Jeny Charles Tsampa

10/11/2002

G'day Jeny, here is something I wrote today about my Tibetan experiences. I hope you do not think that I am being overly critical of China: I am just trying to understand what is happening and reporting what I see and sense.

Tsampa - Tsampa is made in a cup of butter tea, itself churned barley flour with some yak butter. Into the tea is plonked a large blob of yak butter. Then some barley flour is added and mixed together with your fingers until dry, brown pellets are formed. Tsampa is the Tibetan stable. Little wonder in this bleak, arid environment.

I was shown the finer art of making tsampa by a Tibetan family I met in a mudbrick teahouse on the road between Yungdrungling and Lhasa. Fifteen Tibetans and six chinese looked on as I spilled the mixture all over myself while the Tibetans dexterously kept their mixture in their large tea cups. Everyone was laughing as I tentatively ate my nutty brown pellets. I offered a pellet to one of the pretty young chinese women watching. Her well made-up face contorted in disgust. She then smiled and asked me where I was from. Everybody then started to repeat over and over: "ausitaliya hen hua" and my place in the group was established.

The group were fellow hitchhikers. We were all passengers under a tarpaulin over the back of dengfong truck that had stopped so the drivers could have their evening meal. I was surprised that the dengfong stopped for me.

I was walking on the road to Lhasa having just visited Yungdrungling monastery. A light snow was falling and I was in an exhilarated mood: happy to be alone with my thoughts in such a harsh but beautiful environment. The seasons had changed within the last week and this reflected my thinking as I contemplated that I was near the end of my long trip that had started on the searing hot plains of north India. The golden brown leaves of the poplars and the snow confirmed the death of another year. The cycle of life was about to die for its renewal: next spring. " Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom- friend of the maturing sun....Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, While barr¡§¡§ d clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn, Among the river-sallows, borne aloft, Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies," I tried to remember the Keat's lines that I had so determinedly learnt as a schoolchild. And I tried to remember the vedic poem with the same theme: without death there will be no birth. Without autumn there will be no spring. Without Shiva there can be no Brahma. This is the very basis of hindu-cum-buddhist thought.

And, I knew that by hitchhiking I was breaking chinese law and that if caught I faced a fine and possible deportation. But somehow the knowledge of such a punishment gave me that much more sense of freedom. Besides, I had already learnt that Tibetans love to help foreigners who thumb their nose at Chinese power. As long as I was careful not to compromise these people, I was happy to run the risk of meeting Chinese police. Two police cars actually passed me as I walked. The officers gave me a cursory look and sped along their way. Then the dengfong stopped and I climbed into the back to see the Tibetan passengers huddled together along one side of the truck's tray and the five young chinese women, and single older male, huddled along the other side. I joined the Tibetans.

The tsampa stop made the chinese girls loquacious and as we climbed back into the truck they insisted on testing my limited ability to speak Chinese. I learnt that the five girls were hairdressers who had been working in Shigatse but were now on their way to Lhasa beauty parlours. My new found friend was from a town near Chengdu, along with her friend. The other three girls were from Henan and had only been in Tibet for three months. All planned to earn enough money in three years in Tibet and return to their home counties to start businesses. I could not get them to understand my question about how much they earned, or perhaps they did not want to tell me. For I knew exactly what the word hairdresser is a euphemism for throughout Tibet, indeed throughout China. Every Tibetan town seems to have scores of beauty parlours in which Chinese girls entice passing men to relieve their stress. A Tibetan government minister in exile, in Dharmasala, had told me that the Chinese government was encouraging prostitution in Tibet as a means, along with favourable business loans and tax breaks, of attracting young Chinese men, without family ties, to settle. I had not been convinced by the minister's arguement but now found it difficult to refute.

A French doctor who has worked in Shigatse for years confirmed the minister's story to me and told me of the alarming incidence of aids in Tibet. There is the beginning of a government campaign in China to stop the spread of aids, but here in Tibet there is no effort made, he said. "China faces the world's worst aids pandemic because of the sheer size of the population and the apparent free hand given to prostitution," he said. I could not help contemplate the French doctor's words as I struggled to communicate, in the back of the bumpy dengfong, with the five pretty young chinese girls.

Despite these sobering thoughts I was still in an embullient mood for the remainder of the trip back to Lhasa. I had just spent a week following a Tibetan holy path, visiting the four major monastery towns to the south and west of Lhasa. The excursion had begun with a bus ride to Tsetang and a ferry to Samye, across the Yarlung Tsampo. The small, open ferry ride is a highlight of any trip to Tibet. Just being on a waterway at this altitude is intoxicating enough but especially so with the barren mountains with their dustings of snow as a backdrop and the clear, almost cobalt blue, water of the river running between grey/black sandbanks.

