In the Dalai Lama’s Lap

The Chinese, fresh from defeating the Japanese and the Nationalist Party of Chiang Kai-shek, invaded what had been largely autonomous if not historically sovereign Tibet at the time my parents were choosing their research areas. Like all such military actions, the invasion triggered a mass exodus of refugees—particularly monks whose monasteries the avowedly atheist Chinese Communists destroyed.

Around the time of my birth—26 May 1959—word reached the United States that His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, had successfully been granted asylum and was alive and safe in what was to become the location of his government in exile, Dharamsala, India. My parents, who had studied Buddhist lamaistic culture in Mongolia, turned their research to the threatened culture of Tibet.

Dharamsala, like Darjeeling, was just across the mountains from the Dalai Lama’s homeland. Tibetan refugees walked over those mountains seeking asylum and safety from persecution. In March of that year, it seemed to the Chinese that all of Tibet suddenly rose up against them—spurred on mostly by the country’s women. In fact, the Tibetan Uprising, as it became known, was the diversion and cover necessary for the young Dalai Lama’s escape from what appeared likely to be a kidnap attempt if not just a ruse to imprison the country’s pre-invasion leader.

Over the years my parents came to meet His Holiness, and knew Heinrich Harrer, who had been a tutor of His Holiness in his youth. They also helped Geshe Lhundup Sopa, a monk who had been one of His Holiness’s examiners for the teaching rank of Geshe, who in 1967 moved to Madison, Wisconsin, to teach Tibetan and Buddhist studies. Eventually, Geshe-La, as I knew him, became a full professor at the university. Geshe Sopa always laughed and called me ‘Terry’. His Holiness came to know me as the boy who sat in his lap.

I first went to India, to Darjeeling and New Delhi and Calcutta and Bombay, before pre-school. Most of my memories from that time were of Darjeeling, and the woman who kept watch on us kids while my parents were working. Ang Lhakpa was her name. She was a Sherpa, like Tenzing Norgay—who, with Edmund Hillary, had first successfully climbed to the peak of Mount Everest in 1953.

Her husband, Gyalgin Mikchin, was a climbing aid, as was her son. The Sherpa women in Darjeeling were either employed on the tea estates that terraced the green-blue foothills of the Himalayas or—and this was the case with Ang Lhakpa—knitted sweaters and sold them in the street that wound up as a switchback from Darjeeling’s ‘Mall’ to guest lodges and tourist hotels as climbing and interest in alternative religions grew among Western youth. She also minded kids like us, taking us to the playground off the main kitchen of the Windermere Hotel, the collection of bungalows and main hotel where we stayed.

The hotel was run by a very British Tibetan couple, Mr and Mrs Tendufla. They threw magnificent Christmas and new year parties for their guests in the winter, complete with decorations, hats, noise makers and hot rum toddies or hot buttered rums. My parents stayed there when they could afford it—the rates were not bad by modern standards, but my parents were just shy of being poor graduate students when I arrived. The Tenduflas also served as ‘informants’ for my parents’ research into Tibetan and Sherpa culture.

We were staying there when my parents received word—after no shortage of lobbying on my mother’s part—that His Holiness was at a monastery in Darjeeling. The monastery was on top of the hill on which Darjeeling, and our hotel, sat. You climbed a path that wound among pine trees on the hill. From the path just before reaching the monastery of red and white and yellow stucco, you could see, unobstructed, the mountain Kanchenjunga rising from below the hill to the clouds around its snow-capped peak.

Kanchenjunga is where Tenzing and students of the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute practised using crampons and ice axes. Tenzing and Hillary founded the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute to teach Sherpas the latest climbing techniques, to assist their being hired by climbing expeditions and instruct them in expedition safety methods so they would be less likely to be killed helping other climbers and tourists—who flocked to the mountain in droves in later years in an effort to duplicate Tenzing and Hillary’s feat. The Sherpas, like most Tibetans, revered Mount Everest as ‘Chomolungma’, the mother mountain. But they saw no reason not to benefit from its proximity, and their adaptation to climbing in elevation. Despite their experience, both Galgin and Ang Lhakpa’s son died assisting climbers on Everest.

Ang Lhakpa was in charge of watching us kids while we met His Holiness. She and our parents prepared us by handing us each a rolled-up woven silk scarf, a kathak. We were instructed to roll the scarf out and drape it over our own hands, bowing and offering it to His Holiness. His Holiness would then either put the kathak over his head and drape it behind his neck and over his chest, or ceremoniously drape it that way before removing it and draping it over our own necks and chest.

