Forty years ago, I stood in the Dalai Lama’s bedroom contemplating a cup with a skull carved above it, which he drank from as a child, so that he would be always aware of death’s imminence.
He had left that bedroom in 1959, aged 14, to avoid having the Chinese capture him and make him sing the government’s praises, abusing Tibetans’ passionate Buddhist faith to weaken Tibetan resentment over the Chinese invasion in 1959. He escaped to Dharamshala, India. One moving morning, after witnessing a sky burial, I climbed to the top of a hill behind Serra Monastery, one of the three most important monasteries around Lhasa, where a man who lived up there showed me religious items that the Chinese had destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. He unrolled them from a dusty bag as if they were treasures.
Tibetans revered the Dalai Lama. In Lhasa, giving someone a picture of the Dalai Lama was one of the biggest kindnesses a visitor could do.
He, and other tulkus, are believed to be reincarnations of important Buddhist lamas. After a death, signs lead religious leaders to a home, and a child who might be such a reincarnation. They observe the child. Sometimes he seems to recognize someone who was close to the dead lama. Often they’ll spread on the floor before him several things, some shiny and appealing, and when he selects a less appealing article that belonged to the dead lama, as if it were familiar, that is also a sign.
We feared then that when he died the Chinese would appoint his “successor,” from some family they controlled. Tibetan Buddhist leaders would search as usual for his tulku, necessarily among Tibetans in India, but the Chinese would beat them to the punch.
Four decades have passed. Wandering around China, I was moved by Hong Kong folks’ justified fears that when the PRC recovered Hong Kong from the British, in 1997, the Chinese promises of semi-autonomy would be like dust on the wind. Tibetans mostly resented Chinese rule. At the time, I studied carefully what I could see on the ground, but also befriended China’s leading English-language apologist for its invasion. Mao, having liberated much of China from bondage, sought to do the same for Tibetans, and considered religion, as Marx had said, the opiate of the people, a mechanism by which aristocrats kept the ordinary people under control. That’s often true, but the Tibetans loved their religion with a humility and passion of which I was always in awe. Imagine folks making pilgrimages to Lhasa from their rural homes, across land not unlike New Mexico’s, and pausing, every three steps, to prostrate themselves flat on their bellies, as they did when circumambulating the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa. And the Chinese, as the U.S. did with surviving members of indigenous tribes, wanted also to turn the Tibetans into imitation Han-Chinese. It’s called “progress.”
The Dalai Lama lives the “loving kindness” he advocates. He knows all religions, but remains quirky, funny, and warmly informal with everyone. As he says, "A tree can make ten thousand matches, but a single match can burn ten thousand trees.”
Recently he turned 90. His longevity has frustrated Chinese plans. The Chinese are rubbing their hands in anticipation now. In July, he confirmed his plan to be reincarnated, with his non-profit trust locating his successor. Sadly, we will see dual – and dueling – Dalai Lamas.