Tibetan Foothold (21 page)

Extract from 1965 Diary, written en route to a Tibetan Refugee camp in Nepal

When the bus from Patancot reached Lower Dharamsala at 12.40 p.m. I at once took the short cut to the Nursery – and never have I done that climb so quickly. I dashed through Forsythe Bazaar (noticing how many more Tibetans are there now, from Nepal) and I was scrambling up the steep path through the forest when I heard shouts of ‘Amela!’ and saw two Tiblets rushing through the trees with arms outstretched. What a welcome! I would not have known either of them and thought it rather remarkable that they recognised me. On reaching the camp several ayahs greeted me, and we were hugging each other joyfully when a sturdy little object came hurtling across the compound wearing an ear-to-ear grin: I had no difficulty in recognising
this
Tiblet as Cama Yishy flung himself at me. When looking forward to our reunion I had thought it unlikely that he would remember ‘Amela’, much less display such enthusiastic affection, and I was so surprised by this demonstration that I promptly burst into tears – a reaction which annoyed me but which the ayahs took completely for granted.

It is hard to believe that the miserable children among whom I worked less than a year and a half ago have been transformed into these bouncing, bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked Tiblets. Had I been dropped into the compound by helicopter I would never have recognised the place; there are now twice the number of buildings – and half the number of children. The Swiss Red Cross has provided a nurse to work with Doris Betts (the SCF nurse succeeding Juliet, who has been
transferred to Simla and is engaged to a most likeable and talented Indian army officer), and Doris Murray is at last free to concentrate on the educational needs of the camp. Some of the children who were here in 1963 have returned to their parents and others have been transferred to Dalhousie, Mussoorie or Simla; the present policy is to keep numbers down to a maximum of 500, and Pema-la very wisely refuses to admit any but orphans from the road-camps.

Soon after my arrival I went to the Upper Nursery to pay my respects to Pema-la, His Holiness’s younger sister, who has brought about this wonderful improvement. One feels that the future of the Tibetan community in exile depends largely on the leadership of the younger generation of educated Tibetans, and to know that there are people like Pema-la and Lobsang among them is tremendously encouraging.

I spent most of the afternoon playing with the Tiblets in the Lower Nursery. Cama Yishy has become very dictatorial, and Pema-la tells me that he is now leader of his age-group at prayers, dancing and lessons. If anything his charm has increased, but unlike the old days he is very possessive towards me. This afternoon he wanted me all to himself and tried to drive the others away, so I had to be tough and make him realise that I wanted to cuddle
the lot
– a situation which he accepted philosophically enough providing no one else sat on my right, where he well remembered he had long since staked his claim. It’s priceless to see him putting my arm around himself so that my hand is where he likes it on his chest, and grinning triumphantly up at me, obviously conscious of having me where he wants me in every sense – he’s a cunning little devil!

Today’s most remarkable feat of recognition was achieved by Pooh-Bah. He was only three when last we met, yet he knew me at once and almost exploded with gurgles of joy in my arms. What a change there! He has become much more extrovert and sociable and has lost some of his good looks and all his diseases – which latter deprivation he must feel acutely, he so loved complaining.

I could hardly sleep last night, I felt so excited and happy about the
camp’s transformation. And this morning provided another pleasant surprise when I had an audience with His Holiness and found him much more relaxed and approachable than during our last meeting sixteen months ago. He seems to have matured a great deal in that brief time and to have gained in self-assurance, as though he has at last been able to come to terms with his strange situation. The impression I had today was of an astute young statesman in the making – yet when we came to touch on religion he spoke with an easy sincerity that was immensely moving and quite unlike his tense, watchful manner at our previous meeting. He looks considerably older now, and a little thinner – but very much happier.

This time I was not received formally in the audience chamber but was led to the verandah where His Holiness was sitting stroking a magnificent Lhasa Apso terrier with a long, silky, pale silver coat. He at once remarked how much weight I had lost and then went on to ask when I left Ireland. On hearing that I had been in London since 3 April he astonished me by observing ‘so you were not at home to vote in the General Election on the 7th of April’. I wonder how many people outside Ireland are aware that we even had a General Election!

