Sometime during his first incarnation as leader of Tibet in the late 1500s, the Dalai Lama came to a momentous decision. For the sake of Tibet, he decided to reincarnate life after life in the same human niche, as leader of his country, to preserve its spiritual welfare. Each lifetime, before he dies, the Dalai Lama gives several clues as to where his soul will next be born.
When the last Dalai Lama died in 1933, after predicting the future destruction of Tibet, he left no clues. According to custom, however, attendants placed his body in a shrine facing south. Within several days, cloud formations appeared over the northeastern end of the city. A giant star-shaped fungus grew overnight on a pillar in the northeast corner of the Dalai Lama's room. And, several days after his death, the head of the deceased ruler had turned from facing south to facing towards the northeast.
Two years later, a lama in the National Assembly received a vision of a house with blue tiles, twisted drainpipes, and a spotted dog. Immediately, thousands of lamas went into prolonged meditation to seek further direction. Soon after, the same lama saw several symbols identifying the region of Tibet where the house was to be found. Guided by this vision and disguised as merchants, a search party of monks traveled 1000 miles northeast to Amdo, where they were led to a house matching the one seen in the vision.
Upon reaching the house, the monks greeted the owners, a farmer and his wife, and requested some tea. As they sat in the kitchen a two-year-old boy ran into the room and hopped onto a monk's lap. The boy correctly called the disguised traveler "a lama of Sera," and identified two other members of his party as well. The child, named Tenzin Gyatso, spoke to the lamas in the court dialect of Lhasa, unknown to anyone in his district.
According to the lamas and to state tradition, this was still insufficient proof of the child's identity. For a more definitive test, the monks placed several of the deceased Dalai Lama's personal possessions before the boy, along with an equal number of skillfully-wrought replicas. The child chose the right item every time. Finally, the lamas examined the child for the eight birthmarks that reputedly identify the Dalai Lama. From large protruding ears and marks like a tiger's skin on his legs to two vestigal bits of skin on his shoulders representing the third and fouth arms of the Bodhisattva Chenrezi, the child had every mark. The lamas then recognized the boy as the reincarnation of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama and took him back to the capital. At age four and a half, Tenzin Gyatso entered the city and began his training as the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, spiritual and political ruler of Tibet.
Forty years and vast oceans of experience later, the Dalai Lama feels that his mission as a spiritual leader extends beyond Tibet. "As long as there are sentient beings to be liberated from suffering and unhappiness, I will work for the sake of all of them," he said last Thursday. Combining inner meditation with outward service, he embodies the central tenets of Tibet. The practice of kindness, compassion, and love for one's enemies, he says, brings a clear realization of the true nature of reality. "Compassion is something very forceful," he said, adding that it is a potent remedy for dealing with social problems.
Perhaps Tibet's adherence to spiritual goals like loving enemies and avoiding violence helped to make China's vanquishment of Tibet so complete. Along with the thousands of armed batallions that marched into Tibet in 1959 came over five million Chinese "settlers." The Chinese indiscriminately murdered the Tibetans, dismembering and torturing thousands. Monasteries with up to 10,000 inhabitants each were levelled. The invaders forced monks and nuns to copulate and then perform miracles to save themselves. And the Chinese used guns, grenades and missiles on an antiquated country with little more than swords and branches at its disposal for defense. And yet the Tibetans, steeped in centuries of compassion, could not now turn against other men, no matter how barbarous. In the face of imminent destruction, Tibetans returned Chinese fire with passive resistance and an undaunted faith in the justice of circumstance.
"Until the last day, I tried to bring about a peaceful settlement," the exiled Dalai Lama said in his first press conference in 1959. He added that he hoped to help the continuing struggle in Tibet "by means of peaceful solutions rather than military force." Nevertheless, Chinese brutality drove some Tibetans into the mountains to organize guerilla resistance. Their efforts have been futile. Today an occupation army of 300,000 enforces Chinese dictates. Dissentors are publicly executed. Monks who refuse to defrock are interred in labor camps. Between 5000 and 6000 monasteries have been destroyed.
The nation that was Tibet no longer exists. The monasteries are gone, the land belongs to China, and the Tibetans have either been killed or assimilated. And yet, while China may have vanquished the country of Tibet, it cannot kill the Tibetan spirit. Hundreds of thousands of Tibetans throughout the world, as well as adherents of Tibetan Buddhism of all nationalities, still recognize the Dalai Lama as their leader. And many non-Tibetan Buddhists bow down before him as well. He is, perhaps, the world's most powerful living representative of the Asian religious ideal.
At the request of the U.S. State Department, the Dalai Lama de-emphasized politics in this visit to the United States, according to Jan Anderson, media coordinator for His Holiness in this country. Permission for his visit seemed to rest on the recent U.S. recognition of China and the U.S. did not want the sticky question of the status of Tibet to cloud developing Sino-American relations. In this first trip to America, the Dalai Lama said he came to "spread compassion, to teach, and to learn," and spoke in terms of humanity in general, rather than Tibet in particular.
"I call myself a world citizen," the Dalai Lama said at his last press conference Friday. "Tibetans believe there are many worlds, and I am a citizen of this world. As a Buddhist monk, there are no boundaries in my mind, all countries are the same. All people are alike."
It seems somehow fitting that the Dalai Lama's last stop in the United States should have been at the country's oldest university, which the Chinese call the "University of the Laughing Buddha." Carrying with him centuries of Eastern wisdom he expressed his deep gratitude to America for her hospitality, and said the U.S. has a vital spiritual-historical role at this time. Since the U.S. is the world's most materially successful nation, Tibet, a spiritual society and America's opposite image, has a lot to teach. A journalist at the press conference last week asked for a concise statement of his ideas for America. The Dalai Lama meditated briefly, as if drawing on lifetimes of teachings, and said, "Kindness and love--this is my real message." Like the Pope before him he left us with humanity's oldest lesson, and perhaps its hardest.