A friend and her husband visited China and Tibet earlier this year. Mike, a writer, composed a 32-page (!) essay on their return. Here's the section on Tibet --
On Sunday, May 27, we caught a morning flight from Chengdu and landed in a gray-brown desert near Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. We were surrounded by the Himalayan Mountains, but these were not the snow-capped peaks of National Geographic fantasies; these were 15,000-foot ridges the same color as the desert below. The airport and city were at 12,000 feet, and the sudden change made us very woozy. We never adjusted as well as we had in Cuzco, Peru, perhaps because the Tibetans didn’t give us cocoa leaves.
As we drove into the city we saw a woman directing her herd of yaks along the highway. They resembled thinner versions of longhorn cattle with very long hair; they are the hippies of the bovine world. When we eventually had yak burgers, yak steaks and yak goulash at our hotel, we discovered the taste was darker than expected, somewhere between beef and venison.
Our hotel was in the inner city, just a few blocks from the Jokhang Temple, which is the religious center of Tibetan Buddhism because it contains a 2,600-year-old Buddha statue allegedly blessed by the Buddha himself. According to their religious calendar, it was April 12, just three days before April 15, the date of Buddha's birth, enlightenment and death and thus the holiest day of the holiest week of the holiest month of the year. That date, of course, has different connotations in the U.S.
As a result, the city was flooded with pilgrims from every corner of the country—Tibetan Buddhists are obliged to visit the Jokhang Temple at least once in their lives in much the same way that Muslims are expected to visit Mecca. They come by bus, by car and by foot; they sleep in tents and cheap hotels. In the cobbled streets and stone plaza around the temple, thousands of short peasants with bronzed, high-cheekboned faces wearing the bright reds and purples of their hand-dyed woolen clothes—looking not unlike the Andean Indians we had seen in Peru—walked in endless clockwise circles around the temple, murmuring prayers.
Some of them spun their prayer wheels, elaborately decorated metal cylinders atop a rattle-like handle. Inside was a prayer on a curled scroll of paper, and each time the cylinder spun it was as if the prayer had been recited. Others prostrated themselves each step of the way. They would kneel on a cushion and then flatten themselves on the street with their downward palms extended forward. They’d recite a prayer, stand up, take a step and then repeat the process.
Mostly they were poor farmers and herders, their gaunt faces testimony to the hard struggle to feed their families; their woven yak-wool hats, coats and boots testament to the compensations of a folk tradition; their spinning prayer wheels testifying to the solace of religion. Marx's dictum that religion is the opium of the masses is perhaps more ambivalent than he intended, for certain forms of pain deserve a prescription of morphine.
We soon learned to recognize the difference between the native Tibetans with their redder, cheekier faces and shorter, wirier frames and the Han Chinese immigrants who have been flooding into Lhasa to seize economic opportunities and to alter the demographics for the central government's benefit. Seeing these two ethnicities uneasily sharing the same city reinforced how homogenous the populations had been in Beijing, Xi’an and Chengdu. I have never seen—not even in Kenya—such an ethnic sameness. It made me realize how modern the American mix of cultures is—and how that mix has spread to most of the developed world.
Westerners are common enough in China that they don’t attract much attention, but men with bushy white beards are apparently still quite rare, for Chinese often approached me on the street, grinning and miming the shape of my beard. Frequently, pretty young girls would ask if they could have their picture taken as they clasped my arms. I didn’t mind that at all. Some Tibetans rubbed my furry arms, yelping, “Yak! Yak!”
In the United States, I am told several times a week how much I resemble Santa Claus and the same thing happened in China, only there the comparison was to Karl Marx. That made sense, for Santa and Karl are fuzzy, avuncular figures in their respective cultures—their original radical instincts hollowed out as they became poster, button and greeting-card icons.
In front of the Jokhang Temple were two six-foot-tall clay ovens, each on a three-foot brick pedestal. The pilgrims had brought or bought plastic bags of juniper sprigs that they tossed into the roaring oven fires with a prayer, and a thick gray plume of incense smoke poured constantly from the ovens.
The large open plaza beyond the ovens was lined in small outdoor booths overloaded with souvenirs and artifacts. While there was plenty of the mass-produced kitsch we saw elsewhere in China, there were also handsome handcrafts that were either antiques or excellent imitations. As a result it was the best shopping we found in on the trip. The vendors couldn’t speak much English, but they could punch a price into a calculator and then extend the calculator in your direction so you could punch in a counteroffer.
Liz negotiated to buy gray yak wool, and every time she picked up a skein, the vendor lit one end with a cigarette lighter to prove it was real wool and not a synthetic. I bought some T-shirts only to learn that XL doesn’t mean the same thing in Tibet that it does in North America. My favorite purchase, though, were two hand-carved masks unlike anything I saw anywhere else—one of green-faced Buddha and one of a yellow-faced, bearded, laughing monk.
Tibet seemed to be 20 years behind the rest of China—in its economy, in its infrastructure and in its politics. The cars were fewer and older and so were the roads; the buildings were lower and shabbier. The stores had fewer goods, and hot water was intermittent. Though the politics seemed calm on the surface—the police weren’t bothering anyone that we saw—there were more cops around and people did make acid jokes about the tension between the local Tibetans and the increasing numbers of Han Chinese immigrants and the government officials who were overwhelmingly Chinese.
“’Kundun’ and ‘Seven Years in Tibet’ are very good movies about Lhasa,” our local guide told us. “Of course, those movies aren’t allowed in Tibet.” “How do you know the movies are good,” I asked, “if they’re not allowed in Tibet?” He grinned broadly but said nothing. At another point Liz asked him about the “other Penchen Lama,” the number-two man in the Buddhist hierarchy who was kidnapped by the Chinese government and replaced by one more to their liking. “The whole world knows about the other Penchen Lama," he replied, “but we can’t say anything about it."
