Anna Louise Strong Reference Archive
When the Dalai Lama came to Peking in 1954 as a deputy to the National People’s Congress, thousands of pilgrims flocked from Inner Mongolia to do him reverence. Elsie Epstein told me that she saw them going on trams to the Lama Temple where His Holiness was staying. They came decked in all their wealth in the form of silver and turquoise ornaments — brooches, breast-plates, hair diadems — and they left it all with the Dalai Lama as donation, receiving in return a small red cord His Holiness had blessed.
To get from official Buddhist sources the history of Tibet’s Buddhism and the two Grand Lamas in their relation to China, I went to the Temple of Broad Charity in Peking, the center of organized Buddhism in China. It stands somewhat north of the old imperial palace on a street named for the sheep-market to which long ago it led. The temple was built in the twelfth century, a century before Kublai Khan “took Tibet into China.” Many times in past centuries it has fallen into disrepair and been again restored. Extensive repairs and redecoration have been done in recent years with contributions from the present Chinese government. It is a rather typical temple with stone courts and colonnades, which houses also a monastery, many sacred relics and the offices of the All-China Buddhist Association.
The Venerable Shirob Jaltso, seventy-six-year-old Chairman of the Buddhist Association, is a Tibetan who studied theology in Lhasa for thirty-two years, from the age of twenty-one to fifty-three. I met him first at a diplomatic reception, a man of gentle but authoritative mien in robes of orange and magenta who was neatly avoiding the wine and meat sandwiches as a proper Buddhist monk. He agreed to an interview. Later I heard him address the National People’s Congress, of which he is a deputy, on the subject of the Dalai Lama’s alleged statement in Tezpur, India, which he, in common with most people in China, was ready to brand as a fake. He expressed “profound affection for the people of Tibet,” and said: “Now that the Tibetan rebel clique has been put down, the big mountain on the shoulders of the people has been removed.”
“As a Tibetan and a Buddhist,” stated the Venerable Shirob, “I endorse fully the stand of the People’s Government to put down the rebellion thoroughly and dissolve the local Tibetan government that instigated it.” He made an eloquent plea to the Dalai Lama: “My revered Dalai Lama, I want to offer you a hata (ceremonial scarf) from afar. Free yourself from the grip of the reactionary clique and return to the motherland to join in building the Tibetan plateau into a real paradise on earth. Do not lose the trust the people have placed in you.” He pled even with the rebel leaders: “Some of you have been my pupils and some have been my friends. Now you have betrayed the motherland and turned into my enemies.” He advised them solemnly that “there is no future” in this course but only “deplorable exile” and the “people’s judgment.” He begged them to repent, “for the people are lenient to those who return with sincere remorse.”
Such is the quality of the Venerable Shirob. To foreign readers a special interest may attach to the list he gave of contributions made to Buddhist shrines and temples by the present government of China. He noted: the restoration of the Wutaishan Shrine, which the Japanese destroyed; the restoration of the Gumbum Monastery, birth-place of Tson Khapa who founded the Yellow Sect; the restoration of the Chiatsun Monastery in Chinghai, birth-place of the present Dalai Lama; the restoration of the Yung Ho Monastery in Peking and the Lingyin Monastery in Hangchow; the careful restoring of many Buddhist paintings in caves, especially the caves of Tunhuang. He noted that when the Foreign Minister Chen Yi went to Lhasa in 1956 to greet the Preparatory Committee for the Tibetan Autonomous Region, he “provided meals for more than two hundred thousand lamas and gave gifts and contributions to the monasteries. . . .”1
“Even the merits of the China’s Emperor Liang Wu Ti and India’s Emperor Asoka, known in the annals as defenders of Buddhism, cannot be compared to the boundless merits of the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman Mao Tse-tung,” was the sweeping praise the Venerable Shirob gave. For most people outside China, this casts an unexpected light on Chairman Mao!
