Tibet: An encounter with 'the fake
one' By Douglas Wissing
Last summer as our bus approached the deep
tunnel the Chinese had bored through Sichuan's
Erlang Mountain to ensure access to Tibet's
restive Kham region, a phalanx of People's
Liberation Army trucks blocked the way. Public
Security officers boiled out of sport-utility
vehicles (SUVs). A stern-faced soldier waved us to
the side of the road.
Tsering, a young
Tibetan man beside me on the bus, sat up. "Police,
many police," he said, looking around with concern.
Helmeted troops with
semi-automatic rifles dog-trotted into the tunnel
as others secured the entrance. Public Security
men smoked cigarettes and stared up the road until
a convoy of black SUVs with tinted windows finally
rushed past. A Tibetan woman called from the back
of the bus. "Panchen Lama," Tsering reported. "The
fake one. Going to Kham."
In November
1995, the Chinese communists had announced the
discovery of the 11th reincarnation of the Panchen
Lama, considered second only to the Dalai Lama as
Tibet's most important spiritual leader. According
to the Chinese, the new Panchen Lama was a
six-year-old Tibetan boy named Gyaltsen Norbu. The
announcement created a firestorm in the Tibetan
community - six months earlier, the exiled 14th
Dalai Lama had recognized another six-year-old
Tibetan boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, as the new
reincarnation of the Panchen Lama.
As both
the Tibet-in-exile and Chinese communist
governments mounted major propaganda campaigns to
defend their choice of reincarnations, the
agitated Tibetan regions of the People's Republic
of China bubbled with political turmoil. After
quickly abducting Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, communist
officials spent the next 10 years insisting that
Gyaltsen Norbu, ensconced in China, was the true
Panchen Lama. The Tibetan-rights community
clamored that the Dalai Lama's Panchen Lama,
Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, still sequestered by the
communists, was "the world's youngest political
prisoner".
In the decade following his
designation, the Tibetans had widely resisted the
communists' choice of the 11th Panchen Lama. A
long-faced Tibetan man in the next bus seat said
that when the communists brought their Panchen
Lama to Yaoching, the Tibetans wouldn't turn out,
calling him Panchen Zuma (Fake Panchen).
There were reports of bombs planted in
northern Tibet, and protests at the massive
monasteries of Kumbum and Ganden, which were
followed by expulsions and arrests. Some lamas
fled into exile rather than accede to the
communists' choice. Even in Shigatse, home of the
Panchen Lama's Tashilhunpo Monastery, there were
demonstrations against the Beijing-backed Panchen
Lama.
As the speeding caravan vanished
into the Himalayan mountain tunnel last June, I
was witnessing one of the initial communist forays
into Tibet with their now-16-year-old Panchen
Lama. Part of a two-week junket in the eastern
ethnic-Tibetan region of Kham, the convoy was
headed to a rally in Kangding, Tibet's ancient
tea-trading portal and capital of western
Sichuan's Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Region.
Soul boys Tibetans revered the
10th Panchen Lama for his spiritual stature and
outspoken support of Tibetan rights in the face of
official persecution. His mysterious death in 1989
set loose a convulsive power struggle between the
Chinese government and the Dalai Lama's
government-in-exile - a surreal tale of medieval
magical intrigue mixed with adamantine post-modern
realpolitik, replete with Tibetan state oracle
divinations and communist reincarnation
regulations.
The concept of human
reincarnation has a long history, from Plato and
the Pharisees to Celts, Nestorians and Hindus,
whose belief in ultimate Brahma informed Gautama
Buddha's teachings about reincarnation. The
Tibetans' system for identifying the
reincarnations of religious and political leaders
began in the 13th century, when Karma Kagyupa
monks started codifying the esoteric system of
revelation.
According to the Tibetan
canon, reincarnations were identified through such
things as auspicious rainbows, unusual fungal
growth, visions in candle flames, clouds and
sacred lakes, divine vagaries of dice and weighted
barley balls, and predictions from living masters
and portents from their corpses, as well as the
recognition by the young reincarnation of his
previous life's personal possessions.
It
wasn't until 1578 that the Mongolian leader Altan
Khan bestowed the reincarnate title of Dalai Lama
on the Tibetan lama, Sonam Gyatso, who announced
himself to be the third Dalai Lama. That year was
also the first time the Chinese imperial powers
used a Tibetan spiritual leader for their own
political ends: Chinese Emperor Shenzong enjoined
the third Dalai Lama to persuade his political
defender and religious acolyte, Altan Khan, to
stop raiding Chinese territories.
The
fifth Dalai Lama decreed in the 17th century that
the abbot of Tashilhunpo Monastery, known as
Panchen (meaning "great scholar") Lama, would be
reincarnated as a recognizable successor. The
title of Panchen Lama was retroactively applied to
two previous reincarnations. Since then, the
Panchen Lama and Dalai Lama have been instrumental
in the recognition of each other's successor.
The search for the reincarnation of the
10th Panchen Lama that began in 1989 had critical
political implications for the Dalai Lama. To
maintain his pre-eminent spiritual and political
status among the Tibetans, he needed to exert his
traditional prerogatives relating to the Panchen
Lama's recognition. And the Dalai Lama, of course,
felt the pressing need to find the correct Panchen
Lama, the man he believed was going to help
identify his own reincarnation.
