The Dalai Lama: The Making of a Spiritual Hero
 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.
I
traveled to Tibet in the spring of 2009 to see places: rivers, palaces,
obscure corners of old Lhasa. I was writing a book about the occupation
of Tibet and the Dalai Lama’s escape, and when I’m writing nonfiction
about a country I’ve never seen, it can seem like I’m describing an
imaginary place. To make it real, I went to Lhasa to see the landmarks
where the story had played out fifty years before. Places like the
ice-cold river Kyichu that so many Lhasans had fled across during the
1959 uprising, and the cobblestone street where a monk saw a dead
Tibetan man, shot in the back, a leash in his hand still clipped to the
collar of his dog. If
I was on a pilgrimage, it wasn’t a religious one. I was a journalist, a
lapsed Catholic, writing a book about a nationalistic event. One can’t
go to Tibet and not encounter Buddhism, of course, but it wasn’t in the
front of my mind. As
for the people of Tibet, I didn’t expect to talk to them much. One
Tibetan activist told me to imagine that, as a Westerner in Tibet, I had
a fatal disease, and anyone I spoke to would catch it. That gruesome
exercise, he felt, would give me the necessary discipline to keep
Tibetans out of jail for talking to a journalist. Tibet
was tense as I touched down, and understandably so. That spring was the
fiftieth anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s escape to India and the birth
of the Free Tibet movement. Protests had erupted on previous
anniversaries of the escape, and I knew the Chinese bureaucrats in Lhasa
were braced for more. I was prepared to see a tightly controlled city. Lhasa
is surrounded by space—miles and miles of empty, arid terrain. It
reminded me of Ireland, where my parents had emigrated from in the
fifties. Ireland’s countryside is famously lush, but when you are
walking through its blue-black hills late at night, without a porch
light or a spark of electricity visible, the loneliness of the place can
make you shiver. I’ve always thought of superstition and ghost stories
as beginning in places like these, places where the landscape seems
indifferent or ready to devour you. My
father used to tell me about a family friend who told him he would meet
him at “the Hand” when he was dead. The Hand was a local crossroads,
and months after the man’s death, when my father was walking home from a
party, he saw the family friend there. My father is not a superstitious
person, but he swore that he’d met that one spirit. Empty landscapes produce ghost stories. And faith. In my first days in Lhasa, I had that feeling I’d gotten in Ireland. I was struck by how tangible
the Buddhist faith was there. In a place where you could be arrested
for possessing a picture of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tibetan women
prostrated themselves in a square near the Potala Palace, their faces to
the ground. I walked with young men doing their circuit around the
Jokhang Temple at the center of Lhasa, their faces grimy and exhausted. I
saw impossibly old women—bent over at the waist from age—climb the
floors of the Potala Palace. It seemed like a large risk to their
health. Yet in their faces was blissful happiness. Many were crying. I
had always thought of Buddhism as something mental, something you did
with your brain. Pictures of Buddhists practicing their faith showed
them with their eyes closed. The Catholicism I was raised in was more
connected with physical places, pilgrimages, stories of crucifixions,
and bloody pogroms. Buddhism seemed to float above the real world. I’d been raised in the Irish equivalent of Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets—not
as violent, but close enough—and I grew up marinating in the
iconography of the Catholic Church: suffering, wounds, transcendence. I
was named after the first Catholic martyr. Even though I didn’t believe
in it anymore, Catholicism’s intimate connection with the hard details
of life attracted me. In contrast, Buddhism seemed bloodless. Until
I went to Tibet. Just as in rural Ireland, I saw a Buddhist faith that
went down to the bone. These simple people bowing to an empty throne
were risking imprisonment for the rest of their lives by even
acknowledging His Holiness. Buddhism here wasn't just a mental
discipline; it was something that people were actively suffering in the
service of. When I managed to sneak in a quick conversation with a young
Tibetan man, his voice broke at the mention of the Dalai Lama. “We want
to see him so much,” he told me. The fact that they were prevented from
seeing His Holiness, made many of the Tibetans I spoke to in Tibet and
elsewhere seem actually physically tormented—really, there is no other
word. There
was a restless hunger to be in the presence of the Dalai Lama, and
touch him and hear his voice. I hadn’t expected that. It made the faith
more comprehensible to me. Yet that hunger is a conundrum, of course.
Buddhism teaches the value of detachment from worldly things, but here
were Buddhists so attached to the idea of one man that they were willing
to risk jail just to hear his voice. Before
visiting Lhasa, I’d spoken to some Buddhists who felt the intense
devotion to the Dalai Lama was in fact a bad thing. To them, his escape
to the West, which had spread the word about Tibetan Buddhism to every
corner of the earth, had freed Tibetan Buddhism from Tibet. The worship
of His Holiness, the relics, the people flinging themselves to the
ground in front of the Jokhang Temple—all of it was a throwback to them.
It needed to go. But,
after seeing Lhasa, I disagreed. Here were Buddhists whose faith was
something they could touch, something that tore their heart. And that
brought me closer to the faith than I’d thought possible.
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. 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. 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. 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 moment
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 speaker's head. It
was sacrilege for him to meet their eyes. He was barely allowed to think
or speak for himself. His
Holiness’ only access to 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 clichés
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 that
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 backwards,
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 minder’s strict rules. The Dalai Lama patted the poet on the leg to
make a point; he laughed like a 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—childlike, 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. His
Holiness was the fourteenth reincarnation of a line of lamas and
rulers, but his predecessors would hardly 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 would never have had to in Tibet. He came to the world not
as a guru whose word was quite literally law. He came as a 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 come 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 Tibetans’ 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 say
unafraid—even of looking ridiculous. The Dalai Lama skirts that 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 Gethsemane. And the 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 and
a dog on Peking Radio. (One can only think of Peter denying Jesus.) But
the human circumstances of Tibet’s tragedy made 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.
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