The Open Road (17 page)

In an elevated chair—a kind of throne—to one side of the courtyard the young rinpoche of the temple looked on. Behind him roamed a much wilder figure, in much paler robes, the coils of his dusty hair piled on the top of his head like a sleeping snake. This was, I heard, a yogi—a monk who had meditated for years at a time in a cave. His top-knot represented the years he had spent far from society, not cutting his hair while he meditated.

Now this figure was the unofficial head of the temple, a tutor to the rinpoche and, almost literally, the power behind the throne. Figures came onto the scene from the inner halls of the temple wearing masks that looked grotesque to me, and representing various old kings and spiritual figures. Above the courtyard stood a building in which monks were going on sustained retreats even now. Farther up was a pleasant, brightly colored cottage with a garden where I would meet another yogi, close to death, whose years of meditation were evident in his gaze. Nearby was the now celebrated Englishwoman who had become a nun and meditated alone in a cave, through avalanches and visits from wolves and stalkers, for an unbroken twelve years. Later in the afternoon I would climb up to a retreat hall high above the temple courtyard where people could take off for months-long explorations of the interior. I had never been in any place (outside of Tibet) that felt so much like Tibet, so removed from the daily world I recognized.

At moments like this, I was always reminded, forcibly, of how the Dalai Lama, to summon the metaphor again, was constantly coming in and out of his temple, emerging to greet the outside world and talk to it and then disappearing once more into what was a private and almost unimaginable Tibet (just as, during the teachings he gave in Dharamsala, he emerged twice a day from his compound and walked, smiling and greeting petitioners, behind his texts and accompanied by various objects and ritual figures, to the chair from which he spoke; and twice a day he walked back again, into his strictly guarded domain). Much of the time he and his monks practiced a highly cerebral debating that, to some extent, argued about how many symbolic angels could dance on the nonexistent head of an imaginary pin; yet the rest of the time they functioned in a world that acknowledged that philosophy cannot, as is classically said, cure a toothache, and even that, to the nomad in his lonely tent, fifteen thousand feet up, all the figures that swarm across Tibetan
thangka
s were real, painfully real.

The Dalai Lama, besides, could never write off the world beyond logic entirely when it was that very world that had brought him (and a few hundred other incarnate lamas, down from what once had been a few thousand) to the chair on which he now sat, thanks to the consultation of cloud formations, reflections in a mystical lake, and various dreams. The very system of incarnate lamas, or
tulku
s, found through such secret symbols just after their birth, might almost have been a careful mixture of shrewd logic and Tibetan anti-logic: its beauty, after all, was in bringing to power tiny boys (and, occasionally, girls) who had had no chance to be corrupted by the world and had no interest at all in self-advancement. Its shadow side was the very fact that by placing two-year-olds in power, it was effectively, for a few years at least, putting real power in the hands of regents and senior tutors, or relatives of the child, who were by no means immune to power brokering and political chicanery. For Tibetans, I was surprised to learn, having a
tulku
born into the family was not a source of celebration; it was believed that, in worldly terms (and through a kind of complex compensation, perhaps), it usually brought bad luck.

The Dalai Lama generally, as already mentioned, referred to the Dalai Lama institution as if it were just a set of clothes—of duties and responsibilities and titles—he was born to wear (and he referred to death, engagingly, as equivalent to “a change of clothing”); as his younger brother put it to one writer, “He is a simple man whose job it is to be Dalai Lama.” This separation of the spirit and the container was made evident by the fact that some Dalai Lamas were fat, some thin; some were very mild-mannered, some fierce. The Great Fifth Dalai Lama is generally credited with establishing Tibet as it was until recently (and building the Potala Palace, for example, as a great symbol of church and state in one); yet the Dalai Lama who followed him famously spent much of his time cavorting in the taverns outside the Potala’s walls, shed his robes, and left, before his mysterious disappearance, a set of erotic poems that are beloved by Tibetans but susceptible to all kinds of interpretations.

Yet, even in this context, things were never so clear, or so easily written off, as I would like. One day I picked up a book concerning Tibet and the Thirteenth Dalai Lama by Sir Charles Bell, the no-nonsense British diplomat who became the first Westerner to grow very close to a Dalai Lama, and who actually stayed for a year near his palace. Bell’s account was as clear and practical as you would imagine of an officer reporting back to headquarters. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama was “singularly frank,” Bell wrote in 1924, and often dismissed his officials so that he could talk to his foreign friend alone (and even seek out his counsel). “His Holiness has always disliked ceremony,” Bell went on, and, in fact, when he was forced into exile in 1910, in India, as China’s rulers advanced on Lhasa, the Thirteenth clearly rejoiced in the freedom he suddenly enjoyed to take walks in the forest and move around as he could never have done in Lhasa. “He is fond of horses,” Bell wrote, “dogs, and animals generally, but especially of birds. And flowers are an abiding joy to him.”

All this was straightforward enough, and an invaluable source of information about the first Dalai Lama to move out into the larger world and to begin to draw Tibet into modern times. Yet what I found startling, reading it eighty years on, was that in detail after detail, phrase after phrase, Bell’s description of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama could not have been a better description of his very different successor, the Fourteenth. One of the many reasons why I thought there was no call for much physical description of the person and personality of the current Dalai Lama was that it had been given, quite powerfully, eleven years before he was born, by a man who was describing his precursor.