Tenzin Gyatsho—for that was his name—entered to greet us. He was a rather studious-looking man in a maroon robe and yellow silk shirt or vest under the robe, which he often draped just over one shoulder, baring his right arm. His arm was copper-coloured and muscular and had at least one small pox vaccination scar—just as mine did.

Ang Lhakpa wore her long black hair in braids with ribbon, her traditional blue cotton Chuba with a light blue silk blouse, and her pangden, an apron-like piece of clothing with a multicoloured horizontal stripe pattern that indicated she was married. She prostrated herself by clasping her hands in front of her forehead and moving them—from her forehead, to her chest, to her waist—before lying before His Holiness spreadeagled on her face.

She did this three times. The prayer she chanted we already knew well, as it appeared everywhere in flowing Tibetan script at the monastery and was even carved onto rocks in the hill on the path to the monastery. It was also what we said before we were allowed to eat our dinner: ‘Om Mani Padme Hong Ray,’ roughly translated as ‘Oh, the jewel in the lotus, hmm’, referring to the essence of all things, according to our father.

After the third time Ang Lhkapa prostrated herself, she backed out of the room still praying and moving her hands to her forehead, chest, then waist. As soon as she was out the door, despite the fact she was meant to be in charge of watching us kids, Ang Lhakpa bolted, apparently overwhelmed by the presence of the unassuming living embodiment of the revered Buddha.

My parents sat stiffly on cushions as one by one, their three children—starting with the oldest—presented kathaks to the young monk and leader in exile. I was the youngest so I was last. I handed His Holiness the kathak my parents had given me to present to him, but not as I’d been instructed.

‘Here,’ I said, shoving the delicately woven, light, gossamer-like silk ceremonial scarf at his face all crumpled and dangling from my little fist. He blessed it and, as with my brother’s and sister’s, put it over my head to drape behind my neck and over my chest. I was so little—just over three years old—and the scarf so long, he had to double it before draping it.

With Ang Lhakpa gone, I had to sit on the lap of one of my parents until their private audience—the second of many—with His Holiness was over. I quickly grew bored and my squirming caught His Holiness’s eye. ‘Would you like to sit on my lap?’ he asked me, leaning down and smiling under large dark-framed glasses that were just like my father’s.

I looked up at my father, who smiled that ‘don’t you embarrass me’ smile of his, between clenched teeth, then my mother, whose dark eyebrows always looked fierce and angry even if she was smiling, and I went up to the future Nobel Peace Prize winner, and sat in his lap, facing my family. It was a fun vantage point, observing my family as if I were His Holiness, listening to the questions and answers about trivial things and then, more serious things.

I especially enjoyed watching my brother and sister sitting next to my parents, both trying hard to be good, while I exploited all opportunities to stick my tongue out at them, unobserved by any of the grown-ups. It was a game my brother and I invented, and involved contorted ways of sticking a tongue out so only the other could see—through fingers over the mouth, around the heel of a hand, or over whatever the chin or cheek was resting upon. My father caught me, at least once. I could tell by the way his gritted-teeth smile became even wider, but he didn’t want to interrupt the young Dalai Lama, so I got away with it.

Eventually, that game grew boring and I began looking around for more entertainment. There was His Holiness’s robes, which he had to occasionally put back over his one shoulder, as he tended to speak somewhat animatedly with his hands. There were his glasses, in their overly thick black frames, which would occasionally slip down his nose. And there was his nose.

No-one can move as fast as a three-year-old intent upon something. ‘I got your nose!’ I declared, showing my right thumb sticking out between my index and middle fingers to first a startled Tibetan spiritual leader and then my mortified parents.

His Holiness then laughed so hard I fell out of his lap. There were tears in his eyes. He explained I reminded him of himself as a boy.

I had seen young monks—some my age—at the monastery. They often huddled in groups and seemed frequently to be laughing. ‘You are a naughty little monk!’ he said to me, still laughing while appearing to admonish me like a parent. ‘Just like I was!’

I met His Holiness again years later. We were living in New Delhi when my father was resident director of the American Institute of Indian Studies, and I was an experienced twelve-year-old. We had gone on a visit to Dharamsala, and my parents were granted another audience with His Holiness. The occasion this time was that my parents had purchased some land near Iona, Washington, forest land they thought to preserve as a forest amid logging camps, and my father had an ambition to build a chorten—a stupa—for Tibetan Buddhist visitors, to make it a pilgrimage spot. The Dalai Lama’s secretary got my father blueprints for and details on the construction of such a monument, or residence of the ashes of deceased monks, and he also obtained several tsas and a tsa mould, for the making of the statue-like images of the deceased out of the ashes.

