Nine Lives (29 page)

‘Once we reached the summer pastures the different families would separate and we would each head to our own camp. My job would be to take the yak up to the high green pastures each morning, and to stop the mountain wolves from attacking them. At first I was scared of the wolves, but it soon became clear that they were
more scared of us than we were of them – at least during the day. Only when they were hungry in winter were they really dangerous. All you had to do was to shout, and maybe fire a warning shot, and the entire pack would run away. Occasionally I would have to fire at them, but I was too young to handle a rifle in those days, and I never managed to hit one.
There were stories of yetis up in the mountains, but I never saw one. A much bigger threat were the
dremong –
fierce brown bears – which sometimes attacked the yaks, usually as you led them down for the night.

‘On my third summer in the mountains, my great-uncle came with us. He was a monk, though he no longer lived within a monastery, and it was he who persuaded me to become a monk too. My mother had taught me to read and write a little Tibetan, and he thought that I was a promising boy who might benefit from a monastic education. Every day he would sit with me and teach me to write on a slate, or on the bark of a dwarf oak, as of course there was no paper in the mountains. He also loved history, and was very good at telling stories. As we tended the animals, he would tell me long stories about Songtsan Gampo and the kings and heroes of Tibet.

‘But his main love was the dharma, and he told me that if I continued to lead the life of a layman I might acquire many yaks, but would have nothing to take with me when I died. He also said that married life was a very complicated business, full of responsibilities, difficulties and distractions, and that the life of a monk was much easier. He said that it gave you more time and opportunities to practise your religion. I was always a religious child, and I thought about what he said.

‘By the end of the summer I had decided that I would like to try monastic life. I thought that if I really dedicated myself to religion I would have a better chance of a good rebirth in my next life, and have the opportunity to gain Nirvana. My uncle and I guessed that my parents would forbid me from becoming a monk, so we decided that I should join the monastery first, and only later inform the family. At the end of the summer, when we came down from the passes, my uncle and I went ahead to Dakpa monastery, and there he handed me over to the abbot.

‘I was worried I would miss the freedom of the mountains. But as it turned out, in the monastery I was happier than I had ever been. In my life as a herdsman, I had to worry about the wolves, and my yaks, and to look after my grandparents – life was full of anxieties. But as a monk you have only to practise your prayers and meditation, and to hope and work for Enlightenment.

‘Also, the life in the mountains, for all its beauty, was quite lonely. In Dakpa there were nearly 500 monks, and many boys of my own age. Very soon I made many friends. I knew I had made the right decision. Before long even my parents became reconciled to what I had done.

‘How you start your life as a monk can determine the rest of your life. One of our scriptures says,
“Men who have not gained spiritual treasures in their youth perish like old herons in a lake without fish.” I worked very hard at memorising the scriptures and proved to be good at remembering them.

‘The main struggle, especially when you are young, is to avoid four things: desire, greed, pride and attachment. Of course you can’t do this completely – no human being can – but there are techniques for diverting the mind. They stop you from thinking of yaks, or money, or beautiful women, and teach you to concentrate instead on the gods and goddesses. The lamas who taught us trained us to focus on these things. We were taught how to concentrate – to stare at a statue of the Lord Buddha or Guru Rinpoche, and to absorb the details of the object, the colour, the posture and so on, reflecting back all we knew of their teachings. Slowly you go deeper, to visualise the hand, the leg and the
vajra
in his hand, closing your eyes and trying to travel inwards. The more you concentrate on a deity, the more you are diverted from worldly thoughts. As it says in our scriptures:

The quivering, wavering mind,

Hard to guard, hard to check,

The wise one makes straight,

Like the bowman his shaft.

‘It is difficult, of course, but it is also essential. In the Fire Sermon, the Lord Buddha said: “The world is on fire and every solution short of Nirvana is like trying to whitewash a burning house.” Everything we have now is like a dream, impermanent. You can see it: this floor feels like stone, this cupboard feels like wood, but really it is an illusion. When you die you can’t take any of this, you have to leave it all behind. We have to leave even this human body.

‘The training to be a monk was very rigorous. For three years we were given text after text of the scriptures to memorise. It was a very slow process. First we had to master the Tibetan alphabets. Then we had to learn a few mantras, and then slowly we were taught the shorter versions of the scriptures. Finally we graduated to the long versions, and learned the techniques of debating. When I couldn’t remember the words, the teachers would be very disappointed. Sometimes I would try to fool them by taking a peek at the texts. Once I was so frustrated by my inability to remember more that I tore up one of the texts, and the teachers were very angry with me.

‘Finally, after three years, we were each sent off to a cave for four months to practise praying in solitude. We were supposed to master the art of being a hermit, of being alone. There were seven other boys nearby, in the same cliff face, but we were not allowed to speak to each other.

‘Initially I was apprehensive. The cave was cold and dark, and I thought there might be evil spirits lurking there. But once I got into a routine of praying and meditating I became more confident. I made a small altar, and I placed the image of Guru Rinpoche that I had brought from the monastery upon it. I made flower offerings and lit a butter lamp. I used to rise at one o’clock in the morning and until 6 a.m. I was praying and prostrating, until my knees were so sore I could prostrate no more. At 6 a.m. I would make butter tea and take a break for half an hour. Then it was back to meditating on the roots of compassion, until a small lunch of
tsampa
at midday. At 7 p.m. I would have some rice, rest for an hour, and was asleep by 8 p.m.

