STEPHAN TALTY explores the key events of the Dalai Lama’s early life that freed him from the strictures of his traditional role, deepened his devotion to the dharma, and made him the world spiritual leader we know today.
As I toured the spots where the story of the Dalai Lama’s escape had played out, I thought back on the thing that had first made me want to write his story. It was a short passage in His Holiness’s second memoir, where he talked about how, as a young teenager, he was more interested in playing soldier than reading about the Buddha. When I came across that paragraph, I had to stop and reread the words again.
The Dalai Lama had to work to develop his spiritual nature.
I had always thought of the Dalai Lama as a serene being who’d come by his faith automatically. He was, after all, the reincarnation of a line of lamas. He’d inherited his tranquillity of mind as you or I might inherit a chest of drawers.
But when I began researching the story, I realized how untrue this was. As a thirteen-year-old, the Dalai Lama was as unruly, godless, tenderhearted, and selfish as I’d been as a teenager. He had a ferocious temper, growing so angry at times that his body shook as he stood on the shiny floor of his winter palace in Lhasa, and religious stories bored him so much that he would edit them in his head to make them more exciting.
To think that for many years, His Holiness wasn’t religious at all, or even spiritual, was startling to me. I spoke to people who’d been close to him and found out that his minders often worried about him. What if the Fourteenth Dalai Lama turned out not to care about Buddhism at all? It had happened before; the bisexual Sixth Dalai Lama became a drunkard and a womanizer (or a manizer, depending on his mood), fleeing his palace to get drunk in the streets of Lhasa.
It had never occurred to me that a Dalai Lama could choose whether or not to follow the dharma. And when I found out the circumstances under which the Fourteenth had made his choice, I found them revealing.
When the Chinese invaded Tibet in 1950, Tibetans had little or no faith in the aristocrats and bureaucrats who ran the country. I spoke to monks and private citizens who told me how a Chinese bureaucrat would go from door to door in the nice parts of Lhasa, a bag of silver coins over his shoulder, paying off the men who worked in the government offices. Many Tibetan leaders were as corrupt as the day is long.
And Tibetans were divided among themselves. The Easterners hated the Westerners. The Khampas hated the Lhasans, and vice versa. The city folk looked down on the country people, and the country people returned the favor. As Americans, there are so many things that bind us together: the Constitution, baseball, hamburgers, language. But in 1949 a woman from Amdo province would not have even been understood in Lhasa, the capital. Even the great monasteries had individual colleges where different dialects were spoken.
The only things that a Tibetan could say made him a Tibetan were tsampa, the roasted barley eaten from one end of the country to the other. And Buddhism, embodied in the Dalai Lama. So the citizens of this occupied country, quarreling and mistrustful, looked to the young Dalai Lama to save them. But isolated from his loved ones, deeply lonely, badly educated, the young lama had no idea how to be a leader. He turned to Buddhism, not as the reincarnation of a holy line who is finally taking up his destiny, but as a frightened young man searching frantically for a compass. He dove deep into Buddhism’s lessons and emerged, really, a different man. Very much the person we know today, a monk who has given himself over utterly to the practice of the dharma.
In leaving Lhasa, the Dalai Lama opened up Buddhism to a wider audience.
So Buddhism in Tibet was not separate from its modern history. Quite the opposite, it was essential. In many ways, it was all that mattered.
Before I interviewed survivors of the uprising, I had assumed that most of them fought for their country. That was the narrative in the West: Tibet was a nation taken over by a foreign power. It was a story that Americans and Europeans understood instinctively. The memory of World War II, of occupation and liberation, is very much alive in us.
