Nine Lives(65)

As I walked Passang back up to his home later that afternoon, I asked him how he had felt about taking up arms after so long practising non-violence. “There is a teaching story about this in our Jataka Tales. Let me tell it to you.

“There was once a rinpoche of the highest mental state, who was very near Enlightenment. One day he was travelling across the Ganges along with 500 of his brethren in a boat. The captain of the boat was an evil man who hated the Buddhist dharma, and in particular hated the monks who lived and protected it. Secretly he planned to take this boatload of monks to the middle of the river, overturn the boat and drown them all. But because of his spiritual gifts, the rinpoche was able to read the man’s mind, and realised what he was planning. So after hesitating and praying for guidance, he decided to throw the man into the river before he was able to carry out his plan. He did this, and the man was pulled under the waves and drowned almost immediately.

“The other monks were horrified and asked: ‘Rinpoche, you are a most senior monk, the reincarnation of a great soul, and an example to us all. How could you do this? How could you perform an act of such violence and kill a man?’ The rinpoche explained what the man was planning and said that he was willing to take responsibility for his actions, and the bad karma that would accrue through the killing, in order to save the lives of 500 monks. He was supremely unselfish, sacrificing himself and his place on the wheel of rebirth for the sake of the dharma so that the other monks could continue on the path of Enlightenment. I often think of that rinpoche’s sacrifice, and wonder whether he was right to make it. I think he was.”

When I asked how he had actually ended up fighting, Passang told me he had been in the mountains for a month, successfully avoiding the search parties the Chinese sent to look for him, when news first reached him of what had happened to his mother. His uncle the monk came up to the mountains to bring him the news that she had been tortured. He asked that Passang surrender his gun in order to save his mother, and of course he immediately did so. The uncle then took it to the Chinese, who eventually released Passang’s mother. Passang meanwhile made contact with several of his brethren who were also hiding in the hills, and decided to walk with them to Lhasa to warn the monks there of what was happening, and to try to galvanise some resistance.

“For seven or eight months we walked,” he said as we headed up the hill back to the veterans’ home, Passang ahead and me puffing a little behind, struggling to keep up with this man forty years older. “At first we travelled only at night, but after a while, when we began to near Lhasa, we felt more secure walking during the day. There were many checkpoints, but there were lots of other pilgrims and monks on the roads. We told anyone we met that we were pilgrims heading to Lhasa for the Monlam ceremony, when the Dalai Lama addresses all the people with sermons for two weeks.

“When we finally reached Lhasa, the streets were crowded with pilgrims and the atmosphere was very tense. But our government had no real soldiers, and there was little they could do to stop the Chinese doing exactly what they wanted. I and my fellow monks planned to take shelter in Sera monastery, our mother house, because although we had tried to renounce our vows, we were still wearing the robes of monks and still really thought of ourselves as monks. Sera lies to the north of the city, where the Lhasa plain meets a great arc of mountains. There we found to our pleasure that several of our brother monks had already arrived before us.

“I was sure that the Chinese would come to Sera too, as I could see the army camps already established around the outskirts of Lhasa, and I was determined not to bow down to the Chinese. I told the other monks about the Chinese, how they were very strong and very cruel, and how we had to stand up to them. We said the monks should take their guns while they still had them, and join the rebels. But the older monks wouldn’t listen. They thought our government could still protect us, and that the magical powers of the Dalai Lama would keep the Chinese away. We replied that if this was the case, why were the Chinese here, even on the outskirts of Lhasa, and not the other side of the border?

“Then word reached Lhasa that my mother had died. She was not old—no more than fifty. But she never recovered from the beatings the Chinese gave her, and she died as a result of the internal injuries she received for what I had done.”

Passang looked down, and for a moment his face crumpled; but he stopped himself. “Of course, I wept when the news came. For long days after that I was too paralysed with sadness to think of anything else. But I was worried too, because I now felt a real hatred for the Chinese. Violence may be justified by our scriptures in certain circumstances, but anger and hatred are always forbidden. I knew I was now in mortal danger of real sin, but this only made me hate the Chinese more.”