The stakes
were equally high for the ruling communists: the
10th Panchen Lama had initially been a tool in
their subjugation of Tibet, though later became an
unapologetic critic of the communists' onerous
imperial policies. After losing control of the
10th Panchen Lama, the communists were determined
to choose his successor, inculcate him with their
values, and then use him to select the next Dalai
Lama. By asserting what they contended was their
historical role in the identification of the
Panchen Lama, the Chinese government hoped to
legitimize their rule in Tibet, both among
Tibetans and in the court of world opinion.
In August 1989, eight months after the
death of the 10th Panchen Lama, the Chinese
government promulgated what has to be one of the
most bizarre policies ever instituted by an
atheistic, scientific-materialist communist
government: a five-point set of regulations on the
search, selection and recognition of a human
reincarnation.
Along with the use of
supernormal Tibetan divination procedures, the
communist guidelines on reincarnate recognition
relied heavily on the Golden Urn, an 18th-century
attempt by the Chinese Qianlong emperor to
influence the process of reincarnate discovery.
The communists contended that since that time, the
random drawing of names from the Golden Urn was
essential to the discovery of reborn high Tibetan
lamas. The Tibetans countered that the Golden Urn
was just another tool among a plethora of
celestial implements, and indeed had been used
only sporadically since the 18th century.
But political might trumped spiritual
precedent in the case of the 11th Panchen Lama.
The communist government didn't stop at kidnapping
Gedhun Choekyi Nyima. In July 1994, the Chinese
government unleashed a scathing attack on the
Dalai Lama and his Buddhist adherents, which began
with a high-level meeting on Tibet called the
Third Forum. The policies that emerged from the
Third Forum unrelentingly pilloried the Dalai Lama
for "splittist" activities and endeavored to
restrict tightly and eventually destroy Tibetan
Buddhism as a coherent cultural institution. The
campaign was a prologue for the elevation of the
communists' choice for the Panchen Lama.
Just after midnight on November 29, 1995,
the Chinese assembled several hundred monks and
numerous Chinese government officials in Lhasa's
Jokhang Temple, where the Golden Urn sat before
the sacred statue of Sowo, the historical Buddha.
The officials included State Council secretary Luo
Gan and Tibetan Autonomous Region chairman
Gyaltsen Norbu, whom the central government also
named as a "special commissioner" for the event.
A massive power blackout had darkened most
of Lhasa, making the temple's guttering yak-butter
lamps an important source of illumination. About
2am, Luo Gan rose from his chair to read a State
Council resolution approving the three candidates
for the next Panchen Lama - "soul boys", as the
communist press referred to them. The boys' names,
inscribed on ivory tablets, were wrapped in yellow
silk and placed in the urn. A Tibetan lama shook
the urn.
Then another lama drew out a
tablet, and handed it to "special commissioner"
Gyaltsen Norbu. When the commissioner read the
winning boy's name, the assembled communist
officials erupted in cheers: the name of the next
Panchen Lama was Gyaltsen Norbu - the same as the
communist "special commissioner". The communists'
new Panchen Lama was six years old, from the same
remote Nagchu prefecture of northern Tibet as
Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, the Dalai Lama's choice. The
newly designated 11th Panchen Lama's parents were
both Communist Party members.
Flying
katas In the wake of the Panchen
Lama's entourage, our bus passed through the
well-guarded tunnel and bridges bristling with
rifle-toting soldiers. Hours later, we rolled into
Kangding, past a pair of Tibetan monks glumly
tending large clay urns billowing with incense. A
crowd lined the main streets, awaiting the passage
of the Panchen Lama. Given the widespread Tibetan
resistance to the Panchen Lama, I wondered who
came to the event. I wondered if the Tibetans
would kowtow to the Chinese choice of their
religious leaders.
Under a low, gray,
sullen sky, I watched the crowd waiting on
Kangding's winding main street: large clots of Han
Chinese immigrants, school classes waving little
flags, short-haired Tibetan men with Communist
Party pins on their rumpled suit-coat lapels
standing with their prosperous-looking wives clad
in rich brocade dresses.
Many in the crowd
held new white-silk kata offering scarves
to present to the Panchen Lama. A few sunburned
Tibetan nomads in yak-skin coats laughed and
peered up the street. Chinese soldiers and police
picketed the curb every six meters. Hard-eyed
Public Security men scanned the throng and
surrounding buildings. A sharp wind blew yellow
grit into people's eyes as 10 sturdy cops
jog-trotted down the street. A police car swept
past.
After a long interval, a motorcade
roared around the curve, prompting the monks
tending the incense burners to scurry for the
curb. In a flash, a SUV sped past with a slender
teenager in monk's robes benignly waving. A flurry
of white kata scarves momentarily filled
the air as the crowd hurled them after the
speeding car. Chinese men in an entourage of SUVs
and buses followed in close order, including a
grinning cameraman filming the kata-hurling
crowd. As the last car passed, the nomads
scrambled into the street to gather the fallen
offering scarves.
After the brief parade,
I encountered a pair of Buddhist monks in a shop
just off the main drag, a small Tibetan with
grizzled tufts sprouting from his shaven head, and
a fleshy, pockmarked man in patched maroon robes.
The burly monk suddenly asked, "You like this
Panchen Lama?" Knowing Public Security sometimes
assigns bogus monks to watch Westerners, I
noncommittally shrugged and waggled my hand. He
came up close and gave me a knowing look.
"I am so sad," he said. "This Panchen Lama
no good. You know, no good."
Douglas
Wissing is the author of Pioneer in Tibet:
The Life and Perils of Dr Albert Shelton,
published by Palgrave/Macmillan, and has
published with the New York Times, the Washington
Post, the Los Angeles Times and The Independent on
Sunday. He can be reached at dwissing@aol.com.
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