curious blond-haired wanderer, asks to see him, and the two become fast friends.
The European constantly feels that he’s entered a magical world of flower-ringed cottages and garden parties and sturdy outdoors people like himself, who treat him as an honored guest; he feels that he’s slipped out of real life and into a golden fairy tale. But very soon, and inevitably, reality appears again, as Chinese troops cross into eastern Tibet in 1949 and the wayfarer is forced to abandon his idyll and return to a broken Europe.
In the years that followed, while Harrer was writing of his sojourn in a never-never land, Amdo, the province in eastern Tibet where the current Dalai Lama was born, was turned into the largest gulag in the world, set up to accommodate as many as ten million prisoners. One in every five Tibetans—more than a million in all—died of starvation or in direct encounters with the Chinese, according to Tibetan estimates. One in ten found himself in jail, while all but thirteen of the more than six thousand monasteries in Tibet were laid waste and centuries-old scriptures were incinerated. Parents were forced to applaud as their children were shot to death.
In recent years, more details of what the International Commission of Jurists described at the time as a “genocide” have come to light, as have the stories of many of those who escaped at last from incarceration. (One monk, questioned by the Dalai Lama when finally he made it to freedom in exile in India, said that he had been truly afraid while in prison—afraid that one day he might lose his sympathy for his Chinese captors.) Yet what we tend to notice, too often, are the larger-than-life contours of the story, and not the brutal realities that we can do something to transform.
In 1932, one year before his death, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama issued what is known as his “Last Testament,” in which he predicted what would come to pass if Tibetans failed to open up to the world, refused to adapt to modern developments, and continued squabbling among themselves. “It will not be long,” he wrote, as one translation has it, “before we face the red onslaught at our own front door. It is only a matter of time…and when it happens, we must be ready to defend ourselves. Otherwise, our spiritual and cultural teachings will be completely eradicated…. Monasteries will be looted and destroyed, and the monks and nuns killed or chased away…. We will become like slaves to our conquerors, and will be made to wander helplessly like beggars. Everyone will be forced to live in misery, and the days and nights will pass slowly and with great suffering and terror.”
The Thirteenth Dalai Lama worked hard to try to defend Tibet against his fears, setting up the first mint and postal system in his country’s history, bringing telephones and passports to Lhasa, even sending four Tibetan boys to be educated at Rugby School in England (one of the boys returned and helped bring electricity to Lhasa). Yet what suits our fairy tales most is the remarkable prescience, as it seems, of his vision—and not, in fact, all that it entailed. Fully eleven centuries before, Padmasambhava, the great Indian reformer of Tibetan Buddhism, whom the Tibetans revere as Guru Rinpoche, had declared, “When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the face of the earth, and the Dharma will fetch a good price in the land of the red man.” And in 1956, when the current Dalai Lama was assessing his options, his state oracle, Nechung, who offers counsel in a trance, had said, “The real light will shine from the West” (he was referring, as it happened, to India, which is west of most of Tibet, and yet it was a radical prophecy given that only one Dalai Lama in all of history had ever been outside Tibet).
These hard-to-explain networks of cause and effect make us marvel at the secret powers of Tibet and overlook the fact
The European constantly feels that he’s entered a magical world of flower-ringed cottages and garden parties and sturdy outdoors people like himself, who treat him as an honored guest; he feels that he’s slipped out of real life and into a golden fairy tale. But very soon, and inevitably, reality appears again, as Chinese troops cross into eastern Tibet in 1949 and the wayfarer is forced to abandon his idyll and return to a broken Europe.
In the years that followed, while Harrer was writing of his sojourn in a never-never land, Amdo, the province in eastern Tibet where the current Dalai Lama was born, was turned into the largest gulag in the world, set up to accommodate as many as ten million prisoners. One in every five Tibetans—more than a million in all—died of starvation or in direct encounters with the Chinese, according to Tibetan estimates. One in ten found himself in jail, while all but thirteen of the more than six thousand monasteries in Tibet were laid waste and centuries-old scriptures were incinerated. Parents were forced to applaud as their children were shot to death.
In recent years, more details of what the International Commission of Jurists described at the time as a “genocide” have come to light, as have the stories of many of those who escaped at last from incarceration. (One monk, questioned by the Dalai Lama when finally he made it to freedom in exile in India, said that he had been truly afraid while in prison—afraid that one day he might lose his sympathy for his Chinese captors.) Yet what we tend to notice, too often, are the larger-than-life contours of the story, and not the brutal realities that we can do something to transform.
In 1932, one year before his death, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama issued what is known as his “Last Testament,” in which he predicted what would come to pass if Tibetans failed to open up to the world, refused to adapt to modern developments, and continued squabbling among themselves. “It will not be long,” he wrote, as one translation has it, “before we face the red onslaught at our own front door. It is only a matter of time…and when it happens, we must be ready to defend ourselves. Otherwise, our spiritual and cultural teachings will be completely eradicated…. Monasteries will be looted and destroyed, and the monks and nuns killed or chased away…. We will become like slaves to our conquerors, and will be made to wander helplessly like beggars. Everyone will be forced to live in misery, and the days and nights will pass slowly and with great suffering and terror.”
The Thirteenth Dalai Lama worked hard to try to defend Tibet against his fears, setting up the first mint and postal system in his country’s history, bringing telephones and passports to Lhasa, even sending four Tibetan boys to be educated at Rugby School in England (one of the boys returned and helped bring electricity to Lhasa). Yet what suits our fairy tales most is the remarkable prescience, as it seems, of his vision—and not, in fact, all that it entailed. Fully eleven centuries before, Padmasambhava, the great Indian reformer of Tibetan Buddhism, whom the Tibetans revere as Guru Rinpoche, had declared, “When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the face of the earth, and the Dharma will fetch a good price in the land of the red man.” And in 1956, when the current Dalai Lama was assessing his options, his state oracle, Nechung, who offers counsel in a trance, had said, “The real light will shine from the West” (he was referring, as it happened, to India, which is west of most of Tibet, and yet it was a radical prophecy given that only one Dalai Lama in all of history had ever been outside Tibet).
These hard-to-explain networks of cause and effect make us marvel at the secret powers of Tibet and overlook the fact
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