Escape from the Land of Snows (3 page)

From this ring of summits, the land drops down to a huge plateau that is hardly any more conducive to human or animal life. Most of Tibet is so high and cold that trees and vegetation—beyond a few native bushes—will not survive. The north is marked by glaciers, marshes, and quicksand pits. The central province of U-Tsäng is so wind-blasted that it’s called “the land of no man and no dog” by Tibetans themselves. The
changthang
, or northern plains, present an alien landscape that across thousands of miles alternates between flat lengths of earth covered in yellow borax, beautiful deep lakes, and miles of soda and salt deposits that are so bright they can cause snow blindness in travelers. This entire area once lay under the Tethys Sea, which left behind only vast mineral deposits and the occasional river churning white with rapids.

The landscape gives Tibet a physically intoxicating air. Things happen here that happen in very few places on earth. It’s possible to get frostbite and an intense sunburn at the same time. You can safely dip your hand in a pot of boiling water, as water boils at a much lower temperature. You can spot a man walking toward you from ten miles away because the land is so flat and the air so clear. It’s one of the sunniest places on earth, but frost covers the ground over three hundred days a year. For centuries, the
misers—
bonded servants who worked for aristocrats or monasteries for their entire
lives—slept crouched on their hands and knees, with every stitch of clothing they owned piled on their backs, looking like they were bowed in prayer. Any more contact with the frigid earth and they’d have frozen to death.

The land limits the number of people who can live on it. Cold, altitude, and alkaline soil conspire to give the country a small population stretched over 500,000 square miles, the size of Western Europe.
In 1950, only about 2.5 million people inhabited the nation (this includes ethnic Tibetans living in the country’s border areas), fewer than 5 per square mile, while the rest of Asia averaged above 200 per square mile. Tibet, the most sparsely populated country on earth, fairly echoes with emptiness.

The Amdo search party experienced the harsh landscape firsthand as they went in search of the child reincarnation. Led by Ketsing Rimpoche, the thin, bookish abbot of Lhasa’s influential Sera Monastery, the group took two full months to travel the thousand miles to Amdo, battling almost continuous snowstorms and temperatures that plunged well past −10 degrees. They carried with them items that had belonged to the Thirteenth as well as a list of potential candidates, boys who’d distinguished themselves by certain signs (especially touching or asking for holy relics that belonged to high lamas) or by a maturity beyond their years, or, as the process was not completely apolitical, children who had powerful sponsors backing them. In March 1937 they arrived at the storied Kumbum Monastery, founded 350 years before by the Third Dalai Lama on the grounds where a great Buddhist leader, Tsongkhapa, had been born. On first seeing the buildings, constructed in a Chinese pagoda style, the members stopped and exchanged glances. The monastery’s main structure, known as the Temple of the Golden
Tree, was three stories high, and its roof was tiled in gold and green jade, exactly as Reting Rimpoche had seen at the sacred lake. The Lhasa dignitaries tried to contain their excitement.

The team had spent weeks drawing together a list of candidates, finally compiling fourteen names. But one by one, the early candidates failed the ancient tests, designed to coax out of the boys irrefutable signs that the reincarnated spirit of Chenrizi dwelt within them. The Panchen Lama, second only to the Dalai Lama in status as a religious leader, had suggested three of the boys, one of whom had died before the search team arrived. Now two remained. A team of search party members visited the first boy’s house and quietly sipped tea as the child’s mother presented the candidate, freshly scrubbed and dressed in brand-new clothes (although the search party’s mission was supposed to be secret, word often leaked out that an important reincarnation was being sought). At the first test, recognizing a rosary that had belonged to the Great Thirteenth, the boy proved painfully shy and didn’t reach out to grab the relic. Soon, he burst into tears and ran out of the room.

The episode points up a hidden aspect of the search for a Dalai Lama. Though it proceeds according to a mystic protocol, deep in its workings there rests a certain psychological agenda, a second-order intent. Boys who were thought to be possible candidates were questioned; if the child ran off or hid behind his mother’s skirts, he was immediately eliminated as a candidate. A child who was the reincarnation of the Dalai Lamas, divine-like beings who had ruled Tibet for hundreds of years, couldn’t be a milquetoast. Without quite stating it, the search favored the bold.

