LHASA AND ITS VANISHED DEITY
The passage of the river was difficult and dangerous. If we had had to
depend on the four Berthon boats we took with us, the crossing might
have taken weeks. But the good fortune that attended the expedition
throughout did not fail us. At Chaksam we found the Tibetans had left
behind their two great ferry-boats, quaint old barges with horses' heads
at the prow, capacious enough to hold a hundred men. The Tibetan
ferrymen worked for us cheerfully. A number of hide boats were also
discovered. The transport mules were swum over, and the whole force was
across in less than a week.
But the river took its toll most tragically. The current is swift and
boisterous; the eddies and whirlpools are dangerously uncertain. Two
Berthon boats, bound together into a raft, capsized, and Major
Bretherton, chief supply and transport officer, and two Gurkhas were
drowned. It seemed as if the genius of the river, offended at our
intrusion, had claimed its price and carried off the most valuable life
in the force. It was Major Bretherton's foresight more than anything
that enabled us to reach Lhasa. His loss was calamitous.
We left our camp at the ferry on July 31, and started for Lhasa, which
was only forty-three miles distant. It was difficult to believe that in
three days we would be looking on the Potala.
The Kyi Chu, the holy river of Lhasa, flows into the Tsangpo at Chushul,
three miles below Chaksam ferry, where our troops crossed. The river is
almost as broad as the Thames at Greenwich, and the stream is swift and
clear. The valley is cultivated in places, but long stretches are bare
and rocky. Sand-dunes, overgrown with artemisia scrub, extend to the
margin of cultivation, leaving a well-defined line between the green
cornfields and the barren sand. The crops were ripening at the time of
our advance, and promised a plentiful harvest.
For many miles the road is cut out of a precipitous cliff above the
river. A few hundred men could have destroyed it in an afternoon, and
delayed our advance for another week. Newly-built sangars at the
entrance of the gorge showed that the Tibetans had intended to hold it.
But they left the valley in a disorganized state the day we reached the
Tsangpo. Had they fortified the position, they might have made it
stronger than the Karo la.
The heat of the valley was almost tropical. Summer by the Kyi Chu River
is very different from one's first conceptions of Tibet. To escape the
heat, I used to write my diary in the shade of gardens and willow
groves. Hoopoes, magpies, and huge black ravens became inquisitive and
confidential. I have a pile of little black notebooks I scribbled over
in their society, dirty and torn and soiled with pressed flowers. For a
picture of the valley I will go to these. One's freshest impressions are
the best, and truer than reminiscences.
NETHANG.
In the most fertile part of the Kyi Chu Valley, where the fields are
intersected in all directions by clear-running streams bordered with
flowers, in a grove of poplars where doves were singing all day long, I
found Atisa's tomb.
It was built in a large, plain, barn-like building, clean and
sweet-smelling as a granary, and innocent of ornament outside and in. It
was the only clean and simple place devoted to religion I had seen in
Tibet.
In every house and monastery we entered on the road there were gilded
images, tawdry paintings, demons and she-devils, garish frescoes on the
wall, hideous grinning devil-masks, all the Lama's spurious apparatus of
terrorism.
These were the outward symbols of demonolatry and superstition invented
by scheming priests as the fabric of their sacerdotalism. But this was
the resting-place of the Reformer, the true son of Buddha, who came
over the Himalayas to preach a religion of love and mercy.
I entered the building out of the glare of the sun, expecting nothing
but the usual monsters and abortions--just as one is dragged into a
church in some tourist-ridden land, where, if only for the sake of
peace, one must cast an apathetic eye at the lions of the country. But
as the tomb gradually assumed shape in the dim light, I knew that there
was someone here, a priest or a community, who understood Atisa, who
knew what he would have wished his last resting-place to be; or perhaps
the good old monk had left a will or spoken a plain word that had been
handed down and remembered these thousand years, and was now, no doubt,
regarded as an eccentric's whim, that there must be no gods or demons by
his tomb, nothing abnormal, no pretentiousness of any kind. If his
teaching had lived, how simple and honest and different Tibet would be
to-day!
The tomb was not beautiful--a large square plinth, supporting layers of
gradually decreasing circumference and forming steps two feet in height,
the last a platform on which was based a substantial vat-like structure
with no ornament or inscription except a thin line of black pencilled
saints. By climbing up the layers of masonry I found a pair of slant
eyes gazing at nothing and hidden by a curve in the stone from gazers
below. This was the only painting on the tomb.
