Escape from the Land of Snows (5 page)

The Fourteenth was often intensely lonely at first. His nervous and rather meek brother Lobsang went to live with him, but his parents were installed in their own home in Lhasa and were allowed only periodic visits. In their absence, the boy latched on to his beloved Ponpo, his caretaker, forming an attachment that would last for decades. “
So strong was [our relationship],” the Dalai Lama said, “that he had to be in my sight at all times, even if it was only the bottom of his robe visible through a doorway or under the curtains which served as doors inside Tibetan houses.” Like the Dalai Lama’s mother, Ponpo was a forbearing, kindhearted person who fed and soothed the boy. But the memory of his mother
lingered. The Dalai Lama’s younger brother, Choegyal, was installed at Drepung Monastery, a few miles from Lhasa, having been recognized as the reincarnation of a high lama. There Choegyal grew desperate for any hint of his old life, especially the warm presence of Diki Tsering. “
I missed my mother terribly,” he remembers. “She used to send me homemade cookies, lollipops, chewing gum … all wrapped up in a scarf. I would sniff the scarf, desperately trying to recapture the smell of her.” The Dalai Lama suffered similar pangs.

As a boy in the freezing Potala on long afternoons, the young Fourteenth Dalai Lama would sit for hours on the shiny
arga
floors, made of chipped stone and waxed with butter, and gaze up at intricate murals hundreds of years old. These became his history lessons. Extending from floor to ceiling, they told the story of Tibet in flowing allegories and luridly colored portraits.

The Dalai Lama learned about Songtsen Gampo, the Tibetan king who, beginning around AD 629, transformed Tibet into a relentless military power. His armies pushed into Nepal and Burma, into Tang-dynasty China, the border areas of India, and the neighboring kingdom of Zhang Zhung. But he also established Lhasa as a cosmopolitan mecca, sending scholars to northern India to create a written Tibetan language and bringing astrological systems from China, laws and civil administration from the Uighurs, and art from Nepal. The king, in his most lasting legacy, then imported Buddhism to Lhasa and declared it the official state faith. Before Songtsen Gampo, the Tibetans had practiced Bön, “the nameless religion,” a shamanistic belief system populated by demons, vengeful ghosts, snake-gods, and devils who called for human sacrifice and who could only be controlled by a priest known as a “bön,” or invoker of spirits.

Gampo’s successor, Trisong Detsen, summoned the legendary guru Padmasambhava from India and encouraged him to journey
to every corner of Tibet, teaching the Four Noble Truths:
to live is to suffer; suffering is caused by desire; desire can be overcome; and the path to that overcoming is embodied in the Noble Eightfold Path—right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration
. Sin is not the great villain in Buddhist philosophy; ignorance is. We sin because, in our ignorance, we fail to see how lying and stealing and committing violence harms our own karma and leads only to more suffering. Tibetan Buddhism has often been called a science of the mind, and with some justification. It’s a struggle to understand life and overcome its illusions so that one may gradually attain a sublime equanimity. Padmasambhava was the first to expound its principles in the Land of Snows.

The guru didn’t attack Bön so much as cannibalize it, incorporating the faith’s demons and legends into the Buddhist pantheon and thereby giving even the simplest peasant a clear way of comprehending the new religion. It was said he faced down the Bön deities by causing massive avalanches, stopping the wind, and bringing the waters of frigid lakes to a boil, all through a mind honed by constant meditation. By the twelfth century, Buddhism had conquered the country, this time not by imperial decree but by capturing the hearts of ordinary citizens.

