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Tuesday, Oct 14, 2008
From Lhasa to Dharamsala, a Westerner pieces together the poignant puzzle of Tibetan Buddhism and its exalted leader in exile.
Oct 5, 1999 | During rainy season, Dharamsala, India, home to the exiled Tibetan community, is transformed from a mountaintop village into the enchanted forest of Robin Hood folklore. The clouds descend over the ridge like a scrim and the feeling -- the inability to see anything -- can be claustrophobic, can make you blink and squint and hyperventilate in the thick, wet air. Anything might suddenly appear -- cars, monks, cows -- where once was only thick gray fog. Unable to see more than 10 feet down the steep, winding path, you can almost imagine a band of merry horsemen emerging from the pine trees lining the road.
Our guidebook told us the 14th Dalai Lama had a presence so large he filled up the room during his public audiences in Dharamsala. Now suddenly we -- a traveling American writer and photographer -- had been granted a private audience with him. Would his presence, I wondered, overwhelm me? Would I be rendered inarticulate? Would I feel a transcendence afforded legends standing in the presence of this reincarnated demigod? It occurred to me that the cleanest clothing I had was an orange T-shirt that said "Life is Good" -- which seemed mildly inappropriate when meeting a man in exile.
Before leaving Chicago a month earlier, I had not been granted an interview with the Dalai Lama. In fact, I had been told by his private secretary that he would be in Portugal when I was due in Dharamsala. But my photographer, Ann Maxwell, and I had been delayed in Tibet by mudslides and closed roads and we had arrived in India days later than anticipated. Infuriating at the time, this now seemed like a wondrous stroke of dumb luck.
We were on a two-month exploration of all things Tibetan. Our itinerary included Nepal, the first stop for all incoming Tibetan refugees, Tibet, Dharamsala and London, where the Tibet Information Network is based. We investigated increased violence inside Tibet, forced sterilization of Tibetan women, refugees, feminist nuns and dissident groups like the Tibetan Youth Congress. Meeting the Dalai Lama, of course, had always been our greatest hope for the trip, our apogee.
The night before our interview, our nerves nearly combusted. Ann checked her film, flash, batteries and lenses half a dozen times. I checked my tape recorder, pens, batteries and questions; I read more than half the Dalai Lama's autobiography in one sitting; my Chicago Tribune editors called at midnight and went through my questions twice.
Ann believed we would feel it, feel that something that was missing from the presence of ordinary mortals. I was more skeptical. Perhaps he had grown into his power and title not because he was exceptional, but because he had been groomed from age 2 to believe in his own preordained position, in the same way that geishas, slaves and royalty evolve into the roles they're told they command. Perhaps any man would have a presence as large under the same conditions.
And yet, in "Civilization and Its Discontents," Freud begins by discussing the attraction that all people have for power -- in themselves or in others. But the greatness of those we admire, he says, rests on "attributes and achievements which are completely foreign to the aims and ideals of the multitude." Certainly 50 years of peaceful perseverance in his campaign for Tibetan autonomy put the Dalai Lama in this category.
In Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, we had spent a great deal of time at the Potala Palace, the Dalai Lama's former 1,000-room winter home, from which he had fled the Chinese in 1959 disguised as an armed guard. Both the Potala, where 10,000 monks once lived, and the Norbulingka, his summer palace, have been left exactly as they were when he fled them -- a Phillips radiogram in the bedroom, two 1927 Austins and a 1931 Dodge parked behind the palace. The Potala now has just a handful of monks who attempt its upkeep and wait for the Dalai Lama's return. Though the Chinese advertise that it's open for tourism only several days a week, I went often, again and again, through its dark labyrinth of hollow rooms where plain-clothed monks sit quietly and refill yak-butter candles in silver chalices; they smile at the tourists studying the deity reproductions, the faded blue, red, green and yellow silk cloths that hang from the ceiling, the white scarves draping over Buddhas. Here flickering candles shoot wavering shadows on the dark red walls and the quiet is the kind reserved for places where tragedies too big and too close to accept reside: Dachau, the killing fields, Rwanda, My Lai.
In broken English, translators attempt to explain the Tibetan Buddhist sects -- the yellow-head sect or the red-head sect; they point out the Green Tara, or the Buddhas of compassion, wisdom, patience. If asked, they will say the Chinese have offered them opportunities that they never got under the Tibetan government -- though these 20-year-old translators, who smile at the naiveti of Westerners believing Tibet should be free of China, are themselves rarely old enough to remember when their country was ruled by its own people. And in each room of the Potala, far up in a dark corner, drilled into the 300-year-old wood and charting each movement of the monks, each conversation, each wistful gaze they offer, sits a bolted white camera.
I closed my eyes in one room, breathed in the thick scent of yak butter and tried to imagine the voices of 10,000 monks, the chant of the Dalai Lama in his home, his footsteps on the stone ground, the flowing silk robes he once wore when both freedom and country belonged to him. The Potala was like an ancient building undeserving of the historical status afforded it because its history was still alive and well on a misty mountaintop. I opened my eyes and for a long moment, stared into the dark lens of one camera.
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