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

well as the “extraordinary steadiness of his gaze.” The ceremony that followed seemed to go on forever: two mime performances were followed by dance, song, readings of national history, blessings and counter-blessings. It was the boy’s introduction to the marathon Tibetan rituals he would come to know so well (and loathe so thoroughly). The Dalai Lama remained composed throughout, and many people remarked that he seemed to recognize the officials who had served his predecessor.
    The new Dalai Lama took his place at the Potala Palace and began his apprenticeship to the political and spiritual leadership of Tibet. Sitting atop Marbori, “the Red Hill,” the Potala was a seventeenth-century masterpiece, but it wasn’t an easy place to live in. To go anywhere in it you were forever stepping over thick wooden transoms, climbing up stairs or ladders, the sight lines constantly broken by wooden pillars, by doors to hidden chapels, by corridorsthat spun off to another of the thousand rooms. It was freezing cold during the winter. And the Dalai Lama soon learned that his living quarters were placed so high above his people that he could see them only through a telescope. He would often study the criminals, who were closest to view (the Potala even contained a prison), men who when they saw the sun flashing off His Holiness’s telescope lens would bow their heads and look away out of reverence. The palace’s attic was rumored to be haunted by giant child-snatching owls and ghosts, ghosts that terrified the young Dalai Lama when he first stayed there, and its many chapels were filled with the remains of his predecessors in gargantuan
stupas
, or golden burial vessels. When he wasn’t studying or playing, the boy would wander among the
stupas
, the emeralds and rose-gold facets on the tombs occasionally catching a ray of light from the butter lamps and sparkling in the cold gloom. The Potala was too big to truly know, a Buddhist metropolis with offices, meeting rooms for the National Assembly, two treasuries and a large armory, a dungeon hard by the national library, and uncountable chapels. Its interior barely lit by the sun but only by candles and the glimpse of open courtyards, it was as dark and fragrant as a cave inhabited for centuries.
    The Fourteenth was often intensely lonely at first. His nervous and rather meek brother Lobsang went to live with him, but his parents were installed in their own home in Lhasa and were allowed only periodic visits. In their absence, the boy latched on to his beloved Ponpo, his caretaker, forming an attachment that would last for decades. “So strong was [our relationship],” the Dalai Lama said, “that he had to be in my sight at all times, even if it was only the bottom of his robe visible through a doorway or under the curtains which served as doors inside Tibetan houses.” Like the Dalai Lama’s mother, Ponpo was a forbearing, kindhearted person who fed and soothed the boy. But the memory of his motherlingered. The Dalai Lama’s younger brother, Choegyal, was installed at Drepung Monastery, a few miles from Lhasa, having been recognized as the reincarnation of a high lama. There Choegyal grew desperate for any hint of his old life, especially the warm presence of Diki Tsering. “I missed my mother terribly,” he remembers. “She used to send me homemade cookies, lollipops, chewing gum … all wrapped up in a scarf. I would sniff the scarf, desperately trying to recapture the smell of her.” The Dalai Lama suffered similar pangs.
    As a boy in the freezing Potala on long afternoons, the young Fourteenth Dalai Lama would sit for hours on the shiny
arga
floors, made of chipped stone and waxed with butter, and gaze up at intricate murals hundreds of years old. These became his history lessons. Extending from floor to ceiling, they told the story of Tibet in flowing allegories and luridly colored portraits.
    The Dalai Lama learned about Songtsen Gampo, the Tibetan king who,