In Exile From the Land of Snows (30 page)

In a short while, as the day began, Dr. Dhonden was brought tea. Afterwards he was asked to visit his first patient, a twenty-three-year-old monk, infected by the illness, languishing in his room. “I went to see the young man,” continued Dr. Dhonden. “It was a very serious case. The room he lay in stank. Diarrhea mixed with blood was pouring from him onto the bed and he was semi-comatose; he couldn’t talk. I asked for his urine specimen and it was brought to me in a tin cup. All of a sudden I remembered my dream. It was the exact cup, even with the crack on the rim. ‘Oh, I have already examined this before,’ I thought. I was amazed. Then the whole dream came back. I recalled the debate and the treatment and immediately I prepared the correct medicines. The man recovered and after that, the epidemic in the village was completely stopped. Now when I look back on it,” Dr. Dhonden said, “I feel that whoever came to me in the form of a
khadroma
that night was actually administering my true final examination.”

As Dr. Dhonden’s reputation spread, he spent the remainder of the 1950s traveling from one district to another. “Each day I rode from village to village, returning periodically to Lhasa to obtain medicines,” he recounted. “I was able to cure three quarters of my patients. And because I gave penicillin injections for skin disease—a great novelty among Tibetans—my reputation continued to increase. I never had a free day.” A group of young relations began to study with him, but before long the uprising against the nine-year-old Chinese occupation broke out in Lhasa and the Dalai Lama fled. “I saw His Holiness when his party came through my area,” recalled Dr. Dhonden. “Those who weren’t following him had joined the guerrillas to put up a last fight for our freedom. My students all had family members whom they couldn’t leave. My own mother’s legs were too poor for her to walk out and my father had said that he was too old to cross the high passes into Bhutan. As a monk, I wouldn’t fight. So I felt that I had no other choice but to leave. I borrowed a horse, said farewell and set off.”

Though Namro was only a few days from the border, the presence of Chinese troops forced Dr. Dhonden to hide for over a month before finally, in the company of eighty other refugees, he descended a steep snow-covered slope, trekked through a valley and crossed a glacial stream
into the forests of Bhutan. With only a few texts, instruments and medicines in his possession, he then walked across Bhutan begging day to day. “After I was forced to flee my homeland, I was overwhelmed by a deep sense of renunciation,” reflected Dr. Dhonden. “I saw life as essenceless, without real stability. I only wanted to practice religion.” Arriving at Buxa, Yeshi Dhonden requested permission to remain with the monks there while the rest of his group was transferred to road work. The Tibetan government official in charge replied, “You have the right to practice religion and you are also young and fit to work on the roads. However, if the Kashag asks me, ‘Has any doctor come out of Tibet?’ and I’ve sent you elsewhere, what will I say? Therefore, you studied medicine at the government’s expense, and now the time has come for you to help us.”

Dr. Dhonden was sent to Dalhousie, where 3,000 refugees, including the elite monks of Lhasa’s two Tantric colleges, Gyudto and Gyudme, were camped in squalid conditions. Tuberculosis, hepatitis and amoebic dysentery were rampant. Preparing what medicines he could from the few herbs available in Indian stores, he set up a clinic and went to work. “One day a sweeper in my clinic was bitten by a poisonous snake,” he related. “Just as I was applying a Tibetan tourniquet, an Indian doctor arrived. He examined the bite and declared that unless his leg was amputated immediately the man would die in half an hour. I told him this was unnecessary; I had already given the man Tibetan medicine effective for poison. The doctor turned to the sweeper and said, ‘You will die within minutes unless I operate, but this Tibetan’—indicating me—‘thinks otherwise.’ He asked him whose diagnosis he wished to accept. The sweeper had seen my work and so he replied mine. The doctor then compelled me to sign a paper releasing him from all responsibility in the case. There were many aspects to my treatment, but after ten days the sweeper could move about and in a month he was completely cured.”

