The Peace Correspondent (17 page)

IN the 17th century, the first outsiders to reach Lhasa, Tibet's Forbidden City, observed pious pilgrims with spinning prayer wheels prostrating themselves full-length before temples, thousands of red-robed, red-cowled lamas, and yak-butter-greased peasants who “eat their meat raw and never wash their hands or face.”

When I first deplaned from a Civil Aviation Authority of China (CAAC) Boeing in Lhasa in the early 1980s, I saw the same lamas, pilgrims and peasants who eat raw yak and spin prayer wheels for salvation. Only the few battered green Chinese army trucks, the four-wheel drives and the air strip seemed new.

Visitors who now arrive at a new terminal see a large city with entire suburbs of new concrete buildings and an extensive Chinese influence. Tibet has changed more in the past decade than in the previous thousand years. Yet in important ways it is the same exotic place those 17th-century explorers observed.

With an average altitude of more than 5,000 meters, the Roof of the World is the world's highest region, and among the most
isolated, boxed in by immense mountain ranges on three sides. Flying in from Chengdu, China, or Kathmandu, Nepal, it is obvious why this country remained isolated for so long. Jagged, snow-capped peaks of the immense Himalayas poke through the clouds, as though tearing at the aircraft's underbelly.

Tibetans are still cheerful, humorous people open to foreigners. Tibet's' Tantric Buddhism, or Lamaism, is a sometimes ghoulish, bizarre religion of human-skull cups and skull-encrusted crowns, human-bone trumpets, copulating icons and rumored cannibalism.

Until the British invaded Lhasa under Colonel Francis Younghusband in 1904, the only wheel seen in the country was the prayer wheel. Now, jetliners arrive regularly, and satellite dishes receive international television broadcasts -- when not banned by the Chinese government.

Tibet's harsh, stunning scenery seen on the new 68 mile (96 kilometer) highway from Gonggar airport to Lhasa is age-old. Prayer flags flap from all corners of low, square, mud-brick huts, herdsmen drive skittish, shaggy yaks which look and move like musk oxen, and fields of brilliant yellow mustard ripen in the crisp air. Women winnowing barley in the fields toss the golden grain into the air from woven baskets and sing to summon the wind to blow the husks away.

A yak-skin coracle (small, round boat) twirls in the eddies of the cloudy, jade-green Tsangpo River, which thousands of miles downriver becomes the Brahmaputra, India's largest waterway, emptying into the Bay of Bengal.

On my first visit, it was a grueling bone-jarring, head-bashing, four-hour, four-wheel-drive ride over a bumpy dirt road by Chinese jeep. Now, our modern minibus zips along a paved highway, getting us to Lhasa in an easy hour-and-a half.

This mysterious Holy City that eluded outside travelers for centuries opened to tourism in the 1980s. Each year, only a few thousand adventurous tourists come, attracted by the Tibetan lamaist form of Buddhism and the dramatic mountain setting.

The biggest change for tourists has been the improved accommodation. On my last visit, we stayed in the aptly named Number 3 Guest House, a grubby barracks-like place with lumpy, dirty beds and no hot water. The government was building the city's first real hotel that would vastly improve life in Lhasa for visitors. On that early trip, a gracious, elderly American Chinese lady joked that the coffee shop in the new hotel would be called “Yak in the Box” (a parody on the U.S. fast food chain, Jack in the Box). After the greasy, almost unpalatable food we had been eating the whole trip (at that time, the worst Chinese food in Asia was in China), she sounded almost wistful.

Now, the Holiday Inn Lhasa's coffee shop, the Hard Yak Cafe, serves giant yak burgers; its bar, Altitudes (the world's highest), stocks local and imported drinks; and the hotel offers the comforts of an international establishment.

Despite the rapid changes, Tibetans remain friendly, although still given to staring, especially outside Lhasa. These ardent Buddhists are decidedly pious. As we drive through the broad streets of New Lhasa, a dozy grandma, seeing our bus bearing down on her, gives her prayer wheel a few quick extra spins as she scrambles to safety.

