Riding the Iron Rooster

  I had never felt happier, rolling into a town. I decided to pay off Mr. Fu. I gave him my thermos bottle and the remainder of my provisions. He seemed embarrassed. He lingered a little. Then he reached out and put his fingers on my cheek, where there was the wound from the crash. It was scabby, the blood had dried, it looked awful; but it didn't hurt.

  "I am sorry," Mr. Fu said. He laughed. It was an abject apology. His laughter said, Forgive me!

  ***

  It is immediately obvious that Lhasa is not a city. It is a small, friendly-looking town on a high plain surrounded by even higher mountains. There is very little traffic. There are no sidewalks. Everyone walks in the street. No one runs. These streets are at 12,000 feet. You can hear children yelling and dogs barking and bells being rung, and so it seems a quiet place. It is rather dirty and very sunny. Just a few years ago the Chinese bulldozed the Chorten, a stupa which formed the entrance to the city. It was their way of violating Lhasa, which had always been forbidden to foreigners. Even so, the city is not crowded. The Chinese badly damaged Lhasa and hoped to yank the whole thing down and build a city of fine ugly factories. But they did not succeed in destroying it. Much of it, and some of its finest shrines, were made out of mud bricks—easily broken but cheap to replace, like the Buddhist statues that were made anew every few years, or the yak-butter sculptures that were expected to go rancid or melt in order for new ones to be fashioned. The whole of Buddhism prepared the Tibetans for cycles of destruction and rebirth: it is a religion that brilliantly teaches continuity. You can easily see the violence of the Chinese intention in Lhasa; but it was a failure because the Tibetans are indestructible.

  Lhasa is a holy place, so it is populated by pilgrims. They give it color, and because they are strangers themselves to Lhasa, they don't object to foreign travelers—in fact, they welcome them and try to sell them beads and trinkets. Chinese cities are notorious for their noise and crowds. Lhasa has a small population, and because it is flat it is full of cyclists. To me that was a complete surprise. I had expected a dark, craggy city of steepnesses and fortifications, overrun by Chinese and hung with slogans. I found a bright little war-torn town full of jolly monks and friendly pilgrims and dominated by the Potala, which is an ingenious and distracting shape.

  Half the population of Lhasa is Chinese, but those who are not soldiers tend to stay indoors, and even the soldiers of the People's Liberation Army keep a low profile. They know that Tibet is essentially a gigantic army camp—the roads, the airports and all the communications were a military effort—and they know that the Tibetans resent it. The Chinese feel insecure in Tibet, and so they retreat into a sort of officiousness; they look like commissars and imperialists but their swagger is mostly bravado. They know they are in a foreign country. They don't speak the language and they have not managed to teach Chinese to the Tibetans. For over thirty years they maintained the fiction that the official language of Tibet was Chinese, but then in 1987 they caved in and changed it to Tibetan.

  The Chinese imply that they have a moral right to run the Tibetans' lives, but since the late seventies, when they began to despair of political solutions to Chinese problems, they have felt more uneasy about being in Tibet. They have no right to be there at all. The Tibetans themselves would probably have found a way to tax the rich families, get rid of exploiters and raise up the Ragyaba—the scavenging class and corpse handlers—and free the slaves (slavery persisted into the 1950s). But the bossy ideology of the Chinese compelled them to invade and so thoroughly meddle with the country that they alienated the majority of the population. They did not stop there. They annexed Tibet and made it part of China, and however much the Chinese talk about liberalizing their policies it is clear that they have no intention of ever allowing Tibet to become a sovereign state again.

  "It feels like a foreign country," Chinese friends of mine confided to me. They were bewildered by the old-fashioned habits and clothes, and by the incomprehensible rituals of Tibetan Buddhism, celebrating the sexual mysticism of the tantric rites, and the hugging and fornicating statues illustrating the mother-father principle oiyabyum, and the big, toothy, goggling demons that Tibetans see as protectors. Even with the Chinese watching closely and issuing decrees and building schools and initiating public works, Lhasa is a medieval-seeming place, just like Europe in the Middle Ages, complete with grinning monks and grubby peasants and open-air festivals and jugglers and tumblers. Lhasa is holy, but it is also a market town, with pushcarts and stacked-up vegetables and dirty, air-dried cuts of yak which will keep for a year (grain keeps for fifty years in the dry Tibetan climate). The most medieval touch of all is that Tibet has almost no plumbing.