The political situation in Tibet can be boiled down to this: The locals believe the Chinese are crushing a long-standing culture that has sustained and inspired the Tibetans for centuries; they believe their self-determination has been supplanted by a colonial power—often with brutal violence, especially during the 1959 revolt and the late ‘60s Cultural Revolution. The Chinese believe that the locals are ungrateful for having been lifted out of 18th century feudalism by the Communists who have abolished gender and class privileges and have spent much more on highways, hospitals, electrification, housing, schools, airports and factories than they’ve gotten back. What makes the conflict intractable is that both sides are right.
I’ve seen “Kundun” and I was struck even then by just how paternalistic and feudalistic Tibetan Buddhism seemed, even in Martin Scorsese’s sympathetic treatment. It was a system where a pampered class of lamas enjoyed palatial comfort while many of the men and almost all the women toiled away at grueling menial tasks in hopes of a “pie in the sky” reincarnated life. In other words, it exploited its own believers as much as Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Hinduism. Buddhism can inspire great art, of course, just like its fellow theisms, and it is far less militaristic than any of them.
The art can be dizzying—in both the transporting and headachey senses. The Tibetan Buddhists seem to have an impulse to paint every inch of their interiors that aren’t already covered by cloth flags and tapestries or metal ornaments and statues. And not just inside the temples either; our hotel and many of the shops, restaurants and homes were decorated the same way. It is, oddly enough, the opposite of Zen Buddhism. As someone with a maximalist sensibility, I enjoyed all the stimulation.
On Monday morning, May 28, we went inside the Jokhang Temple, stepping carefully around the prostrate pilgrims in front. There were two lines—the long one for the free but slow passage along every display case and the short one for the ticketed, express tour of the temple’s highlights. Before each of the temple's dozens of shrines was a trough the size and shape of a window flower box; each trough was filled with yak butter supporting wicks that fluttered with flames in the shadowy niches. As a token of devotion, a pilgrim would scoop out a bit of yak butter from a personal thermos and add it to the trough. Other pilgrims would stuff bills—worth pennies each—through the wire screens and between the candles and statues.
The statues were either golden Buddhas in his dozens of personalities and positions or painted daemons in fierce poses. Smaller statues were placed before and behind the bigger ones; the pillars and beams were painted in minute detail. In the center of the main room were long benches and cushions for the scurrying monks who took care of the temple. Between the shuffling pilgrims, the curling yak-butter smoke, the shimmering statuary and the dim light, the experience was dizzying—again in both senses.
I absorbed many lessons about Buddhist self-composure, and I had to apply all those lessons when we were in the Jokhang Temple. Our guide peppered his talk with inadvertent double entendres when in his less-than-perfect English he explained that “some lamas practice yellow-hat sects; some lamas practice red-hat sects, and many change their sects.”
In the afternoon we visited the Sera Monastery, one of the few Buddhist schools to survive the Cultural Revolution, albeit in much reduced numbers. Nestled into the lower slopes of the mountains outside town, it resembled a whitewashed fortress containing shrines, classrooms and dormitories.
Every afternoon, the shaved-head, maroon-robed monks gather in the open-air courtyard to debate the nuances of Buddhist doctrine. One monk would stand and make his case to two or three skeptical listeners. Standing on the sidelines, we couldn’t understand what they were saying, of course, but we could enjoy the animation of the arguments, especially when the standing monk would shoot his open right hand toward his listeners, smacking his left palm along the way.
That night after dinner, the Niangre Cultural Group of Tibet performed for the OAT group in our hotel. The troupe had all the elements for a good folklore show—the indigenous instruments, the brightly colored traditional costumes, the repertoire passed down through generations—they just weren’t very good. You didn’t have to be an expert in Tibetan culture to recognize that the six musicians were having trouble staying in the same key and in the same tempo or that the six dancers were having equal difficulty in finishing the same gestures at the same time in the same position. They resembled a high school group that was learning a tradition but were far from mastering it.
This was all too typical of the cultural presentations OAT offered us. For the tour organizers, apparently it was enough to offer indigenous performers doing indigenous repertoire—the quality or authenticity seemed irrelevant as far as they were concerned. All these shows provided fragments of longer works or longer rituals, so all sense of narrative or context was lost. We began to think that OAT stood for Overseas Amateur Theatricals.
Later that evening I climbed to the roof of our hotel and drank a glass of wine as the sun went down as the mountains went from almond to chocolate to cabernet. Up high like that, you could observe the top of Lhasa—the multi-colored prayer flags flapping in the breeze as if in a used-car-dealer's lot, the silver solar reflectors flanking the steel tea pots, the TV antennas, the laundry lines, the hammered golden cylinders atop the temples. As everything else dimmed, the lights on the Potala Palace made it glow on the facing hillside. This is the immense white building, the headquarters of both the government and the church, that's the most photographed image of Tibet.
POTALA
When bright lights flood the Potala Palace,
it detaches from the thickening dusk,
from the brown mountains purpling into silhouettes,
from the family card games in the courtyard below.
The white walls inflate; the ocean liner sails
over waves of three-story buildings,
into troughs of two-story homes,
through the foam of ten thousand prayer flags,
as buoyant as a platonic ideal, an architectural wonder,
a spaceship hovering, above and apart.
It's the city's sounds that pull it back.
The barking dogs, the honking cabs,
the shouting vendors, the blaring TVs,
the angry squabbling, the bawdy laughter,
the bubbling hubbub of humanity,
the granddaughters of slaves who built it,
the husbands of wives who clean it,
present a bill, exert their gravity.
(continued in next post)
