Escape from the Land of Snows (7 page)

The Dalai Lama ascended the throne on November 17, 1950, a date chosen by the state astrologers. “
I had to leave my adolescence behind and prepare myself as best I could to lead the country,” he said. “I was faced with the immediate prospect of leading my country as it prepared for war.”

The young monk had no training in politics, no leadership
philosophy, and no close advisers he could trust implicitly. Even among the sweepers, his favorite—a man who’d become his playmate and his guardian—was gone by this time. “I realized that in a way his death symbolized the end of my childhood,” the Dalai Lama wrote. He was as alone, as unmoored, as he’d ever been.

Then a remarkable thing happened. The Buddhist scriptures that had seemed so dull and lifeless for so many years began to sing to him. In his midteens, he began delving into the huge body of Buddhist literature and finding in it inspiration and guidance. Part of the change came in regard to his famous outbursts that verged on physical violence. The young monk “
began to realize what a destructive thing anger was,” he remembered, “and I was making a big effort to control my terrible temper.” But Tibet’s darkening fate also urged him on.

Faith transformed the Dalai Lama’s life just as Tibet entered a fatal crisis. And one can surmise that anxiety over what lay before him, and the fact that he was essentially alone in facing it, sent the Dalai Lama searching for a true compass. What is beyond question is that he found that direction, at long last, in the Dharma.

A year later, in the southern Tibetan city of Dromo, the sixteen-year-old Dalai Lama sat listening to a news broadcast from Radio Peking on an old Bush radio hooked up to a car battery. He and his ministers had retreated here, to a region that the PLA had not yet penetrated to, when word of the Chinese invasion reached Lhasa. Now His Holiness was forced to listen as the Chinese announced that their armies had ended Tibet’s “enslavement and suffering” under foreign imperialists. “
I could not believe my ears,” the Dalai Lama remembered. “I felt physically ill as I listened to this unbelievable mixture of lies and fanciful clichés.”

The Chinese occupation was codified in the “Seventeen Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet,” signed by Chinese and Tibetan negotiators on May 23, 1951, without the approval of the Dalai Lama or his government. The agreement had, on the face of it, several clauses that reassured the Tibetans about their sovereignty over domestic issues. Clause 3 gave them “national regional autonomy.” Clause 7 guaranteed protection for Tibet’s Buddhists, decreeing that “the religious beliefs, customs and habits of the Tibetan people shall be respected.” But other points made it clear that the Chinese Central People’s Government would control the external affairs of the country, national defense, and even domestic policy. In effect, all the levers of power would be in the hands of the Chinese. The Tibetans would have to rely on Mao’s goodwill to ensure that their political rights were respected and their culture survived.

Hoping to recruit the necessary allies, Tibetans turned to the wider world. They were bitterly disappointed. The Dalai Lama’s oldest brother, Norbu, opened a channel of communication with the U.S. State Department—and the CIA—asking them to assist the beleaguered Tibetans. The Americans were eager to come to an agreement but needed assurances the Dalai Lama would publicly resist the Communist regime. Nehru’s India, worried about offending the Chinese and angered that its neighbor had sought assistance from Washington instead of from New Delhi, offered nothing. (Indian officials were also sensitive on the issue of annexing land, having themselves recently taken over the disputed regions of Hyderabad and Kashmir.) The British regarded the occupation as a fait accompli and felt that the Anglo-American reaction should follow the lead of India. Their diplomats also believed that opposing China would complicate “peace moves” to end the Korean conflict. In short, the British concluded that supporting Tibet offered
no advantages—diplomatic, military, or commercial—but only risks that could complicate the Cold War in Asia. Only tiny El Salvador offered to sponsor a resolution at the United Nations condemning the invasion. The Americans became the Tibetans’ last, slim hope.

In July 1951, the U.S. government sent the Dalai Lama an unsigned letter laying out its conditions for helping the Tibetans. It began paternally by warning His Holiness that the Communists were a new phenomenon: “
Some of your advisors probably think that they understand the Chinese Communists and can make a bargain with them. We do not think that they understand Communism or the record of its leaders.” The document went on to call the Dalai Lama the “chief hope of Tibet” and argued he would be most effective outside its borders “to symbolize the hopes of the Tibetans for the recovery of Tibet’s freedom.” If His Holiness disavowed the Seventeen Point Agreement, the United States was prepared to “issue a public statement of our own supporting your stand.” Washington would back the Dalai Lama’s cause in the United Nations, and it would supply his government with loans and light arms. But only if he formed a serious resistance to the occupation.

