PENGUIN BOOKS
Patrick French is a writer and historian, born in England in 1966. He is the author of Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer (‘Beautifully written, wise, balanced, fair, funny and above all extremely original’ William Dalrymple), which won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Royal Society of Literature W. H. Heinemann Prize, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (‘French is the most impressive Western historian of modern India currently at work’ Herald), which won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land (‘Compassionate … compelling and brilliant … far and away the best book on Tibet I have read’ Daily Telegraph) and, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (‘One of the most gripping biographies I’ve ever read’ Hilary Spurling), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hawthornden Prize. His most recent book is India: A Portrait (Allen Lane, 2011).
Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer
The Life of Henry Norman
Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division
Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul
India: A Portrait
A Personal History af a Lost Land
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2003
Published in Penguin Books 2011
Copyright © Patrick French, 2003
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-01-4-196419-5
To Ab
List of Maps
TIBET, TIBET
Notes
Bibliography
Tibet in 1950
Asia in 2000
Tibet in 2000
My brother said to me … ‘If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened. If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of.’
AKIRA KUROSAWA, Something Like an Autobiography
I was living in a room at Tsechokling monastery, below the Himalayan village of McLeod Ganj, the centre of exiled Tibetan life. It was 1987, and demonstrations were breaking out in Tibet for the first time in decades. At the end of the summer I had to return to Europe, but for the moment I was just where I wanted to be. It was simple. Each morning I would wake early, wash in cold water and walk down through the forest to the library above Dharamsala. The place was poor and insanitary at that time, with hunched old women clutching rosaries, and second-generation hustlers parading in slogan T-shirts and shades. There were a few post-hippie travellers, some Hindu pilgrims who came to visit the shrine at Bhagsunath, and students of Tibetan culture from places like Israel and Japan.
There was one man at Tsechokling who was attached to the monastery, but was not a monk. He lived alone in a hut he had built on the hillside, and could be seen herding cows, collecting firewood and occasionally helping out in the smoke-filled monastery kitchen. His name was Thubten Ngodup. He was quiet and shy, with a worn face that was marked with experience: he had escaped from Tibet after the Chinese Communist invasion of 1950, and worked in pitiful conditions on a road gang before joining the Tibetan section of the Indian army.
Ngodup had learned to cook when he was a soldier, and one of the monks suggested he might make a living by providing food for the occupants of the few monastery guest rooms. I was asked to help him set up the operation. We communicated in fits and starts, using fragments of shared language; looking back, I think that he felt awkward dealing with a foreigner during our fleeting, symbiotic friendship. A feasible menu was agreed (tea, soup, omelette, momo, shabalay, thukpa) which I copied out in English and distributed to likely customers. The arrangement worked well. Ngodup became dedicated to the purchase and preparation of food, anxious, maybe too anxious, in an ex-military sort of way, to provide perfect service. He had a role, and it made life easier for him.
You can see Ngodup at Tsechokling as the sun comes up over the wooden houses high on the ridge, carrying a bashed aluminium tray, on it china cups and saucers, a bowl of sugar and a beaker of hot milk, a cracked pot of tea and a plate of cooling buttered toast. He stands, leaning over the table, half-smiling and half-embarrassed, placing the breakfast things before us, bowing slightly, instinctively, in the Tibetan way. When he has finished, he picks up the tray and, holding it flat against his side, goes down the stone steps of the guest house, back towards the monastery kitchen, hitching up the patched brown trousers that hang loosely from his hips as he walks. He is forty-nine years old.
Eleven years later, during a demonstration in New Delhi, Ngodup made his choice. By his own free will, he ran to a hut where the cleaning fluids for the banners were kept, and poured gasoline across his body, drenching his clothes, his head, his hair, his face, the smell of the clouding vapour enough to make you reel. With a spark and a roar, he burst from the hut and ran into the square, blazing.
The date was 27 April 1998, just as the sun came up. Six Tibetan refugees were holding a hunger-strike at Jantar Mantar, encouraged by hundreds of supporters and frequent visits from the world’s press. The target of their protest was the poor, useless United Nations. There were several demands: a plebiscite over Tibet’s future, a rapporteur to investigate human rights abuses, and a debate on long-forgotten UN resolutions.
The hunger-strike had been going on for forty-nine days, and several people were close to death. Ngodup was in the next batch of protesters, lined up ready to replace those who died. There was a hitch: a Chinese visitor was expected. The chief of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army, Fu Quanyou, was arriving in India on an official visit, and the authorities did not want his stay to be marred by dying Tibetans. Indian police were told to clear the site. As day broke, the police crashed in, wielding boots and lathis, dragging hunger-strikers into ambulances and beating back protesters. Choyang Tharchin, an official from the exiled Tibetan government in Dharamsala, picked up a video camera and began to film the scuffles.
I watched the footage over and over, and each time it seemed more shocking.