An American friend of mine, however, has seen the Lingyin Temple in Hangchow and was much impressed by the restoration done. “A wonderful temple and a site that is one of the beauty spots of the world,” he said. “Chiang’s soldiers left it wrecked. . . . The restoration must have cost a million. Tremendous columns of reinforced concrete were erected right through the time of the Korean war when steel and cement were in short supply. The former Buddha was so defaced it couldn’t be used, so the Art Institute made an enormous new Buddha in camphorwood, carved by the best artists and handicraftsmen, a work of several years. It must be one of the finest Buddhas in the world. . . . So many of the old statues look like feudal lords or stolid men in a trance, but this is an artist’s portrayal of compassion for mankind. The Communists must have set out to make a better Buddha than the Buddhists!”
The caretaker told my friend an anecdote that is too good to omit. Controversy arose between the monks and the artists over the exact position of the Buddha’s feet, the monks demanding a pose which the artists said defied anatomy. . . . The question reached Premier Chou En-lai, who asked: “Is this for an art exhibit or a temple?” They replied that it was for a temple. “Then do what the monks ask,” said Chou. . . . He carefully scrutinized the model and added: “And change his hair. Buddha was an Indian. Make his hair like an Indian, not like a Chinese.”
The Chinese, it will be seen, whether religious or irreligious, take pride in their national monuments, and in the authenticity of their Buddhas. If citizens of Buddhist faith need temples, then national pride demands that these be proper ones. There are at times even practical benefits to be had from ancient memorials. The Temple of Broad Charity, for instance, contains as its most famous relic a “Tooth of Buddha,” brought from India in the fifth century. Long ago a Burmese king waged a war in an unsuccessful attempt to get it.2 When the present Peking Buddhists were allowed to take it on loan to Burma for the 2,500th anniversary of Buddha’s entrance into Nirvana, the goodwill of nations was strengthened by the pomp and the thanks received.
When I came to the Temple of Broad Charity for my interview, the Venerable Shirob was packing to go to Stockholm to answer any questions on Tibet that the World Peace Congress might ask. He referred me to Chao Pu-chu, who could answer my questions just as well and in much less time than the Venerable Shirob, for the latter is fluent in Tibetan and Sanskrit but would have to be twice translated for me, while Chao speaks the tongue of Peking and so needs only a single interpreter. Chao is Vice-Chairman of the Buddhist Association, and Chairman of San Shih Buddhist Institute, the organ of theological research. He led me to a long reception room full of ancient screens and ornamental scrolls, with windows along two walls looking into the temple’s colonnades. Over the usual tea, the pale, unsweetened fragrant tea of China, he began a brief survey of Buddhism in the world.
The Fourth World Congress of Buddhists, said Chao, held in 1956 in Nepal, claimed that Buddhism is the religion of 550,000,000 people, about one-fifth the people of the world. It is hard to count Buddhists, however, for they do not join churches. If very religious, they become monks or nuns; if less religious, they come to temples on special occasions. In China, for instance, Buddhism has more followers than any other organized religion, but nobody could state with any accuracy how many Buddhists there are in China. One can, however, state that there are in China half a million Buddhist monks and nuns, of whom 150,000 are in Tibet.
There are two main schools of Buddhism and many variations within them. They differ in ceremonies and in basic theory. The Hinayana school teaches individual salvation, in that men seek in their present lives to become “Arhats,” which means “freed from rebirth.” This is the religion of much of South Asia, of Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos. The Mahayana school holds the opposite ideal of the Bodhisattva, the soul which, though freed from the chain of transmigration, comes back of its own will to help the world.
“For them,” said Chao, “Nirvana is not the ending of life. They appear again in the world of their own decision.”
The Mahayana school prevails in the northern belt, from Tibet across China, Mongolia and Korea into Japan. It has many sects. In China the main division is based on the language used in the Buddhist Sutras or scriptures. Some use the Han language, some the Tibetan and a few in the south use Pali, or Sanskrit. . . . In all these different groups different ceremonies and even different theories developed through the centuries.