The letter’s first lines address a common perception of the Dalai Lama: that he had no faith in his own advisers. American officials couldn’t even be sure their messages were getting through to His Holiness. One State Department cable complained that the “God-king is almost inaccessible except to certain traditional advisers and certain family members.” His Holiness was the nominal head of government, but, at just sixteen, he hadn’t even begun to install his own trusted advisers, a process that could take years. “
He was isolated in Lhasa,” notes American Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman. “He would hear gossip from the janitors in the Potala.”

And at this crucial moment, the Tibetans were bitterly divided
among themselves. The Dalai Lama’s older brothers Norbu and Gyalo, along with some lay officials in the Tibetan government, favored rejecting the Seventeen Point Agreement and seeking asylum in another country (India was the leading candidate, with Thailand and Ceylon also mentioned). The Americans agreed and pressed the religious issue to make their point: “
If Tibet is to be saved from the enemy of all religions, Communism,” wrote Robert Linn, an American consular official in India, “it will be necessary for you to show the highest courage and act at once.”

Lobbying for the Dalai Lama’s return to Lhasa were high government officials and the entire religious establishment. The abbots strongly favored ratification of the Seventeen Point Agreement, believing Buddhism would be protected, along with their own powerful and exalted positions. Many government ministers, aristocrats, and merchants also encouraged the Dalai Lama to make peace with Mao and return to Lhasa. They argued that the meager help offered by the Americans (and the complete lack of support from India) would doom any fight against the Communists. Besides, the Tibetan experience in regard to Chinese power was that it always faded over time. “Everything turns like a wheel,” said the editor of the
Tibet Mirror
. “
Tibet will once again enjoy its original freedom and independence, free of all Chinese control.”

At this critical point, in exile from his capital and his throne, His Holiness decided to ask for divine guidance. His ministers chose an old divination method, putting two bits of paper, one decreeing the Dalai Lama should return to Lhasa and the other advising exile, inside two small balls of
tsampa
. The balls were dropped in a bowl and rolled around under a painting of the Palden Lhamo, the wrathful protectress of Tibet. When one of the balls dropped from the bowl, it was opened. The message? The Dalai Lama must return to Lhasa.

As the Tibetans prepared for the journey, a Chinese delegation
arrived in Dromo on July 16, 1951. The apprehensive Dalai Lama, who was “
half convinced they would all have horns on their heads,” met with a general, who handed him a copy of the Seventeen Point Agreement. His Holiness signed it. By doing so, he was effectively declaring Tibet a region of China. But His Holiness declined to see it in strictly political terms. Instead, he sought out the Buddhist meaning of the encounter. When he was meeting with the first Chinese Communists he’d ever seen, he was encouraged, simply, to find them to be human. “
Regardless of all the suspicion and anxiety I felt beforehand,” he said, “during our meeting it became clear that this man, although supposedly my enemy, was in fact just a human being, an ordinary person like myself. This realization had a lasting impact on me.”

For to be human, the Dalai Lama believed, was finally to be good. It was, given the situation, an almost perversely optimistic view of the world and of the Chinese Communist Party. But it illustrated His Holiness’s political philosophy. “
What comes naturally, I do that,” he said. “It is spontaneous. I never sort of calculate.” Previous Dalai Lamas had used force, alliances, violence, and cunning to advance the cause of Tibet. As much as they sought to embody compassion, they’d been necessarily ruthless when dealing with Tibetans who betrayed them or their Mongol overlords.

But the Fourteenth turned to religion as his guiding philosophy. “
I had still had no theoretical training in the intricacies of international politics,” he recalled. “I could only apply my religious training to these problems, aided, I trust, by common sense.” While Mao had grown up internalizing Sun Tzu and
The Art of War
, the Dalai Lama sought out the loving Buddha.