Indian police are bustling about. There are Tibetans in traditional dress, more traditional than anything you would find in Tibet, and the police are shoving them, grabbing their arms, poking them with lathis. In the corner of the frame, you can just catch sight of Thubten Ngodup, pushing the wrong way through the crowd, red-faced and desperate, like a runner ending a race. He disappears from view. A minute or so later the camera moves away jerkily from the barging police and protesters, and focuses on an orange light surrounded by a white light. As the picture becomes clearer, you can make out a figure at the heart of the light, a Giacometti, moving, jumping, skipping. As the shape comes nearer, you see that this is a man, burning to death, holding his palms together in the Indian namaste greeting, moving his arms rhythmically up and down as he runs, imploring. You can see his face and just hear him shout in a reedy, high-pitched voice, above the noise of the screaming crowd, ‘Po Gyalo! Po Rangzen!’ He turns away from the camera and moves towards the crowd of Tibetans, still framed by the orange light. Ngodup is stumbling now, dancing and stumbling, but he still holds up his joined hands towards the crowd, as if he is praying, or pleading for his life. He falters; someone acts, a policeman maybe, and pushes him to the ground. Ngodup is whacked with blankets and sacks as he cowers on the ground, shielding his head. The orange light fades, the film runs on, fixed now on the prone figure and the people running in confusion. Above the scene, you notice a hand-painted banner.
UNO
WE WANT JUSTICE
TIBETAN WOMENS WELFARE GROUP
The film flickers, and stops.
In the hospital, his nerve endings still functional, Ngodup was visited by the Dalai Lama, who told him that he should harbour no feelings of hatred towards the Chinese. Ngodup tried and failed to sit up, signalling that he had understood, and seemed happy, and died just after midnight.
Ngodup’s death shook me. There was something about its directness and logic that was hard to put from my mind. It was a very Buddhist death, a suicide bomber who turned his violence inwards, killing only himself, protecting others. Ngodup had no way to make himself heard. He was a powerless, ageing refugee in a country with enough problems of its own, so he burned himself to death, as a protest. For the Tibetan exiles and their supporters, he became a martyr, a symbol. A picture of him wreathed in flames was syndicated across the world, returning Tibet to the front pages, displacing Lewinsky and the Nasdaq, briefly.
Writing about Ngodup’s life and death, the essayist Jamyang Norbu offered an explanation for his actions.
In his last photograph taken before the hunger-strikers’ tent in Delhi, Thubten Ngodup is smiling … There is no hint of anger or fanaticism (or alcoholic depression) in that smile. He was a simple man (he only read Tibetan haltingly) but when I look at his photograph I feel I am seeing the calm happy face of someone who has discovered a simple truth about life; something that has always eluded our leadership, but which traditionally Tibetans have regarded as basic to any major undertaking, especially the effective practice of the Dharma – thak choego ray, you have to make a decision, and act on it.
There were things that kept him on my mind.
That he had shouted, ‘Po Gyalo! Victory for Tibet! Po Rangzen! Free Tibet!’ even as he was being killed by flames.
That people in the crowd had said they heard popping noises as his body began to burn.
That he knew what he was doing, and why he was doing it, even as the flames consumed him.
Ngodup had always seemed such a shy, quiet man when he brought me tea and toast at Tsechokling. I had not thought of him for years until I saw his picture in the paper.*
* In a review of Tibet, Tibet published in the Indian magazine Biblio in June 2003, the BBC journalist Daniel Lak wrote that he was telephoned at home in New Delhi early on the morning of Ngodup’s death: ‘The voice on the line was German, speaking English with a heavy accent. The tone was frantic. “Get down here to Jantar Mantar,” the woman said, “someone is threatening to set themselves on fire …” A pause, then … “Oh God, he’s going to do it, he’s going to do it …” She sounded hysterical, already in tears. Still sleepy, but knowing perfectly well what my caller was talking about, I started shouting. “If you know someone is going to kill themselves then stop them, don’t expect me to put their death on television because I won’t. You disgust me.” I hung up. A few minutes later … Thubten Ngodup doused himself in petrol then struck a match … I am still angry at the foreigners who colluded in the self-immolation of an ordinary Tibetan exile. I felt there was more than an element of cynicism in the phone call I received before Ngodup’s death.’
It was news to me that Ngodup’s death was foreshadowed in this way; I found the idea of such collusion deeply disturbing.
Some nations have access to their history; some never had their history recorded, except in conversation; others had records once, and knowledge, but the coherence was destroyed by outsiders. Writing this from a place of security, a rented office in southern England, connected by fibre-optics to precise information about all sorts of irrelevant contemporary subjects, I can see from the window a stream and a hillside, with cows grazing on the fattening grass. I can find out, with no trouble at all, a depth of detail about what went on here in the past. I can learn that more than a thousand years ago, this hillside was owned by Christian nuns, who were granted the land by Edwy, the first Saxon king of England. I can read the names of the nuns’ tenants, who farmed the hides of land that ran down from the hillside, using – it is recorded – four plough teams to prepare the ground for planting corn. I know that six centuries on, the village clergyman was entitled to graze seventy sheep and five ‘beasts’ on this land, and that his curate, though known to be a drunk, was kept in post because his church services remained orderly. I can learn that a piece of hunting ground on the far side of the hill was sold by one land-owning family to another, and know that now, four centuries later, the same name owns it still.