  The pilgrims hunker and prostrate themselves all over Lhasa, and they shuffle clockwise around every shrine. They flatten themselves on stair landings, outside the Jokhang and all around the Potala. They do it on the road, the riverbank, the hillsides. Being Tibetan Buddhists they are good-humored, and because they are from all over Tibet, Lhasa is their meeting place—they enrich the life of the town and fill its markets. They come out of a devotion to the Dalai Lama, the incarnation of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. They pray, they throw themselves to the ground and they strew tiny one miao notes and barley grains at the shrines, and dump blobs of yak butter into the lamps. The very pious ones blow horns made from human thigh bones—a femur like an oboe—or carry water in bowls made from the lopped-off top of a human skull. They venerate the various thrones and couches of the Dalai Lama in the Potala, and even his narrow art-deco bed, his bathtub and toilet, his tape recorder (a gift from Nehru) and his radio. The Dalai Lama is worshipped as the Living God, but the pilgrims also pay homage to the images of Zong Kapa—founder of the Yellow Sect—and of the Lord Buddha, and of other Dalai Lamas, notably the 5th, whose great buildings dignify Lhasa. Pilgrims have made Lhasa a town of visitors who are not exactly strangers, and so even a real foreigner feels a sense of belonging there. Its chaos and dirt and its jangling bells make it seem hospitable.

  Lhasa was the one place in China I eagerly entered, and enjoyed being in, and was reluctant to leave. I liked its smallness, its friendliness, the absence of traffic, the flat streets—and every street had a vista of tremendous Tibetan mountains. I liked the clear air and sunshine, the markets, the brisk trade in scarce antiques. It fascinated me to see a place for which the Chinese had no solution. They admitted that they had made grave mistakes in Tibet; but they also admitted that they did not know what to do next. They had not counted on the tenacious faith of the Tibetans, and perhaps they found it hard to believe that such dark, grinning people, who never washed, could be so passionate. Tibet has made no economic gains at all. It is entirely dependent on Chinese financial aid. The visiting Party officials stroll around looking smug and hard-to-please. They are mostly on junkets. Tibet is a junketer's paradise: a subject people, two fairly good hotels, plenty of ceremonial functions, and so far from Peking that anything goes. The Chinese reward each other with junkets and official trips—they often take the place of bonuses—and Tibet is the ultimate junket. But it is really for sight-seeing, not business. These Chinese officials nearly always look physically uncomfortable in Lhasa—it is the altitude, the strange food, and the climate, but it is also the boisterous Tibetans, who seem to the Chinese a bit savage and unpredictable—superstitious primitives if not outright subhuman.

  The other aspect of Lhasa—and Tibet, too—is that like Yunnan it has become the refuge of hippies. They are not the dropouts I met years ago in Afghanistan and India, but mostly middle-class, well-heeled hippies whose parents gave them the airfaire to China. Some of them come by bus from Nepal. They seemed harmless to me and they were a great deal more desirable than the rich tourists for whom Lhasa was building expensive hotels and importing ridiculous delicacies—and providing brand-new Japanese buses so that groups of tourists could set out at dawn and photograph such rituals as The Sky Burial (Tibetans deal with their dead by placing them outside for vultures to eat). A
s Lynn Pan remarks in her analysis of recent Chinese history, The New Chinese Revolution, "it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tibetan culture, which has survived the worst that Maoism and force could do to stamp it out, has been left to be killed by tourism." But I had my doubts. Tibet seemed too vast and inaccessible and strange for anyone to possess it. It looked wonderful to me, like the last place on earth; like a polar ice cap, but emptier.

  It took me a while to recover from the drive. My head still hurt from the crash. My neck had been wrenched. I still had an interesting wound under my left eye. The altitude gave me insomnia. I lay in bed in the cold hotel room, with my heart pounding, my pulse racing. Outside, I would sometimes forget where I was and begin running and have to gasp for breath.

  I found a young Tibetan fellow who had an encyclopedic knowledge of the monasteries. He did not speak Chinese at all. He had left Tibet as a child with his parents—when the Dalai Lama escaped in the exodus of 1959, with his 70,000 followers. After his education in Kashmir, in Ladakh, and in various Tibetan refugee schools in Simla (he had been in India for twenty-five years), he returned home. I asked him what it was like being back in Chinese Tibet.