Not everyone agreed with the Fourteenth’s approach. He was simply too soft, it was felt in certain circles, too much the representative of Chenrizi, the compassionate one.
“His Holiness is
very humble and has a bit of a child nature,” one senior Tibetan official told him during a conversation about the Chinese intent. “Chinese are brazen and will not hesitate to exploit this.” The Dalai Lama often behaved like a lama trying to redeem his people, not a politician trying to lead them. “
He thought people were so good,” admits Choegyal, his younger brother. “But what the Chinese were saying and doing were not the same thing. They wanted to destroy Tibet.”

His Holiness was facing, in Mao Zedong, a leader who seemingly had strayed as far from his mother’s devout Buddhism as it was possible to. “
Absolute selfishness and irresponsibility lay at the heart of Mao’s outlook,” write his biographers Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. The Chairman himself knew Buddhism; he’d been raised in the religion. But he lived by a different moral code. “
Of course there are people and objects in the world,” he wrote, “but they are all there only for me.… They have nothing to do with the reality of my own self.” And when it came to violence, the Chairman was enthusiastic: “We must kill.… And we say it is good to kill.”

One of the Dalai Lama’s daily contemplations was the Buddha’s teaching that enemies make the finest teachers. But how to balance the word of Buddha with what was happening around him, to face evil and call it evil? In his first encounter with the Chinese, the Dalai Lama came away as a naïve boy. He had a great deal to learn.

After the first shock of invasion, the Chinese entered Tibet on cat’s feet. Chinese officials and soldiers were told to avoid “big nationality chauvinism,” to speak to the Tibetans gently, to pay for everything they requisitioned, and to strive to make the natives happy. An order published in the
People’s Daily
on May 26, 1951,
told those traveling to Lhasa and beyond to “
truly respect the Tibetan people and serve them in order to get rid of the huge gap left by history between Hans and Tibetans and to win trust.” Mao’s takeover of Tibet displayed an almost infinitely delicate touch and a sense of what individuals in a distant land would accept in an occupying force. The Chinese Communists didn’t yet have a sympathetic base in Tibet and the PLA didn’t have the infrastructure or the troop strength to dominate the country, so Mao persuaded, instead of terrorized, his new subjects.

Every effort was to be taken to mollify the Tibetans. “
When the Chinese first came, they spoke very sweetly,” said one monk from Kham. “They said, ‘We have come to bring development. We are the same … same race, same color. We are brothers. We have come to help you. After we have done that, we will go back.’ ” The Chinese also spent lavishly on everything from barley to houses to labor. “
We had a saying,” commented a Tibetan government official. “Communist Chinese are grateful parents—incessant rain of cash.” Marxism was barely mentioned; the silver coin, not the hammer and sickle, was the emblem of those first years of occupation.

The Chinese’s strategy in Lhasa was to draw His Holiness into their camp. “
Make every possible effort to use all suitable means to win over the Dalai Lama and a majority of the upper strata,” Mao instructed his officials in Tibet, “and isolate the minority of bad elements in order to achieve long-term goals of transforming Tibetan economy and polity gradually without spilling blood.” Above all, the Chinese left the monasteries and the religious authorities alone, knowing that to be seen as enemies of the faith would be to guarantee fierce resistance.

For the first stages of the occupation, the strategy in large part worked. The Dalai Lama had been distraught and enraged by the invasion (and his own government’s abject failure to stop it), but
the reports of a disciplined PLA and Tibet’s need for modernization gave him hope. A key moment in the relationship came in the summer of 1954, when the Dalai Lama visited China for a nearly yearlong tour. China’s material progress under the Communists awed the Dalai Lama: hydroelectric dams, tractor factories, the sheer dynamism of a state-controlled economy in its first flush of production was a vision of what Tibet could become. And the ideas behind what he saw thrilled him as well. He thought Marx’s beliefs were deeply attuned to his own, perhaps the closest match to the tenets of Buddhism he’d ever encountered. The emphasis on justice and equality made these beliefs far more attractive to the young leader than American-style capitalism. “
The more I looked at Marxism,” he said, “the more I liked it.” His main objection, of course, was to the system’s atheism, but he felt a synthesis between Buddhism and communism could be worked out.