‘Initially I felt like a failed monk. I was lonely, and scared, and had a terrible pain in my knees from the number of prostrations – we were expected to do 4,000 a day. But by the end of the first fortnight, I began to see my way. It was only then that I began reflecting deeply on things, and really began to see the vanity of pleasures and ambitions. Until then I had not really sat and reflected. I had done what I had been taught and followed the set rhythms of the monastery.

‘In the cave I felt I had found myself, and for the first time was practising the true dharma. I discovered a capacity for solitude I hadn’t known I had, even in my days in the mountains. My mind became clear, and I felt my sins were being washed away with the austerity of the hermit’s life; that I was being purified. All my worries began to disappear and there were no distractions. I was happy. It is not easy to reach the stage when you really remove the world from your heart. That took place in the cave, and ever since then I have always had a desire to go back and to spend more time as a hermit.

‘But it was never to be. Soon after I returned from those four months of solitude, the Chinese appeared.’

The Chinese invaded Tibet in the summer and autumn of 1950. They rolled across the Drichu River, and split their forces into three, quickly overwhelming and encircling the antiquated and primitive Tibetan army with their speed, efficiency and numbers.

A year later, in May 1951, with more than 40,000 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers lined up outside Lhasa, the Chinese pressured the Tibetans to sign the Seventeen Point Agreement. This was supposed to safeguard some Tibetan freedoms in return for giving the Chinese the right to guide and reform the Tibetan government. In reality, it allowed the Chinese to station troops all over the country, build supply routes and entrench Chinese Communist rule in Tibet.

‘The Chinese invasion of our country had taken place even before I joined the monastery,’ Passang told me. ‘I was twelve or thirteen when I first saw them – long lines of soldiers streaming through our valley with their guns and their horses. In those days there were no roads for trucks or cars. I had no idea why they were there, or what they wanted, but initially there were very few of them, and they never really impinged on our life.

‘Then one day the Chinese troops came to the monastery. There was a colonel, and about fifty or sixty soldiers with guns. Without asking anyone, they put up posters of their president on the walls and erected loudspeakers in the courtyard so that we would have to listen to what they said. Their colonel wore spectacles. He was polite at first. He said they had come to help Tibet be self-reliant and they would return back home when they had taught us to be modern. He said they had come to bring justice, and to help the poor, and to make Tibet a good country, like China. He said that China was like our big brother, and that it would be good for us if we accepted their authority until the people of Tibet were ready to govern themselves in a modern, Communist way. The colonel even told us he had come to liberate us. To this the abbot replied that he could not liberate us, as the Lord Buddha had showed us that it was up to each man to liberate himself. The colonel just made a face – I don’t think he really understood what the abbot meant.

‘After that, the Chinese came to the monastery every month or so and gave us a lecture – they called them indoctrination meetings. Sometimes the posters they put up were blasphemous – insulting the Lord Buddha and saying that the monks were trying to keep the people of Tibet poor and ignorant. Slowly the lectures became ruder and more pointed: they said that everything the monasteries did was wrong, and that there was no other option but to accept the changes the Chinese were making. Even when the Chinese were nice and polite – giving free seeds and yaks to the poor people and so on – we always felt we could not trust them. Even from the seclusion of the monastery we could see that they were bringing in more and more of their people to build roads, and more and more troops. I realised something was wrong, even though they tried to make it look as if they were our friends. I sensed that something bad would come – that something evil was creeping behind their smiles.

‘As the programme of lectures progressed, I began to have sleepless nights, thinking about what was happening to Tibet, and how these Chinese people – and Chinese
lay
people at that – kept telling us what we should do in our own monastery. I didn’t want to be under their rule, but I couldn’t see any other option. Some of the monks began to talk about fighting, saying that the Chinese were out to destroy Buddhism, and that we should not simply surrender to what they wanted. Some nights as I lay awake, I wondered if maybe these monks were right.

‘Then, in the summer of 1954, rumours began to spread that the Chinese had killed many monks and bombed a monastery at the other end of our Kham province. We also heard that there had been a rebellion among some of the Golok and Khampa nomads. It was said that when the rebels took shelter in the monastery of Lithang the Chinese had bombed it, killing everyone there. Then we heard that the same had happened closer to us, at Changtreng Gompa, and that the monastery had been first bombed and then desecrated.

‘There were other stories too: that the Chinese made some of the monks in Kham get married, and others they forced to join the PLA, to build roads for them or even to work in slave labour camps. Some said that parents who refused to send their children to Chinese schools were tied to posts and had nails driven through their eyes.

‘Shortly after we began hearing such things, the Chinese army came to our monastery and asked us to give them all our guns and swords from the monastery armoury. The abbot said that these things had been given to us by our forebears and parents, and that the Chinese had no right to take them. But they ignored him, and searched the monastery and took away all the arms they could find.

‘After this, we had a meeting – not just the monks, but many lay people from the villages nearby. The monks were unanimous that we must fight, as the Chinese were now clearly intent on destroying the Buddhist dharma
and so were
tendra
, Enemies of the Faith. We had heard that many fighters – some said 15,000 – had gathered in Lhokha to the south and founded a resistance movement called the
Chu-zhi Gang-drung
or Four Rivers, Six Ranges. Many said we should all leave and join them there.