But what I found in researching the Tibetan uprising contradicted my assumptions. Many of the people I spoke to had fought as Buddhists first and Tibetans second. Monks in the colleges grabbed rifles when they heard a rumor that the Chinese were going to kidnap His Holiness. They hadn’t taken up arms in 1950 when the Chinese invaded their borders; nationalism hadn’t roused a majority of them to fight. The notion of Tibet was too diffuse and the history with China counseled patience rather than war. What sparked the uprising was a threat to the Dalai Lama that Tibetans—rightly or wrongly—perceived in that spring of 1959. And to stop that threat, they would have laid down their lives. I spoke to monks who now live in tiny rooms in the hills of Dharamsala, India, and many told me the same thing: in fighting the Chinese in Lhasa, they believed they were protecting His Holiness as he sped toward freedom. They believed if he died, the dharma would be irreparably harmed. No price was too great to prevent that.
The men and women I spoke to even remembered in vivid detail the morning when rumors of a Chinese plot to kill or kidnap the Dalai Lama began to circulate in Lhasa. They’d dropped whatever they were doing, literally dropped pans and hairbrushes and shovels to the ground, and ran toward His Holiness’ palace. They’d abandoned their own lives in half a second. They no longer existed as individuals; the only thing that mattered to them was His Holiness.
In talking about the fighting and the horrors they’d seen, these Tibetans rarely mentioned themselves. They didn’t dwell on what the uprising had cost them personally. Some seemed puzzled when I asked that typical American question: When you saw an abbot shot down, or your dead sister, how did that make you feel? They’d so given themselves over to protecting the dharma that they couldn’t understand the question.
I wondered, how many Christians would so lose themselves to the moment? It was then, for the first time, that I understood the concept of detachment from inessential things.
One of my last stops in Lhasa was the Potala Palace. The tiny rooms and hallways are beautifully illustrated with murals, the ones that His Holiness used to gaze at for hours on afternoons when he was left alone. I could almost feel the claustrophobia he must have felt in his early years, locked up in these dark rooms for one afternoon after another, separated from his family and from children his own age.
The Dalai Lama seems to flourish outside Tibet and the confining walls of the Potala.
Before the escape, His Holiness lived a life of less-than-splendid isolation. In his two palaces, one for summer and one for winter, his every movement was scripted and formalized. How he talked, how he walked, how he held his body was determined by tradition. His followers were not allowed to look at him, and the language they spoke was so formalized that it was really just another ceremony, not a real conversation. During these endless ritual talks, the Dalai Lama gazed above the speakers head. It was sacrilege for him to meet their eyes. He was barely allowed to think or speak for himself.
His Holiness only access ti the larger world was a telescope he would gaze through for hours, unnerving the prisoners who were held at the foot of his winter palace. And some old issues of Life Magazine and, later, a few films. That was it.
The Dalai Lama clutched at these artifacts of a different world. Some would say he was only curious; “insatiably curious” is one of those cliches that are passed around about the Dalai Lama as a boy. But I think he was reacting to the narrowness of his world. He was protesting what Tibet had become: isolated and inward.
As much as he loved Tibet, the Dalai Lama by 1959 had come to realize it was also a cage. When he fled with a small group of relatives across the moonscape of the southern provinces, the Dalai Lama was not only fleeing the increasing oppression and brutality under the Chinese, he was fleeing the ancient court of Lhasa.
This was the final thing Tibet taught me: If the Dalai Lama hadn’t escaped, he would be a very different man today. Being ejected into the wider world allowed him to remake himself according to his own ideas. Which is just what he did.
And he began immediately. I found a long forgotten interview with His Holiness right after his escape. He was being housed in a hotel in India when a poet was sent by Harper’s Magazine to interview the exotic “god-king” (a term the Tibetans hated). Before the meeting, the poet was told by the Dalai Lama’s stern minders what he could and couldn’t do in the presence of the Precious Protector. All the old rituals of the Lhasa court were invoked, including the stipulation that, at the end of the interview, the poet couldn’t turn his back on His Holiness and walk out. He had to shuffle backward, ridiculously.