“There is much respect for Tibet as a center of religious learning among all those Buddhists who use the Tibetan scriptures,” said Chao. “This includes Tibet itself and also Sikkim, Bhutan, Nepal, Mongolia and parts of China. In all these places Tibet is highly regarded as a center of religious learning and books.”
Chao admitted that “the Tibetan form of Buddhism” had been corrupted by many elements of Hinduism “even before it reached Tibet,” and had later added many local Tibetan superstitions. He did not elaborate this, apparently not wishing to criticize any Buddhist sect.
At this point I interrupt Chao Pu-chu to note that other authorities handle “Tibetan Buddhism,” which they call “Lamaism,” far less politely, they say that, however high its theory, its practise is debased by shamanism or “devil-worship” acquired from all the primitive tribes of Asia. Its “oracles” range from the travelling, fortune-telling lamas, both sought and feared by nomad herdsmen, to the great “State Oracle” of Lhasa, who helps locate new incarnations of the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni. After the recent rebellion in Lhasa, secret instructions were found from the rebels to the State Oracle, asking him “to bend” Tibet’s past history and religion, in the direction of stressing Tibet’s “independence.”
Belief in devils reaches the point where, as we shall see in the following chapter, it becomes possible for the chiefs of monasteries, while calling themselves “Living Buddhas,” to skin small children alive on the pretext that they are “incarnate devils,” and must thus be treated to save the crops and herds. Belief in the sacredness of life, which did not avail to save these children, may be stressed to save lice and even bacteria against the attacks of modern medicine. Both Winnington and Epstein noted, in 1955 when a group of journalists visited Tibet, that many Tibetan medical workers went weekly to the temples to pray forgiveness for their sins in killing bacteria to save the cattle. They told of a physician in the new hospital in Chamdo who scrupulously ignored the lice crawling onto him from his patient.
“If I should make objections,” he told the correspondents later, “I would lose the confidence of my patients. They have a religious attitude towards lice.” It is on record that Tson Khapa, the founder of the Yellow Sect in the 14th century, won a famous debate in theology by suddenly noticing that his opponent was killing a louse, and by shouting that he heard the cries of the murdered creature from where he sat.
If Tibet’s serfdom was, as Apei stated, a very dark serfdom, then many Buddhists in other lands consider the Tibetan form of Buddhism, also called “lamaism,” as “a very dark Buddhism.”
I asked Chao Pu-chu if it were true that the Chinese Princess Wen Cheng of the Tang dynasty first introduced Buddhism into Tibet in 641 A.D. Most histories of Tibet begin with their king Sron-tsan Gampo, and there are fascinating fairy-tales told by Tibetans about his courtship of the Princess Wen Cheng. These relate the hard tests which the Tang emperor imposed on the many suitors of the princess and how the young prince from faraway Tibet, with his shrewd advisers, passed all tests and won the lady. We learn that the princess “brought Buddhism to Tibet as her dowry” and also silkworms and many arts and crafts, and built in Lhasa a temple as well as setting up silk culture. Her statue still stands in two of Lhasa’s holiest places. Candor compels me to add that the same king also married a princess from Nepal, who also “brought Buddhism as her dowry” and built another temple. The competition in sects and temples in Tibet seems to start from an early day.
Chao Pu-chu, with the smile of a theological expert in dealing with amateurs, said that the princesses were indeed Buddhists, who built temples and created a favorable climate for Buddhism, but they “only brought part of Buddhism,” chiefly the doctrine of mercy. Monasteries were not introduced for another hundred years. Then a monk came from India with “a more complete doctrine” and with scriptures in Sanskrit. For a few centuries the Buddhist religion had its ups and downs. A king in the tenth century “abolished it,” but later kings again permitted it. In those centuries people went from Tibet to India to study Buddhism in Sanskrit. By the twelfth century Buddhism sharply declined in India but Tibet itself became a center of Buddhist teaching, the scriptures having been translated into Tibetan.
