Escape from the Land of Snows (31 page)

But it’s in person that one discovers why this monk has become such a significant figure in modern life. Grasping your hand, he seems completely entranced by you for the moment, interested beyond all reason in questions he’s probably heard a hundred times. The Dalai Lama has a charm that leads deeper. But he isn’t without flaws. The old childhood anger still flares occasionally. One Tibetan remembers His Holiness becoming absolutely furious when he met a group of former monks who’d abandoned their vows in exile. “
He said that the Chinese were forcing monks to remove the robe in Tibet,” the man says, “but here in India nobody was forcing us to take them off.” The Dalai Lama chastised the men “very strongly.”

His Holiness is nothing if not honest about how the escape was fortunate for him personally. “
There is a Tibetan saying,” he offers. “Wherever you find happiness, that is your home. Whoever shows kindness to you, they are your parents. So, as for me, I’m a homeless person who found a happy home.” He knows he’d be a different man if he’d stayed in Tibet and suffered through the terrors of the Cultural Revolution, as the Panchen Lama was forced to. After accepting the nominal leadership of Tibet after His Holiness’s
escape, the Panchen Lama toured the country’s border areas and sent a blistering letter to Mao in 1962 detailing the abuses committed by the Chinese in Tibet: the willful destruction of monasteries, the starving of rural people (“whole families dying out”), and even the “elimination of Buddhism” itself. The Tibetans have sometimes been prone to exaggerating Chinese atrocities; for a people raised on myths and legends, hard numbers and objective reporting sometimes give way to allegory. But these were things the Panchen Lama had seen and heard for himself. The letter was a suicidally brave gesture, and it earned the Panchen nothing but anguish. His missive was deemed “The Seventy-Thousand-Character Document of Reactionaries,” and the Tibetan leader was
thamzined—
beaten and humiliated in front of throngs of cheering Red Guards—and placed under detention for fifteen years. It was a fulfillment, in a way, of the rumor that had swept through the streets of Lhasa in March 1959. The Tibetans had seen what awaited His Holiness if he’d stayed in Tibet. The Panchen Lama’s life proved their premonition right.

The Dalai Lama still has nightmares about his escape. They are mixed in with more pleasant dreams. “
A few days ago I had a dream about my return to Lhasa, wandering about …,” he said in 2003. When asked what the happiest moment in his life has been, he recalls the second day out of Lhasa, when flying down the far slope of Che-La and knowing he was free from the Chinese. And the saddest? Saying good-bye to his Khampa guards at the Indian border as they turned back into Tibet.

The escape changed him. “
The refugee status brings a lot of positive opportunities,” the Dalai Lama says. “Meeting with various different people from different levels of life. I really feel if I remained in the Potala, on the throne, the Dalai Lama would be
a more holy person. But he would have less chance for talk, less experience. I really feel personally being outside has been a good opportunity.”

Becoming famous—and famous as himself, not as an anti-Communist icon or Westernized guru—has been his only real weapon against the Chinese occupation. He is a movable Tibet. He is proof against Chinese fictions.

In leaving Tibet, the Dalai Lama gained an unprecedented personal liberty. From that moment on, freedom—not a traditional Buddhist subject of contemplation—became a subject he returned to again and again. And his words were given weight by the people he’d left behind. “
Brute force … can never subdue the basic human desire for freedom,” he would write years later. “It is not enough, as communist systems assumed, to provide people with food, shelter and clothing. If we have those things but lack the precious air of liberty to sustain our deeper nature, we remain only half human.”

The escape also forced the Dalai Lama to think beyond Buddhism. “
His exile was huge in his life,” says Paul Jeffrey Hopkins, a Tibet scholar and former interpreter for His Holiness. “Without it, it would be very difficult for him to develop a message that is applicable to the entire world. Instead of becoming someone who’s trying to drive Buddhism forward, he’s attempting to call to everybody in society and thus address their need for kindness and compassion. There would be no way for that to develop had he remained in Tibet.”

He has not escaped the bitter truths of his faith. Every refugee arriving in Dharamsala is granted an interview with His Holiness; it’s a policy unchanged since 1959. This means His Holiness has consoled thousands of men and women, bewildered, wounded
people with stories of persecution and loss. One story from thousands: The father of Norbu Dhondup, who had castrated himself after being humiliated in a
thamzin
, spent twenty years in a Chinese prison before being released and allowed to travel to Lhasa. Norbu, at sixty-five, with little money and no connections, made the trip from India to see him. When he walked into the old folks’ home in Lhasa where his father was staying, the two didn’t recognize each other. “
It had been so many years,” Norbu says. “He hugged me and I cried.” Norbu’s father got down to practical matters, asking him, “How do you live in India? What type of house do you have? Do you have cows?” The older man’s mind had clearly been affected by the decades in a Chinese prison, so that he seemed to have erased, or was unable to recall, the years spent there. And Norbu couldn’t find the words to ask him.