There is much to say about Samye monastery, Tibet's first buddhist community. The site of the monastery was chosen by my old friend, Padmasambhava (Guru Rimpoche) and designed by Santarakshita, the other famous proselytizing Indian monk invited by Trisong Detsen in the 700's to challenge Bon with buddhist ideas. Santarakshita's design closely follows precepts from his native Bihar, with its huge circular compound enclosing the Utse, the fabulous central building with a ground floor of Tibetan design, a first floor of Chinese design and a second floor of Indian design. The entire Samye complex is a three dimensional mandala, mapping the buddhist universe. Nowhere, on my buddhist trail from India, have I seen such a complete representation of buddhist cosmology and ideas. The murals in the Utse, telling the story of Padmasambhava's life and the history of buddhism in Tibet, serve as an encyclopedia of Tibetan culture and religion. Furthermore, these murals put into perspective the contrary influences of Indian and Chinese interpretations of buddhism. Again I was reminded of the millennial struggle between the two great traditions of Asian civilisation. China seems to be winning these days, with its efforts to stamp out the Indian-inspired Tibetan language and culture. But I wonder whether we are now witnessing a battle, or the end of the war for Tibet.

Of course, the red guards did their bit to destroy Samye's cultural treasure trove. But what remains is still a wonder and my two nights in the Samye monastery guesthouse are a highlight of my travels, despite the sodden thugpa as my only nourishment. Samye is also the endpoint of my buddhist travels. It is where the fourth great school of buddhism was truely developed and having visited there I have completed my holy walk, my kora: begun at the point of Siddharta Gautama's enlightenment, in Bod Gaya; continued through to where he gave his first lesson as a buddha, in the deer park outside Varanassi; through to where Ashoka created a personality cult out of buddha's teachings and created Mahayana buddhism, in Taxila; and where this philosophy was converted into a Chinese religion, in Duahuang; and re-intrepretated as a state creed in Louyang and Xian; before giving birth to the third buddhist school of Chan (Zen) in Shaolin. The beauty of Samye's environment and the wonder of its architecture is a fitting tribute to the evolution of buddha's teachings.

While in Samye I had my first experience in Tibet of not wanting to leave a place. But I caught a minibus to Gyantse and found a delightful Tibetan town. And again, a town rich in significance with the power struggles of history. For Gyantse is the major Tibetan town on the ancient route between India and China. Along with Dali, in Yunnan, and the high passes over the Karakarom, Gyantse is the bottleneck where trade and ideas passed. And this is why the British seized Gyantse in 1904 in order to force the Tibetans to trade. After a four minute battle, in which four British soldiers and 700 Tibetan soldiers were killed - armed with matchlock rifles and charms from the Dalai Lama - the British shocked the Tibetans by administering medical aid to the Tibetan wounded. I have read the British commander, Younghusband's, account of the lopesided battle and through his words you can sense his feeling of attonement for the crazy slaughter. But that did not stop him from blowing up the Dzong, the wonderfully evocative medieval fort that sits on a hill right in the middle of the Nyung cha plain.

The British were unable to find a Tibetan government representative with whom to sign a trade treaty - because the Dalai Lama had fled to Mongolia - until 1906 when a junior Ganden monastery Lama, acting under the Dalai Lama's authority, reluctantly signed a document allowing a British trade mission to be set up in Tibet. But then, largely because of bickering within Britain's foreign office over inter-departmental territory disputes, the Brits countersigned this treaty with the decaying Manchu court in Beijing. Britain, as the major superpower of the day, therefore recognised Tibet as a part of China. Sun Yatsen, after he declared a Chinese Republic in 1911, recognised Tibet as a sovereign country and voided all Manchu treaties with foreign powers. Despite this, all of China's current legal arguments, not to mention their multitude of specious historical arguments, for ownership of Tibet are based on that 1906 treaty with Britain. I could not help but compare these early 20th century intrigues of the superpower over a small state with current day superpower intrigues over small states. The presentday pre-occupation with oil and its importance to global, re US, economical interests seems to be a direct parallel with those British concerns for free trade. Bugger the consequences for those caught in between Great interests.

The monks in Gyantse's Pelkor Chode monastery seemed blissfully unaware of the historical relevance of their town as they boiled me a lunch of potatoes, flat bread and butter tea. Unlike the depressing monasteries I had visited in and around Lhasa, Gyantse was not over-run with noisy Chinese and foreign tour groups (at least, not when I was there). While studying the chapels in the monastery's Kunbum (stupa-like structure) I had met a monk who spoke hindi. He had fled to India as an eight year told but returned to Tibet five years later to be near his family. He regretted his return, moreso I gathered, because during his five years in India he had learnt just how much his Tibetan world had been devastated by the Chinese army. We chatted about buddhist history and he (there is no way I can write anything else to identify him in an email from Lhasa) proudly showed me the four chapels, each at a compass point, for the four main representations of buddha: Dipunkar in the north, the immediately previous incarnation of Gautama and coloured blue; Sakyamuni, the common name for Gautama, in the south and coloured gold; Sukhavati, the pure land of the west and home of Amitabha, coloured red (the Panchen Lama is considered a reincarnation of this early buddha) ; and Thusita, the pure land of the east, and home of Jampa (commonly called Maitreya) the buddha who is yet to come and whose arrival will signal that all beings have reached enlightenment.