Never in the thousand years since the good monk was laid to rest at
Nethang had a white man entered this shrine. To-day the courtyard was
crowded with mules and drivers; Hindus and Pathans in British uniform:
they were ransacking the place for corn. A transport officer was
shouting:
'How many bags have you, babu?'
'A hundred and seven, sir.'
'Remember, if anyone loots, he will get fifty _beynt_' (stripes with the
cat-o'-nine-tails).
Then he turned to me.
'What the devil is that old thief doing over there?' he said, and nodded
at a man with archæological interests, who was peering about in a dark
corner by the tomb. 'There is nothing more here.'
'He is examining Atisa's tomb.'
'And who the devil is Atisa?'
And who is he? Merely a name to a few dry-as-dust pedants. Everything
human he did is forgotten. The faintest ripple remains to-day from that
stone cast into the stagnant waters so many years ago. A few monks drone
away their days in a monastery close by. In the courtyard there is a
border of hollyhocks and snapdragon and asters. Here the unsavoury
guardians of Atisa's tomb watch me as I write, and wonder what on earth
I am doing among them, and what spell or mantra I am inscribing in the
little black book that shuts so tightly with a clasp.
TOILUNG.
To-morrow we reach Lhasa.
A few hours ago we caught the first glimpse of the Potala Palace, a
golden dome standing out on a bluff rock in the centre of the valley.
The city is not seen from afar perched on a hill like the great
monasteries and jongs of the country. It is literally 'hidden.' A rocky
promontory projects from the bleak hills to the south like a screen,
hiding Lhasa, as if Nature conspired in its seclusion. Here at a
distance of seven miles we can see the Potala and the Lamas' Medical
College.
Trees and undulating ground shut out the view of the actual city until
one is within a mile of it.
To-morrow we camp outside. It is nearly a hundred years since Thomas
Manning, the only Englishman (until to-day) who ever saw Lhasa, preceded
us. Our journey has not been easy, but we have come in spite of
everything.
The Lamas have opposed us with all their material and spiritual
resources. They have fought us with medieval weapons and a medley of
modern firearms. They have held Commination Services, recited mantras,
and cursed us solemnly for days. Yet we have come on.
They have sent delegates and messengers of every rank to threaten and
entreat and plead with us--emissaries of increasing importance as we
have drawn nearer their capital, until the Dalai Lama despatched his own
Grand Chamberlain and Grand Secretary, and, greater than these, the Ta
Lama and Yutok Shapé, members of the ruling Council of Five, whose
sacred persons had never before been seen by European eyes. To-morrow
the Amban himself comes to meet Colonel Younghusband. The Dalai Lama has
sent him a letter sealed with his own seal.
Every stretch of road from the frontier to Lhasa has had its symbol of
remonstrance. Cairns and chortens, and _mani_ walls and praying-flags,
demons painted on the rock, writings on the wall, white stones piled
upon black, have emitted their ray of protest and malevolence in vain.
The Lamas knew we must come. Hundreds of years ago a Buddhist saint
wrote it in his book of prophecies, Ma-ong Lung-Ten, which may be bought
to-day in the Lhasa book-shops. He predicted that Tibet would be invaded
and conquered by the Philings (Europeans), when all of the true religion
would go to Chang Shambula, the Northern Paradise, and Buddhism would
become extinct in the country.
And now the Lamas believe that the prophecy will be fulfilled by our
entry into Lhasa, and that their religion will decay before foreign
influence. The Dalai Lama, they say, will die, not by violence or
sickness, but by some spiritual visitation. His spirit will seek some
other incarnation, when he can no longer benefit his people or secure
his country, so long sacred to Buddhists, from the contamination of
foreign intrusion.
The Tibetans are not the savages they are depicted. They are civilized,
if medieval. The country is governed on the feudal system. The monks are
the overlords, the peasantry their serfs. The poor are not oppressed.
They and the small tenant farmers work ungrudgingly for their spiritual
masters, to whom they owe a blind devotion. They are not discontented,
though they give more than a tithe of their small income to the Church.
It must be remembered that every family contributes at least one member
to the priesthood, so that, when we are inclined to abuse the monks for
consuming the greater part of the country's produce, we should remember
that the laymen are not the victims of class prejudice, the plebeians
groaning under the burden of the patricians, so much as the servants of
a community chosen from among themselves, and with whom they are
connected by family ties.
