Over the past century, the Tibetan lama figure has come to be crys-talized in the figure of the Grand Lama, the Dalai Lama. [39] The person of the present fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, has been instrumental in this. The Dalai Lama's contemporary image has moved beyond the confines of images such as Kipling's fictitious "Teshoo Lama." He is not only a figure of unalloyed admiration in the West; he symbolizes Tibet itself.
Pre-twentieth-century accounts of the Dalai Lama were unflattering. Jesuit missionaries Grueber and D'Orville, the first Europeans to visit Lhasa (1661), declined to meet the Dalai Lama, describing him as "that devilish god the father who puts to death those who refuse to adore him" (in Richardson 1988, 23). In the eighteenth century, Ippolito Desideri reasoned that the "alleged incarnation of the Grand Lama must be a work of the Devil (in De Filippi 1932, 204). Du Halde, in his brief description of Tibet, was clear: "The multitude of Lamas in Tibet is incredible… So long as he [Grand Lama] continues [to be the] Master of Tibet, Christianity will make little or no progress there" (1738, 388). Interestingly, the earliest reference to Tibet in a novel was in Balzac's Old Goriot, where the "Grand Lama" is used as a metaphor for absolute power (Bishop 2001). Positive portrayal of the Dalai Lama is relatively rare, such as in Manning's description of his meeting in 1811 with the ninth Dalai Lama (seven years old): "I was extremely affected by this interview with the lama. I could have wept through strangeness of sensation" (in Richardson 1998, 395).
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Dalai Lama was an enigma. The Younghusband expedition presented the British public with the idea of the Dalai Lama as the "mysterious god-king of Tibet, embodying a line of spiritual predecessors vaguely envisaged as stretching back into the mists of history" (in Richardson 1998, 382). The fact that during the Lhasa invasion the Dalai Lama fled Tibet and was therefore beyond the control of the British added to the mystery. Yet this mystification did not necessarily translate into admiration. For instance, when the thirteenth Dalai Lama was interviewed in 1911 by William Ellis for The Continent, a Presbyterian paper, the interviewer was not deeply impressed. "His face is thoroughly pock-marked… his ears, which are large and pointed at the top, are his most noticeable feature. His moustache is waxed horizontally, while his head, in a lesser personage, would be called bullet-shaped" (New York Times 1911). Of the things the Lama had to talk about, what most pleased his interviewer was his assertion that, upon returning to Tibet at the end of his long exile following the Younghusband expedition, he intended to send young Tibetan men to America for a Western education. There is not much hint of mysticism here but there is a reference to the "strategic" location of Tibet.
In the early years of the twenty-first century, the Western version of the Dalai Lama as a personification of Tibet has taken a literal form. His exile from Tibet has meant that Tibet has been emptied of its real content (see Barber 1969). "Real Tibet dream comes when you meet his Holiness because then-it's actualized" (Gere, in Frontline 1998b). He is seen as embodying Tibet and Tibetan culture: "He creates images of Tibet, builds community through alliances among resident and exiled Tibetan populations, sustains non-Tibetan and Tibetan Buddhist believers, works toward Tibetan self-determination and functions as the central focus of power and identity within the Tibetan diaspora" (Houston and Wright 2003, 218).
Journalistic accounts of meeting with him tend to emphasize elements of Tibetanness in his body or attire or laugh. "The Dalai Lama embodies Tibetan culture and Tibetan cause; he provides the refugees with a concrete example of how to live by the abstract values of their culture" (Forbes 1989, 160; see also Rose and Warren 1995, which calls him the "Living Tibet"). His books are instant best sellers. And yet at the same time, the main reason for his international profile is his internationalism, his status as a global spiritual and moral leader. He "is a symbol of continuity with the spiritual traditions of Tibet… and, for western admirers, a consistent voice of sanity in an age of violence" (Hilton 2006, 29). The Dalai Lama manages to combine nationalism (always already based on particularistic identity) with universal ideas of compassion and peace (see Gyatso 1998) and this is where his appeal lies.
The Dalai Lama acts as a unifying symbol for matters of religion and politics. We may take the celebration of anniversaries in Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile in India, particularly the March 10 Uprising Day and Monlam festival, as illustrating this. Taken together these two represent the paradigm of chos srid gnyis Idan (religion and politics combined) with the Dalai Lama on the top. On Uprising Day the secular Tibetan government renews its worldly claims for national independence, using metaphors in currency in the international community. Monlam, on the other hand, attempts to ground the refugee society in the changelessness of the Buddhist doctrine and the priesthood that embodies it. Both represent the dynamic of change and continuity, the nation and religion. The unifying symbol bridging both events is the Dalai Lama, the king and the god, the active agent between this world and the next. He presents contradictory images: a "simple Buddhist monk" and the head of Tibetan Buddhism; human and god; world-renouncing as well as world- encompassing (Klieger 1994, 67). Personal loyalty to the Dalai Lama plays a key role in the government-in-exile's efforts to strengthen the sense of a unified Tibetan identity. In Korom's words, "Faith in Buddhism and in Dalai Lama's office has provided cohesion necessary for maintaining a form of 'proto-nationalism' within a broadly dispersed world society'' (1997b, 3). The Dalai Lama is also the chief symbol of the Tibetan cause in the international arena.
The unique role of the Dalai Lama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, is perhaps the major reason for Tibet's international exposure. His spiritual, nonviolent approach and frequent travels around the world not only generate much interest in Tibetan Buddhism but also serve to maintain attention to the status of Tibetans and Chinese practices in the region. (Gurr and Khosla 2001, 280-81)
That Sino-Tibetan conflict has come to revolve around the interpretation of the Dalai Lama as an individual is also evident from Bill Clinton's statement in Beijing: "I have spent time with the Dalai Lama, I believe him to be an honest man, and I believe that if he had a conversation with President Jiang Zemin, they would like each other very much" (World Tibet News 1998). On the other hand, critics like Rupert Murdoch support the Chinese occupation by attacking him: "I have heard cynics who say he's a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes… It [old Tibetan society] was a pretty terrible old autocratic society out of the Middle Ages" (World Tibet News 1999; emphasis added). These representations fail to convey through their imagery a sense of the process by which the Dalai Lama has come to represent his constituency or that the Tibet he represents is a "political Tibet with a defined territory and customs, or a highly complex society in transition with a wide range of sectors and interests, and a rapidly changing social environment" (Barnett 2001, 300-301). Without denying the cen-trality of the figure of the Dalai Lama to the Tibetan civilization, it can be argued that the current literalization of the Dalai Lama as Tibet is intimately linked to the Western imagination and Western desires. Another facet of this imagination is Tibet as the "rooftop of the world," allowing for a once-in-a-lifetime temporal and spiritual journey by Westerners.
[39] Interestingly, Kipling had borrowed the term "Teshoo Lama" from earlier British accounts of the limited interaction with Tibetans at the end of the eighteenth century. George Bogle (see Markham 1876) as well as Samuel Turner (Turner 1971/1800), representatives of the East India Company, had both interacted with Tashi Lama/Teshoo Lama (later known as Panchen Lama).