The Open Road (28 page)

“In Tibet?”

“No. Only in China.”

“And you think the Dalai Lama should act on this?”

“Of course. He not only can implement the policy of defending Tibet, he must do so.”

“Do you favor suicide bombings?”

Lhasang said nothing, but the implication was obvious. As long as the Dalai Lama practiced tolerance, waiting for the Chinese leadership to change (as, it must be said, it had done, unexpectedly and all at once, when Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Chu Teh died in 1976), the whole world could continue feting and admiring him, but doing nothing much to help him.

“Politics,” Lhasang concluded, “is just a matter of self-interest. It’s not about helping others, it’s about helping yourself.” He could hardly have more explicitly inverted the Dalai Lama’s teaching—that it is, in fact, only by helping others that you truly help yourself. One day, with no prompting, the leader’s younger brother, Ngari Rinpoche, had said to me, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, “Politics is about knowing how to serve. It’s about learning how to be of benefit to other people.”

The larger good and the smaller, the longer term and right now: a monk’s vision and a guerrilla’s. All across Dharamsala, and the Tibetan diaspora community generally, you could hear the debate going on, in tea shops, in homes, wherever members of the older generation (who had seen Tibet) and the younger (who had only dreamed of it) got together. In its way, curiously, it mirrored the very dialogue you saw in Tibet itself, where one group spoke of “liberation” (from backwardness, from poverty and filth, from feudalism, as the Chinese called it) and another, in the monasteries, saw “liberation” as referring to freedom from ignorance, from attachment, from the delusion that brings on suffering. It echoed the archetypal discussion that had separated Martin Luther King from Malcolm X, Gandhi from Nehru, and still divides one group in Israel from the other. “I purify my thoughts and devote myself to compassion,” a citizen of Beirut says. “But how does that help when around me four million others are acting as before, slaughtering my loved ones, sending a shell into my home to kill my daughter?”

“It takes time,” the Dalai Lama replies. “If you don’t believe you can do better, you never will.”

You must fight fire with fire, the Beiruti responds; extend your hand to a snake and you get bitten.

“What is burned by the fire should be healed by using fire,” the Dalai Lama has calmly said, as if in reply. An eye for an eye, as Gandhi pointed out, makes the whole world blind.

Within the Tibetan community, however, the debate was growing ever more intense, more vocal, because Tibet itself was being fast erased from existence; if something is not done in the next few years, the Dalai Lama has been saying for years, Tibet as we know it will be gone forever. The first thing I saw, often, on entering the Namgyal Monastery, next to the Dalai Lama’s house, was a tire cover on a jeep that said,
TIME IS RUNNING OUTTTTT
…and printed nineteen “T’s” as a row of gravestones.

I knew the truth of this from my own experience. In 1985, opened for the first time to the world, Tibet had been a torrent of warmth and color, local people streaming out of their homes to greet the foreigners they had never seen before, monks chanting in the chapels to which they were in places allowed to return, a sense of possibility breaking out after decades of oppression and destruction. But almost inevitably the very presence of foreigners, the eyes and ears of the world, served to encourage Tibetans to speak out against their occupiers, and to raise in Chinese minds the specter of a popular uprising. By the time I returned to Lhasa in 1990, tanks were stationed outside the Tibetan capital and armed soldiers patrolled the rooftops of all the houses around the central Jokhang Temple. Tibet was effectively still under martial law, and tourists were allowed to visit only if they paid a fortune and traveled in a group (I went as a group of one).

In five years much of the town that had so transported me had been erased. Tibetans were not allowed into the Potala Palace, the centuries-old symbol of their culture and tradition, and stood at its gates, looking wistfully at the few tourists who were led through it backward, in the counterauspicious direction. Most of the rooms in the palace were padlocked, and the lighting sometimes went off as we wandered through it; the Chinese-trained Tibetan guide appointed to show me the sights painstakingly explained that it was a purely secular residence, the home of a king, until two nearby tourists from England pointed out that that king happened to be a monk—it was at least as much temple as palace.

By the time I made my third trip to Tibet, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, I could not even recognize the country I had visited twice before. The Potala Palace was not visible from most parts of the capital, and broad, spotless boulevards traveled between blue-glassed shopping centers and gleaming high-rises. The small Tibetan area still remaining, with its swarm of dusty lanes and little houses, was now called “Old Town,” as if it were already a historic area commemorating the curiosities of an indigenous population long gone. The signs along Beijing Lu, as the main drag is called, were for Giordano and gelato.

