Nine Lives (28 page)

‘I knew that if I stayed in a monastery under the Chinese there was no point in being a monk,’ continued Passang. ‘They wouldn’t let me practise my religion. So, to protect the ways of the Lord Buddha, the Buddhist dharma,
I decided to fight.’

The old monk had a wide leathery face, broad shoulders and an air of quiet calm and dignity. He wore enveloping maroon robes, a jaunty knitted red bonnet and thick woolly socks. Despite his age, his brow was unfurrowed and his face almost unlined. ‘Non-violence is the essence of the dharma,’ he said. ‘Especially for a monk.
The most important thing is to love each and every sentient being. But when it comes to a greater cause, sometimes it can be your duty to give back your vows and to fight in order to protect the dharma.’

Standing talking on one side of the circling pilgrims, we seemed to be the only stationary figures in a great roundabout of religiosity. Some pilgrims paused on their
parikrama
to spin the line of brass-plated prayer wheels mounted in a recess on the outside wall of the shrine chamber; others performed formal prostrations, a few of them on wooden pallets laid out for the purpose. The pilgrims faced in the direction of the great gilt images of the Buddha and the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara that could be glimpsed, gleaming dimly in the light of a thousand lamps, through the great open doors of the temple. They stood up, facing the images, and with their hands clasped in a gesture of prayer, sank to their knees. Then they fell forward on to the pallet, measuring it with their full length, palms together, fingers outstretched before them, before slowly rising again to a standing position. They repeated this exercise over and over again, even though many were craggy octogenarians who between prostrations shuffled painfully around the temple, spinning their prayer wheels and bowing with visible effort before the images.

Later, we sat in the winter sunlight of the temple tea stall, high above the corkscrewing mountain paths of Dharamsala. Passang talked easily, almost abstractedly, about his youth as a nomad on the Tibetan plains; of his time studying in a now destroyed monastery; and of his ambition to become a hermit, living alone in a cave. He also described how quickly those hopes had evaporated with the coming of the Chinese. Their attempts to impose their atheistic creed on a Tibet whose values could not have been more different, and their campaign to close down the monasteries, had, he said, ended that life for ever.

But more surprising was what Passang said of his eventual decision to give up his monastic vows and take up arms to resist – something which seemed to go against all the usual preconceptions about the non-violence of Tibetan monks.

‘It was not that I wanted to murder individual Chinese soldiers,’ he said. ‘And it was certainly not blood lust, or because I took any pleasure in killing.’ He paused, unsure of how to explain, twirling his prayers beads pensively between thumb and forefinger.  ‘I knew that the Chinese soldiers were committing the most sinful of all crimes – trying to destroy Buddhism. And I knew that it is written in our scriptures that in certain circumstances it can be right to kill a person, if your intention is to stop that person from committing a serious sin. You can choose to take upon yourself the bad karma of a violent act in order to save that person from a much worse sin.’

‘So inspired by these teachings,’ I asked, ‘you took up a gun and fought the Chinese?’

‘I tried,’ replied the monk. ‘But we were just fools. Though we acquired some old guns, we were outnumbered and knew nothing of fighting. All we knew was how to pray, not how to kill. As soon as we came across the Chinese troops they put us to flight. It was a total fiasco.’

Eventually, he said, after fleeing Tibet and spending many years with a special Tibetan unit in the Indian army, he had retired to a small wooden hut in Dharamsala, intent on spending his last years atoning for the violence he had committed. Here he began trying to earn merit, by making wooden blocks and printing prayer flags. Finally, encouraged by a sermon of the Dalai Lama, and along with several other former monks, he had once again taken up his old monastic vows and robes, a full thirty years after he first renounced them.

‘Every day now, I recite the mantras of repentance,’ he said. ‘We are told that when you really regret your actions, and repent, and bow towards the Buddha, it is possible for the bad karma to be removed. After all, the Buddha himself forgave a mass murderer.

‘There was a man named Angulimala who had killed 999 people, and hung a finger from each around his neck on a garland. He hoped the Buddha would be his thousandth victim; but instead, on meeting the Lord, he converted and became a monk. Many were critical of this decision, but the Lord Buddha insisted his repentance was genuine, and that he should be allowed to atone for his misdeeds. If he can be forgiven, then maybe so can I . . .’

Passang smiled, his broad face lighting up momentarily. ‘Since I retired I have gone and repented before many lamas. I have visited many temples, pledging not to do such things ever again. I have prayed for the souls of the men I have killed, and asked that they have good rebirth. But still I worry.’

The prayer beads were whirling nervously around his fingers again. ‘The lamas told me that if my motivation was pure, and I had done violent acts to help others at the expense of my own karma, then I can still be saved. But every sentient being has life and even the thought of killing makes me unhappy. In truth I don’t know how much forgiveness I have gathered. I don’t know yet whether on my deathbed I will feel calm and satisfied. Maybe I will never know . . .’

Passang sipped at his butter tea, warming his hands around the sides as he did so: ‘In the scriptures it says that one who lives in the dharma sleeps at ease in this world, and also in the next; but I still have a feeling that I did a terrible thing. When you take up arms, you have to follow orders – you have no right to act as you wish. Sometimes you are told to kill. Still sometimes the dreams come. At night, I hear the noise of war . . .’