Everywhere, in the temples and the streets, we hear the murmured chant, “Om mani padme hom.” Frequent recitation of the incantation, “Hail, Jewel in the Lotus,” helps the faithful achieve enlightenment and reach the Western Paradise of Great Bliss. The words are carved in stones, written on prayer flags and inscribed on prayer wheels. In this Tibetan dial-a-prayer, the wielder gains spiritual merit with each clockwise twirl.

Ten years ago, Lhasa was a mud hut city with only a few small Tibetan shops offering basic goods or plates of tasty momo (dumplings stuffed with ground pork) with chili sauce. Now it is like a shabby, modern Chinese city with straight, paved streets and shops and restaurants with large Chinese script signs.

Karaoke bars and discos are also new. Riding a pedicab one afternoon, I spot The Bar of West. It is a garish place with flocked
red velvet wallpaper rubbed smooth, a three-foot-high blowup Coca-Cola bottle, fake plastic dart boards hung on a purple curtain, green globe bulbs glowing against purple plastic wall brackets and a green patterned linoleum floor. The battered pool table is worn to a shiny moldy green, and dusty tins of Five Star Beijing China beer and Pabst Blue Ribbon are stacked behind the bar, tended by bored, sullen girls.

The square in front of the 1,200-year-old Jokhang Temple in the heart of old Lhasa, which was a muddy rubble when I last visited, has been paved over. However, the streets around this Holy See of Tibetan Buddhism are as lively and chaotic as ever, with locals in heavy regional costumes and unusual headgear buying and selling everything from religious articles to food and kitchenware.

A strange swishing sound comes from pilgrims slowly making the inner circuit clockwise around the temple. Along Barkhor Bazaar, or Free Market Street, these devout people wearing crude shoes or pieces of cardboard on their hands stand, clap, stretch out full-length, foreheads touching the ground, stand up and repeat the action. Slowly they slide along the road, like giant snails in their bulky leather overcoats.

Inside the ancient temple, rustics with matted hair, wild-looking women with turquoise beads woven into their hair, ancient ladies with faces leathery as sheep-skin coats, twirl small silver prayer wheels or giant, yak-sized golden ones.

A solid line of devotees shuffles down steep stone steps and through the crowded warren of dark winding corridors, the blackened, uneven stone floors sticky with yak butter spilled over the centuries. At each of the 24 shrines to various Buddhist deities, they pour yak butter from brass goblets, tin tea kettles, plastic jars or thermoses into basin-like lamps with dozens of flickering wicks. The lamps throw a dim yellow light on fantastic, bizarre murals and statues. Chanting and clutching prayer beads, the flock pushes forward to throw ceremonial silk or gauze scarves on the gilded Buddhas and to receive blessings. The musty atmosphere
here in the nether regions of the temple is eerie, otherworldly, the cloying air pungent with the smoke of yak butter candles, burning juniper, incense and unwashed bodies.

From the roof of the temple overlooking the square we can see a stark new reality of Tibet. Even here in the old city, office and apartment blocks are replacing the traditional Tibetan low-rise stone buildings with elaborately-carved wooden eaves, as China colonizes and modernizes the country.

Not far away, prayer flags hang like lamas' laundry outside the awe-inspiring Potala Palace, Tibet's Holy See, with “Golden domes like tongues of fire” as an early foreign correspondent described it. The magnificent mountaintop 13-story Potala Palace with its gleaming gold rooftop stands against the clear blue sky, a symbol of old Tibet. The world's highest palace was the Dalai Lama's Holy Citadel before he fled to exile in India in 1959. Now, only a few of the 1,000 rooms with 10,000 shrines and 200,000 images are open to the public.

Tourists ride minibuses to the back entrance while Tibetan pilgrims from across the nation climb the steep steps to the front entrance. Together, they form solid lines winding up stairs and along the corridors. Tibet's Tantric Buddhism, or Lamaism, features elements of demonology from the ancient, animistic Bon creed. Detailed murals of demons, gods, heavens and hells cover walls of temples and monasteries everywhere. In some places, protector gods are so fierce, the lamas cover their faces with multicolored scarves to save laymen from nightmares. Elsewhere, happier Buddhist deities are entwined with svelte, naked women.

