Plato and the Pharisees to Celts, Nestorians and Hindus, whose belief in ultimate Brahma informed Gautama Buddha’s teachings about reincarnation. The Tibetans’ system for identifying the reincarnations of religious and political leaders began in the 13th century, when Karma Kagyupa monks started codifying the esoteric system of revelation.
According to the Tibetan canon, reincarnations were identified through such things as auspicious rainbows, unusual fungal growth, visions in candle flames, clouds and sacred lakes, divine vagaries of dice and weighted barley balls, and predictions from living masters and portents from their corpses, as well as the recognition by the young reincarnation of his previous life’s personal possessions.
It wasn’t until 1578 that the Mongolian leader Altan Khan bestowed the reincarnate title of Dalai Lama on the Tibetan lama, Sonam Gyatso, who announced himself to be the third Dalai Lama. That year was also the first time the Chinese imperial powers used a Tibetan spiritual leader for their own political ends: Chinese Emperor Shenzong enjoined the third Dalai Lama to persuade his political defender and religious acolyte, Altan Khan, to stop raiding Chinese territories.
The fifth Dalai Lama decreed in the 17th century that the abbot of Tashilhunpo Monastery, known as Panchen (meaning “great scholar”) Lama, would be reincarnated as a recognizable successor. The title of Panchen Lama was retroactively applied to two previous reincarnations. Since then, the Panchen Lama and Dalai Lama have been instrumental in the recognition of each other’s successor.
The search for the reincarnation of the 10th Panchen Lama that began in 1989 had critical political implications for the Dalai Lama. To maintain his pre-eminent spiritual and political status among the Tibetans, he needed to exert his traditional prerogatives relating to the Panchen Lama’s recognition. And the Dalai Lama, of course, felt the pressing need to find the correct Panchen Lama, the man he believed was going to help identify his own reincarnation.
The stakes were equally high for the ruling communists: the 10th Panchen Lama had initially been a tool in their subjugation of Tibet, though later became an unapologetic critic of the communists’ onerous imperial policies. After losing control of the 10th Panchen Lama, the communists were determined to choose his successor, inculcate him with their values, and then use him to select the next Dalai Lama. By asserting what they contended was their historical role in the identification of the Panchen Lama, the Chinese government hoped to legitimize their rule in Tibet, both among Tibetans and in the court of world opinion.
In August 1989, eight months after the death of the 10th Panchen Lama, the Chinese government promulgated what has to be one of the most bizarre policies ever instituted by an atheistic, scientific-materialist communist government: a five-point set of regulations on the search, selection and recognition of a human reincarnation.
Along with the use of supernormal Tibetan divination procedures, the communist guidelines on reincarnate recognition relied heavily on the Golden Urn, an 18th-century attempt by the Chinese Qianlong emperor to influence the process of reincarnate discovery. The communists contended that since that time, the random drawing of names from the Golden Urn was essential to the discovery of reborn high Tibetan lamas. The Tibetans countered that the Golden Urn was just another tool among a plethora of celestial implements, and indeed had been used only sporadically since the 18th century.
But political might trumped spiritual precedent in the case of the 11th Panchen Lama. The communist government didn’t stop at kidnapping Gedhun Choekyi Nyima. In July 1994, the Chinese government unleashed a scathing attack on the Dalai Lama and his Buddhist adherents, which began with a high-level meeting on Tibet called the Third Forum. The policies that emerged from the Third Forum unrelentingly pilloried the Dalai Lama for “splittist” activities and endeavored to restrict tightly and eventually destroy Tibetan Buddhism as a coherent cultural institution. The campaign was a prologue for the elevation of the communists’ choice for the Panchen Lama.
Just after midnight on November 29, 1995, the Chinese assembled several hundred monks and numerous Chinese government officials in Lhasa’s Jokhang Temple, where the Golden Urn sat before the sacred statue of Sowo, the historical Buddha. The officials included State Council secretary Luo Gan and Tibetan Autonomous Region chairman Gyaltsen Norbu, whom the central government also named as a “special commissioner” for the event.
A massive power blackout had darkened most of Lhasa, making the temple’s guttering yak-butter lamps an important source of illumination. About 2am, Luo Gan rose from his chair to read a State Council resolution approving the three candidates for the next Panchen Lama – “soul boys”, as the communist press referred to them. The boys’ names, inscribed on ivory tablets, were wrapped in yellow silk and placed in the urn. A Tibetan lama shook the urn.
Then another lama drew out a tablet, and handed it to “special commissioner” Gyaltsen Norbu. When the commissioner read the winning boy’s name, the assembled communist officials erupted in cheers: the name of the next Panchen Lama was Gyaltsen Norbu – the same as the communist “special commissioner”. The communists’ new Panchen Lama was six years old, from the same remote Nagchu prefecture of northern Tibet as Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, the Dalai Lama’s choice. The newly designated 11th Panchen Lama’s parents were both Communist Party members.
Flying katas
In the wake of the Panchen Lama’s entourage, our bus passed through the well-guarded tunnel and bridges bristling with rifle-toting soldiers. Hours later, we rolled into Kangding, past a pair of Tibetan monks glumly tending large clay urns billowing with incense. A crowd lined the main streets, awaiting the passage of the Panchen Lama. Given the widespread Tibetan resistance to the Panchen Lama, I wondered who came to the event. I wondered if the Tibetans would kowtow to the Chinese choice of their religious leaders.
Under a low, gray, sullen sky, I watched the crowd waiting on Kangding’s winding main street: large clots of Han Chinese immigrants, school classes waving little flags, short-haired Tibetan men with Communist Party pins on their rumpled suit-coat lapels standing with their prosperous-looking wives clad in rich brocade dresses.
Many in the crowd held new white-silk kata offering scarves to present to the Panchen Lama. A few sunburned Tibetan nomads in yak-skin coats laughed and peered up the street. Chinese soldiers and police picketed the curb every six meters. Hard-eyed Public Security men scanned the throng and surrounding buildings. A sharp wind blew yellow grit into people’s eyes as 10 sturdy cops jog-trotted down the street. A police car swept past.
After a long interval, a motorcade roared around the curve, prompting the monks tending the incense burners to scurry for the curb. In a flash, a SUV sped past with a slender teenager in monk’s robes benignly waving. A flurry of white kata scarves momentarily filled the air as the crowd hurled them after the speeding car. Chinese men in an entourage of SUVs and buses followed in close order, including a grinning cameraman filming the kata-hurling crowd. As the last car passed, the nomads scrambled into the street to gather the fallen offering scarves.
After the brief parade, I encountered a pair of Buddhist monks in a shop just off the main drag, a small Tibetan with grizzled tufts sprouting from his shaven head, and a fleshy, pockmarked man in patched maroon robes. The burly monk suddenly asked, “You like this Panchen Lama?” Knowing Public Security sometimes assigns bogus monks to watch Westerners, I noncommittally shrugged and waggled my hand. He came up close and gave me a knowing look.
“I am so sad,” he said. “This Panchen Lama no good. You know, no good.”
Douglas Wissing is the author of Pioneer in Tibet: The Life and Perils of Dr Albert Shelton, published by Palgrave/Macmillan, and has published with the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and The Independent on Sunday. He can be reached at dwissing@aol.com.
