Nine Lives(63)

“After that, the Chinese came to the monastery every month or so and gave us a lecture—they called them indoctrination meetings. Sometimes the posters they put up were blasphemous—insulting the Lord Buddha and saying that the monks were trying to keep the people of Tibet poor and ignorant. Slowly the lectures became ruder and more pointed: they said that everything the monasteries did was wrong, and that there was no other option but to accept the changes the Chinese were making. Even when the Chinese were nice and polite—giving free seeds and yaks to the poor people and so on—we always felt we could not trust them. Even from the seclusion of the monastery we could see that they were bringing in more and more of their people to build roads, and more and more troops. I realised something was wrong, even though they tried to make it look as if they were our friends. I sensed that something bad would come—that something evil was creeping behind their smiles.

“As the programme of lectures progressed, I began to have sleepless nights, thinking about what was happening to Tibet, and how these Chinese people—and Chinese lay people at that—kept telling us what we should do in our own monastery. I didn’t want to be under their rule, but I couldn’t see any other option. Some of the monks began to talk about fighting, saying that the Chinese were out to destroy Buddhism, and that we should not simply surrender to what they wanted. Some nights as I lay awake, I wondered if maybe these monks were right.

“Then, in the summer of 1954, rumours began to spread that the Chinese had killed many monks and bombed a monastery at the other end of our Kham province. We also heard that there had been a rebellion among some of the Golok and Khampa nomads. It was said that when the rebels took shelter in the monastery of Lithang the Chinese had bombed it, killing everyone there. Then we heard that the same had happened closer to us, at Changtreng Gompa, and that the monastery had been first bombed and then desecrated.

“There were other stories too: that the Chinese made some of the monks in Kham get married, and others they forced to join the PLA, to build roads for them or even to work in slave labour camps. Some said that parents who refused to send their children to Chinese schools were tied to posts and had nails driven through their eyes.

“Shortly after we began hearing such things, the Chinese army came to our monastery and asked us to give them all our guns and swords from the monastery armoury. The abbot said that these things had been given to us by our forebears and parents, and that the Chinese had no right to take them. But they ignored him, and searched the monastery and took away all the arms they could find.

“After this, we had a meeting—not just the monks, but many lay people from the villages nearby. The monks were unanimous that we must fight, as the Chinese were now clearly intent on destroying the Buddhist dharma and so were tendra, Enemies of the Faith. We had heard that many fighters—some said 15,000—had gathered in Lhokha to the south and founded a resistance movement called the Chu-zhi Gang-drung, or Four Rivers, Six Ranges. Many said we should all leave and join them there.

“So we went to the abbot and before him we renounced our vows. We simply said that we could not continue as monks. Now we had to fight to protect the dharma. There was no ceremony; the abbot just said, ‘All right. You have my permission to give up your vows. Now go.’ We weren’t sure whether this really did release us from all our promises; it seemed so perfunctory, especially as we were all still wearing our robes. But there was no time to worry about these things at that moment, though it was something which greatly exercised us later when we had to take up arms.

“Many went off on horseback—a number of the monks were from the village at the foot of the monastery and their families gave them horses to go and join the resistance. As for me, I took the gun I had used as a shepherd from the place where I had hidden it, and left the monastery as well; but I had no horse. I went on foot, on my own, with my gun. All I really wanted to do was to go to my home and see my family again. But the PLA had built a small camp next to our land, and I knew it would not be safe. So taking my gun with me, I headed back in the direction of the camp in the mountains where we used to pasture the yak and dri in summer.

“What I didn’t know was that the monastery was full of informers. As soon as the Chinese heard that I had taken my gun and gone to the hills, they came to our house and began beating my mother, asking her for details of where I was. They were very cruel. They beat her feet, and dragged her by her hair so that she was almost bald, and stayed that way for months. They tied her to a stake outside our house, stripped her and threw cold water over her. They left her there overnight so that the water froze to her and she nearly died of exposure.