My Spiritual Journey Read online

  I Was the Only One Who Could Win Unanimous Support

  At sixteen, I become the temporal leader of Tibet

  IN OCTOBER 1950, IN their campaigns in eastern Tibet, the People’s Liberation Army inflicted heavy losses on our troops, which were greatly inferior in number and poorly equipped. When we learned that the city of Chamdo had fallen into Chinese hands, our fears intensified. Faced with looming danger, the population of Lhasa mobilized to ask that I be made responsible and invested with temporal power.

  Announcements were posted on the city’s walls, violently criticizing the government and demanding that I immediately take the country’s destiny into my own hands. I remember being filled with anxiety when this news reached me. I was only sixteen, and I still had to finish my religious training. What’s more, I knew nothing about the upheavals that had occurred in China and that led to the invasion of our country. I had received no political training. So I protested, citing my inexperience and my age, since usually a Dalai Lama relieves a regent of his responsibility at the age of eighteen, not sixteen.

  It is clear that the long periods of regency were a weak point of our institutions. I myself had for several years been able to observe the tensions between the various government factions and their deleterious effect on the country’s administration. The situation was becoming catastrophic under the threat of Chinese invasion. More than ever, we needed unity, and as the Dalai Lama, I was the only one who could win the country’s unanimous support.

  My cabinet decided to consult the State Oracle. At the end of the ceremony, the Kuten, staggering beneath the weight of his immense ritual headdress, came over to me and placed on my lap a kata, the white ceremonial scarf, on which he had written the words Thu la bap—"Your time has come.”

  The oracle had spoken. I had to take on my responsibilities and prepare without delay to lead my country, which was getting ready to enter into war.

  On November 17, 1950, the Dalai Lama officially became the temporal leader of Tibet. On October 1, 1949, Mao Tse-tung, victorious over the Nationalists, had proclaimed the birth of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing. Beginning in January 1, 1950, he made known his intention to “liberate” Tibet, which the Chinese traditionally called “the House of Western Treasures.” In the language of propaganda, “liberation” was a matter of putting an end to “Western imperialism” and to the “reactionary regime” of the last theocracy in the world. At the time, however, there were only seven foreigners in Tibet.

  On October 7, 1950, forty thousand men from the People’s Liberation Army crossed the Yangtze, the eastern border between Tibet and China. Despite the fierce resistance of 8,500 Tibetan soldiers and considerable natural obstacles, the advance of the Chinese troops was relentless. It stopped only a hundred kilometers away from the capital, Lhasa.

  The Tibetan government was summoned to send a delegation to Beijing to negotiate with the Chinese authorities the conditions of “peaceful liberation.”

  We wrongly believed that isolation would guarantee us peace

  THE THREAT TO THE FREEDOM of Tibet had not escaped the world’s notice. The Indian government, supported by the British, protested to the authorities of the People’s Republic of China in November 1950, declaring that the invasion of our territory threatened peace. But it was all in vain. We would have to pay the price of our ancestral isolation.

  Geography cut our territory off from the rest of the world. Before, in Tibet, in order to reach the borders of India and Nepal, one had to plan for a long, difficult, monthlong journey from Lhasa through high Himalayan passes that were uncrossable for most of the year.

  Isolation, then, is a characteristic feature of our country, and we had deliberately reinforced it by authorizing the presence of only a small number of foreigners. In the past, Lhasa was even called “the Forbidden City.” It is true that historically our relations with the neighboring peoples—Mongols, Manchus, and Chinese—were antagonistic. Above all, though, we wanted to live in peace, in the spirit of our religion. We had thought we could continue this peaceful way of life by remaining apart from the world. This was a mistake. And today I make it a duty to leave my door wide open to everyone.

  The Dalai Lama rightly regrets that, out of a lack of interest in foreign politics and a lack of experience in international relations, Tibet neglected to make its independence officially known to the community of nations. The occasion had presented itself to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, who, during the first Chinese revolution in 1911, had proclaimed his country’s independence and expelled from Lhasa the Manchu ambans (the representatives of the emperor), along with a small garrison of Chinese soldiers.

  In the beginning of the twentieth century, Tibet fulfilled all the criteria for de facto state sovereignty. It possessed a territory with defined borders and a government exercising its plenary authority and maintaining international relations. In 1947, during the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi, the Tibetan delegates sat, along with their flag, among the representatives of thirty-two nations. But Tibetan diplomacy was limited to contacts with bordering countries: British and then, in 1947, independent India, Nepal, Bhutan, and China. This status of de facto independence was not legalized through international recognition.

  The independence of Tibet in relation to China lends itself to contradictory interpretations because of the complex and often misunderstood relations between the two countries, in each of which politics and religion have long been entangled. After having been in the past a warring kingdom that fought in Mongolia, China, and the city-states on the Silk Road, Tibet comprised, at its military apogee in the eighth century, Indo-European peoples, Turks, and Chinese, and even occupied the Chinese capital of Chang’an. Though conquered by the Mongols in the tenth century, Tibet was never integrated into their empire.