My monk friend invited me to lunch and afterwards I sat quietly in the monastery's assembly hall and watched the sangham, the community of 40 monks nowadays allowed by the Chinese government to reside in Gyantse's monastery, recite their prayers. I was lulled into a delicious state of sensory delight with the low, rhythmical chants in the semi dark room, rich with the smell of yak butter lamps and incense. Like all the assembly halls I have seen in Tibetan monasteries, the Pelkor Chode's assembly hall is not an open space, despite being in a large room: approximately 50mx50m. The space is broken by wooden pillars every two or three metres. Lines of raised cushions, for the monks, run parallel from the door of the hall to the main chapel in the hall's rear. This area is alight with yak butter lamps, which give the whole space a diffuse, orange tinge. This orange light is dramatically sliced through by shafts of bright, clear sunlight from windows in a small, floorless room immediately above the ceilingless assembly hall. My monk friend was sitting in one of these shafts of sunlight and he occasionally turned around to where I sat in the shadows and winked at me. Quite unexpectedly, the chants stopped and all the monks reached down and put on the classic yellow Tibetan lama hats. They all shouted something and got up and dispersed. Abit of an anticlimax, really.

But beautifully timed, because just at that moment a tour group entered the assembly hall. I took that as a signal for me to leave and as flashes brought a new, less welcome, harsh light into the surreal setting, I bid my monk friend farewell. Outside I counted seven jeeps unloading camera-welding foreigners who are on the now established tourist route from Lhasa to Katmandu, visiting the Disney world of once great Tibetan monasteries. And I went looking for a lift to Shigatse, Tibet's second largest, and only other, city.

Shigatse is another Chinese imperial town: with broad streets in a grid of white-tiled buildings. My first impression, arriving in twilight with a dust storm brewing, was not positive. My sense of gloom was heightened when I found that the only hotel recommended to me, the Tenzin, was a mess of renovations, with exposed power lines everywhere and that familar concotion of smells - to any home renovator - of plaster, wet cement, freshly sawn timber, turps and paint. The chaos did not stop the owner from trying to make me rent a dusty room without light or furniture. When I asked her if she could recommend another hotel her pride was pricked and I was shown the family shrine room on the roof. For the next two nights I tried to sleep in the small room on a carpeted platform. Two of the walls were taken up with shrines to the various incarnations of buddha and the dalai lama. Every inch of the two remaining walls was covered with thungkas on the same themes. The place reeked on yak butter and as soon as the light was out a rat decided to make his own pilgrimage with repeated circumambulations of the room.

But I wanted to learn about Shigatse. My morning excursion was to Tashilhunpo monastery, reputedly Tibet's best preserved and most active buddhist community. Tashilhunpo holds this reputation because it is where the Panchen Lama should live, and as such, it is integral in the Chinese machinations to gain some philosophical authority for their occupation of Tibet. When the PLA army crushed the Kham-CIA led revolt in 1959, and set about their destruction of Tibet's traditional seats of power, they spared Tashilhunpo because the 10th Panchen Lama, in an apparent power struggle with the 14th Dalai Lama, agreed that China should liberate Tibet. Most Tibetans hated the Panchen Lama for his supposed treachery. The story is far more complex. One aspect is the Panchen Lama's role as a rival with the Dalai Lama as the spiritual head of the gelugpa sect. Another aspect is probably the 10th Panchen Lama's shrewd recognition that resisting Chinese rule was futile. To give the Dalai Lama credit, he also opposed the 1959 actions by the CIA- sponsored Kham fighters. Be that all as it may, the Chinese tried to use the Panchen Lama as their pawn and to divide the allegiance of the Tibetan community. This came undone in spectacular fashion in 1961 when the Panchen Lama presented Mao with a plea to free his countrymen. He spent the next 20 years in prison and when he died the Chinese and the Tibetans each wrote out a list of candidates for the incarnation of the 11th Panchen Lama. The only candidate that appeared on both lists was promptly arrested by Chinese officials and he, along with his entire family, remain as the world's most celebrated political prisoners. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

I needed have bothered. Tashilhunpo is in much better condition than other monasteries I have visited - and the Chinese government has clearly raised their cap on the number of monks allowed to live there - but there is a very un-spiritual air about the place. The usual jeeploads of travellers to the Nepal border were joined by several busloads of Chinese tourists in the monastery carpark. We all trooped up the hillside on which the monastery is built to the chapel of Jampa, the world's largest guilded statute. I followed a couple of PLA officers, with their families, who busied themselves by striking poses and taking copious number of photographs in front of every statute and mural. As I walked out of one chapel I foolishly thought that a photo of a PLA officer taking a photo in front of a no-photograph sign would be appreciated by my friends back home. As soon as I raised my camera a monk ran out to me and pulled my camera away, searching for the trigger to open the back of my camera. While I struggled to tell him that I had not even taken a photo the PLA officer and his family happily clicked away. Eventually, I communicated my regret to the monk with a Y50 note and he stopped trying to expose my film.

