Escape from the Land of Snows Read Online Free PDF

parents.
    This single-minded pursuit also meant that these institutions were far from the tranquil places of meditation that one thinks of when one hears the words “Tibetan Buddhist monastery.” The enormous complexes were roiling, highly political outposts in which not every initiate was dedicated to the pursuit of the Dharma. The Dalai Lama, in later years, spoke of a monastery where only one in five of the thousands of monks was actually a serious student of Buddhism, while the others spent their time distracting themselves or fighting off boredom (“organized gold-bricking,”
Life
magazine would call it).And one young monk painted a rather harrowing portrait of elderly monks’ pursuit of him and other young boys whom they wanted as
drombos
, or homosexual partners. Neither Tibet nor its premier institutions, the monasteries, was free from the vices of the world.
    The heroes of this formerly martial society were no longer warriors and chieftains but monks who walled themselves upin mountain caves to meditate, with a small hole cut in the wall through which food was passed to them once a day. Or the
lung-pa
(“wind men”), who were said to have achieved such a high degree of concentration that they could overcome the laws of physics and fly through the air for hours at a time. The promise of Mahayana Buddhism, the school that had taken root in Tibet, is that a human being, through sustained and devout effort, can rise through his life cycles to become a
bodhisattva
, an “enlightenment-being” who has achieved complete wisdom and compassion for others. And it is selfless empathy for others that leads to Buddha-dom. The lotus, the symbol of Tibetan Buddhism and the subject of its central mantra
Om Mani Padme Hum!
(“Oh! The Jewel in the Lotus!”), is born in the dank mud of a swamp, but it rises above the clammy muck to unfurl its beautiful clean flower. One could in the same way free oneself of the base hatreds of human existence and come to embody enlightenment and the “jewel” in the mantra, pure compassion.
    The fact that the most revered
bodhisattva
in the land, Chenrizi, was resident in the person of the Dalai Lama made him not only a spiritual leader and the political head of state but the example of what every Tibetan Buddhist strove for, a perfect model of what a human being should and could become. Chenrizi was “the Lord who looks down,” a being who, constantly on the verge of attaining Nirvana, postpones his final transformation in order to help others end their suffering. He was therefore, in a sense, the final aim of the nation, the end product of its special mission in the world.
    The Tibetans do not even have a word for “religion.” It isn’t something apart. It abides in life always.
    After his entry into Lhasa, the Amdo boy was installed in the summer palace, the Norbulingka, as he awaited his enthronement,“thelast temporal liberty I was ever to know.” On the cold morning of February 22, 1940, he was taken to the Potala, the winter residence that loomed over Lhasa, its height accentuated by an architect’s trick: the walls angled inward from their base, as did the windows, making the building seem to soar even higher than it did. The boy was led to the Lion Throne, which had been vacant for six years but kept supplied with fresh food, holy water, and new flowers, as this was the seat of a spirit on its way back from distant parts. The British delegate to the ceremony, Sir Basil Gould, walked into the Hall of All Good Deeds of the Spiritual and Temporal Worlds and saw the new incarnation for the first time: “The Dalai Lama,” he wrote, “a solid, solemn but very wide-awake boy, red-cheeked and closely shorn, wrapped warm in the maroon-red robes of a monk and in outer coverings, was seated high on his simple throne, cross-legged in the attitude of Buddha.” The boy was surrounded by five abbots, and Gould was struck by the “devotion and love” they showed the Fourteenth as