Buddhism in the Tibetan form now began to spread with the power of the Mongol emperors behind it. No longer in Tibet was it possible for kings to “abolish Buddhism.” The Buddhist monks themselves became the kings, and the monasteries spread their rule. This power was given them by the Chinese emperors, beginning with the Yuan, or Mongol Dynasty, about 1250 A.D. When Pagspa, the learned monk of Tibet, helped create an alphabet for the Mongols, the appreciative Kublai Khan named him “Prince of Tibet and Tutor to the Emperor.” This confirmed in Tibet the merging of clerical and secular rule and also helped spread the “lama temples” and monasteries into Mongolia and China.
Kublai gave Pagspa a large area for his domain, naming him “King of the Law in the Western Land of the Buddha,” as far as Kokonor. It is much as if one said in the Europe of that century: “Ruler of Lands of Christendom to the Northern Sea.” . . . Some recent demands by the Dalai Lama from India for “greater Tibet” seem to aspire to the area once given by Kublai. But history has moved in the seven centuries since Kublai’s day.
It is not easy in these modern days of “nations” to think in terms of those old feudal sovereignties. There were no sharp boundaries then on the great plains, deserts and mountains in Asia’s wild heart. There were nomad tribes of great variety living by herds, and nomad bandits living by loot; these were not wholly different from each other. Across this vast disorder the monasteries of Tibetan Buddhism marched northward as far as Buriat Mongolia, which is in the USSR today, while the fortified towns of the Chinese empire marched westward to “pacify the barbarian” and protect increasing settlers. Centuries back these two forms of organized life merged through both conquest and appreciation, the Chinese emperors promoting the religious control of the monasteries while prescribing their temporal powers.
The merging of priest with king, by appointment from Kublai, grew in Tibet into a tenacious theocracy, whose power extended wherever its monasteries grew. Far up into Mongolia the tribes became knit in a common religion through scriptures in the Tibetan tongue. Gold piled up through centuries in Lhasa from tribute squeezed from many nomads, only the nearer of which recognized the Dalai Lama as temporal lord, but all of whom paid him tribute through the monks. The similarity with the Holy Roman Empire of Europe is striking. But Tibet’s dominance through monasteries lasted down into the present day. In 1927 when I travelled from Ninghsia north through Mongolia, we met no signs of state power for weeks, but only the dominance of lonely monasteries over lonelier herdsmen, until we reached Ulan-Bator and found at its city gate the passport control and customs post, the mark of the modern world. Remnants of monastery rule were seen in the pilgrims from Inner Mongolia who came to the Dalai Lama in Peking in 1954.
It was not merely religion, as the modern world conceives it, that spread from Lhasa to Mongolia. It was a tribute-collecting mechanism. From every monastery the chief, who usually was called a “Living Buddha,” made regular pilgrimage to Lhasa, bringing the taxes from the tribes. If he failed to bring enough, he might not live to return home for he might find it hard to get return transport. If he failed to make the pilgrimage, he might be replaced. But the Chinese emperors were overlords, in forms appropriate to the era. Theirs was not always a tight control: it was control over great distances and under feudal forms. There were centuries when China broke into warring dynasties and other centuries in which power was strongly centralized. These conditions affected also Tibet.
All basic changes in Tibet from the time of Kublai, were made or sanctioned by the Chinese emperors, including the institution of the Dalai Lama itself. This institution was formed not in Kublai’s day but four centuries later, by the first Ching (Manchu) emperor, who again found Tibet in a state of turmoil and appointed the Fifth Dalai Lama to unify it. He was the first Dalai Lama who thus exercised temporal power.
I asked Chao Pu-chu for the precise status of the Dalai Lama and Panchen Erdeni. Could one call them “god-kings”?