  "It is all right. But my heart is not here. My heart is in Dharmsala—you know what I mean?"

  "The Dalai Lama is in Dharmsala."

  "That is correct. He is not here."

  His name was Ralpa. It was very funny to see him addressed in Chinese. He smiled at the Chinese speaker and said, "No, no, no, no." He could not even utter that useful Chinese sentence that means, "I hear you but I don't understand you." Since the Chinese did not speak Tibetan, and rarely spoke English, Ralpa in a year of being back in Tibet had never had a conversation with a Chinese. I asked him whether it bothered him. He said no. He said, "This isn't China."

  We went to the Drepung Monastery. Before Mao's Religious Re-form of 1955, Drepung had 12,000 monks. It was said to be the largest monastery in the world. It was a sprawling place of whitewashed buildings piled up high in a ravine on a hillside just outside Lhasa. It's nickname was "The Rice Mound." Its population was much reduced. It now had 500 monks, but they had returned to monastic life only recently. One I spoke to had spent the twenty years between 1959 and 1979 on a farm in eastern Tibet, digging vegetables. He was wearing thick brown robes.

  "Did you wear these robes on the farm?"

  "No. I had farm clothes. A blue suit. I hated it."

  "Did you do any praying?"

  "No. It was forbidden."

  "How did you get back here to Drepung?"

  "I heard that things were improving politically, so I made a request. I asked whether I could return to my monastery, and they said yes."

  Another monk at Drepung was a muscular, broad-shouldered man with a deep laugh.

  "I was in prison for twenty-one years," he said.

  "What was your crime?"

  "No crime!" His laugh attracted attention, and pilgrims stared at him, but he didn't lower his voice. "I protected the Dalai Lama at the Norbulingka when he escaped. I was fighting, you see, so that he could get away." He looked very pleased as he said this. "The Chinese caught me and put me in prison."

  "Where was the prison?"

  "Not one, but many prisons. They kept moving me from place to place."

  "What do you think of the Chinese?"

  "I don't hate them. I just want them to leave," he said. "But most of all I want the Dalai Lama to come back. Then I can die happy. I will be very unhappy until then, and I don't want to die until the Dalai Lama returns."

  "Do you think he will?"

  He said nothing, but his gesture was eloquent. He pressed his big hands together and shut his eyes and made a prayerful sign.

  I gave him and other monks pictures of the Dalai Lama. Some monks approached me and asked in halting English, "Dalai Lama picture?" I was not the first traveler to pass through handing out portraits.

  Ralpa pointed to a cluster of white buildings on the hillside.

  "That is the Nechung Monastery, where the Oracle lives. But he is with the Dalai Lama now, in India."

  "What does the Oracle do?"

  "He meditates near the Oracle statue in the chapel, and he speaks for it."

  He showed me the Oracle statue. It was a small doll on a shelf, robed, with staring eyes, outstretched arms and its mouth open as if in a shriek. It gave me the creeps. I wondered whether I was alone in finding most dolls of this kind rather distressing things.

  The pilgrims at Drepung had come hundreds of miles—and in some cases more than a thousand miles—three or four days, jouncing in the back of a beat-up truck. They brought what little money they had, they brought all their children, and quilts and food; they brought meat and vegetables to sell at the market in Lhasa. I was impressed by the way these extremely poor people shared their food, and gave money at the shrines, and money to beggars. They even fed the dogs that hung around the monasteries in yelping, mangy packs.

  We walked around, Ralpa identifying the various pilgrims from their headgear or their robes or their earrings, or the way they braided their hair.

  At one chapel he said, "Do you see that Tara figure on the wall? It appeared all by itself. It was not carved by a human hand. One morning the monks looked at the stone wall and it was there."

  I peered at it.

  "You don't believe it," Ralpa said.

  "I don't know," I said. It didn't seem any more absurd than the Mormon belief in the golden tablets and the Angel Moroni, and it was a good deal more tangible than the apparition of Our Lady of Fatima or the stigmata of those Italian priests who began bleeding every Good Friday.

  There were more miraculous murals—and some spontaneous statues—at the Jokhang, Tibet's holiest place: Manjushri's head popped out of one wall, a Tara had sketched itself on a shelf, and a small stone buffalo had materialized in a corner of a chapel.