The young Dalai Lama slept in the Great Fifth’s bedroom, on the seventh—and uppermost—story of the Potala. “
It was pitifully cold and ill-lit,” he remembered. “Everything in it was ancient and decrepit and behind the drapes that hung across each of the four walls lay deposits of centuries-old dust.” He made friends with the mice who came to steal the food left as offerings for the Buddha. In the morning, after his 7:00 a.m. breakfast, the Dalai
Lama and his brother Lobsang were given their lessons together, beginning with reading and memorization of Buddhist texts. The Dalai Lama was trained through the traditional Tibetan methods. First, he was taught to read and then to write (including a very exacting course in penmanship, divided into training in one script for writing manuscripts and in another for official communications and private letters). Then he began to memorize the classic scriptures, both to sharpen his memory and to give him a basic understanding of Buddhist principles. This was followed by
nyam tee
, “teaching from experience.” Here a lama would be invited to the Potala to give a lecture on a specific virtue, illustrating the point with real-life stories and quotations from Lord Buddha and the classic Indian authorities. Next came perhaps the most important step of all, the practice of meditation, where the student was left alone in complete silence to contemplate the lessons of the day and to begin the internal explorations that are the grist of the monk’s life. Finally, that development was tested in debates with tutors and teachers, accompanied by a series of stylized gestures—the questioner, for example, would try to distract his adversary by slowly raising his right hand above his head and then slapping it into his left palm.

At 10:00 a.m., every day, His Holiness and his brother would be separated, and the Fourteenth would be escorted to a meeting with the members of his government, who ascended the steep stairs from their offices on the second and third floors. He was not allowed to speak. His regent, a flamboyantly corrupt monk named Reting Rimpoche, directed the nation’s business.

When the Dalai Lama was a child, political affairs and religious studies were sheer drudgery. His tutors found the boy to be bright, with an impressive memory, and deeply concerned with underdogs, the friendless and abused. But he didn’t work at his
lessons. “
My only interest was in playing,” the Dalai Lama admitted. He was a strong-willed boy more interested in concocting elaborate war games than anything else. He was almost worryingly obsessed with gadgets, war machines (challenging his keepers to make tanks and airplanes out of balls of
tsampa
dough), military drills, and dangerous stunts, such as running off a ramp and jumping, to see who could leap the highest. Because the Dalai Lama was forbidden to have friends his own age, his adult attendants were shanghaied into mock battles. The young boy would toss missiles made of dough at their heads, and they would fire back.

He hadn’t yet overcome his legendary temper, either. After losing a game to his sweepers (who swept the gleaming floors of the palace clean), His Holiness would sometimes stand and glower at them, literally shaking with rage. The ancient myths held that the Tibetan people had descended from a ravenous she-beast, and Tibetans believed Chenrizi had come to watch over them because of their wild nature. But at times it was the Dalai Lama who seemed ungovernable, a spirit of fury unleashed in the echoing rooms of the Potala.

It was only with the sweepers that His Holiness had what could be called a normal relationship; the others used formal language when speaking to him, addressing the institution, the superior being, instead of the young boy. Protocol gave his ministers strict rules for what they could and couldn’t do in the Dalai Lama’s presence: sitting, for example, was sacrilege. In fact, the Dalai Lama often saw only the tops of his subjects’ heads, as they bowed low at the first sight of him and he, by tradition, looked up in the air. Nor could he be punished: when the Fourteenth did something bad, it was his timid brother Lobsang who was lashed with a whip hanging on their tutor’s wall. The Dalai Lama had the curious fate of being neglected and spoiled at the same time.

When His Holiness was just eight, Lobsang, the last daily link to his old life, left for private school. Now the two brothers would see each other only on the occasional school holidays. “
When he left after each visit,” the Dalai Lama said, “I remember, standing at the window watching, my heart full of sorrow, as he disappeared into the distance.” His estrangement from a normal childhood was complete. “
Those children wrested from their families,” wrote the Tibet scholar Giuseppe Tucci, about the young Dalai Lamas,

As he entered his teens, the Fourteenth was barely treading water with his studies. At thirteen, he was introduced to Buddhist metaphysics, and his mind shut down completely. “
They unnerved me so that I had the feeling of being dazed, as though I were hit on the head by a stone.” The only things that moved him were the stories of the Buddhist martyrs and the passages about suffering and forbearance that the scriptures abound with. At times, he would shed tears when reading them. But for the rest, he only let the verses play on his lips, not even trying to memorize them. He would edit the stories in his head to make them more exciting, or conjure up cliff-hanging adventure stories to avoid boredom.