  A spiritual master-lay protector relationship was established between the Tibetan Dalai Lamas and the Khans of Mongolia,1 and when, in the thirteenth century, the Mongols established the Yuan dynasty in China, the same link was established between the Son of Heaven and the Dalai Lama. The emperor of China was regarded by the Tibetans as an earthly emanation of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of enlightened Wisdom, and a power of temporal protection was assigned to him. The Dalai Lama, whose reincarnation lineage descends from Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of enlightened Compassion, exercised a spiritual authority that was respected in both China and Mongolia.

  In the context of this special relationship, in the eighteenth century the Chinese army intervened to reestablish the Seventh Dalai Lama on his throne when Tibet was torn apart by a civil war. Two ambans settled in Lhasa, but they were required to report to the Dalai Lama’s government, and they never exercised any prerogative on behalf of China.

  Later on, in the twentieth century, Tibet became a stake in Central Asia when it aroused the greed of both Russia and the United Kingdom. First the British tried to sign commercial agreements with China about Tibet and to redraw unilaterally the borders of the Himalayan kingdoms. But the Tibetans protested the validity of these treaties.

  In 1904 a British military expedition tried to impose the supremacy of Great Britain by force, and the Thirteenth Dalai Lama had to flee his occupied capital. The English and the regent signed the Convention of Lhasa, which designated war compensation and bestowed commercial advantages on the British. This treaty established a de facto recognition of Tibetan sovereignty in relation to the Chinese nation. It was confirmed in 1906 by the document that the British signed with the Chinese, which explicitly accepted the Anglo-Tibetan treaty.

  Still, in 1907, to confirm their advantages, the British renegotiated with the Chinese and concluded the Treaty of Peking, in which they agreed not to deal with Tibet except through the intermediary of China. In flagrant contradiction to the previous agreements, this new treaty explicitly recognized a Chinese “suzerainty” over Tibet. Thus, a historic countertruth was legitimized, forming the basis for later Chinese claims that Tibet was part of China.

/>   The Dalai Lama deplored the contradictions in the Treaty of Peking, the consequences of which would turn out to be grave for his country: “Suzerainty is a vague and ancient term. Perhaps it was the nearest western political term to describe the relations between Tibet and China from 1720 to 1890, but still, it was very inaccurate, and the use of it has misled whole generations of western statesmen. It did not take into account the reciprocal spiritual relationship, or recognize that the relationship was a personal matter between the Dalai Lamas and the Manchu emperors. There are many such ancient eastern relationships which cannot be described in ready-made western political terms.”2 Subsequent Tibetan protests before the United Nations did not succeed in overriding Chinese authority and having Tibetan sovereignty accepted.

  I endorse the Kashag’s appeal to the United Nations

  ON NOVEMBER 7, 1950, the Kashag [the Tibetan cabinet] and the government appealed to the United Nations, asking them to intercede for us. I approved of the terms of the letter:

  The attention of the world is riveted on Korea where aggression is being resisted by an international force. Similar happenings in remote Tibet are passing without notice. It is in the belief that aggression will not go unchecked and freedom unprotected in any part of the world that we have assumed the responsibility of reporting to the United Nations Organization, through you, recent happenings in the border area of Tibet.

  As you are aware, the problem of Tibet has taken on proportions in recent times. This problem is not of Tibet’s own making but is largely the outcome of unthwarted Chinese ambition to bring weaker nations on its periphery under its active domination.3

  The strategy of the People’s Republic of China was to make the Western world believe that it was sincerely committed to a peaceful settlement of the Tibetan question. The leading nations were at the time preoccupied by the threat of nuclear war, with Korea at the epicenter of that concern, and the Soviet Union had declared its support for Maoist China. The only UN member country to launch an appeal against the invasion of foreign forces into Tibet was El Salvador, in November 1950. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India, who was concerned about preserving his friendship with his great neighbor in the north, refused to intervene. Great Britain showed itself indifferent, and the United States took the side of prudence for fear of aggravating its relations with the Soviets.

  On Tibetan soil, however, the Chinese armies were perpetrating acts of violence in eastern Tibet. The Tibetan government had sent a delegation to Beijing to negotiate. But the discussions came to an abrupt halt, and threatened with a forced march on Lhasa, on May 23, 1951, the Tibetan emissaries signed the Agreement for Peaceful Liberation of Tibet, also called the Seventeen-Point Agreement, which organized the annexation of their country by China.

  According to the International Commission of Jurists,4 this text is worthless under international law because it was signed under the threat of weapons.

  The motherland, a shameless lie

  I USED TO LISTEN TO the broadcasts of Radio Beijing in Tibetan. One night when I was alone, I suddenly heard a shrill voice announcing that the Seventeen-Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet had just been signed between representatives of the government of the People’s Republic of China and the so-called regional government of Tibet.

  I couldn’t believe my ears. I wanted to jump up and call out to everyone, but I was riveted to my seat. The announcer explained that “during the last century, aggressive imperialist forces had invaded Tibet to perpetrate all sorts of abuses and provocations there. The result of this,” he said, “was that the Tibetan people were plunged into the profound sufferings of slavery.” I felt physically ill when I heard this improbable mixture of lies and the clichés of fantastic propaganda.