It was the same visit in which His Holiness, moved by my parents, declared himself a brother to my father, and gave them a tanka, a Tibetan ceremonial wall hanging, from his private collection. The one he chose to give my parents was a painting of a seated Buddha, with blue barnacle encrusted hair, on a lotus petal in the clouds. Below it on the silk border was the main teaching in English and translated Tibetan: ‘Know DUKKHA (sufferings) give up SAMUDAYA (causes of sufferings). Attain NIRODHA (cessation of sufferings) practice MARG (Path) – indulging not in commission of evil deeds, but always accumulating a wealth of merits. Discipline your mind in perfection. This is the teaching of the Buddhas.’ His Holiness added to drape over its hanging rods a kathak with a knot tied in the middle. He told us all that the knot would remain tight until such time as one or the other of my parents was leaving their current life.

On that visit, I described to His Holiness a dream in which the room in the monastery where he and I first met had turned into a cave. I was viewing him in it, from a distance, and I was protecting him in the cave. In my not-yet-adult description of it to him, it sounded to me like the story of Batman, until I realised I was describing the dream in which I was part of His Holiness’s security detail during his escape. I was confessing to him that I had been required to take lives for his protection.

He invited me to stay in Dharamsala and study with him. I looked at the young monks, many of whom were my age, and I thought about what we’d been through in India that past year—the Bangladesh War, which affected my perceptions of politics and human interactions greatly. After thinking about it for a couple days, and discussing it with my parents, I turned the offer down, explaining to him and to my parents that I was eager to get back to my life as a soon-to–be American teenager.

Many years later, in the summer of 1981, His Holiness was performing a religious teaching, The Kalachakra, for the first time outside Asia, at a small monastery in the rolling hills outside Dunn, Wisconsin. Our old family friend Geshe Lhundup Sopa, who was now teaching at the monastery at the location my mother helped find for him, had managed to get His Holiness, who had sent Sopa to the United States to teach Tibetan Buddhism, to hold the ceremony at his new monastery.

I was covering the event for Time magazine, along with a photographer named James Balog. I managed through friends—His Holiness’s personal secretary again—to obtain an exclusive interview with His Holiness about the event. His Holiness arrived in the room in which I was instructed to wait. I sat in my dark suit and tie, with my moustache, which I’d started wearing early in high school. His Holiness had not seen me, nor I him, in about ten years.

He sat in a chair across the room from me and leaned forward, shifting his robes as always. He looked a bit older, the stubble on his shaven head a bit lighter and higher up on his scalp, but still much like the young man in whose lap I’d sat as a child. Looking closely at me, he asked his interpreter my name. The interpreter repeated it, reasonably quietly.

‘I have interpreter,’ His Holiness said. ‘My English, you see, is … not so good.’

I had attended a press conference he held a few days before, sitting rows back, and saw his English in action.

‘Do you remember any of your past lives?’ a buxom young reporter for a Chicago newspaper asked as if she were covering an entertainer.

His Holiness stuck a finger in his ear, as if to clear it from the question. He was standing, while we in the press were all sitting some distance from him.

‘Sometime yes … and sometimes no.’

His expression, a very open and honest, almost apologetic smile, made everyone laugh.

‘Can you tell us about any of them?’ the reporter insisted.

‘Uh … no.’

‘Why not?’

Again, His Holiness cleared his left ear with a finger. ‘It’s … none of you business,’ he said, smiling.

I’d been a journalist long enough to be aware of the tactic—always good to compare notes with someone independently about what was asked and how it was answered. I knew His Holiness was virtually fluent in English, and other languages as well. It was his protective layer, much like why I preferred to play drums in a rock band in high school instead of being out front.

He leaned over to his interpreter again, after about my first or second question in the exclusive interview about why here, why now, was he performing the ceremony that was largely an instructional lecture. I waited.

He pointed in my direction, and said, ‘la?’ which is an honorific—essentially showing endearment, as in Spanish a man may refer to his grown son as his hijito.

After smiling and asking the interpreter the same question in Tibetan and responding with ‘La?’ His Holiness turned to me. He leaned as close as he could towards me from his chair without falling over. He appeared to be scrutinising me, and my moustache.

‘Got your nose!’ he said, laughing hard and rocking in his chair.

I’d been taught in my journalism school courses—from which I had not yet graduated at the time of the interview—how to ‘control’ the interview, or how to get your interviewee to stick to your subject. Having His Holiness laugh uncontrollably at my childhood incident made it difficult to get back to the serious business at hand.

‘You have not been doing this long,’ he kindly observed. ‘I wish you all success in your career.’