Chewing the Buddha

13 August 2008

Lhasa, Tibet - China's secret police are just terrible at keeping themselves secret.

The detective, dressed in her business suit and pumps appropriate to urban Lhasa, did not expect to be trailing my wife and me up the steep hillside to a monastery 15,000 feet up an ice-crusted ridge. Even at 200 yards behind us, I could see her shivering in the thin, frozen air, trying, absurdly, to look like just another hiker on the barren slope.

But then, she really wasn't trying to hide. Her presence was meant to send a message of fear and intimidation.

I got the point earlier when a photographer we'd helped sneak into Tibet was arrested, her film of protesting Tibetans seized and her camera smashed as she was hustled onto the first plane leaving the country.

When my police shadow looked away, I snapped a photo of the long boxes below me, roofs of the prison complex. It housed more Buddhist monks than any monastery.

At a hermitage carved into the summit rock I found my host sitting cross-legged under an ancient tapestry depicting a monster ready to devour quiet souls.

The holy man had questions for us:

Does Christianity have a god? (Answer: "Sometimes.")

What is a ‘President'?

It was 1993. I told the monk the new President, Bill Clinton, had met the Dalai Lama

This Clinton must be a very holy and very good man, yes? ("Sometimes.")

It's not that the priest avoided worldly newspapers, but he'd just gotten out of prison after 27 years and he didn't get much news there. Not that you could get any real news in Tibet. No journalists are allowed there. (Not to be impolite to their Chinese minders - or lose their lucrative Olympics deals - The New York Times and NBC cover Tibet from Beijing and Delhi. Just check the by-lines.)

I assured him that Clinton, though not quite holy, would, at the least, help Tibetans.

That seemed easy enough as they didn't want very much, these mountain folk. They didn't demand independence from China but, ironically, just the opposite: an opportunity to become Chinese, that is, have full access to schooling, university positions afforded their ethnic Han comrades; and to have a share of the jobs and wealth created by the uranium and other resources of their plateau nation.

And maybe something a little un-Chinese: freedom of expression, of movement, of culture, of religion. I assured the monk that this new President would help them obtain just a bit of autonomy in the "Tibetan Autonomous Region," as China calls it.

The lama smiled. It was not cynicism but a friendly disbelief in change happening in this coming year. He measured change in lifetimes.

He asked a student monk to pull down a small painted statue of the Buddha - which the elder man then chopped apart with a knife. He then gestured to his acolyte to give us each a piece of the icon - to eat.

Swallowing the body of his Lord was not meant to make us holy but to solve a more immediate problem - lunch. The painted god, I discovered with relief, was made out of barley, beer, rancid butter and honey.

I could see that my Tibetan translator was chomping at the bit to show the old man messages we'd brought from the Dalai Lama's Secretariat in India. But that would have been suicide. The young translator's brother (I certainly won't use their names), a cook at a nearby temple, joined a demonstration of monks against Chinese rule and was shot dead. I admonished our translator that his mother couldn't afford to lose her last remaining child.

Instead, we gave the lama a postcard printed with the image of the multi-armed god Chenrezig. The priest would know, but the Chinese wouldn't, that Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama, is a reincarnation of this god.

"Ta la'i bla ma tshur log pa," I said in my ridiculous Tibetan. The Dalai Lama will return.

We all return, he indicated, though not necessarily in this body.

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