Escape from the Land of Snows Read Online Free PDF Page A

remembered from the trip was the wildlife, the
drong
(wild yaks),
kyang
(wild asses), and
nawa
(Himalayan blue sheep), “so light and fast they might have been ghosts.” He was also struck, as a young child uprooted from his familiar landscape, by the forbidding remoteness of the territory they were passing through, “gargantuan mountains flanking immense flat plains which we struggled over like insects.”
    Still days away from the capital, the boy shed his peasant clothes for the last time and was dressed in the maroon-and-gold robes of a Buddhist monk. Then the
Mendel Tensum
was performed, in which the boy was presented with a reliquary, a scripture, and a statuette of the Buddha of Long Life, gifts appropriate to a high lama. His head was shaved, and he was given a new name as well, Tenzin Gyatso. By these modest steps, the boy from Amdo prepared himself to become the Precious Protector of Tibet.
    It is one of the more charming traditions of Tibetan life that no one is allowed to leave on or return from a trip unattended. A young boy who is being sent off from Lhasa to a remote monasterywill find dozens of friends and family taking the first part of the trip with him, sending their loved one off with tears and assurances that they will be waiting for his return. And on his arrival back, he will again find a party of friends and neighbors waiting for him on the road, ready to escort him back. To set off alone on a journey would be seen as deeply uncivilized. For the next Dalai Lama, the tradition was filled by battalions of Tibetan soldiers, officials, and the heads of the capital’s three great monasteries, who journeyed out from Lhasa to meet the caravan. When the Amdo party approached Lhasa, the dignitaries met them on the plain two miles outside the capital. They brought with them “the Great Peacock,” a special wooden throne used only for greeting the new incarnation on his arrival in Lhasa. Among the officials was a humble monk named Ponpo (“the boss”), who would be in charge of the Dalai Lama’s kitchen. This self-effacing man would become the Dalai Lama’s surrogate mother in the lonely and alienating days to come.
    A daylong ceremony followed, which to the young boy’s eyes consisted of enormous swarms of people, more than he thought even existed in the world, coming to greet him and receive his blessing. What seemed like the entire population of Lhasa waited for him in the capital, a sea of shining faces flooding around his litter. The boy felt “as if I were in a great park covered with beautiful flowers while a soft breeze blew across it and peacocks elegantly danced before me.”
    To understand the Fourteenth and his role in Tibetan life, one must understand the nature of Tibetan Buddhism and its place within the nation. Tibet pursued the building of monasteries and the pledging of huge numbers of monks as state ends. One out of every four young men was placed in a monastery, often when he was six orseven years old. The monasteries sought these extraordinary numbers of monks for both theological and political reasons: not only to advance the Dharma, the way of the Buddha, but also to draw as many Tibetan families as possible into the monastic economy and to build up their political base. As anywhere, numbers translated into power. The monasteries also doubled as universities, offering the only real education that peasant children could hope for, while at the same time owning huge tracts of land and collecting revenues that dwarfed the government budget. Buddhism was much more than a state religion; it was the sole reason for Tibet’s existence. The faith became the institution around which all other things in the society were molded: the economy, the military (or lack thereof), foreign policy, domestic policy. One explorer described Tibet as one “huge monastery inhabited by a nation of monks.” Stealing from a monastery’s funds was considered a graver offense than killing one’s own