The land here has not been invaded. The people have not been driven out. There is an at times oppressive weight of continuity, a continuity that you only notice clearly when you have been to other places where the past has been torn up and the history of the land and the people who came from that land has become a story of loss and longing, of partial and absent memory, of lasting exile and the destruction of collective identity. As the song of the Sixth Dalai Lama says,
White crane!
Lend me your wings,
I will not go far …
From verifiable sources, you can learn much about the Tibetan empire of the seventh and eighth centuries, or the history of particular monasteries, rulers or Buddhist lineages. What has disappeared for those inside Tibet is the link between the past and the present. This link has been broken systematically by the imposition of an alien political ideology, exported from industrial Europe, and the physical destruction of texts and objects. The effect of the period of mental cleansing – which was at its most intrusive in the 1950s and sixties – has been to kill the processes of thought and memory that define a society, and enable the people within it to communicate and interact. This rupture has left those in Tibet, both Tibetans and Chinese, in a state of something like atrophy. As Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote in Hope Against Hope, her memoir of Stalin’s terror, ‘An existence like this leaves its mark. We all became slightly unbalanced mentally – not exactly ill, but not normal either: suspicious, mendacious, confused and inhibited.’
It was only towards the end of my time in Tibet in the fall of 1999 that I came to understand the extent of the abnormality. The Lhasa hotel I was staying in, the Raidi, was under surveillance. There was nothing peculiar about that. I had been in the Tibet Autonomous Region for too long, and try as I might, the places I went to and the people I met prevented me from seeming the tourist I claimed to be. So there were men, Chinese men in double-breasted suits, who came to the hotel each day and asked questions and examined my room when I was not there. A man with a wide-brimmed hat sat in the window of the shop opposite, watching people going in and out of the hotel.
All this I could accept, although it made me sick with tension. What shocked me was the discovery, a little later, that the smiling, joking Tibetan receptionist, barely out of her teens, with whom I chatted casually most days, was working for the PSB, the Public Security Bureau. I was told that she was required to report foreign tourists who behaved suspiciously: if they met the wrong sort of people, if they spoke Tibetan, if they had professional-standard film cameras, if they knew too much. She did not want the job. Her father had been compromised by the PSB over a minor irregularity; she had no choice but to do it.
To Tibetans in Lhasa, none of this seemed strange. It was how things worked. Anyone, even a member of your family, might be betraying you. Most of the betrayers betrayed not for political or financial gain, but because they felt they had no alternative.
Around this time, I was talking to a very old Tibetan man, a doctor, at his house by the Barkhor. He said in passing that he felt like screwing up his new Conduct Agreement and trampling it beneath his feet. I asked him what a Conduct Agreement was, and he produced it, a document that every resident of his part of Lhasa had been made to sign.
It was titled Responsibilities of the People, and there were headings such as ‘Defending the Security and Stability of Society’ and ‘Education in Political Ideology’. The tone was threatening, with talk of fines, neighbourhood committees, model compounds and model families, like China in the days before Deng.
The people must love their motherland, oppose splittists and defend the unity of the motherland and the friendship and solidarity of the nationalities. The townsfolk must show their respect for Party policies by refraining from engaging in activities that are detrimental to the image and interests of the Party and the government. They must display their political loyalty clearly by opposing the splittists resolutely, not participating in political disturbances, refrain from watching such political disturbances, show no mercy to the splittists and avoid spreading rumours … Upon becoming aware of or coming into contact with a suspicious-looking person, they must immediately report the person to the authorities instead of hiding them.
The redundant political jargon was as bad as the content: the people, the Party, the motherland, the elusive solidarity of the nationalities and the danger of those who thought their own thoughts about how Tibet should be run; the splittists. It went on. There were rules on gatekeepers, rules on how to report your neighbour, rules on how much you should be earning, rules on contraception, rules on hygiene and rules on who could visit you and when.
Moments like this – the discovery of the existence of Conduct Agreements, or the plight of the chirpy young PSB agent – made me feel that I had fallen through a trapdoor to another level of comprehension. The place was ruled not by terror, as it had been once, but by constant mental supervision; the absence of freedom.
