Escape from the Land of Snows (2 page)

Lhasa (whose name means “place of the gods”) had first appeared to him as a city of wonders. Almost twenty years before, he’d entered the capital on a golden palanquin constructed of a curtained box set on poles carried by teams of young men, with massive crowds cheering his approach and bowing to him with the ceremonial
katas
, or white scarves, in their hands. “
There was an unforgettable scent of wildflowers,” recalled the Dalai Lama. “I could hear
[the people] crying, ‘The day of our happiness has come.’ ” But it hadn’t. In fact, during his reign, disaster had followed disaster. Men in the east of the country were now being “
driven into barbarism,” forced to fight the Chinese and dying in the battles, ensuring themselves a rebirth as lower animals and demons. And Lhasa too was growing unstable.

The sun was climbing over the small mountains to the east. Soon he would have to return to the palace.

Perhaps what was most shocking about what had happened in the past few days was that the idea of escape wasn’t entirely repugnant to him. It would be devastating to his people, for whom he was Kundun, the Presence, the spirit of Tibet itself. It would be equally devastating for the nation, for the idea of an independent Tibet, and it cut at his heart to contemplate what it would mean for the future. But it wouldn’t necessarily be devastating to
him
. The notion of escape had always appealed to the Dalai Lama, ever since he was a boy in the Amdo hills, before the search party seeking the next incarnation of Chenrizi—the deity that manifested itself in each successive Dalai Lama—had knocked on his parents’ door. When he was only two, he would pack a small bag, tie it to a stick, and tell his mother he was leaving for Lhasa. He had always been an unusual boy, but those moments astonished her. And twenty years later, the idea of leaving still intrigued him. He knew that freedom of the kind he had tasted only briefly in his life was impossible in Tibet. Even without the occupation, Lhasa for a young Dalai Lama was often a dark and suffocating passageway.

He didn’t wish to leave, nor was it even clear that he could if he wanted to.
Some 40,000 Chinese troops were stationed in and around Lhasa, and he’d have to be spirited past their patrols. And if he did flee, Tibet, in a way, vanished from Tibet. He was central to every Tibetan’s sense of his or her own life in a way that no other leader,
not even Mao in China—Mao, who was finally revealing himself in these horrible days—could equal. He was the storehouse of the Buddhist Dharma, a subject that had once bored him profoundly but that now quickened his every thought. Was it possible that that too could disappear from his country, from the earth itself?

The Dalai Lama took the path that turned and wound back toward his home on the Norbulingka grounds. He could hear the crowds stirring outside. The chants would begin soon. He didn’t hurry.

little more than twenty-five years earlier, on the morning of December 12, 1933, hundreds of excited monks had milled around one of the open, stone-floored courtyards of the enormous winter palace, the Potala, their breath visible in the thin air of 12,000 feet. They were there for their annual audience with the
Thirteenth Dalai Lama, the Fourteenth’s tough, visionary predecessor.

But when the maroon-robed monks entered the meeting room, instead of the holy person of the Thirteenth, his compact body and
steely gaze, they saw propped on the golden throne an empty robe. His Holiness, it turned out, was too ill to attend the audience, and his followers would be granted only a chance to commune with his garments, a ceremony the Tibetans call “inviting the clothes.” One monk began to weep. Rumors about the Thirteenth’s bout with a flu-like illness had been sweeping through Lhasa for days. The monk felt instinctively that His Holiness was not going to live long.

Five days later, his fears came true, and the Dalai Lama passed away from natural causes. The announcement was made by dancers on the roof of the Potala, beating out a somber rhythm on traditional
damaru
drums, and by the sight of butter lamps being placed outside, which in Tibet is a symbol of death. The population was grief-stricken, openly crying on the streets of Lhasa. Each Dalai Lama creates an impression of what the institution could be, and the Thirteenth, who’d held the throne for fifty-four years, had set a high bar. He had been a handsome man with a shaved head, an intense, transfixing gaze, and the flourish of a thin mustache. Far from emitting a Buddha-like serenity, his official portraits reveal a Tibetan prince, one well versed in the politics of fear and retribution. But he had presided over the nation’s entry into at least a sort of independence, and he was beloved.

An old saying decrees that whenever two Tibetans get together, there will soon be two political parties. Tibetans are notoriously fond of political intrigue, and at the Potala there were competing loyalties, power struggles, and infighting that sometimes turned lethal. But the Thirteenth had expertly negotiated the dark waters of political life. On his ascension to the throne in 1879, the Dalai Lama’s jealous regent had attempted to use occult magic to get rid of him, placing a “black mantra” in a finely crafted pair of shoes that were then given to a powerful lama, boosting the mantra’s killing power. Having escaped the assassination attempt, the Thirteenth
had ordered the ambitious regent drowned in an enormous copper vat. It was an example of his frequently ruthless nature, but it was also a fact that one often needed to be very tough to survive in the Potala Palace.