“He is impulsive, cheerful, and gifted with a keen sense of humor,” Bell wrote of his friend. “His eyes twinkled as he described to me the strategems by which he evaded the pursuit of the Chinese soldiery.” He was “a shrewd judge of character, quick in understanding” and always ready to show his feelings, though “innate courtesy never wavered.” Surprisingly, perhaps, the head of Tibetan Buddhism was not enthusiastic about Buddhism being carried around the world, although he genuinely respected anyone who sincerely pursued a religious practice (and was taken aback, he confessed, by the Chinese he met who didn’t).

“The God-king is intensely human” was Bell’s conclusion, and got up to meditate sometimes at three a.m., not even breaking from his meditations when traveling on trains. He gave his secretaries fits with his eagerness to make good use of every moment, and he always seemed to hunger for details of the outside world, having the English papers translated for him and following the tense situation in 1920s Germany. At the very least, he seemed to have much more in common with his successor than even a George Bush had with a George W. Bush. The one detail that Bell didn’t include (because he could not know of it) was that, as a boy being taught calligraphy, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was made to write out the Thirteenth’s chilling last testament over and over, so that, one might guess, he finally had it by heart.

Even in old Tibet the incarnation system had never been an unambiguous blessing; the finding of new lamas and the protection of them against rival candidates or others with different ideas had never been easy. But like everything in the Tibetan world, it had become infinitely more complex now that the culture was scattered across the globe, and incarnate lamas were being presented in Seattle, in Spain, all over the place. The head of the Nyingma lineage had become the subject of much speculation in the West after he announced that the martial artist Steven Seagal (a generous contributor to his cause) was a high Tibetan incarnation, and then said the same of a four-times-married former psychic from Brooklyn. Besides, traditional monastic search groups looking for new incarnations now had to travel across Tibet and into other countries, with secret faxes sent back and forth and no one sure of whether the new lama would be found in China or Tibet (where he would not be able to see the Dalai Lama) or be born in exile, and therefore unable to meet the vast majority of his people.

The second-highest incarnation in all of Tibetan Buddhism—one of the main figures responsible for finding a new Dalai Lama—is the Panchen Lama, whose traditional home is Tashi Lhunpo Temple in Tibet’s second city, Shigatse. But the Tenth Panchen Lama had remained in China when the Dalai Lama fled to Tibet, and not even Tibetans were of one mind as to how much he had collaborated with the authorities in Beijing, how much he had used his position in China to try to help Tibet from within. In 1989, a healthy man of fifty, he made a long-planned return to Tashi Lhunpo to inter the remains of previous Panchen Lamas, only five days after saying, outright, that the Chinese had brought more harm than gain to Tibet. Suddenly, only days after his return, he collapsed one morning and died, and rumors of a poisoning began to fly.

For six years the search for his successor was conducted via a complex series of communications between Tibet and Dharamsala, until finally, in May 1995, the Dalai Lama announced that a little boy had been found in Tibet who was the Eleventh Panchen Lama. As soon as he did so, incensed perhaps that a Tibetan exile was daring to authorize incarnations in Chinese territory, the Chinese came up with their own candidates and, in a divination ceremony at the Jokhang Temple, in Lhasa, that partook of all the ritual they so often mocked (including boys choosing pieces of paper from a golden urn), they announced their own little boy (the son of Communist cadres) as the true new Panchen Lama. The Dalai Lama’s choice, six years old, was placed under house arrest, and has not been heard of since.

The third-highest incarnation in Tibetan Buddhism—in fact, the oldest incarnation in the philosophy—is that of the Karmapa, the head of the Kagyu lineage. When the Sixteenth Karmapa died, in 1981, a search was undertaken, and two young candidates emerged, each backed by one faction of the previous Karmapa’s followers. One boy was in Delhi, the other (the Dalai Lama’s approved choice) in China itself, though, in the first days of the new millennium, as in a fairy tale, and months after the Dalai Lama turned sixty-five, the fourteen-year-old from China, having pulled off an astonishing escape, dramatically appeared in Dharamsala. Tibetans by now know that no fairy tale comes without a shadow, or some aspect of the real world, and so while some people embraced him as the new hope of exile Tibet, others wondered how the most conspicuous Tibetan in Tibet could have escaped under the eyes of a Chinese government that was able to intercept even the simplest peasant.

The Dalai Lama greeted the boy and gave him a place to stay near Dharamsala, since the Indian government, fearing he was a Chinese spy, refused to allow him to take up his ancestral residence in Sikkim. But the confusion perhaps intensified the Dalai Lama’s wish to stress, as he had done since 1969, that there might be no Fifteenth Dalai Lama at all. There would be another Dalai Lama, he always said, only if that Dalai Lama was of help to the Tibetan people.

Meanwhile, the world of protective deities and spirits, of rival groups within Tibetan Buddhism and ancient enmities that had always cast shadows over old Tibet now came out into the global order. In 1996, the Dalai Lama began, as I’d seen in Vancouver, to tell audiences not to propitiate a particular deity called Shugden, because he felt that it was proving harmful, and that certain of the tenets involved in its propitiation went against the principles of Buddhism and the very tolerance and reason he was trying so hard to promote. In response, the followers of the spirit, gathered in the West around a rinpoche in England who ran an organization he called the New Kadampa Tradition, started protesting the Dalai Lama’s talks (hence the warning that had greeted me in British Columbia), claiming that he was violating the principle of freedom of religion; they even allowed themselves to be co-opted to some degree by the Chinese.