The people of each nation are formed in part by their physical geography: the level of the Netherlands, the ice of the Arctic, the islands of Greece, the jungles of West Papua, the climate of England, they all create a culture, a way of seeing and doing. Tibet has always been varied and diverse, a nation of interactors and travellers, rather than the hermetic, forbidden land of European repute. A geographical treatise written by a Tibetan monk in around 1820 contains references to Louisiana, Rio de Janeiro, the department system in France and the imprisonment of a Corsican general named ‘Na-pa-li’ on charges of conquering most of Europe.
Tibet’s inaccessibility has long driven its people to roam, whether to spread religion, to trade or to fight. Thousands of years ago, its cultural borrowings extended to distant lands. Important roots of the Tibetan language can be found in the West, rather than in a Chinese or Sino-Tibetan proto-language. Some of the oldest words in Tibetan have Indo-European origins, including such linguistic staples as cow, wheat, pig, wheel, dog, rice, birth, star, kin and government. The linguist Christopher Beckwith has observed that ‘The famous Indo-European root that gives words for “king”, “royal”, “right”, “rights”, “reckoning”, and so forth, namely reg, “to touch” … is represented very richly in Old Tibetan.’ There are ‘remarkably good correspondences between Old Tibetan and Proto-Indo-European’.
As far back as 715, Arab soldiers joined forces with Tibetan imperial troops in a gruesome battle in Ferghana, a Central Asian outpost closer to Constantinople than it was to Changan (or Xian), the Tang dynasty capital of China. A case has even been made for the conceivable influence of the First Book of Kings on an eighth-century Tibetan historical narrative, The Testament of Ba, perhaps via ‘Nestorian Christians, Manichaeans, and Jewish merchants operating along the Silk Road’.
Today, ethnic Tibetans stretch from northern Amdo to the Kunlun Shan, across the Changtang to the Himalayas and over to Sikkim, back through the high deserts and snow mountains to Lhasa, up to Chamdo, on to Lithang and down to the hot forests on the border of Burma. The common bond is indefinable. Religion, language, jokes, appearance, dress and social convention all go some way towards explaining it. The historian Tsering Shakya delved into tradition and came up with the eating of tsampa, roasted barley flour, as the defining mark. ‘During the height of Tibetan resistance to Chinese rule in 1959,’ he observed, ‘a letter appeared in the only Tibetan newspaper, The Mirror. It was symbolically addressed to “All Tsampa Eaters”. Here the writer has gone back to the most basic element which united people … tsampa is the sub-particle of Tibetanness. It transcends dialects, sects, gender and regionalism.’
Tsampa-eaters have never had the security that comes from a soft, pliant landscape and fixed national boundaries. Survival depends on constant self-reliance. If you walk too far east from London, or too far west from Tokyo, you will fall into the sea; but on the vast, sprawling continent of Asia, borders are uncertain. Where does Tibet begin and China end? Where does India end and China begin? The Chinese government lays claim to much of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. India lays claim to territory inside the Tibet Autonomous Region. The exiled Tibetans lay claim to parts of Sichuan.
In the days of empire, Tibetan power stretched as far north as Turkestan, as far east as Changan, as far south as the banks of the Ganges and as far west as Afghanistan. It was a massive, fluctuating sphere of influence, pulsating out from central Tibet, sustained by frequent battles and a network of shifting alliances. A millennium later, ethnic Tibet and political Tibet had become disjointed. Tibetans were spread across the Himalayas and up into China, but although their ultimate spiritual loyalty may usually have lain in Lhasa, political allegiance varied. The source of authority in different parts of the giant, impervious Tibetan plateau ranged from the Lhasa government, to the Chinese emperor, to a temporarily dominant warlord, to a large local monastery.
During Tibet’s brief period of de facto independence between the First World War and 1950, the Tibetan government controlled territory roughly corresponding to the borders of today’s Tibet Autonomous Region. Like the Balkans, Tibet’s fringes have long been inhabited by a patchwork of different ethnic groups: a Han Chinese village, a Hui Muslim village, a Qiang village and a Tibetan village may sit side by side. In the Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan – which border Tibet – there has for many years been a substantial ethnic Tibetan population, living on untamed land that was often under no clear external control. In modern times, Beijing’s response to this diversity has been to carve out nominally autonomous Tibetan counties and prefectures within the four border provinces. More Tibetans now live there than in the Tibet Autonomous Region itself.
According to official Chinese census statistics (which are regarded by demographers as wanting but usable) there are today around 2.5 million Tibetans in the Tibet Autonomous Region and 2.9 million in Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan. But if you take the province of Qinghai, for instance, which has almost all of its land under ‘autonomous prefecture’ designations, there are approximately 838,000 Tibetans and 619,000 Chinese living in Tibetan prefectures, and another 141,000 Tibetans and 799,000 Chinese living in non-Tibetan autonomous areas. In Sichuan, a province of 85 million people, there are 1.2 million Tibetans living in Tibetan prefectures, but the same areas also contain 780,000 non-Tibetans. So although the autonomy of these prefectures and counties is largely fictional and their boundaries are often inept, it is apparent that the different ethnic groups within them could never be easily disentangled.