“That is a foreign term, distasteful to us,” Chao replied. “The Hans use the term ‘Living Buddha,’ but this also is not quite accurate. The correct term in Tibetan is ‘chu-gu,’ which in Sanskrit is ‘gu-ru.’ It means ‘revered teacher.’ It is applied to incarnated beings who appear in the world of their own will. It is assumed that there are many ‘chu-gu’: how many, nobody knows.”
I supplemented Chao’s theology with the news that when I was in Mongolia in 1927, it was said there were a thousand “living gods” in Mongolia, and that Alan Winnington had reported in 1955 that the same number was estimated in Tibet. All heads of monasteries and even lesser dignitaries appeared to be “Living Buddhas.” Chao nodded and remarked: “They may not really be ‘chu-gu’ even if they take the name,” a comment to which I would agree.
The Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni, Chao continued, are “chu-gu,” similar in essence to all the other “chu-gu” but the chief of all. They are supposed to be incarnations of the two chief disciples of Tson Khapa, the famous monk who in the fourteenth century founded the Yellow Sect, the form now dominant in Tibet. Spiritually the Dalai Lama and Panchen Erdeni are “equal brothers.” Since in mortal incarnations one may be born much older than the other, they are also known as “father-and-son,” a single word implying a unified being. Whichever is older helps direct the search for the other and assists at his installation. The two are supposed to be in “harmony.” In our temporal world this is not always the case.
Not all Tibetans one meets would think of the Dalai Lama in Chao’s abstract theological terms. The Fifth Dalai Lama, the first to make a name in history, “had a revelation” that he was also the incarnation of Chenrezi, an ancient “patron god of Tibet” from long before Buddhism, and that the Panchen had been his teacher. The relations between Dalais and Panchens are too complex to be more than hinted here. The term “god-king” may annoy theologians, but seems not far from the popular Tibetan view.
What mainly distinguishes the Dalai Lama and Panchen Erdeni from other “chu-gu,” according to Chao, is “their possession of temporal power. This was given them by the Chinese emperors.”
The title “Dalai” is a Mongolian word meaning “ocean”: it implies “ocean-like wisdom.” It was first applied by a Mongolian king to the “third incarnation” of the appropriate disciple of Tson Khapa, but without giving temporal rule. As formalized by the first Ching emperor for the Fifth Dalai, who was given rule over Tibet, the full title became: “The Dalai Lama, King of the Law in the Western Land of the Buddha, Spiritual Lord on Earth, all-knowing, Holder of the Thunderbolt by Order of the Emperor.” The powers implied were terrific, but the emperor was their source.
The Panchen Erdeni was elevated by the second Ching emperor who may have wished to “divide and rule.” He also was given temporal power over an area which differed with different emperors, but which in modern days was only twelve counties to the Dalai Lama’s hundred and nine. The Panchen’s title combines three languages, “pan” being Sanskrit for “wise,” “chen” being Tibetan for “great,” while “erdeni” means “jewel” in Manchu. He is thus the “Great Wise Jewel.”
Confusion exists abroad as to whether the Panchen is “under the Dalai” or equal to him. The Panchen himself told me that “the two powers are parallel” and that this was stated “by many Chinese emperors.” I shall go into greater detail on this in the chapter on the Panchen. Even a cursory view into history shows that at some times the Panchen was more prominent, at other times the Dalai. Emperor Chien Lung favored the Panchen, and built him a summer palace as part of his own imperial summer palace at Jehol, in order to have the benefit of his advice. The French priests who visited Tibet in the nineteenth century, found the Dalai Lamas a mere succession of pitiful infant victims, assassinated by their regent, while the Panchen was the strong man who sent a secret letter to the emperor, got an investigator and had the regent exiled. The prevalent belief in the West that the Dalai Lama is ruler over the Panchen, comes from the British penetration of this century, when the Thirteenth Dalai Lama yielded to British plans and was supported by them, while the Ninth Panchen fled into the interior of China for his life. Since most books on Tibet in this century were either written by British or on their information, they take the Dalai Lama as the supreme lord.