His Holiness’s English has improved so much that nothing I said had to be translated – though he always spoke to me through his
interpreter
– and we had a long discussion on current Tibetan difficulties, particularly those with which I will soon be battling in Nepal. Some of his comments revealed a mischievous sense of humour which might not be fully appreciated by the senior lamas but which proved that he has no illusions about the extent to which some Tibetans worsen the refugee situation and that he does not wish to present to foreigners any false image of the Tibetan way of life. I could not but notice the temperamental affinity between himself and Pema-la (who has always been his closest friend) and I left the Palace feeling that the combined efforts of these two young people could eventually solve quite a number of problems.

It is a slightly daunting task, this writing of a new afterword for a book first published more than half a lifetime ago. To begin with, one has to read the book – and never before have I read one of my own products. That leads to an odd encounter: the sixty-seven-year-old meeting the thirty-two-year-old. In
Tibetan Foothold
the latter sounds to the former astonishingly politically naïve, my reaction to President Kennedy’s assassination being the most obvious example of this. Looking back, I can see that my political education began while I was living among the Tibetans. By 1966, when the Red Guards were devastating Tibet and my continuing involvement with the refugees had taken me to Nepal, the CIA was also covertly involved in their affairs.

Another sort of education came about during the first four months of 1969. Then, Mrs Rinchen Dolma Taring, first met in Mussoorie five years previously, came to stay with me in Ireland while writing her autobiography,
Daughter of Tibet
(John Murray, 1970; Wisdom Publications, London, 1986). Amala, as she is known on three continents, was still running the Tibetan Children’s Homes (see page 135) and her time off was limited. We therefore lived in isolation, except for the presence of my new-born daughter, working seven days a week – with just one day off, in February, to celebrate Losar, the Tibetan New Year.

I was not ghosting Amala’s book but giving editorial advice – a much slower process – and soon I realised that a Buddhist’s
autobiography
is a contradiction in terms, especially if the writer is as ‘advanced’ a Buddhist as Amala. Her spiritual training had encouraged the obliteration of the Self; conventional autobiography requires a certain amount of concentration on that same Self. At an early stage in our joint endeavour, I recall standing with Amala in the kitchen, beside a round table, and laying a finger on its centre while saying, ‘You’re
supposed to be
here
, in relation to this book. Everything else must derive its importance from being linked to
you
.’ Amala chuckled, dismissed this primitive notion and went on to write an incomparable volume of layered social and political history – with her family, rather than herself, at its centre. There exists no better account of daily life in Tibet between
c
. 1910 – the probable year of Amala’s birth – and 1959, when she followed the Dalai Lama into exile in India.

To spend four months with only one person, collaborating in the intrinsically intimate task of memoir-writing is a rare experience. And my companion, being a spiritually advanced and scholarly Tibetan Buddhist, during our time together taught me more about her belief system than could be learned from 108 books.

Amala’s father, Tsarong
Shap-pe
Wangchuk Gyalpo, was descended from a famous physician, Yuthok Yonten Gonpo, who, during the reign of King Trisong Detsen (
AD
755–7), studied Sanskrit medicine at Nalanda University in India. Yonten Gonpo’s block print biography of 149 leaves, containing some of his own drawings and diagrams, was destroyed when the Red Guard attacked Lhasa’s Government Medical College. Tsarong
Shap-pe
married Yangchen Dolma, who was descended from the Tenth Dalai Lama’s family, and Amala was their ninth surviving child. In 1886 her paternal grandfather,
Tsi-pon
Tsarong, had been despatched to the Tibetan–Sikkimese border by the Dalai Lama to negotiate its demarcation with representatives of the Raj.

By 1903 the Raj was feeling twitchy about a Russian takeover of Tibet, and the Younghusband Mission set off for Khampa Dzong, just over the border from Sikkim, to put British relations with Tibet ‘on a proper basis’. This alarmed the Abbots of Lhasa’s three great monasteries – Ganden, Sera and Drepung – who regarded all outsiders as the enemies of Buddhism. Accordingly they urged the Thirteenth Dalai Lama to instruct Amala’s father, the senior lay Cabinet Minister, and his monk equivalent, to hasten to the border (a ride of three weeks) and persuade the British to come no further. As a result, the Younghusband Mission became the infamous 1904 Younghusband Expedition which on its way to Lhasa slaughtered some 500 Tibetan soldiers, armed mainly with swords. Later that year, Tsarong was one
of the four
Shap-pes
who signed a Convention with Britain – a
Convention
forbidding Tibet to have relations with any other foreign power. In 1912, when Amala was a toddler, her father and eldest brother – then a twenty-five-year-old junior Government servant – were victims of a political assassination, murdered on the steps of the Potala. Some said Tsarong
Shap-p
e had made enemies by signing the 1904 Convention without consulting the Dalai Lama’s Government. Others believed that he and his son were distrusted for ‘liking foreigners too much’ and introducing to the country novelties of
illomen
. (When Tsarong
Shap-pe
went to India in 1907 on Government business he returned with cameras and sewing machines – inventions never before seen in Tibet.)

