THE LIVING GOD OF LHASA

By FOSCO MARAINI

In our i88tH! oj November 1943 w. publiaMd an anielt! on LamaiMn tnMongolia. Thi" ttme our reader" are taken to it" original home, 7'tbet, in a .tudyoj thai 1.lIle·A-rlOwn per80nuY6, the Deala; Lama.

Dr. Marai,.i, who lil,ta in Kyoto, vi8iUd Tibet Jor tA. pt.U"p08e oj antAropologi.colruearch. Ife rurntly publil,hed in Japan a collulton oj hi4 beaw;Jul photogro

THE LIVnW GOD OF LHASA 33

the Dalai seems no exception. WhenEkai Kawaguchi-the Japanese monkwho secretly visited Tibet in 1900/02-was sub equentIy found out to have beena foreigner, many people who had be-friended him were tortured. His Holinessthe Dalai even had some pairs of eyesgouged out by way of punishment!

A picturesque and imaginative officialTibetan genealogy provideM a series ofover sixty earthly reincarnations forAvalokitesvara. The divine origin of thepower held by the Dalai Lama has thusconveniently been pushed back into thedepths of legendary history. The mostexigent intellect of Central Asia couldhardly re-ai. t the emotional compulsionof such a hoary tradition which takesits life from the very origin of things,descending indeed from the sky. Inreality, the genealogy is very short, datingonly from the sixteenth century. Whilethere have been 124 Emperors of Japanand 266 Popes in Rome, the presentDalai Lama is only the fourteenth of hisseries.

Prior to the s '\'enth centurv of ourera when Buddhism was first i~troducedto the highlands beyond the H imalll.yu.s,little or nothing is known of Tibet. Itseems that the resistance of the nativeHon religion was very strong, provingthat an indigenous culture was not al-together lacking, At that time theTibetans were notorious for being wa.rlikebrigands; and one of the king, Srongtsan-Gam po, forced a Chinese emperor to ahumiliating peace in which he obtainedl\ princess of the blood in marriage.Another princess had been given to himpreviously by the King of Nepal.

\

THE XXt.h CENTURY

to manifest their pre6ence five times onearth, in five different living beings(Manushi), one for each Kalpa or age ofthe world. Gll.utnma was only the Manu-shi of Avalokitesvara for the Kalpa inwhich we are still living, namely, thefourth. Thus the philo::lopher who hadpreached a lofty, Berene, stoic way ofdeliverance without gods, ended by takinga humble place as the emanation of allemanation of an emanation in a vastcongress of supernatuml beings.

And what supernatural beings! Nearlyall emanated female energies (Shakti),with whom they hastened to engage infantastic cclestial orgies of bejeweledobscenity. Morals and ethics were super-seded by sacrifices and appeasement or,worse, by sorcery and magic. The Ely-sian Bocial climber no longer needed tobehave well or be good; all he had todo was repeat certain formulas and per-form (correctly) certain ritunl act~. Theoriginal teachings wore no longer rec·ognizable.

This form of religion was promptlyaccepted in Tibet. Gradually the powerof the monks became paramount. Theancient kingdom broke up into a numberof independent fiefs, the lords of whiohactively fought each other. When Ku-bini Khan, in the thirteenth century,wi hed to receh-e the blessing of thegreatest Church in Asia, he invited theh\ma of the Sakya monastery (ncarShigatJ e) to his court. In return hegranted this religious ruler the temporalsovereignty over Tibet. Thus the priest-king tradition was established.

However, that tradition did not becomea driving force in the country until twocenturies later. Bmldhism, a a religion,had sunk to a degen·rate form of devilworship, and the power of the Sakyalamao had once more dwindled to nothingin the fnce of the turbulent feudal 10rdIl,unt.il a great reformation, which had bothreligious and practical results, was wlder-taken by Tsong-kapa (1358-1417), thefounder of the "Yellow sect." A cen-tralized hierarchy and administration, asound educational curriculum, strict super-vision, and a high moral tone (marriage

and concubinage were forbidden) com-bined to gi\-e this organization an out-standing position in the religious life ofTibet.