When I asked Chao about the murders of the Dalai Lamas, he said there was not much evidence on the subject and he clearly did not wish to discuss it. But barely a century ago a regent confessed to three murders3 and similar events have occurred in later years. The Eleventh Dalai Lama met with sudden unexplained death in Potala Palace at the age of eighteen, the Twelfth died suddenly at the age of twenty. As late as 1947 the father of the present Dalai Lama was poisoned and his first regent strangled in prison in the struggle for power. Much murder has occurred in the high circles around the Dalai Lama as it did in Rome of the Borgia’s day.
A feudal theocracy is not the holy thing the West likes to imagine. The religious and political system of Tibet was based on a dark, barbarous serfdom, in which the biggest serf-owners struggled for power. They did not unconditionally respect the Dalai Lama, even though they set him up as god and king. From babyhood they conditioned him to be worshipped by the people, but to take orders from the nobles through the hierarchy, which imposed its conditions, directed his life and even did him to death when they thought it useful. Of all the fourteen Dalai Lamas down the centuries, only two, the Fifth and the Thirteenth, wielded strong political power.
Government by the kasha, the Dalai Lama’s cabinet of ministers, was complicated. The kasha was originally composed of four kaloons, nobles both lay and clerical, but the number increased in modern days to six. Its decrees had to be sealed by the Dalai’s Secretariat, a clerical body which thus kept veto on everything. Every government post was staffed with two persons, a layman and a clerical; they had to “agree,” but the clerical ranked higher. This government handled the affairs of the upper class. Commoners were directly ruled by their masters. A serf-owner had power to cut off the hand or foot or gouge out the eyes of disobedient or runaway serfs. For a serf even to appeal from his master to any other law was a punishable crime.
Let us hasten down those dark centuries to our present day. I quote from the Venerable Shirob, as he summed up Tibet’s historical relations with China’s emperors for the National People’s Congress, but I sharply condense. “Tibet,” he said, “has been one of China’s administrative districts for seven hundred years.” I here omit interminable feudal shifts of power and note only that “the Fifth Dalai Lama, the first to appear in the political arena, was appointed head of Tibet by the Central Government in the reign of the Emperor Kang Hsi” (1662-1723), that “the kasha as local government of Tibet was authorized in the time of the Seventh Dalai by the Central Government under Emperor Chien Lung (1736-1796),” that “the leading position of the Dalai Lama was thus bestowed by the overall Chinese government then in power and the kasha was an administrative organ of the overall government.” Thus the Venerable Shirob, from thirty years’ study in Lhasa, sums up history.
At the height of Ching power, when Gurkas from Nepal invaded Tibet, both the Dalai Lama and Panchen Erdeni appealed to the emperor for aid. Emperor Chien Lung in 1792 sent an army of 20,000 men who drove back the Gurkas with the aid of the Tibetans, no mean feat at a distance of 1,500 miles without roads. The Tibetans were grateful for this, but other acts of the Chings annoyed them. The early Chings pushed the borders of Chinghai south at the expense of Tibet. The last of the Chings formed Sikang Province, partly from lands that the Dalai Lama claimed.4
As the Chinese empire weakened under pressures of Western imperialists, the British pushed into Tibet at the turn of the century. What they took by force, they sought at once to legalize by treaty with China. Thus the Younghusband Expedition in 1904 dictated a treaty in Potala Palace, but turned to Peking to collect the indemnity of 750,000 pounds imposed on Tibet and made another treaty with China two years later to supplement and modify the first. To the end of the empire, China’s sovereignty over Tibet went unchallenged.