No doubt the Lamas employ spiritual terrorism to maintain their
influence and preserve the temporal government in their hands; and when
they speak of their religion being injured by our intrusion, they are
thinking, no doubt, of another unveiling of mysteries, the dreaded age
of materialism and reason, when little by little their ignorant serfs
will be brought into contact with the facts of life, and begin to
question the justness of the relations that have existed between
themselves and their rulers for centuries. But at present the people
are medieval, not only in their system of government and their religion,
their inquisition, their witchcraft, their incantations, their ordeals
by fire and boiling oil, but in every aspect of their daily life.
I question if ever in the history of the world there has been another
occasion when bigotry and darkness have been exposed with such
abruptness to the inroad of science, when a barrier of ignorance created
by jealousy and fear as a screen between two peoples living side by side
has been demolished so suddenly to admit the light of an advanced
civilization.
The Tibetans, no doubt, will benefit, and many abuses will be swept
away. Yet there will always be people who will hanker after the medieval
and romantic, who will say: 'We men are children. Why could we not have
been content that there was one mystery not unveiled, one country of an
ancient arrested civilization, and an established Church where men are
still guided by sorcery and incantations, and direct their mundane
affairs with one eye on a grotesque spirit world, which is the most real
thing in their lives--a land of topsy-turvy and inverted proportions,
where men spend half their lives mumbling unintelligible mantras and
turning mechanical prayers, and when dead are cut up into mincemeat and
thrown to the dogs and vultures?'
To-morrow, when we enter Lhasa, we will have unveiled the last mystery
the of the East. There are no more forbidden cities which men have not
mapped and photographed. Our children will laugh at modern travellers'
tales. They will have to turn again to Gulliver and Haroun al Raschid.
And they will soon tire of these. For now that there are no real
mysteries, no unknown land of dreams, where there may still be genii and
mahatmas and bottle-imps, that kind of literature will be tolerated no
longer. Children will be sceptical and matter-of-fact and disillusioned,
and there will be no sale for fairy-stories any more.
But we ourselves are children. Why could we not have left at least one
city out of bounds?
LHASA,
_August 3._
We reached Lhasa to-day, after a march of seven miles, and camped
outside the city. As we approached, the road became an embankment across
a marsh. Butterflies and dragon-flies were hovering among the rushes,
clematis grew in the stonework by the roadside, cows were grazing in the
rich pastureland, redshanks were calling, a flight of teal passed
overhead; the whole scene was most homelike, save for the bare scarred
cliffs that jealously preclude a distant view of the city.
Some of us climbed the Chagpo Ri and looked down on the city. Lhasa lay
a mile in front of us, a mass of huddled roofs and trees, dominated by
the golden dome of the Jokhang Cathedral.
It must be the most hidden city on earth. The Chagpo Ri rises bluffly
from the river-bank like a huge rock. Between it and the Potala hill
there is a narrow gap not more than thirty yards wide. Over this is
built the Pargo Kaling, a typical Tibetan chorten, through which is the
main gateway into Lhasa. The city has no walls, but beyond the Potala,
to complete the screen, stretches a great embankment of sand right
across the valley to the hills on the north.
[Illustration]
LHASA,
_August 4._
An epoch in the world's history was marked to-day when Colonel
Younghusband entered the city to return the visit of the Chinese Amban.
He was accompanied by all the members of the mission, the war
correspondents, and an escort of two companies of the Royal Fusiliers
and the 2nd Mounted Infantry. Half a company of mounted infantry, two
guns, a detachment of sappers, and four companies of infantry were held
ready to support the escort if necessary.
In front of us marched and rode the Amban's escort--his bodyguard,
dressed in short loose coats of French gray, embroidered in black, with
various emblems; pikemen clad in bright red with black embroidery and
black pugarees; soldiers with pikes and scythes and three-pronged
spears, on all of which hung red banners with devices embroidered in
black.
We found the city squalid and filthy beyond description, undrained and
unpaved. Not a single house looked clean or cared for. The streets after
rain are nothing but pools of stagnant water frequented by pigs and dogs
searching for refuse. Even the Jokhang appeared mean and squalid at
close quarters, whence its golden roofs were invisible. There was
nothing picturesque except the marigolds and hollyhocks in pots and the
doves and singing-birds in wicker cages.