If living among the refugees had tempted me to idealise ‘Old Tibet’, Amala quickly brought me down to earth. With honesty, tolerance and humour, she wrote and talked of a society that genuinely revered non-violence and yet could be very bloody indeed. For this reason, her book serves as a powerful antidote to the many partisan volumes which either glorify or denigrate pre-Communist Tibet. She told it like it was, and as the weeks passed I felt as though I had left Ireland, mentally and emotionally, and been transported in time and space to a world that had survived, almost untouched by Outside, for more than a millennium – and had then been shattered forever a mere decade before Amala sat in my home distilling its essence on paper in her neat, firm handwriting.

It was a world of bewildering contradictions, of much laughter and song, of opaque monastic/political conspiracies and abruptly imprisoned Cabinet Ministers, of rarefied Buddhist metaphysics and un-Buddhist superstitions linked to the ancient Bön-po religion, of towering bejewelled head-dresses and lousy heads, of joyous
week-long
festivals when the entire population relaxed and picnicked by sparkling rivers, dancing and gambling and (apart from the more ascetic monks) drinking too much chang, of State Oracles whose pronouncements seemed to influence every Government decision, of Incarnate Lamas who did not always fulfil expectations – Amala’s brother Kalsang Lhawang being one such.

Amala vividly described noble families setting out from Lhasa on ten- or twelve-day rides to their country estates, attended by a battalion of ‘retainers’ – her word. There would be farm stewards, cooks,
chang-girls
, ladies’ maids, children’s nannies, a physician if anyone was in poor health, syces to look after the riding animals, and muleteers in charge of the long train of baggage animals carrying tents, bedding, clothes boxes, food and musical instruments for the family’s evening entertainment
en route
. Sometimes I gazed enviously at Amala, wishing that I, too, had been born in Tibet in 1910. I would have happily settled for reincarnation as a lady’s maid if that occupation required me to ride for twelve days across a landscape of incomparable beauty where humans were scarce but it was not unusual to glimpse bears, wolves, bighorn sheep, wild yak and musk deer. On every side roamed huge herds of
chiru
(a Tibetan antelope), gazelles and wild asses, and by the many lakes dwelt an abundance of birds. The creatures did not flee on the approach of a caravan, knowing they had nothing to fear. Hugh Richardson, a British Trade Consul who lived in Lhasa during the 1940s and was a good friend of the Tsarong family, observed: ‘The majority of people made efforts to live as much as possible with nature, not against it.’ The Chinese live otherwise and by now Tibet’s wildlife has been hunted to the verge of extinction.

Just as the Tibetan language, in 1950, lacked the vocabulary to deal with a mechanised, industrialised, scientific era, so we lack the vocabulary to deal with Old Tibet. In that context, such words as feudalism, serfdom, autonomy, education – even religion – have a misleading resonance; the Western connotations distort the Tibetan reality. Strictly speaking, Buddhism is a philosophy rather than a religion; the Lord Buddha is not, conceptually, the ‘equivalent’ of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim ‘God’.

As for ‘feudalism’, it doesn’t begin to describe the complexity of Tibet’s social organisation. The secular West is ill-equipped to comprehend a country in which all legal, social and political institutions and systems were based on the Buddhist dharma which had long ago been modified and adapted to produce that unique phenomenon known as ‘Tibetan Buddhism’. Although the pre-Communist way of
life was not, as some like to imagine, ‘deeply spiritual’ – in the sense of being guided by devout, mystical scholar-priests with their sights fixed on Nirvana – it really was permeated through and through by abstract spiritual values. Few lamas were ‘hypocritical parasites’ living off the labour of ‘cowed serfs’; only a minority entered one of the great monasteries for no other motive than to enjoy a life of ease. The average monk
was
average: sincere in his beliefs, dutiful about performing his duties yet never aspiring to reach a high spiritual plane. To that extent he was no different from the average Christian priest or monk down the centuries, though of course a far smaller percentage of European men joined monastic orders or the priesthood.