The claims made today by Tibetan rebels in India that Tibet was “practically independent” after the empire fell, are based on the decades of disunion in China, when warlords ruled various provinces, and when Chiang Kai-shek, who rose to power in 1927, only succeeded in unifying part of China, which was almost at once involved in a long war with Japan. Chiang never gained control of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Sinkiang or Tibet. Britain used the slogan of “Tibetan independence” in this period to cover her own growing dominance. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama at first vacillated, and then fell in with Britain’s plans, and, at least on one occasion, declared severance from China. In this he was not supported by all the nobles or monasteries nor by the Panchen, who fled into exile.
Even in those days of China’s weakness and disunity, signs appeared that Tibetans considered themselves part of China. The approval of China’s Central Government was still sought to validate the choice of a Dalai Lama or Panchen Erdeni. “All incarnations have to have the approval of the Central Government,” said Chao Pu-chu flatly. This was sought both by the present Dalai Lama and the present Panchen.
“When the present Dalai Lama was discovered in Chinghai,” continued Chao, “agreement had to be reached with the Kuomintang to install him in Lhasa. When he went to Lhasa, it was with armed escort of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops. His formal installation was done by a minister appointed by Chiang, according to the tradition of centuries.” When the Dalai Lama recently, after reaching India, began to assert independence from China, a certain man named Cheng Chien sputtered in Peking. He was the general who, under Chiang Kai-shek, formally approved the present Dalai Lama and permitted his elevation as a god!
No foreign power in seven hundred years has recognized Tibet as a separate nation or sent an ambassador to Lhasa. Whatever uncertainties from the period of British penetration might have clouded China’s title, were dispelled in 1951 when the Dalai Lama signed the Agreement with Peking, by which Tibet “returned to the motherland” and abjured “foreign imperialists.”5
Let us not mistake the nature of that Agreement nor its importance for both sides. Whatever the Dalai Lama now says about it, he needed that Agreement for his own status and local government, as much as Peking needed it for the unification of China. The new People’s Republic was showing the strength to consolidate the unity that had fallen apart with the empire. And without the recognition of its Central Government, the Dalai Lama faced only exile or endless, fruitless war. Nor can all the wishful thinking of the Voice of America hide the fact that this is still his case.
Before leaving Chao Pu-chu I went with him into the inner shrine of the temple which contains the most sacred relics. In the middle of the room in a huge glass case, stood the elaborate jewelled receptacle that contained the “Buddha’s tooth.” Chao stood before it for a moment in an attitude that seemed close to worship. Then he moved quickly to show me the pictures of the “Thousand Buddha Pagoda” that once stood on the Western Hills as a shrine for this “tooth,” but which the Eight Invading Imperialist armies in 1900 destroyed. Cabinets in the walls were full of ancient Buddhist manuscripts from the Ming Dynasty, using real gold in ornamental design. . . . There were gifts here from Burma, from Cambodia, from Japan and from Nepal.
Two gifts were there in that central shrine from the present Dalai Lama. They were given in 1954 on his visit to Peking. They made an odd contrast. One was a shaft of cloisonné several feet long, which served as a receptacle for what was said to be “a grain of a bone of the Buddha.” The other was a framed poem in the Dalai’s own hand, in praise of Chairman Mao Tse-tung.
The Dalai Lama likened the brilliance and work of Mao to those of Brahma, the creator of the world, and said that “only from an infinite number of good deeds can such a leader be born.” He said:
Your will is like the gathering of clouds, your call like thunder,
From these comes timely rain to nourish selflessly the earth.
Even through a double translation, it seems that the Dalai Lama has the feeling, the metaphor and the extravagance of a poet. He was happier as that poet than he is today.
1. Most estimates say Tibet has 150,000 lamas. See Chao Pu-chu below.
2. Stated by Burmese as occurring in the 11th century. Not noted by available Chinese history.
3. See chapter on Panchen.
4. See Chamdo in preceding chapter.
5. See preceding chapter.