Tibet of my youthful dreams

In Colonial Ceylon of the 1920s Ananda College, headed by the charismatic Kularatne, was bubbling with patriotic fervour. Many of its staff and students followed their ‘guru’ in discarding the colonial symbol of ‘tie/coat’ and adopting “Ariya Sinhala’ dress. [Amusingly, the black coat and tie have been embraced with relish in independent Sri Lanka. Good stuff for a sociological study.]

Ananda also became a magnet for some of the icons of Indian nationalism. Her students and teachers had the rare privilege of hearing, in their own school hall, the inspired words of the great Mahatma, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, Sarojini Naidu the poet [once reputed to have had a Sinhalese lover] and many more. Following in the footsteps of the Theosophist Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, guiding light of Buddhist education, quite a few unconventional Britishers and Americans also came to Ananda to interact with Kularatne and the Buddhist revival.

Among the most interesting of these was the American scholar of Tibet’s Tantrayana Buddhism,W.Y.Evans-Wentz. He gave a few public lectures on Buddhism where he fearlessly criticised many cherished Christian beliefs.

The wide publicity given to these talks inevitably earned the wrath of the French Jesuit Fr. Le Goc, Rector of Ananda’s rival school in Maradana – St. Joseph’s College. The French Jesuit now challenged the American Buddhist to a public debate on the existence of God and related doctrines. It would have been a dramatic confrontation as I gathered, many decades later, from my father [admittedly a partisan witness] then a young teacher at Ananda.

Evans-Wentz had amazed the audience when he strode in-dressed in immaculate white Ariya Sinhala dress! I have no idea as to the outcome of this last of the great Buddhist-Christian debates. I am pretty sure all present were, predictably, convinced by the arguments of their respective protagonists, and left with their natal beliefs unchallenged. The reading public was so interested that the debate was duly published in Colombo.

Evans-Wentz left behind his magnum opus “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” (which went on, many decades later, to become a ‘sacred text’ of the Beat/Hippie/LSD Movement).It is this book, and its charismatic author, that inspired in my father D.T. Devendra an abiding fascination with Tibet and all things Tibetan.

Father read every book on Tibet that he could lay his hands on – and I became the collateral beneficiary, in a home where every son or daughter was free to read any book in the house. It was thus that I learnt of Tibet and its traditions from the fascinating accounts of Younghusband’s British ‘invasion’ of Lhasa, the gruelling journeys of the intrepid Madame Alexandra David-Neel, the sensitive musings of the Italian scholar Marco Pallis, the French traveller Andre Migot, the articles and paintings of the Russian Professor Nicholas Roerich and “Stepping Stones” the journal edited by the English Mahayanist Bhikshu Sangharakshita of Kalimpong [who went on to found the Western Buddhist Order in Britain] – and Evans-Wentz himself.

The colourful pictures in “Lands and People” held me spellbound with intricately carved temples, whirling dragon-dancing monks, yak caravans and forbiddingly beautiful mountains. There is much more I read, but can no longer recall as I write entirely from memory.

Thus, I became fascinated with a Tibet, of sorts – the incense-smoky interiors of ancient temples clinging to mountain precipices, weather beaten yak shepherds in tattered rags, serene looking monks in strange headgear, or in fearsome masks.

A frisson of strange emotion overcame one when confronted with the Tibetan paintings of spirits in conjugal embrace symbolising spiritual ecstacy, or their ‘sky burials,’ where the dead are chopped up and left on bare hilltops for mountain eagles to feed on. Father firmly argued that this was truly Buddhist, in that you renounced any craving you may have had for the body “you” once occupied and, instead, donated it as ‘dana’ for the birds of the air to live on.

The strange spiritual practices of Tibetan Buddhism held us in thrall – the lamas meditating in snow which melted around them as they sat in trance, yet other lamas who chose to be walled into minute ‘kutis’ where they meditated for years and, strangest of all, the transference of the spirit of high lamas to infant boys who were then inducted into monasteries for decades of training in Buddhist doctrine and the rigorous practice of meditation. The present Dalai Lama is held to be the reincarnation of an unbroken series of thirteen earlier Dalai Lamas, all chosen as infants in a time-honoured tradition.

Later on, I became enamoured of books by climbers of Himalayan peaks after reading John Hunt’s book on Hillary’s ascent of Everest. Base camps, Sherpas, ice picks, oxygen bottles, crampons, pitons and Yeti footprints thrust lamas, ‘tanka’ paintings and precipitous monasteries into the background of my consciousness.