• • •

Summer brought the move to the Norbulingka, and the young Dalai Lama quickly grew to love the rambling green place. He would take his younger brother, Choegyal, out on the pond in a tiny boat that could fit only the two of them. They would stare down over the gunwales of the boat and drop food to the fish that they could see flitting in the green water. His attendants would walk along the shore, tracking the progress of the vessel. The Fourteenth proved to be a daredevil, falling into the pond one time while trying to retrieve a stick and being rescued by a janitor who happened to hear his calls.

When, at fourteen, he first met the Austrian soldier Heinrich Harrer (who would go on to write the memoir
Seven Years in Tibet
), the two worked a film projector together. At one point, the Dalai Lama convinced Harrer to speak through a microphone and announce the next film to his tutors sitting in the theater, which Harrer did in the casual way of a Westerner. “
He laughed enthusiastically at the surprised and shocked faces of the monks when they heard my cheerful, disrespectful tones,” Harrer remembered. Harrer found the Dalai Lama to be an ebullient, confident teenager who felt the suffocating traditions of his office keenly. “
From the first day of the year until the last, it was nothing but a long round of ceremonies,” the Dalai Lama wrote. “This formalism regulated every detail of our everyday life. You had to observe it even while talking, even while walking.” He preferred gossiping to politics—and the intrigues that swirled around Lhasa were as complex as any Tudor plot. When his father died in 1947, allegations circulated that he’d been poisoned as part of a complex conspiracy. (There was even one rumor that said the Fourteenth was not the real Dalai Lama but an imposter.)

Harrer described the young man he met: “His complexion was much lighter than that of the average Tibetan. His eyes, hardly narrower than those of most Europeans, were full of expression, charm and vivacity. His cheeks glowed with excitement, and as he sat he kept sliding from side to side.…” The Dalai Lama wore his hair long (probably, Harrer thought, as protection against the freezing cold of the Potala Palace), suffered from bad posture as a result of many hours spent bent over books in his badly lit study, and had beautiful hands, which he kept folded. “He beamed all over his face and poured out a flood of questions,” Harrer remembered. “He seemed to me like a person who had for years brooded in solitude over different problems, and now that he had at last someone to talk to, wanted to know all the answers at once.”

His Holiness was interested in the world outside Tibet but had few ways of learning about it. He had a seven-volume account of World War II, which he’d had translated into Tibetan, but there were large patches of world history that were a mystery to him. World War II had reshaped societies outside the Himalayas’ ranges and set in motion the forces that would threaten to overwhelm his country, but the Dalai Lama learned about the battles by paging through back issues of
Life
magazine, which arrived in Lhasa months after their issue date, already musty with age.

All he had for an insight into power was the Tibetan myths and the murals that looped and spiraled across the walls of his palace. They told him how the great imperial era of Tibetan history, a time of conquest and national consolidation, drew to an end in the ninth century. The line of religious kings was terminated, and Tibet spun off into regional fiefdoms ruled by warlords and local chieftains. By the thirteenth century, when Genghis Khan marched on Tibet, he found waiting for him not a formidable opponent arrayed in battle formation but a few chieftains waiting with gifts.
The skirmishes between China and Tibet would continue for centuries, but China was now the dominant power. And for the Han, nomads such as the Tibetans were more than outsiders or enemies. They were alien, a people “
not yet human, because they pursued a lifestyle similar to wandering beasts.” Tibetans were destined to be seen by the Han as primitive hunter-gatherers who’d never joined the human fold. Barbarians.

The murals the Dalai Lama gazed at were also a family tree. In the mid-seventeenth century, the line of politically dominant Dalai Lamas began with the political genius of the Great Fifth. Before him, the Dalai Lamas were simple monks and abbots who were recognized as reincarnations of Chenrizi, the
bodhisattva
of Infinite Compassion. But the Great Fifth, as the leader of a relatively new sect of Tibetan Buddhism still seeking its place among competing schools, cannily reached out to Gusri Khan, founder of China’s great Qing dynasty. Gusri Khan sent his soldiers to Tibet and, in a series of withering battles, defeated the Fifth’s rivals and installed the Dalai Lama as ruler of a newly unified Tibet. Tibet’s Buddhist rulers had struck a grand bargain with Peking, allying themselves with a more powerful neighbor. Having traded the sword for the prayer wheel, they would now depend on foreign protectors for their security. It was a compromise that would come to haunt the Fourteenth.