Back in my shrineroom, listening to my rat make his rodent form of offerings to whatever gods, I decided I needed a good meal: I headed off to the Shigatse Kitchen for a Nepali curry. There I met a couple of aid workers, sponsored by the European Union. I spent the next two days in the company of these two chaps and learnt an immense amount about the plight of contemporary Tibetans.

It is a sign of the degree of paranoia generated by the present Chinese regime in Tibet that even these two chaps, both senior academics and backed by the EU, would rather not have their names or organisations revealed by a lone traveller, such as myself, in a travel diary. Both chaps are worried that anything attributed to them could be used as a pretext to censor, even arrest, one of their Tibetan workers. This is an occupied land and fear is the government. Be that as it may, we did talk about the current dialogue between the Tibetan government in exile, in Dharmasala, and Beijing. The aid workers think that there are three factors in the Dharmasala initiative: the World Trade Organistion (WTO), the Lhasa railway and 11 September. Of these, China's entry into the WTO is the most significant because Tibet's rural economy is on the cusp of total devastation.

To illustrate the point, I was given an example from Tibet's dairy industry. Currently a litre of milk sells in Tibet for Y4. The average yield of theTibetan dairy herd is between 200-300 litres/cow a year. Compare that to the 5000-6000 litre/cow average of the European diary herd.Even in Sichuan, only 400 km from Lhasa, a litre of milk sells for Y1. Obviously, this means that the Tibetan dairy industry, which is the main livelihood of the majority of Tibetans, is extremely inefficient. A large factor is the harsh environment, the limited season for fattening cattle and the poor quality of available feed. But these factors will not be taken into consideration when a rail line opens to Lhasa and that Sichuan milk, at Y1/L is for sale against Y4/L local milk. Under China's agreement to join the WTO, the central government, even it wanted to, will be forbidden from protecting Tibetan farmers from the harshness of this commerical reality. Rural Tibetan economies will collapse overnight and rural Tibetans will be forced to migrate into the Chinese-dominated cities. This is a huge social control issue that threatens the stability of the entire Chinese state. There are some 900M rural workers in China, against the 400M relatively affluent urbanites.

But the problem is even more acute in Tibet because of the nature of the administration here. There is a five year lead in to when WTO accords come about. Elsewhere in China, the central government is implementing a series of programs to lessen the impact of the removal of subsidies. However, seemingly through neglect, these programs are not being introduced into Tibet. Dharmasala is now tuned into the immient diaster in Tibetan rural society. In Dharmasala, I was told by the Dalai Lama's personal secretary that the Tibetan government in exile's major concern was the migration of ethnic chinese into Tibetan towns. "We remain optimistic for the core of Tibetan society as long as Chinese migration is quaranteened to the cities, " the PR said, as recently as July. It would seem that this optimism evaporated when the Dalai Lama realised that traditional Tibetan rural society is about to collapse.

A third factor for the Dalai Lama's emissionary to Beijing appears to be the after effect of 11 September. Both here in Tibet, and a couple of months ago in Xijiang, I had several conversations with people who believe that there are huge ramification of the US government listing the Uyghar liberation front as an outlawed terrorist organisation. The prevailing attitude in the US means that self-determination movements have been given a new hurdle. And that despite the Dalai Lama's remarkable marketing skills, whatever voice he had in Washington has now been lessened, if not removed altogether. The Chinese government, meanwhile, must be chortling with joy over the turn of events and possibly willing to make a concession to its poor public image in the west.

But after two days of this politics talk I was ready to renew my exploration of Tibetan spirituality. If anything of Tibet survives the onslaught of modern global politics and economies, it will be the unique spiritual relationship fostered between humans and this remarkable environment. So I headed off down to Sakya, where emissionaries from the court of Kublai Khan were seduced by the Tibetan interpretations of the cosmos. A significant moment in Chinese history.

But i am tired now and can write no more. I leave Lhasa at 16:00 on Monday 14 October for Chengdu on SZ4111. Please do not collect me, unless it is convienent for you. I have not booked a hotel room yet but I am sure there are plenty of backpacker types in Chengdu. Can you recommend one?

see you soon,

Charles _ _ ______________________________________________________ _ _

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