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