Mayank Chhaya - Dalai Lama: Man, Monk, Mystic

CONTENTS

To

KESUMI,

my wife and hopefully my friend

JASHN AND HAYAA,

our son and daughter

INTRODUCTION

T he Fourteenth Dalai Lama and Tibet were the most mysterious part of my childhood apocrypha. Everything about the man and his land was fabulousmystical stories of reincarnation unfolding in fog-laden valleys of frozen mountains at the height of 13,000-plus feet. Tonsured monks in ochre robes contrasted against the white snow-covered landscape of the Himalayas appeared so stunningly picturesque to me that I did not care if such a world could really exist. It did not matter whether the stories were true or not as long as they were captivating. There were pretty good chances that both Tibet and the Dalai Lama existed, but in my Indian childhood in the early 1960s they seemed to belong more to magical folklore than reality. In a country where the real and the magical constantly fuse and metamorphose into each other, what difference did it make whether this world actually existed? In any event, for a child who was not even ten years old, the magical seemed infinitely more engaging than the real.

That view changed every time the winter came and the Dalai Lamas existence became all too real when hundreds of his portraits and pictures adorned the sidewalks of my town along with piles of brightly colored sweaters that Tibetan refugees came to sell. At least it was true that there were Tibetan people. It appeared quite possible that after all someone called the Dalai Lama did indeed exist. I remember having asked a Tibetan woman who the grown-up babylike figure in the picture was. That is His Holiness. He is the living Buddha, she replied. I neither understood His Holiness nor the living Buddha. I knew of only one Buddha, who had been dead for some 2,500 years. The question that troubled me was if Gautama Buddha had died so long ago how come he was still living? It took me another decade and a half to unravel that mystery.

Since I grew up in a country where renunciates and ascetics crowd the landscape, yet another monk was unlikely to attract my attention. This was particularly true of the one who lived some thousand miles away in the pre-Himalayan Dhauladhar mountain range in northwest India. In the 1960s and 70s the Dalai Lama was featured in local Indian newspapers frequently, especially after the countrys disastrous war with China in 1962. There were some delightfully misinformed people in my neighborhood who seriously believed that India could avenge its humiliating defeat at the hands of China using the Dalai Lamas Tantric powers, which ordinary people took to mean some sort of black magic or occult practices. In their neat, if completely flawed, formulation, the Dalai Lama, forced to flee Tibet amid grave threats to his life by the invading Chinese army barely three years earlier, would be thirsting to settle scores with them. And could there be a more potent weapon for a reincarnate Buddhist monk than black magic?

In 1967, a full five years after the war between India and China, one of my neighbors gathered unsuspecting and impressionable children like myself and conjured up an image of the Dalai Lama going into a deep trance and unleashing destructive energy against the Peoples Liberation Army. Since he came from the land of Mount Kailash, the putative hub of the Hindu god Shiva, the raconteur told us that the Dalai Lama had three eyes, one right in the middle of his forehead. The third eye was where all his power of cosmic destruction resided. If he opened that eye, there was no way China could survive. Indias thenprime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, he claimed with utter certainty, had persuaded the Dalai Lama to invoke the devastating wrath that would instantly atomize the Chinese army. Such street-side phantasms let loose by the neighborhood fantasist merely reinforced my perception that the Dalai Lama was more apocryphal than real.

My first encounter with the real Dalai Lama came sometime in the early 1980s when he was visiting Bombay to attend a congress on synthesis between science and religion. I did not consciously look for his third eye, but it was reassuring that he did not have one. I vaguely remembered that my neighborhood storyteller had qualified his claim about the Dalai Lamas third eye by saying that it became apparent only during extraordinary times. The congress was clearly not one such extraordinary time. As a reporter assigned to cover the congress, I was expected to produce an offbeat story of the event, one that did not necessarily have any immediate news value. I remember asking the Dalai Lama, Arent we rapidly approaching a stage in human history where the dividing line between science and religion is fast vanishing? The Dalai Lama laughed from the core of his being and said, Religion is science with faith. Science is religion in search of faith. Even as he said that I realized that this story was not going to make that days or any other days paper. It is just as well that the remark had to hibernate for nearly two decades because it has now found a home in the more substantial context of a book.

The Dalai Lama has grown in my consciousness over the last fifteen years. Sporadic reading about him, Tibet, China, and Buddhism marked the run-up to my first substantial meeting with him in 1996. He was never in my professional focus till that year when I began working on a cover story for India Abroad, a New Yorkbased Indian American weekly newspaper. The scope of the story was very general, covering the question of Tibet from many different angles. It was in this context that I first sought an interview with the Dalai Lama. It took place on the sidelines of Shoton, a Lhamo festival at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA) in McLeod Ganj, the Dalai Lamas place of exile for four decades in India. Lhamo is a 580-year-old Tibetan tradition that began as a simple bridge-building project over the Kyichu River near Lhasa by the fourteenth-century scholar Thangtong Gyalpo. Legend has it that Gyalpo, hard-pressed as he was for money to build the bridge, turned to seven sisters in his workforce who excelled at dancing and singing. The scholar created an operatic style around the seven sisters talent and traveled throughout Tibet staging performances to raise money for the bridge. The sisters high-pitched martial singing and vigorous dancing earned them the sobriquet the heavenly dancing goddesses, or Lhamo. The bridge was built and so was the Tibetan opera.

After the interview the Dalai Lamas aides invited my family, my wife, Kesumi, and my son, Jashn, for a ceremonial blessing. Kesumi is an Indonesian Muslim who was born in the Buddhist island nation of Sri Lanka. Having been used to Buddhist monks who do not hobnob with the laity, my wife approached the Dalai Lama with a great deal of circumspection, even trepidation. I am narrating this incident in some detail because I believe it influenced the Dalai Lamas decision to authorize me to write this book. The Dalai Lama sprang from his chair, went to the door, where my wife stood with our son, gave her an avuncular hug, massaged my sons head, and brought them in. Stunned by the gesture, my wife said spontaneously that she was a Muslim, I an agnostic, and that maybe our son would become a Buddhist. For a fraction of a second I could see that the Dalai Lama was touched by what was being said to him.

During one of my many subsequent visits to McLeod Ganj, a very senior monk, who bound me to the oath of never revealing his name, said, Dont make the mistake of thinking that you were chosen for any worldly reasons. He left it at that with a cryptic clue hanging on my head forever. Be that as it may, I was chosen to write this ambitious book. It does not matter why.