It’s described to me as ‘a campus’ but with cell-phone beeps and a constant quiet coming and going between departments, another description comes to mind.
This is a highly motivated Garden of Eden.
It nevertheless retains a typically Buddhist character. There is an amiable sense of tranquillity, people don’t shout and everyone works with seraphic concentration, whether in the thangka workshop, painting fine detail on a banner of beasts, angry gods and flying horses, or in the metal shop, hammering out the base of a sitting Buddha from a sheet of copper, or in an inscription room, sitting beneath a framed picture of the Dalai Lama and copying onto long, thin, rectangular plates the text of Buddhist scriptures picked out in gold, coral and silver.
Everywhere we go we are received with quiet cordiality and politely but persistently followed by a video camera recording our every move.
It’s impressive, if a little tiring, all this courtesy and hospitality, and I’m not quite sure where it will all lead. The Tibetans in exile are skilful operators and I admire the tenacity and persistence with which they court world opinion, but as time goes by the Chinese are strengthening their hold on Tibet, while adopting more liberal policies towards the Buddhists and better relations with the rest of the world. It’s hard to see where the leverage might be applied to get them to change their policy and allow a meaningful Tibetan government to work from Lhasa rather than McLeodganj.
Another problem is that over the last 44 years increasing numbers of the people who are running the government in exile have been born and bred in India and have never seen the country they represent.
As we saw at Norbulingka this afternoon, life is comfortable for the cultural executives and it would surely not be easy to uproot themselves from this congenial corner and relocate to a cold plateau on the far side of the Himalayan wall.
Day Thirty Eight : Dharamsala and McLeodganj
Our audience with the Dalai Lama is at 2.15 this afternoon. We arrive early and film in the streets of McLeodganj. It’s Gandhi’s birthday and a public holiday, but no day off for the desperate figures in vests and cotton trousers trying to mend roads as cars continue to drive along them, or for the limbless beggars squatting beneath a Western Union sign, or the bundles of rags with hands protruding outside the cyber cafe. I’ve never seen so many mutilated and deformed people in one place, and there’s not much you can do but walk on and try to avoid eye contact. Their own people, I notice, ignore them completely.
I stop to make some notes leaning up against a metal post crowned with a thick mesh of unprotected electric cabling. A boy, not more than five or six, holds out his hand.
‘Hello.’ He repeats softly, ‘Hello.’
An older man with a stick simply stands there with a small pail, whimpering soundlessly. Passing these wraith-like figures are the substantial, muscular, Western backpackers who home in on these places, looking for cheap accommodation while sporting designer shades that would cost a street mender six months’ wages.
Poverty is corrosive, but it’s always worse when it is found side by side with wealth. Occupants of shanty towns in the Philippines or South America are as poor as this but they have their own, fierce, communal pride, and (apart from BBC film crews) they don’t have rich foreigners walking their streets every day.
We’re at the Tsechokling Temple in good time. The Dalai Lama is giving a public audience before he speaks to us and security is tight. A beagle sniffer-dog is led along the line by a Sikh policeman. In the outer office leading to the Dalai Lama’s private quarters we’re politely asked to sit and wait while our papers are checked. A poster on the opposite wall makes depressing reading. ‘China’s Record in Tibet’ is blazoned across the top. ‘More than a Million Killed, More than 6000 Monasteries Destroyed, Thousands in Prison, Hundreds Still Missing’, and in big red letters at the bottom, ‘China Get Out of Tibet’.
The Dalai Lama’s bungalow is spacious but not ostentatious. A room full of the various medals, awards and citations he’s been given from all over the world gives onto a long, cool, marble-tiled verandah, from which a few steps lead down to a driveway that snakes around an oval garden bed full of conventional roses and marigolds. A desk has been set up at the bottom of these steps, beneath the protective shade of bushy bougainvillea. A long line of visitors is being led in, at its head an Indian Catholic priest in white robe with a prominent crucifix around his neck.
Monks line the drive, a most benevolent form of crowd control.
At 12.40, dead on time, the man they’ve been waiting for appears and without fuss or bother he begins to greet them, going through all 700, showing interest in every individual, catching the eye, trying to avoid identical responses. Whereas a lot of the Westerners pass by quite briskly, like students collecting passing-out degrees, the Tibetan monks approach slowly, utterly awed, some bent double in their supplication. Though I have the impression that the Dalai Lama is not comfortable with too much respect, he listens earnestly and at length to their requests and has a nice way of rubbing his hand across their shaven heads and, occasionally, bending forward to brush his lips against their foreheads.
By two o’clock the last of the line has gone through, and he is escorted away by his efficient, ever so slightly severe minders, only to reappear on the verandah minutes later to address a group of 60 new arrivals from Tibet, refugees who have just made the difficult and dangerous crossing through the mountains as he did 45 years ago. One of his private secretaries translates his remarks for me. Very interesting they are too. He begins in a folksy way, sitting, hands on hips, trying to draw these cowed and respectful new arrivals out. He starts by asking if any of them had been caught by the border police, or lost money and valuables on the way. He asks about the current state of the hospitals and schools. Do they teach Tibetan? How many lumberjacks are there in Tibet these days (a reference to the massive deforestation since the Chinese arrived)? Then he talks to them quietly but with authority. He tells them that since September last year the government in exile has renewed official contact with the Chinese. Though he hears that the Chinese occupation is even more repressive than the year before, he notes that more Chinese are visiting Tibet, both as tourists and pilgrims, and that there is a growing interest in things Tibetan around the world, which is putting pressure on the Chinese.
It is important that they retain their Tibetan culture and language but Buddhism is far from being an irrelevant, unchanging religion. Buddhists and scientists have much in common, while in the field of psychology the Buddhists are well ahead. He grins. By 2000 years.
We will win, he assures them, because we have truth and truth will ultimately prevail. Don’t worry. Educate yourselves. Learn Chinese. Learn about the world outside Tibet, because if he ever returns to Lhasa he will not go back to a feudal society. Go back, he says to the ones who plan to return home, and tell them that.
It’s a sober, realistic, pragmatic message, implying, quite clearly, that the past is past. He has accepted the fact, if not all the practices, of the Chinese occupation. It echoes the mix of Buddhist spirituality and 21st-century savvy that characterizes the operation here in McLeodganj.
Meanwhile we have set up our cameras and lights in the audience room, hung with thangkas with a finely modelled shrine to the Buddha at one end, but as our time comes round, the secretary appears, eyebrows raised apologetically, to tell us that a group of local worthies have to be accommodated, but his Holiness hopes to get them through in five minutes. It sounds as if he’ll be exhausted.