Walking In The Dahli Lama's Garden June Calender   © Copyright 2021 by June Calender

Photo courtesy of Pixabay.

June Calender

(calenderpages@gmail.com

Walking in the Dalai Lama’s Garden

I walk. It’s my exercise and often my transportation. For a woman of a certain age, walking in New York City, even in the daytime (especially in Central Park where I walked often) was not a time to put your mind in idle. I am alert, I watch, I assess. When I travel to other countries, free time is walking time, preferably by myself, away from whatever group or guide I am with. 0n my first trip to Lhasa, Tibet in 1996, I walked out of the gate of the Holiday Inn one afternoon. I noticed, as I had not when with others, that the entire property of the Holiday Inn was fenced, probably the gate was locked at night. To keep us in? To keep others out? Lhasa was an occupied city. (In 2024 it still is).

I was free that afternoon to walk through the gate. I shook my head ‘no’ to the bicycle-rickshaw men and also to the “Looky-Looky,” women who had spread cloths on the sidewalk to display an assortment of trinkets, jewelry, possible antiques. I had been told our group would not visit Norbulinka, the summer residence of the Dalai Lamas, because it was not been kept up. Monks were not allowed to tend the desecrated shrines and residential buildings. Norbulinka was open to the public but hardly any public cared to visit. “It’s sad,” the guide said.

I had read of its former grandeur. It was an easy walk from the hotel. The street was a major one, part of the traditional lingkor, the three-mile circle path around the city where pious Tibetans used to circumambulate every morning turning their hand-held prayer wheels and counting their mantras on 108-bead malas. The tradition was now forbidden just as owning a photo of the Dalai Lama was now a crime. A small uprising had occurred a few weeks ago. In the center of the city, near the most holy sites, brown uniformed soldiers loitered; their duty was simply watching. Our guide said a tourist caught slipping a picture of the Dalai Lama to a Tibetan would be thrown in jail; he wasn’t sure he could get anyone out of jail.

This October afternoon was sunny with a particular brightness and clarity of almost unpolluted air containing 25% less oxygen than at sea level. Such clarity distorted my perception of distance to the surrounding mountains. I didn’t realize until I returned home that the hypoxia, which makes some people dangerously ill, represses serotonin and increases dopamine in the brain gifted me with perceptual acuity and mild ecstasy that I have found lingers as love of the city and Tibetans now that I am back at sea level.

Norbulinka was only a mile west of the Potala Palace but the experience for a Dalai Lama was a complete change of environment: from a three-room apartment at the top of the vast Potala, looking down on all of Lhasa valley, to a garden complex in a woods, once a marsh, then converted to gardens, birdsong, koi ponds, individual shrines and a small zoo of animals sent by India and Nepal as gifts. Tigers, elephants and monkeys were surely pleasant relief from the hundreds of lamas that filled the Potala. Guidebooks described the beautifully tiled stables for horses, the most elegant and cleanest stables in all of central Asia.

The garden retreat had been the idea of the 6th Dalai Lama, a teen rebel against the austerity and grandeur of the Great 5th who masterminded the building of the Potala, making it the highest and grandest palace in the world with over 1000 rooms. The 6th chose to live almost entirely at Norbulinka. He also chose the prettiest young women in Tibet to live with him. He wrote poetry that was set to music extolling physical love, not monkish celibacy. He was scandalous; he was beloved and still is. He died young (possibly poisoned). His poems are still sung in Tibet.

I did serious homework to understand this country’s remarkable culture and history. Of course I needed to visit Norbulinka. I knew the sumptuous shrines had been destroyed. The gold covered statues I wanted to see had been destroyed. I read of twin golden statues: one of Cheresig, the thousand armed Buddha of compassion, with the 13th Dalai Lama, his avatar on earth standing like the twins they were believed to be. Destroyed, of course.

I found the gate and paid a small fee. I had not brought my camera, the guide had advised we take photos only when he said it was allowed. Our guide was obviously nervous about being here soon after an uprising. I had not told anyone where I was going to walk, perhaps, I thought, I should have.

This “front” entrance, the one used when the Dalai Lamas arrived in sedan chairs from the Potala, was not the most important one. The gate at the other end of the garden once housed an army barracks. That was the gate used by the 19-year old 14th Dalai Lama when he fled with a small body guard and a few trusted advisors to the exile he still endues over sixty years later.

 Inside the garden was a narrow road that had been graveled but now was mostly dirt. I had not walked far when I saw a small building. Two men stood at the doorway. I had no idea what kind of building it might be, one for caretaker’s implements, or an inside guard house? I walked up to the building and nodded to the men.  

“English?” asked one.

“American,” I said.

“I show you?” The man gestured at the doorway. The other said nothing.

“Yes, please,” I said. My right hand tightened where it habitually rested on my purse with its long strap across my body so as not to be snatched. I could easily be robbed although they would get only a few yuan. But my passport was in the purse, I would fight not to lose it.

