“They came back every day, each time beating her and devising new tortures so that she would say where I had gone, or so that I would come and give myself up. But I was up in the mountains, and it was over a month before I came to hear of what had happened to her.”
By the time Passang had reached this part of his story, it was very late, and he needed to retire for the night: he had to rise at 3 a.m. to begin his round of prayers and meditation.
The following morning, Passang said he had to go and visit the Home Ministry about his allowance, so I offered to help him down the hill. We wandered down together, and while he was there I took the opportunity to visit the library and archive which stood next door. This contained some of the most precious texts and artefacts that had been smuggled out of Tibet. Like the Parliament building which it abutted, it was modest in scale, but built in the style of a Tibetan gompa with sloping walls and wooden pillars vaguely modelled on those of the Potala Palace. Inside, the walls were closely lined with books, while one room contained shelves of ancient Sanskrit and Pali texts, wrapped up in yellow cotton dust covers.
Browsing around the books, I asked the scholar who kept the manuscripts to explain to me the rules governing a monk who wished to renounce his vows. In answer he produced from the shelves a series of old leather-bound volumes of Max Müller’s translations of the earliest Buddhist texts on monastic rules and conduct, the Vinnaya Sutra (in Sanskrit, literally, “The Text on Taming”), said to have been collected together in 499 bc at the great council which convened after the death of the Buddha; before then the rules had been passed down orally from the Buddha to his disciples. He also brought down the celebrated commentary on the Vinnaya Sutra made by the monk Tsonawa in Debung monastery in the fourteenth century, and a translation of the Pratimoksha Sutra (literally, “The Path Which Leads to Moksha”), the fundamental Buddhist text on vows.
From these it was clear that there was a long tradition of monks being able to give up their vows in case of emergency. Unlike ordination, for which very detailed ceremonial instructions were given, the renunciation of vows was a very straightforward matter. As long as strict criteria were met—notably the need for the monk to fight for the dharma—then the monk merely approached a rinpoche or senior lama, or if none was available, a statue of the Buddha, and explained what he wanted to do, and that his intention was to defend rather than damage the dharma.
There were also many examples in Tibetan Buddhist cosmology and history which justified violence in the defence of the dharma: most notably the very popular Bodhisattva of Wisdom, Manjushri, who changed into his terrifying and wrathful form to become the most violent and destructive of all Tibetan deities, Yamantaka, the Conqueror of Death. In 1984, as an eighteen-year-old backpacker fresh from Scotland, I had first come across this fearsome god on a visit to the monastery of Alchi in Ladakh. Now part of India, Ladakh had been for most of the Middle Ages an important region of western Tibet. At this time the great Tibetan emperors like Songtsan Gampo had ruled from Bengal and the borders of Kashmir through the whole of China as far north as Mongolia.
In Alchi, a huge mural of Yamantaka was placed above the doorway in the Sumtsek of the monastery. The god was shown sitting naked but for a tiger skin, surrounded by a flaming halo in a graveyard strewn with filleted and decapitated human corpses. He was depicted fanged, blue-skinned, six-headed and six-armed, clutching in his claws his sword, bow and mace, as well as his strangler’s noose and disemboweller’s hook, his hair decorated with the skulls of his victims and his neck garlanded with snakes. Seven hundred years after it was painted, it still had the power to make you shudder.
Yamantaka is not alone in Tibetan cosmology. There is also, for example, the four-headed, six-armed Chakrasamvara, who is shown in murals dancing on his prostrate demonic enemies. Engulfed in flames, roaring with rage, yet strangely poised and balletic, he is crowned and garlanded with skulls, brandishing thunderbolts and skull-headed sceptres; over his head he holds the stretched skin of a dead elephant. Such angry and violent protectors are common in Tibetan Buddhist art, and correspondingly popular in Tibetan devotion; they use their powers for the good of humanity, warding off demons and the creatures of darkness, subverting the ancient warrior imagery of Tibet and utilising it for peaceful ends. Even the most benign figures, such as Guru Rinpoche, are believed to have the power to transform themselves into terrifying killers who can perform acts of great violence in order to protect Buddhism and defeat its enemies, both human and demonic.
Nor is this tradition of violence to protect the dharma solely the preserve of religious tracts and iconography. The great secular epic poem of King Gesar tells how the ruler of the legendary Tibetan Kingdom of Ling killed hundreds of thousands of enemies of the dharma. If these figures could take up arms to protect their faith, then so could the monks. The Dalai Lama’s message has always been one of strict ahimsa (from the Sanskrit for “to do no harm”), and was reinforced after his arrival in India by his reading of Mahatma Gandhi; but it is clear that in the 1950s some monks looked as much to their ancient Tibetan warrior traditions as they did to their Buddhist heritage of non-violence.