Never just a simple monk
Don Cupitt
FREEDOM IN EXILE: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HIS HOLINESS THE DALAI LAMA OF TIBET
Hodder & Stoughton, £16.95, pp.308
In the summer of 1950 reports began to reach Lhasa of border incursions by Chinese troops. In the hope of stiffening Tibet's will to resist, the Regency was ended and the 15-year-old Dalai Lama was enthroned with full temporal power on 17 November. But there was no Tibetan army to speak of, and the country did not even have wheeled transport. On 26 October 1951 units of the People's Liberation Army entered Lhasa, and the country has in effect been under Chinese military rule ever since. For some years the Dalai Lama's regime collaborated, but on 17 March 1959 he escaped on muleback across the mountains to India with a retinue of 80 persons.
India proved hospitable and the Tibetan government in exile, together with the largest part of the refugee population in diaspora, is still based there. The Dalai M'sieu?' Lama has concerned himself with main- taining Tibetan culture, looking after the diaspora and pleading Tibet's cause. Un- fortunately, the West, though ready to exert itself on behalf of Afghanistan, Kuwait and many other countries, has done nothing for Tibet, and the land now lies half-ruined. The most recent unrest, 1987-90, has been put down as cruelly as ever.
The Dalai Lama does not in his closing pages discuss the latest events in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Might the general loss of faith in Marxism-Leninism affect China too, and so give Tibet cause for hope? Perhaps not: any successor govern- ment in China may well be equally cruel, and equally determined to hold on to Tibet's uranium reserves.
The Dalai Lama has published a pre- vious autobiography in the early Sixties. It was written with the help of David Howarth. In 1973, when he visited Britain, he met a group of Cambridge theologians for discussion, but his English seemed to me to be still very poor. Yet he claims to have written the present work directly in English, with only the most minimal sources and editorial help. If so it is a considerable achievement, for it is fluent and full of extraordinary details; but it is a little unnerving to find him making incon- sistent statements about his own age. He claims to be a '56-year-old', `born on 6 July 1935'. Do people really get such things wrong?
The tension between religion and poli- tics troubles this book as deeply as it has troubled the author's life. He claims in the foreword to be `a simple monk', and is known to be a good scholar and expositor of Tibetan Buddhism. Yet the opinions expressed here about matters of religion and morals are banal in the extreme, a sad testimony to the difficulty of bringing ancient religious doctrines to bear effect- ively upon modern political realities. For the main themes of this book are inescap- ably political, and the dominant motif of the author's life has been the impossibility of surrendering precisely his political aims. He has never in fact been able to be 'a simple monk'.
It is a touching book, that arouses great sympathy for its extraordinary author:
I am held to be the reincarnation of each ot the previous 13 Dalai Lamas of Tibet . . . who are in turn considered to be manifesta- tions of Avalokiteshvara, or Chenrezig. Bodhisattva of Compassion, holder pf the
White Lotus. Thus I am believed also to be a manifestation of Chenrezig, in fact the 74th in a lineage that can be traced back to a Brahmin boy who lived in the time of Buddha Shakyamuni. I am often asked whether I truly believe this. The answer is not simple to give.
That should cheer up the Archbishop of York. Buddhism at least is a faith in which a great leader can make mildly sceptical remarks without thereby disqualifying him- self for the highest office.
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