The few Tibetans we met in the street were strangely incurious. A baker
kneading dough glanced at us casually, and went on kneading. A woman
weaving barely looked up from her work.
The streets were almost deserted, perhaps by order of the authorities to
prevent an outbreak. But as we returned small crowds had gathered in the
doorways, women were peering through windows, but no one followed or
took more than a listless interest in us. The monks looked on sullenly.
But in most faces one read only indifference and apathy. One might think
the entry of a foreign army into Lhasa and the presence of English
Political Officers in gold-laced uniform and beaver hats were everyday
events.
The only building in Lhasa that is at all imposing is the Potala.
It would be misleading to say that the palace dominated the city, as a
comparison would be implied--a picture conveyed of one building standing
out signally among others. This is not the case.
The Potala is superbly detached. It is not a palace on a hill, but a
hill that is also a palace. Its massive walls, its terraces and bastions
stretch upwards from the plain to the crest, as if the great bluff rock
were merely a foundation-stone planted there at the divinity's nod. The
divinity dwells in the palace, and underneath, at the distance of a
furlong or two, humanity is huddled abjectly in squalid smut-begrimed
houses. The proportion is that which exists between God and man.
If one approached within a league of Lhasa, saw the glittering domes of
the Potala, and turned back without entering the precincts, one might
still imagine it an enchanted city, shining with turquoise and gold. But
having entered, the illusion is lost. One might think devout Buddhists
had excluded strangers in order to preserve the myth of the city's
beauty and mystery and wealth, or that the place was consciously
neglected and defaced so as to offer no allurements to heretics, just
as the repulsive women one meets in the streets smear themselves over
with grease and cutch to make themselves even more hideous than Nature
ordained.
The place has not changed since Manning visited it ninety years ago, and
wrote:--'There is nothing striking, nothing pleasing, in its appearance.
The habitations are begrimed with smut and dirt. The avenues are full of
dogs, some growling and gnawing bits of hide that lie about in
profusion, and emit a charnel-house smell; others limping and looking
livid; others ulcerated; others starved and dying, and pecked at by
ravens; some dead and preyed upon. In short, everything seems mean and
gloomy, and excites the idea of something unreal.' That is the Lhasa of
to-day. Probably it was the same centuries ago.
Above all this squalor the Potala towers superbly. Its golden roofs,
shining in the sun like tongues of fire, are a landmark for miles, and
must inspire awe and veneration in the hearts of pilgrims coming from
the desert parts of Tibet, Kashmir, and Mongolia to visit the sacred
city that Buddha has blessed.
The secret of romance is remoteness, whether in time or space. If we
could be thrown back to the days of Agincourt we should be enchanted at
first, but after a week should vote everything commonplace and dull.
Falstaff, the beery lout, would be an impossible companion, and Prince
Hal a tiresome young cub who wanted a good dressing-down. In travel,
too, as one approaches the goal, and the country becomes gradually
familiar, the husk of romance falls off. Childe Roland must have been
sadly disappointed in the Dark Tower; filth and familiarity very soon
destroyed the romance of Lhasa.
But romance still clings to the Potala. It is still remote. Like Imray,
its sacred inmate has achieved the impossible. Divinity or no, he has at
least the divine power of vanishing. In the material West, as we like to
call it, we know how hard it is for the humblest subject to disappear,
in spite of the confused hub of traffic and intricate network of
communications. Yet here in Lhasa, a city of dreamy repose, a King has
escaped, been spirited into the air, and nobody is any the wiser.
When we paraded the city yesterday, we made a complete circuit of the
Potala. There was no one, not even the humblest follower, so
unimaginative that he did not look up from time to time at the frowning
cliff and thousand sightless windows that concealed the unknown. Those
hidden corridors and passages have been for centuries, and are, perhaps,
at this very moment, the scenes of unnatural piety and crime.
Within the precincts of Lhasa the taking of life in any form is
sacrilege. Buddha's first law was, 'Thou shalt not kill'; and life is
held so sacred by his devout followers that they are careful not to
kill the smallest insect. Yet this palace, where dwells the divine
incarnation of the Bodhisat, the head of the Buddhist Church, must have
witnessed more murders and instigations to crime than the most
blood-stained castle of medieval Europe.