The monk broke off, and fell silent, looking into his empty cup. ‘Come and see me tomorrow,’ he said, rising suddenly, ‘and I will tell you how all this came about.’

McLeod Ganj, the Tibetan settlement above the north Indian town of Dharamsala, is a miniature Tibet-outside-Tibet. It is the place to which countless displaced lamas and landowners, refugee peasants and farmers, exiled townsmen and traders, have made their way, clustering like barnacles on a rock around the temple-residence of the Dalai Lama.

The complex crowns a saddle on one of the higher ridges of the town. Above, in the grey wintery light, loom the black rock walls and fault lines of the Himalayas, rising to a series of gleaming white snow peaks glowing strangely with refracted light at the level of the clouds.

Below, rutted roads and cobbled footpaths lead down to the Tibetan Parliament, which despite its grandiose name is in reality little larger than a village scout hall. On one side is the equally modest yellow ochre Tibetan Home Ministry; to the other a library and archive. Further below still, through steep slopes of cedar and deodar, and below the slowly circling eagles, is a stutter of foothills. These lead down to the foggy floor of the Kangra Valley, where the hilltops emerge from the flat blanket of winter morning mist like the humps of a school of whales rising from the deep.

The old people’s home for Tibetan veterans where Passang had finally found shelter lay a short walk below the library, on a projecting ledge of rock in the lee of a small temple. It was late afternoon when I arrived. The old veterans who had been sitting silently on benches in the sun, playing cards or watching the light rake down the peaks, now found themselves in shade, with the temperature dropping rapidly. So they gathered their shawls around them, and adjusted their knotted mufflers and bonnets. Then they began to shuffle inside to drink their evening butter tea before heading up to the temple for their evening prayers. I later learned that of the 150 inmates in the home, no fewer than thirty had, like Passang, been monks who had given back their vows to fight in the ill-fated Tibetan resistance.

Passang led me to his room, a warm and snug space at the back of the home, in the shadow of the cliffs. This he shared with one other monastic army veteran. On a shelf at the end of the room lay a line of doll-like images of Tibetan saints and rinpoches. A butter lamp burned in a brass brazier, and a red electric light mimicked the flickering of a candle below a framed image of the Dalai Lama. Above the door, Passang had hung some fatty yak meat to dry on an improvised framework of skewers.

For a few minutes the old man fiddled around with a primus, making chai which he poured from a saucepan into small
cups. He passed me one, then proceeded to sip noisily from his own. Only when he had finished did he begin to talk.

‘I was born in 1936 in the Dakpa country of Kham province,’ said Tashi Passang. ‘Like many in eastern Tibet, my family lived a semi-nomadic life. Although we were small landowners with a stone three-storey house, we also had many yak and
dri
. The herd numbered almost 100, and in summer it was the job of the boys of the family to help my grandparents and my uncles to take the animals up to the high summer pastures.

‘As a young child, I would watch my elder brothers go off with the herd, and feel sad to be left behind. But the valley where we lived was very beautiful in summer. The trees were all in blossom and there were so many wild flowers – cornflowers, poppies, deep purple gentians – that I couldn’t name even half of them. There was a big river leading to a lake near our house, and in summer red crane and white duck would come in their thousands, and build their nests. They laid their eggs by the side of the lake and my parents would warn me not to go near the nesting area, in case I touched the eggs. Then the mother would smell a human and abandon them, and the young would die – something my mother said was a sin and which would bring bad karma on all of us.

‘In autumn the birds would fly south, and we would begin to prepare the butter lamps to light us during the cold and darkness of winter. I remember helping my father roll the cotton for the wicks, hold it in the centre of the bowl and pour in the melted butter, then put it aside to settle. As we did so, my father would quietly chant mantras, as if it was some sort of religious ceremony
.

‘Soon after, winter would come, and both river and lakes would freeze over. It was very, very cold and the blizzards would bring a covering of thick snow. The ice on the river was so hard that you could walk or even skate on it. We each had a pair of flat wooden skates that my mother kept in a special box, and would produce only when she was sure the ice was hard enough to take our weight. During this season the yaks were all sheltered in a covered enclosure, and it was only at the beginning of the thaw that we would take out the young beasts and pierce their noses so we could put a rope through and harness them for ploughing.

‘When I was twelve, I asked my parents if I could accompany the herds to the mountains for the summer. Finally, after much pleading, they agreed. For me this was a totally new way of life. That part of the year we all slept in a single round
ba
made of skins. Inside there were no partitions, and a fire in the centre; the smoke would escape through a small hole in the roof. My mother would pack
tsampa
– roasted barley – and butter, cooking vessels and lots of bedding, and load them with the tents on the back of the yaks.

‘Five families would collect their herds, and head together into the mountains. We would walk all the way, driving the animals in front of us
.
Yaks are very good-tempered, and I always felt safe with them. They seemed to enjoy the journey and my grandmother was especially good at handling them. She knew them all by name and would talk to each one as she milked them in the evening. Every evening, all the families in the migration would gather together to have dinner, and recite prayers to the goddess Tara.