The exiled Tibetan government in Dharamsala (‘by far the most serious’ government-in-exile in the world, according to the Economist magazine) has responded to this complex, historic demographic problem in a dramatic way. To keep things simple, it lays claim to all land inhabited by Tibetans, covering a total of 2.5 million square kilometres, more than twice the area of the Tibet Autonomous Region. Astonishingly, this territorial sleight has been swallowed and endorsed by most foreign supporters of the Tibetan cause, despite much of the land, especially in the north and east, never having been administered from Lhasa.
I had tried asking the Dalai Lama’s foreign minister, T.C. Tethong, why the exiled government maintained a claim over territory that it did not control before 1950. Surely this position weakened its chances of ever reaching an accommodation with the Chinese government? His response was loose: they were ‘still looking into it’. The border was based on ‘ancient claims’, as well as on oral history and the demands of different Tibetan exile groups. ‘We made our map so as not to leave out any Tibetans,’ he said, ‘so that they didn’t feel isolated. We are going for the whole of Tibet. But I accept there will have to be give and take. His Holiness the Dalai Lama wants a fair compromise.’
The demand for a greater Tibet is rooted in the politics of displacement. In order to maintain the unity of the émigré community after the Dalai Lama’s flight across the Himalayas in 1959, his exiled administration developed the idea of a giant, theoretical Tibet. In the early 1960s, with the arrival in India, Nepal and Bhutan of large numbers of Tibetan refugees (many of them from the border areas close to China, who had endured the worst of the reforms and suppression), it became necessary to develop a pan-Tibetan identity. Its focus was the idea of ‘Po Cholkha Sum’, the unity of the three historic regions of ethnic Tibet: Amdo, Kham and U-Tsang. People who had previously identified themselves with a particular region now became consciously Tibetan.
A sense of Tibetan nationhood was created deliberately, in exile. The Lhasa dialect served as the basis of a shared refugee language; a regimental banner devised in the 1920s by a wandering Japanese man (which had been displayed at the Asian Relations Conference in India in 1947), featuring red and blue stripes and a pair of snow lions, became the Tibetan national flag; a song written by the Dalai Lama’s tutor Trijang Rinpoche (himself a reincarnation of the Buddha’s chariot-driver) was adopted as Tibet’s national anthem; the Dalai Lama’s birthday became a day of popular celebration; and an invocation used at the new year festival of Losar, ‘tashi delek’ or ‘good luck’, was promoted as a versatile greeting, which could be picked up easily by foreign helpers.
My mental involvement with Tibet had started in the early 1980s, when I was about sixteen, provoked by an encounter with the Dalai Lama, whose style and exoticism caught my eye. I was being educated in vice and morality at a school for boys in northern England, physically and culturally isolated from the rest of the world, run by Roman Catholic monks. The Dalai Lama had expressed a wish to see a Christian monastery in operation, and we were the chosen venue. There was great anticipation. We were instructed to wear suits, since he was, after a fashion, a head of state. There were security preparations involving dogs and detectives. A documentary film was shown about the history of Tibet, which I remember in detail: the landscape shots, a caravan of horses and yaks making its way jerkily through a mountain pass, tall yellow hats, images of a religious ceremony, which I think must have been archive footage of the Dalai Lama’s own enthronement. I can even remember the angle at which I was watching the screen, from the back, on the left, in a wooden-panelled common room.
Some of the monks, our teachers, communicated the view that the visit was a great, historic honour. Others spoke in sardonic tones, debating the ethics of allowing a prominent denier of Christ into the hallowed sanctuary of the abbey, the monastery and the school. There was one old monk who spread a story which I think he must have gained from one of the fantastical travel books of the early twentieth century, or conceivably from Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique. He said that anywhere a Dalai Lama defecated at once became a Buddhist shrine, so foreigners of various kinds would now be bound to treat the place as a site of lasting pilgrimage. There would be no way of keeping them out, the Orientals, who would certainly come in numbers to revere the sacred excrement. The more simple-minded schoolboys appreciated this line, discussing the mechanics of the worship.
The Holder of the White Lotus arrived in rain with police cars and an entourage of Tibetan monks and Indian security men, some displaying automatic weapons. We stood in a rough line, waiting. He was in his forties, so young and uncelebrated, I realise now, looking back and seeing him against the backdrop of the heavy stone buildings, the distant sports fields, the old-style police cars, the drizzle, the memory of the England of my childhood, far from Tibet. He wore platform flip-flops and a maroon robe, vivid against the sombre black habits of the receiving monks. Joy poured from him; there was no trace of piety, the great Christian virtue. I remember having an urge to be noticed by him, to be picked out. He smiled and laughed and leaned forward, gripping each person’s hand in turn.