Despite the man’s recovery, the episode proved to be the start of a serious conflict. Once a week Indian doctors came to inspect the refugees, in the course of which they dropped by Dr. Dhonden’s clinic to demand that, as he was not certified in India, he discontinue practice. “During one of their visits I was examining a patient with skin disease,” continued Dr. Dhonden. “The physicians saw this woman and together announced that she had chicken pox. They claimed that unless she was isolated an epidemic would sweep over all the refugees. I said bluntly that they were wrong. It was a minor heat disorder and no more. They departed, leaving medicine for her to take. I forbade her to. In a short while they came back and tried to remove her to an isolated house in the forest. I refused to let her go. They asked if I was willing to have an outbreak of chicken pox
on my hands and I replied, ‘The Tibetans are my own people. How could I ever harm them?’ I then demanded that now
they
sign a paper, just as I had been made to, certifying that indeed this woman had chicken pox. They stalled and within a few days the woman was cured.” Despite this minor victory, more battles ensued, until, in mid-1960, Yeshi Dhonden was unexpectedly summoned to Dharamsala. Word had reached the government-in-exile that a Mendzekhang-trained physician had escaped. Apprised of his existence, the Dalai Lama had called for Dr. Dhonden personally.

“I arrived in Dharamsala just before sunset,” Dr. Dhonden remembered. “The hills were covered with tents. People were living in very poor conditions. They had refused to leave His Holiness and were going wherever he went.” Directed to the kitchen area of the Secretariat compound at Mortimer Hall, Yeshi Dhonden sat and waited. He was finishing his tea when the Dalai Lama arrived. “Suddenly I heard His Holiness in the other room. ‘Where is the doctor?’ he said. I stood up, folding my hands in prayer, praying for his long life. I had a very strong mind of faith. But when he entered the room I began to weep. I had never wept upon meeting someone before. I must have been thinking of Tibet …”

The Dalai Lama questioned Dr. Dhonden on his escape and then requested him to treat those camped around Dharamsala. Working out of the Nursery at Conium House, Dr. Dhonden began seeing patients under the observation of Tibetan government officials. Having met with their approval, he was summoned to the Dalai Lama once more, this time in the capacity of examining physician. After curing the Dalai Lama of a skin disorder, he was asked to see Kyabjé Ling Rinpoché, the Dalai Lama’s senior tutor and head of the Gelugpa sect, who was bedridden in a hospital in Calcutta suffering from a severe case of pericarditis, an inflammation and swelling around the heart. In little over a year Ling Rinpoché was cured and Dr. Dhonden was officially appointed to be the Dalai Lama’s personal physician, a post normally filled by up to four doctors in Tibet. His enthusiasm for his practice now fully recovered, he set about the monumental task of preserving Tibetan medicine in exile.

Only two other doctors had escaped from Tibet, neither of whom could assist Dr. Dhonden in Dharamsala. Alone, he began to train ten students in the rudiments of his science, their progress hampered by an almost total lack of funds. Yeshi Dhonden could do little until, one day in 1963, his many run-ins with Indian doctors yielded an ironically positive result.

Responding to repeated complaints from local physicians that the Tibetan was “stealing” their patients, a senior minister in the Indian
Health Department arrived in Dharamsala to investigate. For a week he watched Dr. Dhonden diagnose patients by their pulse and urine, after which he carefully asked each individual his ailment. At one point, five officers from the nearby army cantonment came in to refill prescriptions. “When the minister saw them he exploded in a rage,” recalled Dr. Dhonden. “ ‘We give you the best health care in India and now you’ve come here to eat shit from a Tibetan!’ he yelled.” The officers replied that in many cases they had been ill for fifteen years or more. Where Western medicine had failed, Tibetan medicine had succeeded. “Unlike other doctors,” they said, “we don’t have to tell Dr. Dhonden what’s wrong. He tells us.” The day before he departed for New Delhi, the minister came to Yeshi Dhonden’s office. “You are doing very good work here,” he said. “There is only one problem. You don’t have enough students. I’m going to give you thirty thousand rupees a year and a twenty-bed hospital.” In this manner, the Tibetan Medical Center was formally organized.

Dr. Dhonden assumed the roles of director and pharmacologist as well as chief examining physician. In 1965 he was joined by a second physician, who assisted in teaching the now seven-year curriculum, leading expeditions into the mountains behind Dharamsala to collect herbs and manufacturing 165 principal drugs. With 15 students graduating to join the 150 or so doctors practicing Tibetan medicine outside of Tibet and plans underway for a research wing, a museum and nine outpatient clinics in the settlements, Dr. Dhonden resigned from the Center in 1969. Opening a private practice in McLeod Ganj, he continued to see the Dalai Lama, taking his pulse each day just after sunrise, until in 1978 another physician was appointed to assist him. Dr. Dhonden was then freed to introduce Tibetan medicine to the West.