The man stepped into the building. I was partly blinded by going into darkness from the brilliant sunlight. It was a small shrine; I saw flames flickering at the opposite end of the room, butter lamps beneath a painted picture on the wall.

The room got darker. The Chinese man was in the doorway. Was that a signal? He  stepped away from the door. Everything about the darkness said danger. I took a couple steps behind the man as he moved the beam of light over four painted, standing buddhasattvas similar to ones I had seen in other shrines where they were usually free-standing statues dressed in brocade. The man told me their names. His voice was fairly loud. He would said a name then  “You understand?” I said “Yes.’All I knew was that they were enlightened beings.

The man’s voice dropped as we moved into the darkness. “I Tibeti. He Chinese,” he said nodding toward the door. “I Buddhist; he not. Understand?”

“Yes, I understand.” He said a few more things in a thick accent that I did not understand. It seemed to be about the Chinese. We moved toward the butter lamps with their distinctive rancid scent that perfumed all shrine rooms. The room grew a little darker, we saw that the Chinese man was again in the doorway, watching us.  

“This Mahakala,” the Tibeti said loudly, shining the light on the fierce demon-like god astride a furious horse that trampled on a nearly naked man. The god wore a necklace of skulls. I had learned that fierce and frightful pictures like this were pictures of a god trampling evil. The light played over the god’s fierce face with bulging eyes, over the screaming horse, over the twisted being beneath the horse’s hooves. “He kill evil; see skulls?” His voice was loud and the shadow in the doorway moved away, letting light come into the small room.  

The man began speaking rapidly in his almost impossible English. I understood he was talking about the recent uprising. Perhaps he mentioned prison. He wants to be free, to escape but he cannot. Do I understand?  I understood that much. “Will you tell Americans Tibetis want freedom, want to worship Dalai Lama,?” He whispered the words.

“Yes, I understand.”He talked rapidly; his accent was too thick. I did not understand. He showed me the other wall with more Budddhasattvas. He took my hand for just a moment, holding it tightly, “You will tell?”


“I will tell.” We went out into the light. “Thank you,” I said. “Tashidaley.”

The Chinese man was smoking. If I  went to the other end of the garden I would find more Chinese guards and the sad remains of once beautiful buildings, koi ponds without koi, flower gardens without flowers. The Dalai Lama’s summer residence with no holy man there, no caretaker monks. No bird song filled the tree tops, no insects scurried underfoot, partly because it was early afternoon, the hottest time of the day. But also because some years earlier the Chinese had instituted a rule for all Tibetan school children: they must kill the Four Pests. Tibetans did not take life, they did not kill animals or bids or even insects. School children were given quotas: they must bring, weekly, a certain number of “Pests”: flies, frogs, rodents, birds, other insects. Tibetans had not been free for nearly forty years, since before the man in the shrine was born, I thought.

I walked the derelict drive and came to a path that went into the silent, weedy woods. I had lost interest in the tiled stable and empty animal cages. I would find more brown uniformed soldiers. I have a good sense of direction, I found another path that took me back to the gate.. Further down the road I crossed to an embankment along the Chichu River.  I sat for a while on the grass feeling sad. An elderly, bent, Tibetan couple approached. Their hands were busy spinning small prayer wheels. As they reached me the man whispered, “Dalai Lama?” He hoped for a picture. I could only show him my empty hands.

Further along the embankment I came to another broad street that I assumed  would lead to the Potala. It did. Tomorrow our group would go into that grand building, we would see the Dalai Lama’s apartment; we would stand on the roof and look down over the long forbidden city and see many places where modern buildings stood. We would see a construction site where little enclaves of Tibetans had lived in the Chinese manner with several buildings for an extended family around a central courtyard. Soon the city would sprout Soviet style apartment building, tall and ugly in this city where it was believed no building should be tall enough to look down on the Potala Palace.

On a street beside the Potala I found a good vantage point and stared up at the Great Fifth’s structure. A young woman on a bicycle stopped beside me. “‘Merica?’” she asked. I nodded yes. She pointed to toward the roof. “Dalai Lama,” she whispered. She had tears in her eyes. I was afraid that if I embraced her some brown shirted Chinese soldier would appear and take her away for conversing with a foreigner.

“Dalai Lama,” I said and blinked away my own tears.  

I have told many people about my meeting with the man in Norbulinka. My telling may be remembered by a few people, but nothing has helped the Tibetans. I am as helpless here in America as I was there in Lhasa.

That was 1996. Thirty years later, 2016, the Chinese have initiated another of their frequent attempts to stamp out all Tibetan culture. Not long ago a news item said they are destroying homes near the few monasteries that remain (allowed largely for international tourism) in what was Eastern Tibet. For 50-plus years Tibetans have been  jailed for the smallest infractions, often tortured. In 2015, 130 Tibetans, who do not believe in violence against others, self-immolated in protest. This resulted only in more jailings and more torture of prisoners. After sixty years of systematic ethnic cleansing, no country has challenged the Chinese’ relentless efforts to destroy the Tibetans and their culture. So far as we know, Tibetans who were forced to kill “pests” have not killed one of the Chinese.