A little later, as he came out of the school theatre, he was intercepted by a long-haired American woman, fresh from Chicago. She was howling. In our isolation, far from women and far from America, such a sight was hardly imaginable. I got as close to the action as I could. She looked a little like Joni Mitchell. The gist of her message, communicated in noisy sobs, kneeling, hugging the Dalai Lama’s knees while damp security men darted about, was that the world needed him. She had been told in a dream to go to him, wherever he was, and help humanity in whatever way he thought best. I was struck by the seriousness with which he dealt with her, listening carefully to each word, unconcerned by the gawping schoolboys and his embarrassed hosts.
That was the beginning of my obsession with Tibet – or from this distance what looks like a beginning, although it did not feel like one at the time. I read a leaflet, issued by the Dalai Lama’s office, which explained the principles of reincarnation, and how he was chosen as the reborn version of his predecessor.
In 1935 the Regent of Tibet went to the sacred lake of Lhamo Latso, and had a vision of a monastery with roofs of jade green and gold, and a house with turquoise tiles. In 1937 high lamas and dignitaries carrying the secrets of the vision were sent to all parts of Tibet in search of the place that the Regent had seen in the waters. The search party that headed east was under the leadership of Lama Kewtsang Rinpoche of Sera Monastery. When they arrived in Amdo, they found a place matching the description of the secret vision. The party went to the house with Kewtsang Rinpoche disguised as the servant, and a junior official disguised as the leader. The Rinpoche was wearing a rosary that had belonged to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, and the little boy of the house recognised it and demanded that it be given to him. Kewtsang Rinpoche promised to give it to him if he could guess who he was, and the boy replied that he was ‘Sera aga’, which means in the local dialect ‘a lama of Sera’. Then the Rinpoche asked who the leader was and the boy gave his name correctly; he also knew the name of the real servant. This was followed by a series of tests that included the choosing of correct articles that had belonged to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, including a walking stick and drum. In 1940 the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was enthroned.
I was captivated by the romance of this scene: the search party setting off, finding the house with the turquoise tiles, disguising the lama as a servant and identifying the chosen child, who could recognise a walking stick and a drum. It was only some years later, when I read the memoirs of a member of the Dalai Lama’s family, that I saw the background was more complex. The Dalai Lama’s great-uncle and elder brother were important reincarnate lamas in Amdo, his uncle was financial controller of nearby Kumbum monastery, and the region’s notoriously brutal Muslim warlord, Ma Bufang – who was personally instrumental in choosing the Dalai Lama – turned out to be a friend of his mother’s family.
I began to read about Tibet, its life, religion and traditions, its rulers and ruled. Looking back through sheared, overlapping memories, trying to get a glimpse of the past, it is hard to be sure what made me feel such instinctive devotion to Tibet. I can see another version of myself responding, with similar instincts but different knowledge.
In essence, there were two things that drew me: the place and the spirit.
Tibet was as far as you could go. It was a harsh, remote, untouched land, outside time and geography, where ideas could be projected and dreams could be lived, a high plateau the size of western Europe, the most mountainous country on earth and nearly the most sparsely populated, a place of physical angularity and limitless expansion where perceptions of space and distance altered, a land of blue sheep, blood pheasants and barking deer, ringed by snow peaks and impassable high-altitude deserts, dropping to fields of jasmine, sky-blue poppies, apricot orchards, incandescent turquoise lakes and hillsides of juniper; a place of serenity, where the enlightened chose to return after death and reincarnate themselves in human form for the good of all sentient beings; of names that rolled from your mouth: Pandatsang, Chomolungma, Dekyilingka, Dorje; of ancient monasteries with smoking butter lamps, wrathful deities, prostrating nuns, flailing oracles, revelatory trances and shaven-headed incarnations in maroon robes, cloistered in meditation, the low cry of human thigh-bone trumpets and the rhythm of soft, guttural chanting flowing down the valleys with the snow-melt; nomads and herders, amulets close to the skin, children wrapped in sheepskins, pushing flocks of yak and dzo, the yak–cow crossbreed, through the mountain passes, heading for the fragrant grasslands as their ancestors had always done. This was Tibet, before I went there: a place of dreams, a place to feel at home.