Father and son left by bus for Nepal, where the crossing out of Tibet was easiest, to a place called Dam, near the border. The roads ahead were bad and there were no vehicles that would risk them, so Norbu was forced to carry his elderly father on his back. From Nepal they took a bus to India. Norbu’s father had one wish he wanted fulfilled before he died: to see His Holiness. Faith in the Dalai Lama had sustained him in the long years in prison. Finally, after weeks of trying, a meeting was arranged. Norbu stayed outside while his father went to speak to the Dalai Lama. “When he came out,” he remembers, “he was crying so much that he was speechless.”

The meetings are private, but they give weight to everything His Holiness does. His encounters with suffering and death animate the Dalai Lama’s message to the world: compassion is, finally, strength. “
When, at some point in our lives, we meet a real tragedy,” he said, “which can happen to any one of us, we can react
in two ways. Obviously, we can lose hope, let ourselves slip into discouragement, into alcohol, drugs, unending sadness. Or else we can wake ourselves up, discover in ourselves an energy that was hidden there, and act with more clarity, more force.”

Buddhists believe the Dalai Lama perfected his gift for compassion in the course of many incarnations. Unbelievers may question that. But he has, at least in this lifetime, exemplified the virtue.

he first thing I noticed were the shotguns. Slim, blunt-nosed shotguns, being carried by patrols of PLA troops as they swaggered through the streets of Lhasa. The guns looked like deadly black eels nestled on the shoulders of the young soldiers. The weapons seemed out of place among the picturesque alleys full of traders and Buddhist pilgrims.

It was February 2009. I was in Tibet fifty years after the Dalai Lama had escaped over the Kyichu, a clear cold stream filled with snowmelt that comes up to one’s knees. The city itself had changed a great deal. The landmarks of the events of 1959 were still there:
the Norbulingka, now open to tourists for a small admission fee; the Jokhang; the cobblestoned streets of the old city where Tibetan rebels had fallen. But over them had been laid a twenty-first-century metropolis, a Chinese city that now dominates the centuries-old Tibetan one. And, as the anniversary of the uprising approached, the city was under something approaching martial law.

But why
shotguns
?

In the big public squares, where the distances are greater and the firing angles more open, the PLA troops carried automatic rifles, which were almost comforting to see. In the post-9/11 world, they are everywhere: carried by American soldiers in Penn Station and British marines at Heathrow. These days, an automatic rifle in a public place isn’t so much an actual gun as it is a prop in a ritual. The world’s ugliest and most-capable-looking guns are paraded through city squares, so that people might feel safe. Lhasa was no different.

But what message were the Chinese sending with the shotguns, which are far less menacing, less recognizable tools to intimidate terrorists than UZIs or M16s? It took me a couple of days to realize that I was being too abstract. This was not theater. Shotguns were the best weapon for shooting Tibetans in the narrow alleys of the old city should another uprising be touched off fifty years after the last one. That was the message.

I’d spent weeks arranging the trip, while the Chinese issued a blizzard of restrictions as the anniversary drew closer. No journalists were allowed in. Two reporters were kicked out weeks before I’d arrived. (I’d listed myself as “Salesman” on my Chinese visa to avoid the same fate.) No individual travel—all visitors had to be part of a tour. No travel to the western provinces of Tibet.

The authorities were desperately trying to avoid a repeat of
2008’s protests, when 239 people were killed (19 Chinese and 220 Tibetans, according to the Tibetan government-in-exile), 1,300 were injured, and nearly 7,000 were taken into custody or thrown in jail. To the Chinese, the startling thing about the wave of protests was that it was centered in the rural regions, among nomads and farmers who attacked police stations and raised the Tibetan flag. China had poured money into the regional towns that dot the Tibetan plateau and created a new native middle class. The Chinese felt they’d won hearts and minds in those places. But peasants, farmers, and monks had largely missed the influx of new money, and they deplored the laws outlawing Tibetan flags and even the most innocent displays of cultural pride. “
Even the high-ranking Tibetan cadres in the Communist Party were
furious
with Beijing,” says Professor Gray Tuttle. “They’re strong nationalists, even though they’re making Shanghai-level salaries. And the level of respect for the Dalai Lama is incredible.”

The swell of anger astonished the Chinese. And the recent independence movements in places such as Ukraine and Georgia shocked the Communist Party into a newly paranoid view of nationalist sentiments.

But Lhasa would always be the focal point during the anniversary of the 1959 uprising. Anniversaries of key political events have always been important in Chinese history. Grievances spill out. In Tibet, March 2009 was the biggest anniversary of all.

I was in Chengdu when the Chinese issued another edict: no
injis
(Tibetan for “foreigners”) after February 28. I’d be one of the last to get in.

The final requirement was to have an English-speaking guide. When I finally arrived in Tibet, I met Sharma, a slim, short, sad-eyed Tibetan who’d been guiding for several years. Sharma was dead silent during the hour’s ride from the airport, avoiding the
inane chitchat that most guides engage in to fatten their tip. It was a little unsettling.