The students who listened to Lhasang give his powerful appeal for action probably did not know that his shop, like every other shop in Dharamsala, featured a large framed picture of the Dalai Lama at its center, draped in ceremonial white scarves, and next to it, similarly adorned, a picture of Mahatma Gandhi. Large sections of the store were devoted to books by or about the Dalai Lama, and about Tibetan Buddhism as a whole. This was in part, no doubt, because any shrewd businessperson knows that these are the kinds of books a foreign visitor to Dharamsala most wants to buy; but it was also because, even for so outspoken and uncompromising a prosecutor as Tsering, his leader, the object of his devotion, and the center of his Buddhist life was the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

In thirty years of traveling around Dharamsala and Tibet I could not remember hearing a single Tibetan say a word against the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Over and above the ritual authority that his institution carries, Tibetans inside Tibet and outside know that he is their one hope, the living symbol of their culture, and both their future and their past; they hold on to him, in their heads, as if on to life itself. And they cannot fail to see that he is working, to the point of exhaustion, to try to protect their welfare. Yet for more and more of them, especially the young but even many of those who had worked inside his government and can no longer contain their restlessness, there is less and less hesitation about criticizing his Middle Way policy and the government deputed to implement it.

I thought back to the book of English-language poems I had been given and recalled that, even in its introduction, its editor had written, “The collective conscience expressed by [exile youth] has a root of deep resentment directed towards the U.N. and the exile government for their failure to find a workable political solution to the dilemma of Tibet’s occupation.” And even before that, in words that would shake the Dalai Lama’s heart—referring to the classic Tibetan Buddhist notion of a limbo between life and death—the editor had written, simply, “We float in a
bardo
of statelessness.”

When I walked around the Lingkhor, or ceremonial path around the Dalai Lama’s home, each morning, hearing the mostly elderly petitioners stop to sing their national anthem and throw barley flour up toward the blue heavens and their leader’s house at the top of the hill, I could not fail to see a bust of Pawo Thupten Ngodup, a fifty-year-old Tibetan who in 1998 had set fire to himself, fatally, in the streets of Delhi after a long hunger strike, protesting the Chinese occupation of Tibet. The Dalai Lama opposed such acts as acts of violence and squanderings of the special opportunity that human life is thought by Tibetan Buddhists to be. But near the bust were written the words
VICTORY TO TIBET
, and on the mani stones I saw nearby one day, someone had painted, ambiguously,
TIBET NEEDS YOU
. One of the prayer flags along the same path consisted of a citation, in English, of United Nations Resolution No. 1723 (XVI) (on Tibet), from 1961.

The Dalai Lama had been practicing nonviolence and moving the world with his example for almost half a century, the messages might have been saying; but he had moved China not at all, and Tibet now was almost gone.

One bright March afternoon I made my way through the muddy streets of central McLeod Ganj and climbed up toward the pine-covered slopes to visit the Tibetan Youth Congress, the official voice of unofficial Tibet in exile. The organization is centered in a slightly broken building that looks like where you might put together an alternative newspaper, but in reality the TYC is exiled Tibet’s largest organization, linking thirty thousand people in eighty-three chapters across eleven nations, a framework for offering an alternative, highly engaged response to the Tibetan situation different from that of the government in exile. In fact, however, the Congress was partly founded by the man who has served as the Dalai Lama’s private secretary for more than forty years, and its former members now constitute 90 percent of the official leadership, including a recent prime minister. In the tiny world of Tibet in exile—smaller in population than Newport News, Virginia—the parallel world to the government in exile and the government itself overlap at every other point, so that the debate across the community begins to sound like an internal dialogue.

“The TYC is not supposed to be an NGO,” Lobsang Yeshi, its then vice president, said as he ushered me into a conference room around a long table, the sun streaming in through windows on every side of the slightly rickety construction. “We’re supposed to be a national organization. TYC is said to be very militant, separatist, whatever. But His Holiness is our strength, our power, our ground, everything. We cannot think of anything without His Holiness.” Without perhaps intending to, Yeshi had put his finger on the core of the Tibetan predicament, which everyone (not least the Dalai Lama himself) has to work around: those calling for independence are themselves dependent on a man who counsels against such an external dependence (and calls, rather, for a deeper independence within). Even those not completely convinced of the wisdom of the Dalai Lama’s political policy defer to him as their leader, their hero, and the incarnation of a god it would be near sacrilege to go against.

“The Dalai Lama is the most democratic of democrats,” Yeshi volunteered, in words that no one outside of Beijing would challenge. “No one has ever objected to his rule, to his advice. He is the only one to object to his rule. He frankly likes people to challenge him, to criticize, to give another side. He doesn’t like those who just kowtow.” Thus, again, the second distinctive conundrum of the Tibetan situation: the Dalai Lama constantly tells his people to look to themselves, not to him, for their strength, to lay claim to the possibilities of democracy, to let him, in effect, depose himself, and they say that they’d much rather leave all the decision making to him. As a result, he has been forced to attempt a sustained and systematic revolution to topple himself and to “impose” (as his current prime minister put it to me) democracy on his people.