I was not the first to fall for such an idea of this remote land. Later, I came to know that it had been coveted in this way for centuries, and that my fellow travellers included Tintin, Franklin Roosevelt, Heinrich Harrer, Madame Blavatsky, Sherlock Holmes and Lara Croft. Sometimes I felt that most of the Western world saw Tibet as a place of distant realisation. ‘Do you know what the Lama says?’ asks Bill Murray’s character in the cult comic movie Caddyshack. ‘He says, “Oh, ah, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.” So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.’ The computer game heroine Lara Croft, with her erupting breasts and 9mm Uzis, sees Tibet as a place of initiation into heroism. She throws off her aristocratic past and begins a career as an adventurer when her plane crash-lands in the Himalayas, returning to Tibet on a mission in Tomb Raider II. In John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest, failing, dying Harry Angstrom tells his lover Thelma, ‘The only country over there I’ve ever wanted to go to is Tibet. I can’t believe I won’t make it. Or never be a test pilot, like I wanted to be when I was ten.’ Angstrom has ‘always been curious about what it would feel like to be the Dalai Lama. A ball at the top of its arc, a leaf on the skin of a pond.’ A decade on, at the end of the millennium, his grandson Roy returns to the theme in Rabbit Remembered, e-mailing his grandmother: ‘What really took my interest in the news is this Tibetan boy just my age who was the second most important lama in the world and escaped by walking several days through a blizzard in the Himmeleyas, hes called the KARMAPA. On the same website I read where the Dolly Lama (the most important lama) said of YK2 “Millennium? The sun and the moon are the same to me.” ’
Tibetans themselves believe they come from somewhere special. Implicit in Tibetan Buddhist teaching is the idea of Tibet as a sacred land. The prophecy of Shambhala, found in the scriptures of the Kalachakra initiation, projects a huge, mythical kingdom ruled by a congenial monarch, shaped like a lotus and encircled by a range of snow peaks. The kingdom may be in the mind; or it may be real. The nineteenth-century Hungarian scholar Csoma de Körös suggested with admirable precision that Shambhala was to be found ‘between 45° and 50° north latitude … where the increase of the days from the vernal equinox till the summer solstice amounted to twelve Indian hours, or four hours, forty-eight minutes, European reckoning’. It was an idea taken up by James Hilton, the author of the mawkish Goodbye, Mr Chips, in his 1933 novel Lost Horizon, when he coined the now universal term ‘Shangri-La’, to mean an imaginary secret paradise. Hilton’s Shangri-La was a place where wisdom and knowledge were preserved from the ravages of the madding world by an elite gang of old men, led by a Capuchin monk named Father Perrault, in the Valley of the Blue Moon, somewhere inside Tibet. A mountainous region on the Yunnan–Sichuan border now markets itself to tourists as the ‘real’ Shangri-La.
Hugh Richardson, Britain’s last representative in Lhasa, who in 1943 signed the treaty which gave up British extra-territorial rights in China, once mentioned to me in a letter ‘a quotation from Newbolt which I can’t find, “The mind’s Tibet where none has gone before”.’ I liked this phrase. Everyone has a Tibet of the mind, a notion of a pure, distant land, a place of personal escape, the heart of lightness. For some, it may be glimpsed through music, or fasting, or drugs, or prayer, or excessive exercise, or perfect love. It is the imaginary paradise, the cool correlative of the desert island with palms, coconuts and Gauguin’s women. I searched for the phrase ‘the mind’s Tibet’ in the writings of the patriotic British poet Henry Newbolt, zipping through lines on a database, but without success. I decided to ask Hugh Richardson if he could remember where the phrase came from, but before I could, he died, at the age of ninety-four, while Al Gore and George W. Bush squabbled over chads, and the last link in a shared history was broken, leaving ‘the mind’s Tibet’ elusive and unlocated.
In 1986 I travelled through the Tibetan borderlands as a tourist, spending time in Kumbum and other parts of Amdo, as well as in Chinese cities such as Xian and Beijing. I realise now that I saw and comprehended little of substance. I was looking for the wrong things, concentrating on the experiences of travel and the reactions of the foreign tourists around me, rather than on the place itself. Aspects of Tibetan and Chinese conduct that I took to indicate ignorance, hostility or insipidity I see now to have been no more than automatic, conditioned fear, the responses of a society emerging from trauma, of people who have passed through terror and know that nothing will be gained from frankness, certainly when dealing with something as unstable as an outsider.
I felt I was perceiving things more clearly when I spent the next summer living in the monastery at Tsechokling, near the headquarters of the Dalai Lama’s exiled government. I learned the exiles’ view of their native land, seeing this as necessarily more authentic and truthful than the controlled version I had seen the year before. The scale of Tibet’s dislocation seemed to become clear then, viewed from a distance in the relatively free society of India (politically chaotic, but unconstrained), so that the suffering and victimhood of the entire Tibetan people in the years following 1950 replaced my own memories of the place I had seen. Tibet became for me, at that time, a land of certainties: an independent country had been invaded by Chinese Communists, who destroyed six thousand monasteries and killed 1.2 million people, an exact figure, one-fifth of the population.
Tibet became the cause to which I attached myself, writing leaflets, making speeches, going on demonstrations. Much of this attachment was a reaction to my own world, a case of what George Orwell called ‘transferred nationalism’. A movement that has since been termed post-Seattle politics was beginning. Ideologies were viewed as weights from the past, discredited by the ways they could be seen to have failed. Party politics were being replaced by particular causes and concerns. The Tibetan cause became a central part of my life, and many friendships and relationships developed from it. When I was leaving university, determined above all to live on my wits and not be an employee, the chronicling of Britain’s 1904 invasion of Tibet and its leader Francis Younghusband became an obvious route out.