The Thirteenth’s great mission in his lifetime had been to modernize the country and usher Tibet into the company of independent nations. He believed that the age-old threat from Tibet’s ancient adversary, China, would return, more powerful than ever, and that his nation, backward and isolationist in the extreme, would prove to be easy prey for its huge neighbor. But by the time of his death, it was clear that he’d utterly failed in this mission. The leaders of Tibet’s great monasteries thought that opening the country to the world would spell the end of their domination and the end of Tibet’s role as the keeper of the Dharma. They equated modernity with atheism. Westerners were seen as
Tendra
, enemies of the faith, and enemies of the men and institutions that supported the faith. One monk remembered that, growing up, he was taught that India was the holiest place on earth but that “
everywhere else is to be feared.” It was even permitted to kill intruders rather than let them contaminate Tibet.

The Thirteenth dreaded what lay ahead for his country. As part of his last will and testament, he left to the Tibetan elite, and to his eventual successor, what some called a divine prophecy. But when one reads it, it turns out to be a hard-nosed political analysis of Tibet’s position in Asia and a stern warning about the future. It reveals what a steel-trap political mind the Fourteenth’s predecessor possessed, and how clearly he saw disaster’s approach:

It was a remarkable document. Dog-eared copies of it were passed around in Tibetan villages for years, and the young Fourteenth Dalai Lama would study it nightly to learn the intricacies of Tibetan grammar.

The death of a Dalai Lama has always been a deeply traumatic event for Tibetans. The state is always most vulnerable in the time—traditionally ranging between nine and twenty-four months—that the search for the new incarnation is carried out and a successor named. (The spirit of the former Dalai Lama does not immediately incorporate itself into a new body; indeed, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was not even born when his predecessor passed away.) The nervous anticipation that all Tibetans feel on the death of their
Precious Protector flows partly from the fatal and scarred history of the Dalai Lamas. The Ninth through the Twelfth (from 1807 to 1875) had all died young, believed poisoned either by their regents, who wished to hold on to power, or by the representatives of the Chinese throne, the
ambans
, who wished to keep a pliable regent in power and prevent the rise of a great lama. Others had died in their prime under suspicious circumstances, among them the rebellious Tsangyang Gyatso, the tragic Sixth. He was a carouser, a poet, a bisexual hedonist who had written some of the most beautiful lyrics in all of Tibetan literature. The loveliest, so often quoted that they now serve as his epitaph, cry out with something the Fourteenth Dalai Lama would come to know intimately—the desire for escape:

In the summer of 1935, nearly two years after the death of the Thirteenth, the search for his successor began in earnest. The corpse of the Thirteenth had provided the first clues. Monks had prepared the body to lie in state in a coffin lined with salt, dressed in his finest gold brocade robes, with the head facing southward, the direction of long life. The next morning, they found the head had turned toward the east. They returned it to its original position, but the next day the same thing happened again. It was a sign that the Fourteenth Dalai Lama would be found in the provinces bordering on China.

Village leaders and authorities all over Tibet looked for telltale signs that the spirit of Chenrizi had been reincarnated, that the new
bodhisattva
—a being who has attained complete enlightenment
but postpones Nirvana to help others obtain liberation—was among them. Finally, Reting Rimpoche, the regent who was the political head of Tibet until the next Dalai Lama could be found, traveled ninety miles southeast of Lhasa to the mystical lake known as Lhamo Latso. Along with a search party, he climbed to the top of a nearby mountain, set up camp, completed his prayers as ritual music played, then gazed down on the clear alpine waters below. Some of Reting Rimpoche’s fellow searchers saw nothing but the turquoise surface of the lake rippling in the breeze. But the regent witnessed a succession of images rising from and then disappearing in the deep waters: the Tibetan letters
Ah, Ka
, and
Ma
, a three-storied monastery with a gold and green jade roof, a white road leading to the east, a small country house with unusual blue-green eaves, and, finally, a white-and-brown dog standing in a yard. When the regent reported the vision to the National Assembly the following year, the members consulted the Nechung Oracle, the state’s chief medium, then decreed that three large search parties would head to the east to conduct a thorough search for the child Fourteenth. In September 1937, the Year of the Fire Rat, the search parties set out from Lhasa: one party headed northeast toward Amdo (which began with Ah, the first letter the regent had seen in the lake), the second party traveled due east to Kham, and the third southeast toward the regions known as Takpo and Kongpo. They were heading into territory as desolate, in places, as the surface of the moon.

Tibet is awash in superlatives. It is the highest country on earth and the most mountainous, with three-quarters of the country’s territory lying at 16,000 feet or higher, a full three miles above sea level. It’s ringed by world-class mountain ranges on three sides. In the north, the Altyn Tagh range separates Tibet from China’s Xinjiang province and the Gobi desert. To the west is the Karakoram
system, across which lie Kashmir and Pakistan. In the south are the almost impenetrable Himalayas, which cut Tibet off from India, Nepal, and the kingdom of Bhutan. Mount Everest, on the border with Nepal, is the crown in a line of mountains that top out at more than 25,000 feet. The mountain ranges are so high that they even dictate Tibet’s weather, intercepting storm fronts before they can shower the plains beyond with water, leading to the “rain shadow effect” that has made Tibet so arid. The country receives only eighteen inches of rain and snow a year.