Since the assumption of temporal power by the fifth Grand Lama in the
middle of the seventeenth century, the whole history of the Tibetan
hierarchy has been a record of bloodshed and intrigue. The fifth Grand
Lama, the first to receive the title of Dalai, was a most unscrupulous
ruler, who secured the temporal power by inciting the Mongols to invade
Tibet, and received as his reward the kingship. He then established his
claim to the godhead by tampering with Buddhist history and writ. The
sixth incarnation was executed by the Chinese on account of his
profligacy. The seventh was deposed by the Chinese as privy to the
murder of the regent. After the death of the eighth, of whom I can learn
nothing, it would seem that the tables were turned: the regents
systematically murdered their charge, and the crime of the seventh Dalai
Lama was visited upon four successive incarnations. The ninth, tenth,
eleventh, and twelfth all died prematurely, assassinated, it is
believed, by their regents.
There are no legends of malmsey-butts, secret smotherings, and hired
assassins. The children disappeared; they were absorbed into the
Universal Essence; they were literally too good to live. Their regents
and protectors, monks only less sacred than themselves, provided that
the spirit in its yearning for the next state should not be long
detained in its mortal husk. No questions were asked. How could the
devout trace the comings and goings of the divine Avalokita, the Lord of
Mercy and Judgment, who ordains into what heaven or hell, demon, god,
hero, mollusc, or ape, their spirits must enter, according to their
sins?
So, when we reached Lhasa the other day, and heard that the thirteenth
incarnation had fled, no one was surprised. Yet the wonder remains. A
great Prince, a god to thousands of men, has been removed from his
palace and capital, no one knows whither or when. A ruler has
disappeared who travels with every appanage of state, inspiring awe in
his prostrate servants, whose movements, one would think, were watched
and talked about more than any Sovereign's on earth. Yet fear, or
loyalty, or ignorance keeps every subject tongue-tied.
We have spies and informers everywhere, and there are men in Lhasa who
would do much to please the new conquerors of Tibet. There are also
witless men, who have eyes and ears, but, it seems, no tongues.
But so far neither avarice nor witlessness has betrayed anything. For
all we know, the Dalai Lama may be still in his palace in some hidden
chamber in the rock, or maybe he has never left his customary
apartments, and still performs his daily offices in the Potala,
confident that there at least his sanctity is inviolable by unbelievers.
The British Tommy in the meanwhile parades the streets as indifferently
as if they were the New Cut or Lambeth Palace Road. He looks up at the
Potala, and says: 'The old bloke's done a bunk. Wish we'd got 'im; we
might get 'ome then.'
LHASA,
_August --._
We had been in Lhasa nearly three weeks before we could discover where
the Dalai Lama had fled. We know now that he left his palace secretly in
the night, and took the northern road to Mongolia. The Buriat, Dorjieff
met him at Nagchuka, on the verge of the great desert that separates
inhabited Tibet from Mongolia, 100 miles from Lhasa. On the 20th the
Amban told us that he had already left Nagchuka twelve days, and was
pushing on across the desert to the frontier.
I have been trying to find out something about the private life and
character of the Grand Lama. But asking questions here is fruitless; one
can learn nothing intimate. And this is just what one might expect. The
man continues a bogie, a riddle, undivinable, impersonal, remote. The
people know nothing. They have bowed before the throne as men come out
of the dark into a blinding light. Scrutiny in their view would be vain
and blasphemous. The Abbots, too, will reveal nothing; they will not and
dare not. When Colonel Younghusband put the question direct to a head
Lama in open durbar, 'Have you news of the Dalai Lama? Do you know where
he is?' the monk looked slowly to left and right, and answered, 'I know
nothing.' 'The ruler of your country leaves his palace and capital, and
you know nothing?' the Commissioner asked. 'Nothing,' answered the monk,
shuffling his feet, but without changing colour.
From various sources, which differ surprisingly little, I have a fairly
clear picture of the man's face and figure. He is thick-set, about five
feet nine inches in height, with a heavy square jaw, nose remarkably
long and straight for a Tibetan, eyebrows pronounced and turning upwards
in a phenomenal manner--probably trained so, to make his appearance more
forbidding--face pockmarked, general expression resolute and sinister.
He goes out very little, and is rarely seen by the people, except on his
annual visit to Depung, and during his migrations between the Summer
Palace and the Potala. He was at the Summer Palace when the messenger
brought the news that our advance was inevitable, but he went to the
Potala to put his house in order before projecting himself into the
unknown.