Spending time over the years with Tibetan exiles, but not returning to Tibet itself, my image of a promised, damaged land grew. Coming from a materially rich but spiritually confused world, I could not help but be drawn by the character, feeling and serenity of many of the Tibetans I met, by their capacity for dealing equably with whatever life threw at them. Many had passed through intense personal suffering, but seemed to have found a way, through their religious or cultural beliefs, of coping with it. Sometimes, their pain was internalised and liable to emerge in another form, but often it seemed to have been faced, and dissolved.
Poverty can kill you, but widespread affluence does not bring happiness. It is one of the gravest problems of overdeveloped societies. Depression, stress, weight fixation and loose rage flourish in rich countries; in poor countries, people have other things to worry about.
I remember a moment in a pristine shopping centre in southern England. There were clean metal elevators, themed shops, designed spaces, corporate brands and coffee bars. As I rose sleekly from one floor to another, looking down through the glass and light, I felt that few people in this shoppers’ paradise seemed content. There was an air of anxiety, as if time was running out for all of them. It brought me back to a moment in Tibet, to a memory of a group of men and women sitting, laughing, on the edge of a field of barley after a morning’s harvest, wearing wide-brimmed hats to keep off the strong sun, each one spinning wool on a spindle, or carving a wooden peg, telling a joke, passing the day. In the free world, the invented world, there is little time for being. Each step is managed, and you have to work ever harder to get the money to buy the things that will keep you from falling out of the system. The people in the shopping centre had everything, but all they wanted was more, because having everything did not make life easier for them; they had to run just to stand still.
For Tibetans, the idea of self-loathing or of loneliness in a crowd is hard to comprehend; there is no way to translate, for instance, the concept of low self-esteem into Tibetan. You are what you are. Mental disturbance or illness is understood, but formless anguish is not. This is something that the Dalai Lama has noticed and tried to respond to, and is one of the reasons for his global allure – the hope that he might provide some answers.
In his book Freedom in Exile, he wrote:
There are a lot of people in the West who live very comfortably in large cities, but virtually isolated from the broad mass of humanity. I find this very strange – that under the circumstance of such material well-being and with thousands of brothers and sisters for neighbours, so many people appear able to show their true feelings only to their cats and dogs. This indicates a lack of spiritual values, I feel. Part of the problem here is perhaps the intense competitiveness of life in these countries, which seems to breed fear and a deep sense of insecurity.
An old Tibetan refugee who lived in India once told me about a trip he had made to see his daughter, in Zurich. It was a baffling experience. They went to visit friends, but everyone was too busy to stop and talk. Sometimes, you would go to someone’s house and they would not even invite you in to sit down, or offer you anything to eat. Children would spend their time addressing computer games rather than talking. If you went to a party, you would be expected to arrive and leave at a certain time, and to bring a bottle of alcohol with you. Machines, rather than humans, were used to mend the roads, but unemployed people were funded generously by the state. Oddest of all, he said, in a land where people always seemed too busy to stop and chat, was their behaviour when they had a chance to relax. On hot days, the residents of the city would go to a park filled with people, but once there they would try to avoid contact or conversation, and pretend they were alone. Although he had been intrigued by his time in Zurich, the common social behaviour there was outside his comprehension.
In the wealthy world, the pervasive sense of lack drives people to worship at the oddest shrines, and to seek a solution to their formless malaise in bogus shamanism, crystal therapy, hands-free massage, rebirthing, sun salutations, flotation and pesticide-free food. Some people abandon the search for a transcendent explanation quickly, settling on materialism as an alternative, while others continue it for a lifetime. The process of being born and raised within the rituals of an established religion, which has been automatic for most people through the whole of human history, becomes rarer with each year that passes. For many people in rich countries, the certainties of earlier generations now seem implausible, especially the theories and dogmas of revealed religions.
For me, Tibetan Buddhism was a workable approach. Leaving the Roman Catholic faith of my childhood was not hard. It had long seemed less than credible, although its rituals could be reassuring and I liked the emphasis on moral inquiry. But the creator god, the conjuring of bread and wine into flesh and blood, the ban on contraception, the promotion of Christ’s sexless mother as an example to women, the harassment of dissident clergy, the thought that ex-cathedra pronouncements by the Pope should be taken seriously – all of these things had pushed me away from my inherited faith.
Buddhism appeared to create contentment among its followers, and reincarnation seemed a fair explanation of what happened to the spirit after death. So my admiration was partially utilitarian: it felt good to be around Tibetans, and if their religion brought good to them, it was worth pursuing. The outward aspects of Tibetan Buddhism, and the celibate male hierarchy running the show, were what I found least appealing, although I still respected the Dalai Lama. It was the Buddhist explanation of life, the universe and everything that drew me, rather than the ritual or the theology.