Gaping lamas lurk in the shadows here, slyly offering to sell bronze Buddhas. Here, as in other temples across Lhasa, workers are busy renovating -- and installing electric lights, which I fear will destroy the spiritual aura.

Numerous ornate temples and isolated monasteries perch on mountains surrounding Lhasa, testimony to the Tibetan piety. One day, I join a group of visitors in a minibus for a long, scenic
drive along dusty roads.

On this brilliant morning, with bright summer sun lighting a chilly autumn landscape, we pass through barren valleys hemmed in by rugged, dusty hills. Along the way, our Chinese guide points out a holy mountain where sky burial takes place. Tibetans bury their dead in five ways: in a tomb pagoda, for Dalai Lamas; water burial (in the river for the fish to eat) for the sick or children; earth burial for criminals; fire burial (cremation) for leading lamas; and sky burial for others.

In sky burial, an undertaker lama called a joba takes a body to the sacred mountain, chops it to pieces and whistles for vultures to come and feast. Some witnesses contend the lama samples a morsel himself, others that he merely drinks a cup of blood. The bones are ground into fertilizer, I'm told, or carved into religious objects or musical instruments.

“Most Tibetans enjoy sky burial,” our guide says.

After several hours, Tsurpu monastery suddenly appears, monk's-robe purple against the mountain at the end of a rocky canyon. Monks, women in Tibetan floor-length black gowns with striped aprons, and a few calves wander the dusty courtyard oblivious to the cold wind that sends us scurrying for shelter behind the walls.

Inside the main hall, rows of monks, men and boys, chant, beat drums with curved sticks, bang cymbals. Pointing out animal skulls hanging from the rafters, our guide explains that this is the Gelugpa (Black Hat) Buddhist Sect, which uses blood in its ceremonies.

Like the Tibetans, we have come for an audience with the living child Buddha, the 17th incarnation of the Karmapa, and the only spiritual leader now living in Tibet. Buying a kata, the traditional white scarf offering, I line up with the pilgrims slowly moving to a dais in a small room. There, a jaded-looking boy of about 10 sits, tapping each passing pilgrim lightly on the head with a short rope on a stick. A lama then gives each supplicant a piece of red yarn to wrap around their neck or wrist.

As we reach the front, the English woman ahead of me puts some shiny pens with holograms on the pile of offerings. I fold the scarf as instructed and drop it alongside. Then the boy gently touches me on the head, and I am out of the chamber. For a non-believer, it is merely a curious experience, but seeing the rapture it brings to these pious people is touching.

On another morning, we set out for Ganden, one of Lhasa's three famous monasteries, and the most spectacularly located. Leaving the main road east of Lhasa, we climb a series of switchbacks leading high up to the hilltop, with stunning views of the river valley far below.

Up here at 4,300 meters, I notice my hands have turned purple, I'm gasping and giddy after a few steps, my head pounds and morning coffee gurgles unpleasantly in my stomach. Altitude sickness strikes most lowlanders in Tibet, with headaches, dizziness, slight nausea and shortness of breath. For most, it lasts only a few days, and the hotel provides oxygen bags in every room, but the going is slow at first.

The constant refrain everywhere along Tibet's roads, as guides point out temple ruins, is: “It was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution.” During that era starting in 1966 when Mao's young Red Guard vandals went on a rampage across Tibet, this magnificent site suffered more than most, being almost leveled.

Ganden is being reconstructed, and already a hamlet of holy buildings sits atop the peak, where monks again live and worship. A herd of saddled yaks with red wool braided in their manes stands outside a temple as though part of an ancient caravan.

Alone, I wander around the buildings, and find a dimly lit hall. Inside, the monks are chanting and the air is rich with the now-familiar smell of yak butter. The temple may be new, but the spirit is as old as Tibet itself.