As soon as he entered the room, the poet was frightened to realize he was with an ebullient and childlike person who had no intention of observing his minders strict rules. The Dalai Lama patted the poet on the leg to make a point; he laughed like young boy; he pursued his interviewer across the room. The poet was terrified that the meeting in fact was one long heresy. When he began to shuffle backward toward the door, the young monk laughed, grabbed him by the shoulders and gave him a small push.
This is the first real sighting of the man we would come to know as the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. A free, ordinary man. Free not only from the Chinese and from worldly illusions, but from his own past. I believe escaping Tibet gave him the chance to manifest Buddhism in his own nature- open, joyful, empathetic. As his own people had thrown over their own lives in an instant to save the dharma, so he had begun to peel away everything that restricted him from pursuing it.
Exile has encouraged the Dalai Lama to teach the dharma to the world from the point of view of an humble refugee.
His Holiness was the fourteenth reincarnation of a line of lamas and rulers, but his predecessors wouldhardly have recognized themselves in this compassionate and wonderfully approachable man. He shed the more absurd traditions as one would slip out of a badly fitting coat, and that process began in those high Himalayan passes on the trail from Lhasa.
If you ask the Dalai Lama, he will tell you that leaving Tibet forced him to think differently. And it did. He had to contend with issues and situations he never would have had to in Tibet. He came to the world not as a guru whose word was quite literally law. He came as political supplicant. And only then as a teacher.
The real benefit of all this to the world is in how His Holiness practices his faith. The core of the Dalai Lama’s faith wasn’t changed by leaving Lhasa. If you attend one of his lectures, you will find him delving deeply into the traditional texts; I’m sure in doing this he disappoints many of the people who came to see him. Hoping to find a more authentic Deepak Chopra or a more exotic Dr. Phil, they find instead a serious student of the classical texts.
But how he applies his beliefs was clearly affected by his experience as a refugee. He thinks like a man who is guaranteed nothing. He strives to make Buddhism modern- his work with the Mind & Life Institute, for example, shows his near obsession with proving that some of the faith’s tenets are scientifically sound. The very instability of [the] Tibetan’s place in the world has given his message to the global community a flexibility and adventurousness it wouldn’t have had back in Lhasa.
The result is a Buddhism that is forward looking, one might even day unafraid- even of looking ridiculous. The Dalai Lama skirts the border occasionally, because there is nothing he considers off-topic. You need to attend just one of his press conferences to get a taste of the kooky questions tossed his way, and how genuinely he answers. He finds no question embarrassing. There’s nothing that’s beneath him, and that fact alone has changed how people view their own small tragedies.
It’s His Holiness’ openness that has attracted so many people to his view of Buddhism. He isn’t a Martin Luther; he hasn’t reformed the dharma. But he’s helped many thousands of people simply by making it relatable.
Perhaps I’m Westernizing Buddhism by looking for real world events to view it through. Perhaps I need this idea of a faith tested in action to begin to understand what Buddhism truly is. But I find its role in the spring of 1959 thrilling and instructive.
Or maybe I’m Christianizing it- the testing of the Dalai Lama during the uprising was, in a way, his Gethsmane. And blood spilled in an uprising against oppressive rulers, well, that is the story of the first Catholics. Some Tibetans cooperated with the Chinese army; one of the Dalai Lama’s closest advisers called him a traitor on Peking Radio. (One can only think of Peter denying Jesus.) But the human circumstances of Tibet’s tragedy make Buddhism more meaningful for me.
Today, half a century after the escape, the Dalai Lama is a spiritual celebrity. His twitter account and his daily lessons on Facebook reach many thousands of people. (To literally become a follower of the Dalai Lama nowadays, one need only click a button.) But his words often emerge out of the ether, sayings from a smiling man in a robe. I worry that, to many people, he is a nice man who says gentle things, and nothing else.
If people knew how much he went through to see Buddhism clearly, and how Tibetans suffered to keep the dharma alive, I think those words would feel heavier.
They certainly do to me.