Escape from the Land of Snows Read Free

eradicated.… Even the names of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas will be erased.… The monasteries will be looted and destroyed, and the monks and nuns killed or chased away.… We will become like slaves to our conquerors … and the days and nights will pass slowly and with great suffering and terror.…
    Use peaceful means where they are appropriate, but where they are not appropriate do not hesitate to resort to more forceful means.… Think carefully about what I have said, for the future is in your hands.
    It was a remarkable document. Dog-eared copies of it were passed around in Tibetan villages for years, and the young Fourteenth Dalai Lama would study it nightly to learn the intricacies of Tibetan grammar.
    The death of a Dalai Lama has always been a deeply traumatic event for Tibetans. The state is always most vulnerable in the time—traditionally ranging between nine and twenty-four months—that the search for the new incarnation is carried out and a successor named. (The spirit of the former Dalai Lama does not immediately incorporate itself into a new body; indeed, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was not even born when his predecessor passed away.) The nervous anticipation that all Tibetans feel on the death of theirPrecious Protector flows partly from the fatal and scarred history of the Dalai Lamas. The Ninth through the Twelfth (from 1807 to 1875) had all died young, believed poisoned either by their regents, who wished to hold on to power, or by the representatives of the Chinese throne, the
ambans
, who wished to keep a pliable regent in power and prevent the rise of a great lama. Others had died in their prime under suspicious circumstances, among them the rebellious Tsangyang Gyatso, the tragic Sixth. He was a carouser, a poet, a bisexual hedonist who had written some of the most beautiful lyrics in all of Tibetan literature. The loveliest, so often quoted that they now serve as his epitaph, cry out with something the Fourteenth Dalai Lama would come to know intimately—the desire for escape:
    White crane!
    Lend me your wings
,
    I will not go far, only to Lithang
,
    And then I shall return
.
    In the summer of 1935, nearly two years after the death of the Thirteenth, the search for his successor began in earnest. The corpse of the Thirteenth had provided the first clues. Monks had prepared the body to lie in state in a coffin lined with salt, dressed in his finest gold brocade robes, with the head facing southward, the direction of long life. The next morning, they found the head had turned toward the east. They returned it to its original position, but the next day the same thing happened again. It was a sign that the Fourteenth Dalai Lama would be found in the provinces bordering on China.
    Village leaders and authorities all over Tibet looked for telltale signs that the spirit of Chenrizi had been reincarnated, that the new
bodhisattva
—a being who has attained complete enlightenmentbut postpones Nirvana to help others obtain liberation—was among them. Finally, Reting Rimpoche, the regent who was the political head of Tibet until the next Dalai Lama could be found, traveled ninety miles southeast of Lhasa to the mystical lake known as Lhamo Latso. Along with a search party, he climbed to the top of a nearby mountain, set up camp, completed his prayers as ritual music played, then gazed down on the clear alpine waters below. Some of Reting Rimpoche’s fellow searchers saw nothing but the turquoise surface of the lake rippling in the breeze. But the regent witnessed a succession of images rising from and then disappearing in the deep waters: the Tibetan letters
Ah, Ka
, and
Ma
, a three-storied monastery with a gold and green jade roof, a white road leading to the east, a small country house with unusual blue-green eaves, and, finally, a white-and-brown dog standing in a yard. When the regent reported the vision to the National Assembly the following year, the members consulted the Nechung Oracle, the