His face is the index of his character. He is a man of strong
personality, impetuous, despotic, and intolerant of advice in State
affairs. He is constantly deposing his Ministers, and has estranged from
himself a large section of the upper classes, both ecclesiastical and
official, owing to his wayward and headstrong disposition. As a child he
was so precociously acute and resolute that he survived his regent, and
so upset the traditional policy of murder, being the only one out of the
last five incarnations to reach his majority. Since he took the
government of the country into his own hands he has reduced the Chinese
suzerainty to a mere shadow, and, with fatal results to himself,
consistently insulted and defied the British. His inclination to a
rapprochement with Russia is not shared by his Ministers.
The only glimpse I have had into the man himself was reflected in a
conversation with the Nepalese Resident, a podgy little man, very ugly
and good-natured, with the manners of a French comedian and a face
generally expanded in a broad grin. He shook with laughter when I asked
him if he knew the Dalai Lama, and the idea was really intensely funny,
this mercurial, irreverent little man hobnobbing with the divine. 'I
have seen him,' he said, and exploded again. 'But what does he do all
day?' I asked. The Resident puckered up his brow, aping abstraction, and
began to wave his hand in the air solemnly with a slow circular
movement, mumbling '_Om man Padme om_' to the revolutions of an
imaginary praying-wheel. He was immensely pleased with the effort and
the effect it produced on a sepoy orderly. 'But has he no interests or
amusements?' I asked. The Resident could think of none. But he told me a
story to illustrate the dulness of the man, for whom he evidently had no
reverence. On his return from his last visit to India, the Maharaja of
Nepal had given him a phonograph to present to the Priest-King. The
impious toy was introduced to the Holy of Holies, and the Dalai Lama
walked round it uneasily as it emitted the strains of English band
music, and raucously repeated an indelicate Bhutanese song. After
sitting a long while in deep thought, he rose and said he could not live
with this voice without a soul; it must leave his palace at once. The
rejected phonograph found a home with the Chinese Amban, to whom it was
presented with due ceremonial the same day. 'The Lama is _gumar_,' the
Resident said, using a Hindustani word which may be translated,
according to our charity, by anything between 'boorish' and
'unenlightened.' I was glad to meet a man in this city of evasiveness
whose views were positive, and who was eager to communicate them.
Through him I tracked the shadow, as it were, of this impersonality, and
found that to many strangers in Lhasa, and perhaps to a few Lhasans
themselves, the divinity was all clay, a palpable fraud, a pompous and
puritanical dullard masquerading as a god.
For my own part, I think the oracle that counselled his flight wiser
than the statesmen who object that it was a political mistake. He has
lost his prestige, they say. But imagine him dragged into durbar as a
signatory, gazed at by profane eyes, the subject of a few days' gossip
and comment, then sunk into commonplace, stripped of his mystery like
this city of Lhasa, through which we now saunter familiarly, wondering
when we shall start again for the _wilds_.
To escape this ordeal he has fled, and to us, at least, his flight has
deepened the mystery that envelops him, and added to his dignity and
remoteness; to thousands of mystical dreamers it has preserved the
effulgence of his godhead unsoiled by contact with the profane world.
From our camp here the Potala draws the eye like a magnet. There is
nothing but sky and marsh and bleak hill and palace. When we look out of
our tents in the morning, the sun is striking the golden roof like a
beacon light to the faithful. Nearly every day in August this year has
opened fine and closed with storm-clouds gathering from the west,
through which the sun shines, bathing the eastern valley in a soft,
pearly light. The western horizon is dark and lowering, the eastern
peaceful and serene. In this division of darkness and light the Potala
stands out like a haven, not flaming now, but faintly luminous with a
restful mystic light, soothing enough to rob Buddhist metaphysics of its
pessimism and induce a mood, even in unbelievers, in which one is
content to merge the individual and become absorbed in the universal
spirit of Nature.
