This one is our TibetHaus tour group at Lhasa airport. That’s Elke, with the dark hair, and that’s Puntsok. That tall, distinguished-looking man? That’s Professor Klaus Jork, the Chair of TibetHaus. And the woman with long hair next to him is his daughter Kirstin, who has done research on Himalayan poppies. Some of you will recognize this man, even without his big beard – it’s Mario, who is very involved with TibetHaus and has spent time as a Buddhist monk. The woman with glasses next to him is Geri, who speaks good Chinese, which came in useful. And that’s Ute, who like Klaus is also a doctor (and a homeopath), so we were in good hands if anything went wrong medically. Then there are Eva, Gertrud, Bernhardt and Ingrid (who had been in Tibet before, trekking in the western part of the country). And the other Tibetan is Pema, the guide provided by the Chinese tourist agency. As we were with Elke and Puntsok we didn’t really need a guide, but you have to go on a group visa, and the Chinese like to keep track of where their tourists are going.
This is me, standing in a large room on the ground floor of a temple, facing a teaching throne. We have only been in Tibet for less than two hours, and already I am almost in tears. Lhasa Airport is like Frankfurt-Hahn, a long way out of town. After going through the efficient Chinese immigration procedures and being met by Puntsok with a mini-bus, we have made our way towards our hotel in the city. But we have stopped en route to take in a couple of temples. (This sets the tone for our entire trip – full days of visiting one Buddhist place after another, which is fine by me.) The second one we visit is called the Drölma Lhakhang, the Tara Temple. In the photo I am contemplating the fact that, almost a thousand years before, the great Indian pandit Atisha had taught in this room. Atisha famously came to Tibet in 1042, despite predictions that doing so would shorten his life. He had a profound impact on Tibetan Buddhism. Apart from anything else, he was responsible for the introduction of the Lam Rim, the Graduated Path teaching laying out the whole path to Enlightenment, which is a central aspect of Tibetan Buddhist teaching.
Atisha was a great devotee of Tara, the female embodiment of Great Compassion. In the room to my left is a beautiful set of images of the Twenty-One Taras. On the floor above me is a room where the great twentieth century teacher Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö spent time practising meditation. After over thirty years of hearing about them, and studying their work, I am very moved by being in the actual places where these great teachers lived and practised.
This, I’m sure you’ll recognize, is the Potala Palace, where the Dalai Lamas used to live. It’s a very impressive structure, but these days it is basically just a place for tourists. You have to pre-book to go round it, and you are only allowed one hour. You climb painfully up the massive staircase to the top, with modern Lhasa laid out below you. Then you work your way down, through a labyrinth of corridors on four floors. It is very interesting seeing the rooms in which the Dalai Lamas lived, meditated and entertained visitors, but it feels like a museum rather than a place of Buddhist practice. You come across the occasional monk in one of the rooms, reading prayers, but to me they have the air of museum attendants rather than practitioners.
Finally you come to the ground floor, where there are massive stupas – reliquaries of the various Dalai Lamas. The largest of all is that of the Great Fifth, who built the Potala in the 17th century. (Actually, it wasn’t quite finished when he died, and his chief advisor, Desi Sangye Gyatso, concealed his death for several years, pretending that the Dalai Lama was in retreat, until the project was completed.) This stupa is a massive structure, covered in gold and jewels, whose spire rises up far into the darkness of the upper storey above your head. It is a great devotional object. Yet, somehow because of the lack of devotion being shown to it, it feels like a symbol of all that has passed, all that has been lost in Tibetan Buddhism since 1959. I walked out of the dimness of the Potala into the bright light of midday feeling heavy-hearted. This feeling was reinforced by a sign by the exit, about observing Fire Regulations in order to preserve the ‘historical relics’.
If the rest of the trip had been like that, I would have come home depressed by the tragedy of Tibet. With the absence of any sense of living practice, and all the stupas of the deceased Dalai Lamas, the Potala felt worse than a museum to me. It felt like a mausoleum, the place in which the corpse of Tibetan Buddhism, destroyed by the Chinese invasion, had been interred.
Thankfully, though, the Potala was the exception. Before I visited it on my fourth day in Tibet, I had already been to the Jokhang, the main temple in Lhasa. You only have to visit the Jokhang early in the morning to have unarguable proof that, wonderfully and despite everything, Buddhism is still very much alive in Tibet.