  I had arrived near the end of the Tibetan New Year, which is a fifteen-day festival known both for its piety and its rambunctiousness. That was why there were so many pilgrims in Lhasa. The monks—about a thousand or more—had gathered at the Jokhang to chant mantras. They were led by an elderly bald figure called the Ganden Tipa, the holiest monk in Tibet and the spiritual leader of all these monasteries. He sat cross-legged and robed in gold, facing away from the monks. The monks fidgeted and laughed. Some chanted, others fooled and giggled. They were all ages—some were no more than teenagers, and some were women; but they had shaven heads and were robed like the men, and so they were almost indistinguishable. I watched it all from an upper balcony, where Tibetans tossed scraps of paper with mantras written on them to the monks below, who made piles of them.

  Through Ralpa I asked a monk whether it was true that the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism was characterized by debating subtle points of theology.

  The monk nodded vigorously and said, "Yes, yes!"

  "Could you give me an example?"

  "Yes. The abbot asks, 'Does a rabbit have a horn?' And a monk may stand up and say, 'No. A rabbit does not have a horn.' Then the abbot hits the monk with a stick and the other monks laugh. Another monk may say, 'Yes. A rabbit does have a horn. He digs a hole in the ground, and what does he use? Not his paw, but the nail on his paw. That is his horn.'"

  "Does that settle the matter?"

  "Maybe they argue a bit more, about whether it is a horn or not."

  All this time, everywhere in Lhasa, the prayer wheels were spinning. Most pilgrims had the hand-held variety, a sort of upright pencil sharpener. The pilgrims plodded clockwise and spun the wheel—often very quickly, because the prayers uttered by the wheel (there is a scribbled mantra inside) are weaker than spoken prayers. These prayer wheels were usually copper or brass, but occasionally they were embossed with silver or else gilded. Prayer wheels were fastened in the temple enclosures—some were the size of oil drums and very hard to turn, others were no larger than nail kegs, and you could hear the flutter of the mantras in their innards as they spun. They had handles
, they were greased with yak butter, and they were all inscribed in Tibetan and Sanskrit with the efficacious mantra om mani padme hum—the om is the most powerful and mystical element in the mantra, a combination of three Sanskrit sounds that sum up the three-in-one nature of the universe. These prayers are so sacred that just writing them or carving them in stone (the sacred om is frequently seen hacked into cliff faces) is regarded as much more pious than putting up statues.

  Tibetan pilgrims thronged the Jokhang Temple, muttering prayers, prostrating themselves and gawking at the monks. They were from distant places, and they were dazzled by this Vatican of Tibetan Buddhism to such an extent that their pilgrims' piety seemed to vanish among the gold statues and lurid murals (of hell and heaven) and incense (sandalwood, cypress leaves) and dull, clopping drums. The pilgrims' eyes glittered in the half-dark of the cloisters, and these people took on the odd curiosity of tourists with their squints and stares, as if, so startled were they by the droning monks and the aromas and the drooping tankas, they had fogotten to pray.

  Here, very recently, in the inner sanctum of the Jokhang, under the serene gaze of the holiest figure, Jowo Shakyamuni, the Precious Lord, the Chinese army had kept pigs, and the rest of the Jokhang had been commandeered as a barracks. They had been following the Mao dictum set out in the well-known essay "On Going Too Far": "To right a wrong it is necessary to exceed proper limits, and the wrong cannot be righted without the proper limits being exceeded." That was the Chinese epitaph for Tibet. You didn't close the temples—you kept pigs in them. You did not simply shut the monasteries—you defrocked the monks, put them into factories and forbade them to pray; and you used the monastery timbers for chicken-coops. The Mao policy of systematic humiliation of traditional belief reached its apotheosis in Tibet. Now the Chinese admit to "mistakes ... excessiveness and errors during the ten chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution," as the Chinese diplomat Zheng Wanzhen put it in his defense of Chinese policies in Tibet which he wrote for The Washington Post in 1987. The Chinese reiterate the sums spent on restoration work, but it goes without saying that the Tibetans will never forgive the desecration of their holy places and the impertinence of the Chinese occupation. Buddhism teaches restraint and moderation and propriety. The worst, most anti-Buddhist aspect of Chinese policy was that it stipulated that liberators and revolutionaries must go too far.