Waiting for the Dalai Lama: Stories of faith and devotion

When kindness goes hiding

By Tenzin Tsundue

When I was lodged in a Chinese jail in Tibet two decades ago, I had to listen every morning to a radio programme in Tibetan language, abusing and mocking the Dalai Lama. As a helpless prisoner in a Lhasa jail, it deeply pained me, but I endured it by pitying the small-mindedness of an otherwise powerful military power, China.

This happened shortly after my graduation. I had planned a secret mission to sneak into Tibet and start a revolution among nomads and farmers. I was only 22. I managed to cross the border undetected by the Indian personnel. After five days of clambering over the rocky Himalayas, crossing the Indus river and traversing the cold desert swept by blizzards, I was arrested by Chinese border forces.

After being thrown out of Tibet, I enrolled at Bombay University. His Holiness had come to the city for a public event. Along with others, I was granted five minutes. I related my Tibet story. In those years, Tibetans were escaping Tibet, but no exile-born Tibetan had gone into Tibet, been jailed and returned alive. He called me pawopatruk, meaning ‘a little hero’. That was my first personal audience with him.

Then, amid the chaos of the Tibetan national uprising in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when China came under international pressure for violently suppressing protests, His Holiness came out in support of China, saying: “China deserves a good Olympics.”

As an activist, I was deeply disappointed. We had spent years trying to expose China, and just when the world was finally beginning to listen, His Holiness softened the blow. This wasn’t the first time. In 1991, when Tibetan lobbyists were trying to isolate China, His Holiness had supported its bid to join the World Trade Organization.

His Holiness said that our struggle was not only about political freedom, but also about inner freedom: from anger, hatred and greed. The real enemy, he said, was within us. The enemy on the outside is our teacher, because they challenge our patience, kindness and forgiveness. Your enemy trains you in compassion and makes you spiritually resourceful. You cannot practise kindness in a solitary cave or an air-conditioned room. That year, I came to know a new Dalai Lama.

His Holiness simply introduces Buddhism as kindness. He says: “Practise kindness whenever possible, and it is always possible.”

But this is easier said than done. When your enemy comes to your door to kill you, kindness goes hiding. Yet when you are weakest, it is not anger but kindness that saves you.

I first saw the Dalai Lama when I was in class five. I was perhaps 11. Our school, the Tibetan Children’s Village in Patlikuhal in the Kullu valley, packed us all into four large buses and brought us to Manali. In a forest garden, we were neatly seated in front of the Dalai Lama, who was perched on a throne. Gesturing towards us, he said we were the future seeds of Tibet.

That reinforced two things: our identity was Tibetan, and that our reality was that of refugees. I took a pledge to educate and empower myself, to become worthy of the cause. A freedom fighter was born.

When I travel around India, my Tibetan face often attracts unwanted attention. Some Indians, to my great consternation, call me Chinese. In moments like these, we say we are the Dalai Lama’s people. Sometimes even that doesn’t help. My final resort is Mount Kailash, the abode of Lord Shiva. Indians believe Shiva lives in Tibet. And we believe that the Buddha of our times lives in India.

The author is a Tibetan writer and activist based in Dharamsala.

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The wish-fulfilling gem

By Palden Sonam

I DO NOT REALLY remember when or how I came to know that Yeshi Norbu is another name for His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Yeshi literally means “as the mind wishes” and Norbu means gem in Tibetan. Together, the name means the wish-fulfilling gem. Most Tibetans in Tibet call him by this name.

I also do not know how I came to have great faith, from a young age, in a Buddhist lama whom even my grandparents, though they fervently wished to, had never seen. To the best of my memory, I cannot recall any instance of my elders telling me to have devotion or respect for the Dalai Lama. It is almost as if I inherited their unshakeable faith in him the way I inherited their genes—they without having to tell me, and I without having to ask. I had, however, seen his image when I was in Tibet, but I don’t recall how he looked in that picture.

My family is from a nomadic region in eastern Tibet, and like most Tibetan homes, we kept a portrait of the Dalai Lama on our altar, as it was relatively safe then given the remoteness of our region. This is no longer the case. It was also common at the time for us children to wear small pictures of various Buddhist saints and lamas, including the Dalai Lama, around our neck to protect us from harm.

I recall two occasions when I sensed the danger of possessing a photo of the Dalai Lama. It was probably in 1998 when I was in Lhasa with my aunt’s family. While we were having dinner, there was a loud knock on the door. Instantly, one of the elders stood up and hid an image of the Dalai Lama in a drawer. Then the door opened and some Chinese police entered, asked a few questions and left. Luckily, there was no search that night.

The other occasion is more personal. After several days of walking and hiding in the Himalayas, we were about to sneak into Nepal in January 2000. But our luck ran out and we were caught by the Chinese border security. They took us to a small town and kept us in a detention centre. It was as dark, as it was cold. I heard the voice of a monk advising me to get rid of the small picture of the Dalai Lama I had around my neck, along with an amulet and many Jindue (blessed knots). If they found the image, he warned, they would beat me and trample on the picture.