  But the worst was yet to come. The radio announced that, according to the first clause of the agreement, the Tibetan people would be returned to their “motherland.” That Tibet could return to the motherland was a shameless lie! Tibet was never part of China. On the contrary, it could even claim large Chinese territories. Our peoples are ethnically different, and radically so. We don’t speak the same language, and our writing has nothing in common with Chinese characters.

  The most alarming thing was that the Tibetan delegates were not authorized to sign in my name. Their sole mission was to negotiate; I had kept the state seals with me.

  The Dalai Lama was confronted with a dilemma. In his entourage, his older brother, Takster Rinpoche, had fled the Kumbum monastery and made contact with foreign diplomatic missions in Calcutta. He was convinced that the Americans would not tolerate the Communist expansionism of the Chinese and that they would fight for Tibet. Knowing that the United States was already militarily engaged in Korea, the Dalai Lama doubted that it would open a second front in Tibet. What’s more, realizing that China was a much more populated country, he feared that an armed conflict, even if supported by a foreign power, would be extremely long and bloody. To try to avoid bloodshed with an uncertain outcome, the young Dalai Lama decided to meet the Chinese leaders. Thinking that they were human beings too, he hoped to be able to discuss things with them and reach an agreement.

  Mao’s personality impressed me

  DESPITE THE CONTEXT of difficult relations with China, in 1954 and 1955 I went to that country. It was a good chance to discover a different world. What’s more, during this trip I met many Tibetans in the provinces of Kham and Amdo, so I acquired a number of new experiences and acquaintances. I also met many leaders, notably President Mao Tse-tung. I first saw him during a public meeting. When I entered the room where he was, I noticed first a battery of spotlights. Mao in person was sitting in their light, very calm and relaxed. He didn’t look like a particularly intelligent man. When I shook his hand, though, I felt as if I were in the presence of a great magnetic force. He behaved in a very friendly, spontaneous way, despite protocol.

  All in all, I had at least a dozen meetings with him, most of them during large gatherings, but a few in private. On these occasions, whether they were banquets or conferences, he always had me sit next to him, and once he even served me food.

  I found him very impressive. Physically, he was very unusual. He had a dark complexion, but his skin seemed to gleam, as if he were wearing skin cream. His hands were very beautiful and had that same strange glow, with perfect fingers and exquisitely shaped thumbs. I noticed that he seemed to have difficulty breathing, and he wheezed a lot. Perhaps that affected his way of speaking, which was always very slow and precise. He seemed partial to short sentences, probably for the same reason. His movements and gestures were also very slow. It took him several seconds to move his head from left to right, which gave him a dignified, self-assured air.

  Our final interview took place in the spring of 1955, the day before my departure, in his office. I had visited several Chinese provinces by then and I was getting ready to say to him in all sincerity that I was strongly interested in different development projects for Tibet. But he came over to me and murmured, “Your behavior is correct because you are learned. But believe me, religion is a poison that has two serious defects: it reduces the population, since monks and nuns take the vow of celibacy, and it curbs progress. It has produced two victims, Tibet and Mongolia.”

  At these words, I was filled with a burning sensation in my face and an intense fear.

  The Dalai Lama left China without illusions. But he candidly observed that people in trouble always tend to cling to the slightest hope, so he tried again to find common ground with the occupier, whose presence had been reinforced in his absence.

  After the signing of the Seventeen-Point Agreement, the People’s Liberation Army had continued its advance, occupying Lhasa and central Tibet, in violation of the official guarantees that had been given. The Chinese Communist Party went on to demolish the eastern Tibetan provinces, which passed under the administration of different regions in the People’s Republic, since Mao decided, in 1955, to include them in “the great tide of soc
ialist transformation.”

  Between 1950 and 1959, the upkeep of the occupation troops and the first land collectives sparked a famine, while forced labor was instituted to build strategic roads. When, starting from the “Great Leap Forward” of 1958, the democratic reforms entailed the forced denunciation of Tibetan leaders and respected lamas, popular revolt spread. The Chinese authorities reinforced the occupying force with additional troops as armed resistance against the occupier became more radical in the eastern reaches of Tibet in Kham and Amdo.

  March 10, 1959, a day of insurrection in Lhasa

  AFTER MY PRAYERS AND BREAKFAST [on March 10, 1959], I went out into the light of a calm morning and strolled through the garden. The sky was crystal-clear, and the sun rays lit up the top of the mountain that overlooked Drepung monastery in the distance. Soon they were shining on the palace and shrines and on Norbulingka, the Jewel Park, where I was walking. It was a fresh, cheerful spring, with tufts of new grass and fragile buds opening on the poplar and willow trees. Lotus leaves were poking up through the surface of the pool and spreading in the sun. Suddenly I jumped when I heard shouts in the distance.

  I sent some guards to find out the reason for these cries. When they returned, they explained to me that the population was streaming out of Lhasa toward Norbulingka in large numbers, to protect me from the Chinese. They kept pouring out all morning. Some remained grouped together at the different entrances to the park, while others were starting to patrol around it. By noon about thirty thousand people had gathered there. The situation had to be defused.