The next boy on the list, Lhamo Thondup (or “wish-fulfilling goddess”—the Tibetans often gave androgynous names to their young children), was destined to be the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and he certainly qualified as a bold spirit. Lhamo had been born
on July 6, 1935, into a peasant family in the village of Takster in northeastern Tibet near the Chinese border. He was the fifth child of sixteen, only seven of whom lived past infancy. His father was a farmer and horse trader named Choekyong Tsering and his mother was Diki Tsering. (Tibetans do not take their names from either their fathers or their mothers, and they often take on new names after auspicious events.) Diki Tsering had given birth to the boy as dawn approached in a rough-hewn cowshed behind the main house, among the family’s yaks and calves, while a single mustard lamp threw shadows on the wall. Lhamo Thondup’s arrival was marked by unusual signs: his eyes were wide open at birth, and his father, who’d been ill for many weeks as his wife’s pregnancy advanced, jumped out of bed after the boy arrived, so fully recovered that his wife accused him of faking his illness. (It was an early indication of strains in the marriage, as Diki Tsering believed her husband often avoided work, while she bent over in the fields with her latest infant strapped to her back.) Told he’d had a son, his father was pleased.
“Good,” he said. “I’d like to make him a monk.”

Lhamo Thondup had grown up like any other boy in the rugged eastern territories. He lived in the family’s flat-roofed house with its unusual turquoise eaves, and he played in the fields of wheat and barley (after being warned about the wolves that sometimes snatched children away), making little houses in the haystacks and wrestling with his brothers. His tiny village sat on a plateau, surrounded by bright green hills, a typical Tibetan landscape. “
Clear springs of water fell in cascades,” he remembered, “and the birds and the wild animals—deer, wild asses, monkeys, and a few leopards, bears, and foxes—all wandered unafraid of man.” With his mother, he would tend the family shrine, placing offerings of butter or dried fruit to the Buddha. In the evening, the
family might receive visitors, neighbors or merchants whose yaks snorted outside, the men dressed in fur caps, thick
chubas
(long sheepskin coats), and square-toed leather boots, while the women wore long sleeveless dresses over bright cotton blouses. The young Lhamo Thondup would often jump on the windowsill and pretend to be riding away toward the capital, Lhasa, or pack a bag for parts unknown. But so did his older brother, and so must have thousands of other Amdo boys. It was only in retrospect that his games attained a kind of prophecy.

As a boy, Lhamo Thondup was closer to his mother, a deeply loving woman whom all the children sought out when they needed to be comforted. But his personality had flashes of his father’s dark moods. His father was strong-minded, prone to bursts of intense anger, sometimes cruel. He would kick or slap his sons when unhappy with them, and once, when the nervous Lobsang, Lhamo’s elder brother, failed to ride a horse properly, his father had swatted the animal and sent it off like a shot. Lobsang tumbled from its back and slammed to the ground, suffering a severe concussion. The future Dalai Lama was prone to the same kind of outbursts. “
I used to torture my mother,” he admits. “When she would carry me on her shoulders, I would pull her ears to steer her this way or that.” But it was an anger with a difference: he fought the local bullies and jumped into fights on the side of the underdog. “
I have memories of running after those I perceived to be the tormentor in any fight,” the Dalai Lama said. “I just could not take the sight of the weak being harassed.”

This impetuous boy was the last candidate recommended by the Panchen Lama. The abbot from Lhasa, Ketsing Rimpoche, went to see the boy himself, disguised as the servant of a religious pilgrim, a tattered sheepskin robe thrown over his shoulders. Around his neck he placed one of the Thirteenth’s rosaries. With two attendants and
a government official in tow, the abbot set off for the boy’s village, home to about thirty families. When they reached the outskirts of Takster, they spotted the house immediately, a standard Tibetan rural home distinguished only by its turquoise roofing tiles. In its yard was a tall wooden pole on which hundreds of prayer flags had been tied, each flap of wind sending the devotion written on it skyward. A brown-and-white Tibetan mastiff was chained near the front door, and it began to bark furiously as Ketsing Rimpoche and the three others made their way down to the house. The door opened and the woman of the house came out. Ketsing Rimpoche’s servant, disguised as an aristocratic pilgrim, asked if they could use the woman’s kitchen to brew some tea. She immediately agreed and invited them in. It was the three others’ job to keep the parents and any siblings busy while Ketsing Rimpoche talked to the young Lhamo Thondup.