'J'song-kapa's nephew, Gedundub (1391-1475), was the first Great Lama of theYel10w sect. At bis death the succes-sion was shrewdly based on the theoryof reincarnation; but tbe extension ofthis idea to the metaphysical refinementof appearing as an Avalokitesvara in theflesh seems to date from the fifth GreatLama, Nagwang-Lhozang (1617-1682).

This last-mentioned pontiff was a manof great energy, of ruthless ambition,and perfecUy adapted to succeed in thatatmosphere of transcendent Maehiavellismso typical of Tibet. After having attaineda strong position as head of the greatDepung Monastery, he persuaded a Mon-gol prince, Uu~ri Khan, to conquer thecountry, an enterprise which Beoms toluwe been completed quite easily. Nat-urally the barbaric potentate, who wasunder the spiritual sway of the monks.ended by presenting Tibet to the GreatLama (1640) and by granting him theMongol title of Dalai, meaning "(vast as)the ocean." Ten years later tlus sover·eignty was also recognized by the ChineseEmperor.

To give this newly acquired power ofhis a dignified setting, the "Great }i'ifth"(as he is known in Tibet) Luilt a majesticstronghold near Lhn.sa, which he called-after the mythical Indian residence ofhis celest inl self, Avalokitesvam-thePotala. He also set out to invent pic-tW'esque legends magnifying his ownpower and dra tically limited that of theother sect8, which ended by acknowledg-ing his supremacy as the head of theLama Church.

On.ly one lama, the Panchen ("GreatGem of Learning") or Tashi Lama, livingat Tashilumpo (near Shigat8e), was al-lowed to hold a position in some wayscomparable to that of the Dalai in LhuoSa.Here philo80phicalniceties come in again:the Panchen is considered to be theincarnation of Amitaba, one of the fiveDbyani Buddhas. and actually the "fa-

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~CENJURY

THE

13th DALAI LAMA

A D HIS REALM

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'IRE LTYISG GOD OF LHASA 37

tber" of Avalokite~vam. Hence, from atrictly theological point of view, the

Pan 'hen is superior in saintliness to hiscolleague in Lhusa. The idea eem "how vcr, tu he that to deal with theworld is not worthy of 'uch u grel~t godas Amitaba. and that politic: t;houltl beIdt to t.he Dalai.

The fifth Dalai perfected the sy ·tem of8ul'ceH:ion 1)." rcincaTllll.tion. Jt is in-tereRt ing to note that the other sectsI5tartcd at onl'(' tll COp." l;uch I~n excellentiden; now there are :even~1 hundred"Ii\'illg .Burldha~·' ill Tibet alltl Mongolia,every monastery wisbillg to have its own.Indeed, the whole paRt history of Tibethas been readjustetl 011 incarnation lilles.The anciellt king ~rongt8all-( ;Ullll.lO waslittetl into the series of Avalokitel:lvara'slive' on earth, and Tsong-kapa was de-clared to have been a living Manjushri,or "(:od of Wisdom."

Th lli:l we see that the actual politicalpower of the lamas is a. compara.tivelyr cent acquisition. It is also amusing tonotice that wbiJe Comte, the FronchphiJmolopber, used to say that man pro-ceed" from a theological to a motaphy 'icaland 1:1stly to a positi\'o stago, in Tibetexactly the reverse ha happ ned. Thekingdom was succeeded by the 'akyapope and ended in the Lhasa living god.

The sixth Dalai (16 :1-1706) l:ieern' tohave been a mORt entertaining yOllth whopnsFeri most ()f hill time elegantly carous-ing /Lnd mnking lo\-e in the gardensnrouml Lhal:iH.. He wrot.e Ulany poems,"hif·h arc l:ilill ].lopullLr in Tibet. Theeltlcn; of the Church said t.hat, for once,the I'eincarnation must have been mis-taken. and the remarkable Dalai was 'oondepol:'cd and ultimately killed.

_" _. one fnction believed him really t.ohave been :halokites\ara'a soul, a lon~period of dil:!tul'uanccs ensued. The (jhi-nese were al 0 dragged in. and finallythe Emperor Ka,ng Hsi Kent up a.n army.He restored flome order but curtailed thepuwer of the lama by appointing tworeprc."entatives (Am ban) with great power.