No wonder that, when one looks for mystery in Lhasa, one's thoughts
dwell solely on the Dalai Lama and the Potala. I cannot help dwelling on
the flight of the thirteenth incarnation. It plunges us into
medievalism. To my mind, there is no picture so romantic and engrossing
in modern history as that exodus, when the spiritual head of the
Buddhist Church, the temporal ruler of six millions, stole out of his
palace by night and was borne away in his palanquin, no one knows on
what errand or with what impotent rage in his heart. The flight was
really secret. No one but his immediate confidants and retainers, not
even the Amban himself, knew that he had gone. I can imagine the awed
attendants, the burying of treasure, the locking and sealing of chests,
faint lights flickering in the passages, hurried footsteps in the
corridors, dogs barking intermittently at this unwonted bustle--I feel
sure the Priest-King kicked one as he stepped on the terrace for the
last time. Then the procession by moonlight up the narrow valley to the
north, where the roar of the stream would drown the footsteps of the
palanquin-bearers.
A month afterwards I followed on his track, and stood on the Phembu Pass
twelve miles north of Lhasa, whence one looks down on the huge belt of
mountains that lie between the Brahmaputra and the desert, so packed
and huddled that their crests look like one continuous undulating plain
stretching to the horizon. Looking across the valley, I could see the
northern road to Mongolia winding up a feeder of the Phembu Chu. They
passed along here and over the next range, and across range after range,
until they reached the two conical snow-peaks that stand out of the
plain beside Tengri Nor, a hundred miles to the north. For days they
skirted the great lake, and then, as if they feared the Nemesis of our
offended Raj could pursue them to the end of the earth, broke into the
desert, across which they must be hurrying now toward the great mountain
chain of Burkhan Buddha, on the southern limits of Mongolia.
LHASA,
_August 19._
The Tibetans are the strangest people on earth. To-day I discovered how
they dispose of their dead.
To hold life sacred and benefit the creatures are the laws of Buddha,
which they are supposed to obey most scrupulously. And as they think
they may be reborn in any shape of mammal, bird, or fish, they are kind
to living things.
During the morning service the Lamas repeat a prayer for the minute
insects which they have swallowed inadvertently in their meat and drink,
and the formula insures the rebirth of these microbes in heaven.
Sometimes, when a Lama's life is despaired of, the monks will ransom a
yak or a bullock from the shambles, and keep him a pensioner in their
monastery, praying the good Buddha to spare the sick man's life for the
life ransomed. Yet they eat meat freely, all save the Gelug-pa, or
Reformed Church, and square their conscience with their appetite by the
pretext that the sin rests with the outcast assassin, the public
butcher, who will be born in the next incarnation as some tantalized
spirit or agonized demon. That, however, is his own affair.
But it is when a Tibetan dies that his charity to the creatures becomes
really practical. Then, by his own tacit consent when living, his body
is given as a feast to the dogs and vultures. This is no casual or
careless gift to avoid the trouble of burial or cremation. All creatures
who have a taste for these things are invited to the ceremony, and the
corpse is carved to their liking by an expert, who devotes his life to
the practice.
When a Tibetan dies he is left three days in his chamber, and a slit is
made in his skull to let his soul pass out. Then he is rolled into a
ball, wrapped in a sack, or silk if he is rich, packed into a jar or
basket, and carried along to the music of conch shells to the ceremonial
stone. Here a Lama takes the corpse out of its vessel and wrappings, and
lays it face downwards on a large flat slab, and the pensioners prowl or
hop round, waiting for their dole. They are quite tame. The Lamas stand
a little way apart, and see that strict etiquette is observed during
the entertainment. The carver begins at the ankle, and cuts upwards,
throwing little strips of flesh to the guests; the bones he throws to a
second attendant, who pounds them up with a heavy stone.
I passed the place to-day as I rode in from a reconnaissance. The slab
lies a stone's-throw to the left of the great northern road to Tengri
Nor and Mongolia, about two miles from the city.
A group of stolid vultures, too demoralized to range in search of
carrion, stood motionless on a rock above, waiting the next dispenser of
charity.
A few ravens hopped about sadly; they, too, were evidently pauperized.
One magpie was prying round in suspicious proximity, and dogs conscious
of shame slunk about without a bark in them, and nosed the ground
diligently. They are always there, waiting.
There was hardly a stain on the slab, so quick and eager are the
applicants for charity. Only a few rags lay around, too poor to be
carried away.
I have not seen the ceremony, and I have no mind to. My companion this
morning, a hardened young subaltern who was fighting nearly every day in
April, May, and June, and has seen more bloodshed than most veterans,
saw just as much as I have described. He then felt very ill, dug his
spurs into his horse, and rode away.