As the travelers filled their kettle and chatted with the unsuspecting mother, a young boy emerged from another room and spotted the scholarly abbot, who was sitting on a small platform inside the kitchen. Lhamo Thondup was two and a half years old, with penetrating brown eyes and a confident expression. He walked up to the abbot, took the rosary in his tiny hands, and said, “I want that.”

The words seemed to echo in the room. The attendants turned to look at the boy. Ketsing Rimpoche smiled and said, “If you guess who I am, you can definitely have it.”

“You are a lama of Sera,” said the boy.

Ketsing Rimpoche nodded. “And who is this?” He pointed to the government official with him.

The boy turned to look. “That is Lobsang Tsewang,” the boy said. Then he remarked that the other two visitors were from Sera Monastery. Each answer was correct. Packed into the tiny room,
the men who’d come a thousand miles to find the next Dalai Lama shot glances at one another. They felt themselves to be on the verge of one of the central miracles of their faith, the return of Chenrizi to earth, a thing of almost inexpressible joyfulness.

The party stayed the night at the young boy’s house. Ketsing Rimpoche played with him but asked him no further questions. The next morning, when the party was leaving, Lhamo Thondup burst from the front door and ran after the group from Lhasa, crying that he wanted to go with them. The search party could console the weeping boy only by telling him they would return soon.

Back at the monastery, Ketsing Rimpoche sent a messenger off with a telegram to the authorities in Lhasa, telling them (in prearranged code) of their discovery of a promising candidate. The messenger set off for Sining, where the message would be relayed through India and China and finally back to Lhasa, along Tibet’s only telegraph line. Four weeks later, the reply arrived: “The young Takster boy sounds very interesting,” it read. “We have high hopes for him.” Ketsing Rimpoche was instructed to continue the examination.

As the abbot departed for Takster for the second time, the entire search party of forty men went with him. The monks blew on their conch shells, the sound of the Dharma’s constant victory over ignorance, always a favorable omen. Along the way, the party met a young Chinese man ferrying wood to his home by donkey and asked him the way to the boy’s house. The man told them to take the lower of two possible paths to their destination, and soon they came to a clearing that they recognized as the spot where the Thirteenth Dalai Lama had stopped briefly while traveling through the area decades before. It was a minor landmark in the spiritual map of Tibet, but the excitement of the search party increased. It was as if a string of portents were leading them onward to Lhamo Thondup.

When the forty dignitaries tramped down into their enclosed yard, Diki Tsering and her husband knew that their youngest boy was destined for something greater than a life as an Amdo farmer. They suspected he’d been marked as a high lama. Already, one of Lhamo Thondup’s older brothers had been recognized as the reincarnation of another holy man. And the search party’s appearance came as a relief: their little boy had been tormenting them ever since Ketsing Rimpoche had left, wanting to know when the abbot would return and asking his mother to brew her best tea and cook a special meal so that the abbot and his companions would be happy when they arrived. The boy had even piled some of his possessions on the kitchen table and told his bewildered mother, “
I’m packing to go to Lhasa.” But they didn’t dream that the dignitaries were there to find the next Dalai Lama.

Ketsing Rimpoche, now dressed in his abbot’s robes, presented the boy’s father and mother with presents and requested to see Lhamo Thondup alone. The pair showed the abbot and his attendants to their bedroom, and the search party placed a long wooden table across the bed. On it, Ketsing Rimpoche laid the items he’d brought from Lhasa for just such an occasion: two black rosaries, two yellow rosaries, two
damaru
hand drums, and two walking sticks. One item of each pair had belonged to the Thirteenth. The other hadn’t.

The bright-eyed Lhamo Thondup entered the room, crowded with strange men, and calmly walked over to Ketsing Rimpoche. The abbot greeted him and held up the two black rosaries. He asked the boy which one he wanted. Lhamo Thondup immediately pointed to the Thirteenth’s and placed it around his neck. The same thing happened with the yellow rosaries. The tension in the room, a mix of anticipation and nerves frayed over months of searching, mounted. Ketsing Rimpoche pointed to the walking
sticks. Lhamo Thondup considered, then reached for the wrong stick—it belonged to Ketsing Rimpoche himself. The members of the search party froze. One mistake would disqualify the boy. But then Lhamo Thondup gently let go of the stick and grabbed the Thirteenth’s cane, holding it up in front of him. The officials in the room let go of a collective breath. Later they would realize that the first walking stick had actually belonged to the Dalai Lama briefly before he gave it away to a monk. It was as if the boy had felt the spiritual traces of the Thirteenth, like fading fingerprints.