I was as terrified of being beaten up as much as I was of the picture of the Dalai Lama being crushed under Chinese boots. I grew up in a culture where the words of Buddha dharma and images of Buddhist deities, saints, masters and lamas are revered as holy. More than the intended humiliation, it was the weight of negative karma that frightened me.

So, during dinner, when we were allowed outside, I threw the image onto the roof of our detention room. After two months, we were released. My uncle, an adamant man, soon made another attempt to escape to India with me. This time, I succeeded.

It was a fine June day in Dharamsala in 2000. The newcomers from Tibet had lined up early in the morning for an audience with His Holiness. When he appeared, the moment felt not only dream-like, but also deeply emotional—some were crying, others praying.

Finally, I had seen Yeshi Norbu. This was the secret wish of my elders. Their other wish was to give me a good education. Yeshi Norbu has fulfilled the wishes of our elders as much as ours, the next generation.

The author researches issues related to Tibet, Sino-Indian relations and Chinese domestic politics.

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Waiting for the Dalai Lama

By Tenzin Dickie

I HAVE WAITED many times for His Holiness to arrive. When I was at school in Dharamsala in India, every time the Dalai Lama went out of station—to America, to Europe, or maybe South India—our teachers took us to the bazaar. We waited in line by the roadside, to receive him, to send him off, to welcome him back. We loved it—it meant a half day in the bazaar instead of in school. We waited in the sun, talking quietly, gossiping, keeping the line, restless and shifting, desultory as the hour went by—and then suddenly, a hush swept over the lines, and we all straightened, excited and awed, open and ready to receive His Holiness. 

Finally, we saw the cars coming, windows open—His Holiness smiling, raising his hand, receiving our reception. I always wished, as I am sure so many of my classmates did too, to catch his glance or somehow receive special attention from the Dalai Lama. I wanted to be blessed. Of course, just seeing him is blessing—that’s why we were there, waiting in the streets, so he could bless us, with his glance, with his presence, with his being among us. I always felt raw after these encounters—broken open somehow, a light spilling in, or maybe out.

When I was 14, I moved away from my exile Tibetan world in north India to the new world in Boston on the American east coast. I missed my former life desperately, or rather, I missed my people. So, after college, I went to work for the Office of Tibet in New York. Among my myriad duties was helping my boss, the Representative of His Holiness and the Tibetan government, to coordinate and oversee all visits of His Holiness to the entire Americas. 

My first big visit was in DC. After a final check making sure that all the rooms were sufficiently prepared at the Park Hyatt, I went down to stand with my colleagues to wait and receive His Holiness and his entourage from India. I told myself not to cry. I couldn’t get emotional, I was at work. If I got weepy, it would be so unprofessional.

His Holiness came in, followed by his staff and the Representative. As I bowed my head and offered up a white scarf, I felt—nothing. I mean, a light giddiness, a heightened buzz and excitement, sure, but none of the weepiness that I had been anxious about and none of the transcendence either. I had sufficiently fortified myself against his presence. It was just work—incredibly meaningful work, of course—but it was work and I was working. It was mundane, not magic. Bureaucratic and logistical—at panels and events that he attended, I observed and took notes for the daily reports that I produced.

The other visits were similar in nature for me—I was just at work. Except the last visit in New Jersey. It was one of my last visits that I worked on, as that fall I started graduate school. Again I was waiting in a hotel room hallway—waiting as His Holiness came towards me, on his way to his room, followed by the Representative. His Holiness spoke a few words to me and then went into his room. 

When His Holiness started walking towards me, I felt a surge of energy, widening gyres of energy that were like sea waves coming towards me, growing wider and stronger as he neared—the waves were almost like light because I could actually see them but they were pure energy. It was like he had an incredible Doppler effect. I have no real explanation for what I felt. He had a force field around him, and I was picking up on its frequency. It was like my transmission line had been turned off, and I had lost the signal, but now somehow reactivating after a rest, my line had caught the signal and it was stronger than ever.

My faith in the Dalai Lama is not mine alone. It’s my mother’s, my father’s, my brother’s. It’s my aunt’s faith, and it’s my ancestors’ faith. Like generational wealth, it’s a kind of generational faith that’s compounded for my family, and for my people, over centuries and lifetimes. It’s love, actually.

To recognise divinity in a human being, isn’t that just what love is? And to wait for someone to arrive. As we do, wait for His Holiness, I mean, to arrive, now and in the future.

The author is a Tibetan writer and translator. She is editor of Old Demons, New Deities: Twenty One Short Stories from Tibet and The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays. A former Fulbright fellow, she currently works as a Communications Officer at Harvard University.