“T
HE INFORMATION REQUIRED
before Tibetan medicines could be approved for use in the United States would take an army of lab technicians years to develop,” commented Dr. Gerald Goldstein, speculating on the future of an exchange between Tibetan and Western doctors as Yeshi Dhonden’s visit in Virginia drew to an end. “Each ingredient must be individually identified, purified from its crude state and then thoroughly tested. Who is going to pay for it?” “Research today is a cost-benefit situation,” concurred Dr. Donald Baker. “How is a drug company going to collect all of these medicines in northern India and still make a profit at it?” “The impetus for the work, though, is clear,” added Dr. Goldstein. “Over one third of our pharmacopoeia comes from plants and microorganisms, specifically some of our oldest and most effective
cancer drugs. These are just the sort of materials Tibetans have acquired experience with over centuries of use. Personally, I think the drug companies are missing a bet. Some of these medicines are definitely going to be active.”

In the East, the bet has not been missed. Whereas Peking destroyed every institution of the old Tibet soon after 1959, it preserved and later expanded Mendzekhang. Now called the Hospital of Tibetan Medicine, Mendzekhang’s 127-member staff treats 700 to 800 patients a day. Though the doctors have been forced to curtail their unique knowledge of the mind’s relation to the body (considered, as a basic component of Buddhist teachings, anathema), volumes of color photographs cataloguing medicinal plants have been compiled, while many of the most valuable herbs indigenous to the Himalayas have begun to be cultivated on high-altitude farms. Concurrently, Tibetan drugs are in widespread use throughout mainland China though they are referred to as Chinese in origin and not Tibetan.

“Tibetan and Western medicine begin from completely opposite standpoints,” said Dr. Dhonden, summing up his view of the two sciences after visiting the United States. “To start with, a Western scientist looks through a microscope to examine the cause of a disease in terms of its molecular particles. Only then does he take into account the particular patient. Tibetan doctors begin with the patient. We consider his disposition in terms of wind, bile and phlegm. And then we approach the disease. The difference, I feel, makes for weakness and strength in both. We lack many of the symptomatic treatments modern physicians possess. On the other hand, it would be useful for Western doctors to understand the Tibetan presentation of the humors, their balance and imbalance in the human body. Without this, their medical system remains incomplete. It cannot establish a clear view of the correct causes and conditions governing all disease. If young Western doctors would come and train with us for a period of years—as well as relating their own system’s analysis of disease—then, I feel, a true exchange could occur. So each of us it seems,” he concluded, judiciously, “has something of value to learn from the other.”

N
IGHT BLACKENS
P
ATHANKOT
. Headlights swerve across the buckled row of wood stalls lining one end of the main road. Inside, chilled keepers sit on platforms buried in unbought goods: old blankets, used rubber boots, discarded greatcoats from the nearby army base. Lighted by single bulbs dangling over their angular heads, they gaze balefully into the dark street. Even at night, its chaos refuses to subside. Tattered coolies, rearing up on bicycle rickshaws, press into the middle of the road in the trail of a bus, ignoring fierce horn blasts from the next, coming up behind. Dented, scarred Ambassadors, India’s domestically manufactured car, jockey for position. From opposite directions they speed at one another down the center of the road, their drivers veering at the last instant only to avoid collision. The Tatas, towering diesel-powered trucks, festooned with somber portraits of blue- and red-faced deities illuminated by colored bulbs and framed with tinsel, supersede the bluffing. Refusing to slow for the town, they plummet through, horns blaring, spraying the road with fumes. In their wake hundreds of men, wrapped in shawls against the early-January cold, dash across the avenue. Obscured by the dark and even after a rain, the dust rises around their thin legs. As it clears, the scene behind appears. Scores of cubbyhole-sized repair shops specializing in one aspect of a vehicle—tires, radiators, fenders or batteries—have thrown their contents onto the open ground before their doors. While the older
drivers of berthed trucks huddle about fires in trash cans, smoking leaf-wrapped
bidis
, gaunt young men clad in pajama-like pants, arms and faces black with grease, rush feverishly from part to part searching for any small item, of rubber, steel, black iron or wood, that might temporarily serve as a facsimile of a functioning thing. But the decay is irremediable. The very elements of this world, it seems, have devoured their vital force long ago.