The men in the polit ical game werenow the Dnlni, the various party leadcrs

among the heads of the principal monas-terie. , the principal feudal lords, and thetwo foreign representati,·es. The Mach-iavellian" ~nme of che on the roof ofthe world continued, now even morevaricd and ent'rtaining, mingled withtreason, I '''llssinatiom-, and torture,againl:it the invigible ba,ckground of I:lubtletheological theoric' and in the dubiousglamour of celestial glury.

The poor living god cannot be said toha.ve enjoyed a good time. Four IlalaiLaniUS. the nint.h to the twelth (from1bOG tu 1HH), all died very young and ina mysterious way, one at cleven andthe remaining three at eighteen. Evi-dently the exalted position was not c'on-dueive to u pntriarehal age. The strangehaste in the tmnl-lnligration of Avaloki-tesvara's suul is easily u('counted for: thepolitical powers preferred to have a mereregent at the bead of the state ratherthan a living god who e hold on thepopulnc'e would have been too strong forthem to cope with.

In 1876 the thirteenth Dalai was born.He soon gave proof of an unusual energyand Hatly refused to die at the canonicalage of eighteen, like his predecessors.By [I, clever stratagem he practically gotrid of the Ambans, amI then he set outto reorga.nize the government of Tibetindependently of Chinese rule.

The .Japanese monk Ekai Kawaguchi,who saw the Dalai in 1902, when theliving god was about twenty-Iiix, says inhis book Three Years in Tibet: "TheDnla.i Lama looks very brave. His eye-brows are very high, anti he i very k

38 THE XXth OENTURY

armed expedition to Lhasa (1904\. TheDalai fled to Mongolia and then to China.

The moment the British retired fromLhasa, the Chinese renewed their tradi-tional policy Ilnd claimed sovereigntyover the country. The Dalai returnedto Lhasa in 1909 but had very 800n toflee again, pursued this time by theChinese. He passed the next few yearsin India. At last, when the Republicanrevolution in China had made Lhasauntenable for his enemies he returnedto the holy city in 1912.

From then on tiLl about 1920, frontierincidents with the Chinese continued togive much trouble to the Tibetan Gov-ernment. Later on a period of com-parative peace permitted the Dalai toundertake a series of internal reforms andto continue the reconstruction of a power

which had been handed to him greatlycurtailed. The most notable incident inthese last years has been the open dis-sension between the Panchen Lama, whowas pro-Chinese, and the Dalai Lama,who was pro-British. The Panchen Lamaleft Tibet for China and then tried severaltimes to return with the aid of a Chineseescort, but without success. He finallydied in e:xile, shortly after the death ofhis Ulore fortunate rival, the Dalai, in1935.

The new fourteenth Dalai has beenfound at Jekundo, in Eastern Tibet, andwas enthroned a short time ago. Whatdoes the future hold in store for thisyoung gilded living god, in whose un-known person are concentrated theadoration of humble believers and theenvy and hatred of crafty rivals?

tRe!igioas CferoorLouis IX, known to the world as Saint Louis, loved to have the

Norman sea rovers baptized en masse and was convinced that there-upon they immediately took a turn for the better. For the solemnceremony each of them was presented with white garments whichthey were allowed to keep.

One Easter Sunday there were such crowds of people seekingbaptism that there were not enough robes to go round and coarsesubstitute garments had to be provided in a. hurry. A Norman noble-man flung his baptismal robe down in a rage and cried: "The devil!This is the twentieth time I have had myself baptized-but I havenever yet been given such rags!"

tFriendsnipThe Duke of Villeroy, a governor under Louis XV, wa.~ asked

who was going to be appointed Minister of Finance.

"I have no idea who will be given the post," he replied. "Butno matter who it is-I am a close friend and a distant relative of his."

q)eaf~ tWnere is CGng c!fing?It is hardly news that Veronal, the well-known sleep-inducing

drug, is very popular among would-be suicides as it is fatal when takenin an overdose. But it is news that the manufacturers have nowtaken steps to prevent this misuse. Every tablet still contains exactlythe sa.me dose of the effective substances; but in addition to this everytablet now contains a small quantity of a powerful emetic. A sleeplesspatient taking the proper number of tablets will get his sleep withoutany unpleasant sensation. A would·be suicide, however, who swallowswhat he imagines to be a fatal dose of Veronal will simply be very, verysick and probably feel sorry the next day that he ever thought ofsuicide.

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