Tibet’s comparatively rich nobility was based mainly in Lhasa. Each of the 200 or so families had to provide one layman to serve as a Government official with a monk colleague – the two having equal status and responsibility. Families lacking a male to fulfil this duty in theory forfeited the lease on their estates. (All land was State-owned.) But in practice there was an ‘escape clause’. With His Holiness’s
permission
, a son-in-law could change his forenames, take his wife’s family name and save the day. After the assassination of Amala’s father and brother, a peasant named Chensal Namgang – a favourite of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama – married one of her older sisters and was ennobled. Subsequently he married another sister – and in 1928 he married Amala and fathered her first child. (Polygamy and polyandry were equally acceptable in Tibet though the latter was more common – and most marriages were monogamous.) In 1929 Jigme Sumtsen Wang-po, Prince of Taring, arrived on the scene and Chensal Namgung helped to arrange the marriage of his third wife to her handsome young prince. When my daughter and I stayed with Amala and Jigme-la in Mussoorie in 1974 they were still very obviously in love.

The upward mobility of Chensal Namgang – son of a smallholder and arrow-maker – was not unusual. Although the nobility were unequivocally the ‘masters and mistresses’, an odd form of democracy prevailed in Old Tibet. Rich and poor visited each other’s homes and formed friendships if personally inclined to do so; there were no European-style class barriers. A monk from the humblest background,
if suitably gifted, could rise high in his monastery’s hierarchy. The families of all Dalai Lamas were automatically ennobled – only two of the fourteen came from the hereditary nobility. The same schools served the children of nobles, traders, craftsmen and peasants, and an erring little noble might find him or herself being chastised by a peasant prefect. Family retainers gave heeded advice about who should marry whom and other important matters. Each craft – artists, goldsmiths, moulders, masons, boot-makers, tailors, carpenters – had its own respected guild, and many craftsmen were richer than some senior noble officials, whose public responsibilities were very costly. On ceremonial occasions (numerous in Lhasa), the guild leaders joined all other officials in the Potala and Norbu Lingka Palaces and were seated above the younger nobles. As Amala wrote: ‘Tibet had its own peculiar feudal system that no other country has ever experienced … Tibetans consider that the more wealth and luck one has, the better were one’s deeds in previous lives. Yet people who do not know how to utilise their wealth properly are thought to be great sufferers and a contented poor man is considered luckier than a miserly rich man.’

On first encountering the refugees, Westerners marvelled at their stoicism in the face of extreme hardship, their cheerful gentleness and serenity – all qualities assumed to be ‘natural’ to Tibetans. The reality is more complicated; Tibet’s cultural history – the Buddhism-powered evolution of a pacifist state – is very remarkable indeed.

According to the earliest records, the men of Tibet were renowned warriors – brave and ferocious. The Chinese can produce written evidence of nineteen serious Tibet versus China conflicts between ad 634 and 849 and the Tibetans were almost always the aggressors. (Those pioneer bureaucrats collected accurate facts and figures for periods which leave Europe’s historians relying on fuzzy guesswork.) At one stage Tibet’s army crossed the river Oxus, invaded Samarkand and prompted Harun Al-Rashed, the Caliph of Baghdad, to ally himself with the Chinese.

Then, after the death in 842 of the anti-Buddhist King Lang Dharma, Buddhism put down deep roots. By 1249, when the Sakya Pandita came to power, it was unthinkable that anyone could rule Tibet without
the support of a Buddhist sect. The change from a militaristic society to a society guided by non-violent principles was gradual and sometimes faltering, but there was no going back, no fudging on a par with Christianity’s conveniently elastic concept of a ‘just war’. This is not to say that Tibet became a completely conflict-free zone. For centuries Tibetan Buddhism was riven by sectarian rivalries and inter-monastery jealousies – occasionally leading to brief battles. However, those lamentable aberrations were recognised as such at the time; physical violence was no longer taken for granted as a legitimate means of settling disputes. The institution of the Dalai Lama (reincarnations of the compassionate aspect of the Lord Buddha, over-simplified by many ordinary folk who worshipped His Holiness as the living Buddha) had, since the mid-seventeenth century, brought to Tibet an extraordinary degree of social stability – described by the Communist invaders as ‘stagnation’.