Both interests, however, came together when I read Heinrich Harrer’s “Seven Years in Tibet”. I wonder how many yet remember this man who seems to have acted as catalyst for the Dalai Lama’s flight from the “Forbidden Kingdom” to the Empire of Materialism. Harrer was an Austrian mountain climber sent by Germany during WW II to spy on British activities in India’s North East. He was captured and interned in a POW camp in the Himalayan foothills. He escaped and, after a gruelling journey without any equipment, reached Lhasa the capital of Tibet. He lived there in peace amidst Buddhist hospitality till the war ended.

The already ‘enthroned’ Dalai Lama was a teenager at the time. His percipient teachers soon realised that, in Harrer, here was an unwitting ‘visitor’ from the outer modern world who could introduce its strange exotic ways to the young Dalai Lama. Teacher and pupil studied together for many years and thus was kindled in the young Lama an enduring fascination with the world outside his ‘Forbidden Kingdom’ – a fascination that, later, led both to his great success and, perhaps, spiritual doom. When Harrer left Tibet he left behind a brilliant student but infected, alas, with the heady virus of Western materialism.

Chairman Mao’s China now began consolidating its borders. Tibet had, for centuries, accepted its status as a feudatory of the “Middle Kingdom”. However, decades of civil war, invasion, famine and destruction gave the central government no time to establish effective authority over the outlying enclave of Tibet. This “province” thus continued to exist in an undisturbed time capsule of esoteric Buddhism embedded in a medieval feudalism. This period provided the ‘window in time’ that enabled the many Western travellers and scholars to write of the Tibet that entranced my father and me.

No resurgent Communist government could tolerate a self-governing feudal enclave within its borders. Least of all a territory which shared a border, and strong cultural links, with an expansionist India. Thus, as was inevitable, Tibet was “invaded” with all the insensitivity and brutality of Communist regimes determined to assert their authority.

The Western press published colourful accounts of ill-armed Tibetan guerillas and stave-wielding lamas bravely resisting the brutal People’s Army and Red Guards.

Sensibly, the Dalai Lama and his advisers fled their mountain fastness to hospitable India, the birthplace of Sakyamuni and the Buddha Dharma . China soon established direct administrative control over Tibet and abolished the existing “oppressive feudal clerical regime”. Medieval and monastic Tibet was dragged “kicking and screaming” into the harsh reality of the 20th Century.

The Dalai Lama and his genuine followers flourished beneath the canopy of India’s hospitality. A little Tibet of the faithful, under the Dalai Lama’s tutelage, grew at Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills. The extraordinarily intelligent Dalai Lama now blossomed in the heady atmosphere of intellectual, and multi-cultural, freedom that would have been denied him in cloistered Lhasa. He now attracted an unending stream of journalists, disciples, politicians, film stars and the plain curious. He also began travelling the “world” – curiously enough only the Western world. The great success of these missions was the establishment of several Tibetan monasteries, largely in America and Britain, where learned lamas preached Tantrayana doctrines and taught monastic practices to Western disciples.

Hot on the heels of these lamas, a steady stream of average Tibetans began making their way to the Golden West, exploiting the loophole of political asylum – already well polished by the diaspora of Armenians, Kurds, ‘eelam’ Tamils etc. While they made a living by pumping gas in New York or crunching numbers in Silicon Valley, they provided highly visible mobs for any anti-China demonstration. Their TV-genic assaults on the Olympic Torch Marathon were the best possible illustration. The Dalai Lama’s ill- advised demand for independence from China gave the West a ‘pious’ cudgel with which to belabour China and deflate its Olympic ambitions. The Tibetan diaspora, keen to exhibit loyalty to their new homes in the West, served as his footsoldiers to throw mud in China’s face.

It saddens me to see how much the Dalai Lama relishes the honey dew of media adulation – as did the late nun whom the media beatified long before the Vatican did.

Like her, he developed a fondness for hob-nobbing with headline makers – Presidents, Prime Ministers and Hollywood stars. He has compromised his moral stature in showering blessings on the US President responsible for thousands of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is no wonder he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – an accolade the West bestows on Third Worlders who irritate enemies of the West. It is tragic to see the decline of a Buddhist leader of such spiritual eminence into a global pop icon and pawn in an ideological Cold War.

Time’s chariot wheels roll inexorably on – and so does the high speed railway now linking Lhasa to Beijing. There is no going back, ever, to the Tibet of my youthful dreams, now buried forever in the permafrost of history.