Nine Lives (31 page)

The following morning, Dharamsala dawned dark and threatening, with black thunderheads massing above the town and blotting out the snow peaks.

I had arranged to meet Passang again at the tea house below the temple after he had finished his morning
parikrama
. The weather had turned, and as it was now bitterly cold we sat inside and ordered tea,
momos
and a bowl of
thukpa
to warm us.

As we ate, Passang described how the tension in Lhasa had reached crisis point during the first week of March, when the Chinese invited the twenty-five-year-old Dalai Lama to attend a theatrical performance in the army camp outside Lhasa. The invitation came when the Tibetan leader was debating in the great Jokhang Temple. Two Chinese officers barged through the crowd and demanded to see His Holiness immediately, breaking all rules of Tibetan protocol. They said that, contrary to custom, the Dalai Lama should bring no bodyguards when he came to their camp to see the performance.

Word of this suspicious invitation soon got out, and the population of Lhasa, along with the crowds of pilgrims who had come to Lhasa for Monlam, converged around the gardens of the Dalai Lama’s summer palace of Norbulingka, in an attempt to prevent his attending and – it was widely suspected – being abducted to China.

‘On the evening of 15
March, I and twenty-five other monks of Sera were told to get ready as we were going to meet His Holiness,’ said Passang. ‘Ahead of us, leading the party, went two senior monks on the back of donkeys. The rest of us walked. We assumed we were going to join the crowds gathering at Norbulingka, and I was excited as I hoped we would get to hear His Holiness give one of his public teachings. But we didn’t stop at Norbulingka; instead we headed off into the darkness. We crossed the wide Tsangpo River in a small boat, and for the next two days we walked and walked, through empty plains, with only hard balls of
tsampa
to eat. The monks who were leading us refused to tell us where we were going or what we were doing, and as we were all very junior monks we had no option but to obey.

‘Finally, at the village of Chi Thu Shae, we stopped to rest and to eat. We had only been there two hours when a party of Khampa horsemen turned up at the inn. Among them, to our amazement, was His Holiness, with a rifle strapped to his back. At first none of us recognised him, as he was dressed as an ordinary guard, but it was his spectacles that gave him away. He had fled Lhasa in disguise, and we were told that it was our job to escort him. None of us knew that he was heading into exile. I am not sure even he knew at that stage. All we knew was that we had to escape from the Chinese, and to stop their soldiers seizing the Dalai Lama. Of course we were very excited, and very honoured. We realised this was a great responsibility.

‘We walked for several more days through very harsh country, struggling to keep up with His Holiness, until we reached Lhuntse Dzong. It was here that we met a rinpoche in the street. We asked him to release us from our vows a second time, as we were still wearing our monastic robes, and it was clear that our duty was now to take up arms to defend His Holiness, and to slow down the PLA if they tried to follow and capture him. We obviously couldn’t do this while still wearing the robes of monks, and we felt strongly that we must end this ambiguity. The first ceremony of giving back our vows at Dakpa had seemed very inadequate and hurried, and we were not sure what our exact status was: were we monks or not?

‘So the rinpoche gave us a long lecture, almost a sermon, and said that just because we were giving back our vows didn’t mean we could indulge in loose living and worldly affairs. We were doing this to protect the Dalai Lama. If we needed to, we must fight the Chinese and even kill; but he warned us – “Don’t do anything else which will go against your monastic vows.”

‘We shed our robes and were given ordinary
chupas
to wear, and guns to use. His Holiness had already left, hurrying on to escape the Chinese who were expected at any moment. We remained behind with the Khampa fighters of the
Chu-zhi Gang-drung
movement, vowing to stop the Chinese if they attempted to follow him. We were very proud to do this work, and planned to make a heroic stand, and to die fighting for His Holiness. But that is not what happened.

‘Only a single day passed before a huge force of Chinese arrived. There were hundreds of them, with trucks and tanks and artillery and machine guns. Worst of all they had two fighter planes, and we were completely outnumbered. I’m ashamed to admit it, but when the planes began to strafe us, we fled into the hills after firing only a few shots, heading in the direction of the Mango-la Pass. Without food or arms or supplies it seemed pointless to stay and die. We could not fight, so we fled. Some of the
Chu-zhi Gang-drung
volunteers died fighting at Lhuntse Dzong, but almost all of us monks took to our heels and ran, hoping that on another occasion we might be able to redeem ourselves and do a better service to His Holiness.’

‘In fact, I think we did do him a service just by running, though that wasn’t really our intention. For the Chinese patrols followed us, perhaps thinking His Holiness was with us. Many of the people I was with were shot dead. The planes were out searching for us. We hid during the day and travelled only at night, and even then the Chinese sent up flares, and shelled anyone they could see.

‘When we got higher we found ourselves trudging through heavy snow.
By that time we were reduced to eating the donkeys that had died – we had nothing else – and the snowfall was very heavy. There was nowhere to shelter, and it was very cold. We lost so many on the way, zigzagging through the shells in thick snow red with blood. We were frozen, and our feet and hands were numb and senseless. By the end we were reduced to just six people, half-walking, half-sleeping.

‘After ten or fifteen days of this we finally reached the Indian border. Only then did we hear that our Precious Jewel, the Dalai Lama, had escaped. But we also heard there what had happened in Lhasa – that the Potala and Norbulingka Palaces had been shelled, and that thousands had died when the Chinese sent their tanks into the Jokhang Temple.

‘In my heart I knew that we must get our country back, and if I had to learn to fight to do so, then so be it. This had happened before, at the time of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, when the Chinese invaded for the first time, and after a while those who fled returned, and the Chinese went back to their own country. I never guessed it would take so long this time. Not only me; most Tibetans thought that in a year or two we would be back.’

I asked: ‘Did what happen damage your faith? Did you wonder how it could happen that such a catastrophe could overtake Tibet?’

‘On the contrary,’ said Passang, ‘I gained more faith. How else could we have survived, despite the entire PLA following us? I wore amulets with religious texts to guard my life and when the bullets came, they just travelled right past me. On one occasion, when we were being shelled at night, a shell landed very close to me. For a moment in the sudden blinding light I thought I saw the protector goddess, Palden Lhamo. Though the shell landed only a few feet away from us, no one was hurt. So, no, my faith was not affected. I felt completely protected.

‘We Buddhists believe in karma, and in cause and effect. An action has consequences; we are the consequences of our acts. Perhaps because there was a time in the seventh century when we Tibetans invaded China and tortured the Chinese, so we are suffering this torture now. It is our turn to suffer for what we did in previous lives.’

For a while Passang waited at the border, to see if the resistance needed him, and he could return.

‘We had a plan to return to Tsona, which we had heard was still free,’ he said. ‘We thought that we’d fight the Chinese from there. But we had no food and no bullets. We thought that we’d give it a go, that someone must come and support us, and that they’d give us some supplies. We waited for two weeks, but nothing came and no one was there to organise us into a fighting force. We hesitated to enter India. We were scared that we had lost our country, and were angry that we couldn’t go back and fight. Eventually there was no alternative: it was starvation that forced us across the border. But when we decided to cross, we did so only because we thought it the most likely way for us to be able to continue the fight for the dharma.’

In time, the Indian government gave the refugees places to stay, and was especially generous to those who had joined the resistance: Passang was lodged with other members of the
Chu-zhi Gang-drung
in an old British bungalow. It was only in the months that followed, when so many former monks and fighters were forced to join Indian road gangs in order to eat and survive, that the full implication of what had happened sank in.

‘It felt awful,’ said Passang. ‘It was the lowest point in my life. At night we would talk about how everything was over. We had lost our country. We were in exile, dependent on others, with no will or right to do what we wanted. We hoped that someone would arm and help us, so that we could recapture Tibet, but nothing happened. Our only hope was in following His Holiness.’

In time the refugees were divided up, and Passang was sent to the new Tibetan settlement that was created at Bylakuppe in the forests of Karnataka in southern India. Here Passang was taught to make carpets and handicrafts, and for two years he lived by selling these. It was not destitution; but it certainly seemed a dead end.

However, the fortunes of the Tibetan resistance changed radically two years later, in 1962. When China attacked Indian positions in Aksai Chin in the brief 1962 Sino-Indian war, seizing the disputed border region linking Kashmir and Tibet, it left Nehru’s policy of appeasement of China in tatters. It was realised in India that the Tibetan refugees contained a large body of potential troops who would willingly fight against China and who were, moreover, accustomed to fighting at high altitude. Recruiters were sent to the Tibetan refugee settlements, and Passang was among those who were enlisted in the Indian army.

Along with many of his former monastic brethren, Passang was persuaded to join a Tibetan unit in the Indian army known as the Special Frontier Force, or Sector 22. This secret force was jointly trained by India and the CIA in a camp near Dehra Dun. Like all the other Tibetans, Passang was assured that he and his fellow monks would be parachuted back into Tibet to fight for their country and their faith.

‘We were told that we would train for a few months and then be sent back to Tibet to begin a revolution. We signed up as we thought this was the way to get our land back and re-establish the Buddhist dharma. Clearly making handicrafts in Karnataka was not going to do that, and this seemed the help we had been waiting for ever since we fled Lhasa.’

But the promise was never realised. Instead, after many years, first of training under American officers in high-altitude warfare, then guarding the high passes and glaciers for India, and occasionally being sent over the Assam border into Tibet to do low-level intelligence work, Passang and his brethren were sent to fight in the war that led to the creation of Bangladesh.

‘The first time we really saw action was the 1971 war,’ said Passang. ‘From Dehra Dun they flew us to Guwahati, and then drove us in trucks up into Manipur. We crossed a river into Bangladesh, and managed to surround the Pakistani army from three sides. It was a great victory, at least as far as the Indians were concerned. But for me, it felt like a total defeat.

‘I had to shoot and kill other men, even as they were running away in despair. They would make us drink rum and whisky so that we would do these things without hesitation and not worry about the moral consequences of our actions. Every day I saw corpses. Sometimes even now at night I see them – the whole scene: people shooting, others being shot, airplanes dropping bombs and missiles, napalm, houses burning and men and women screaming. War is far worse than you ever imagine it to be. It is the last thing a Buddhist should be involved in.

‘Despite all this, we tried to behave as much like monks as we could. We brought our short Buddhist texts with us and recited our mantras, even in battle. In between the fighting we continued praying – when we were marching, when we were fighting. If anything I prayed more in the army than I did as a monk. Even when we were digging trenches in the jungle we carried holy images in our packs, and lit butter lamps to honour them.

‘But within my heart, I knew I was going against
ahimsa
, and the most important Buddhist principles – it was not to fight the Pakistanis that I gave up my monastic vows. I knew that I wouldn’t free Tibet, however many Pakistanis I killed. It was for the Tibetan cause and to defeat China that I joined the army; but it occurred to me that now I was no better than the Chinese. They also blithely shot people with whom they had no argument. It was only their guns and bullets that gave them power. The same was true of us in Bangladesh.