Hello Dali

One night in January, 1995, Isabel Hilton, a British journalist, was awakened at her home in London by a telephone call from the office of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader. A private secretary to the Dalai Lama told Hilton that His Holiness wanted her to come immediately to his residence in Dharamsala, the remote town in northern India where Tibetan exiles are based. Why, exactly, the secretary could not say. Hilton, more than intrigued, agreed to go.

As she lay sleepless in bed afterward, wondering at the sudden urgency, Hilton surmised that a critical juncture had been reached in the search for a Panchen Lama, the second-most important figure in Tibet’s religious hierarchy. The search, though it may sound like an arcane religious procedure, was actually a grave political issue with tremendous implications for China and Tibet.

At the center of the Panchen Lama dilemma lies the way Tibetans choose their religious leaders, a secretive blend of mystical divination and back room politicking that is medieval by almost any definition. The theory, in Tibetan tradition, is that when a holy person dies, his spirit assumes a new body, typically a boy born within a year of the lama’s death, who carries identifying marks or behavior.

The reality, in Tibetan history, is that recognizing those signs on a small boy has been an inexact process, vulnerable to interference. The senior monks charged with searching Tibet’s vast countryside for unusual boys are meant to follow instructions they receive in a vision or a dream, and they have often used criteria that shifted to fit a favored candidate, once he was found. Perhaps every religion has to stretch to find heavenly reasons to select its earthly representatives. Lama choosing, whatever its charm, is plainly of another age.

Hilton had interviewed the Dalai Lama before and was at work on a book about the Panchen Lama when the call came. But she had not expected to be drawn herself into a role in the remarkable drama that was unfolding in the fractious, devout, almost surreal Himalayan desert of a land known as Tibet. Hilton’s was a side role, but it gave her a special view on the turn of events.

For centuries, the Panchen Lama has headed a sect of Tibetan Buddhism that made him simultaneously a rival and a partner of the Dalai Lama. Competing Buddhist sects have risen and fallen in Tibet, but for the last few hundred years, the Dalai Lama’s sect has dominated. The Panchen Lama, though secondary, has retained a critical role as well. After 1959, when the Dalai Lama fled Tibet as China seized control, Beijing tried hard to discredit the Dalai Lama and to promote the Panchen Lama as a superior Tibetan leader. Only 20 years old at the time, the Panchen Lama looked pliable at first, yet he steadfastly refused to denounce his spiritual confrere.

Although he was effectively strong-armed by the Chinese into endorsing their rule and was jailed by Mao during the leftist frenzy of the 1960s and ‘70s, the Panchen Lama emerged in the 1980s as a critical power broker. He was useful to China in legitimizing its rule, but he was also a fierce protector of Tibetan culture.

When the Panchen Lama died unexpectedly at age 50 in 1989, it left a void and a new crisis. Who would select his replacement? Tradition dictated that the Dalai Lama give final approval to the chosen one, but exile limited him. Beijing, always trying to reinforce its rule of Tibet, insisted that any new incarnation of the Panchen Lama be found and raised on Chinese-controlled territory, under the watchful eye of the Communist Party. Relations between the Dalai Lama and Beijing were so bad that negotiations were conducted sporadically over the course of six years before the process came to an unsavory end.

“The Search for the Panchen Lama,” Hilton’s riveting account of the entire drama, captures the panoramic scope of a remarkable story. Brimming with political intrigue, it is colored with amusing anecdotes about the oddities of Tibetan life and with the poignancy of a people whose land has been torn apart. The ending is heartbreaking.

In a broad sense, “The Search for the Panchen Lama” is about the clash of traditional religion and modern circumstance. Transitions from one leader to another are a test for any system, and contemporary Tibet, as ruled by China, fails horribly. The unsolved political struggle between old and new, between Dalai Lama and Beijing, has left a chasm between faith and politics. Each side seems at a loss about how to bridge this canyon of dissonance.

The Chinese seem torn between pointing out the archaic nature of traditional Tibetan practices or accepting them as a sign of respect for Tibetan worshipers and co-opting them under Chinese rule. Either way, theirs is the role of a colonial occupier, struggling fitfully to hold onto this enormous chunk of land and utterly perplexed by the locals and their idolatrous religious practices.

The Dalai Lama argues that he is concerned only with finding the “real” Panchen Lama. As saintly as he often seems, however, the Dalai Lama is a politician, too.

Irrespective of its larger implications, “The Search for the Panchen Lama” is a great story. The real tale begins with the death of the 10th Panchen Lama in January 1989. In the months before the demonstrations and massacre at Tiananmen Square in June 1989, a liberal breeze blew through Beijing. China’s leadership agreed to appoint a committee of Tibetan religious figures to guide the search for a replacement. Though some in Beijing wanted to block the naming of any religious figure, moderate voices persuaded the leadership that a new Panchen Lama, properly supervised within Chinese territory, was preferable to one chosen and raised in exile.

So Chinese leaders agreed to a search committee headed by Chadrel Rinpoche, the abbot of Tashilhunpo, the home monastery of the Panchen Lama. Chadrel Rinpoche was an intriguing figure. Though many Tibetan exiles considered any religious leader who cooperated with China a sell-out, Chadrel was a respected figure who helped build Tashilhunpo into a vibrant center of religious learning.

Although Chadrel had survived for years by constantly compromising with Chinese authorities, he felt strongly that the Dalai Lama must give his approval for whatever choice emerged. Without the Dalai Lama’s nod, Chadrel warned Chinese leaders in Beijing, it would be hard to persuade Tibetans to accept the choice.

Chinese leaders countered that Beijing alone had the right to make the choice and that it would be best if the Dalai Lama accepted it unquestioningly. Chadrel knew he would have to handle the issue gingerly. Beijing and the Dalai Lama mistrust each other so deeply that even a small difference over the issue could escalate into a confrontation. If that happened, Chadrel feared, the institution of the Panchen Lama would be irreparably damaged, and a political buffer against Chinese domination in Tibet would be lost.

By 1994, Chadrel had devised a risky scheme. He outlined it in a secret letter to the Dalai Lama, which was carried by a monk who traveled mostly on foot through the Himalayas to India. Essentially, he proposed that the Dalai Lama make a choice in secret and then let Chadrel try to railroad that choice through Beijing’s selection committee. After Beijing announced the choice, it could be revealed that the Dalai Lama agreed. In this way, Chadrel hoped, Beijing could satisfy itself that it had been the final arbiter in the choice, while Tibetan worshippers could know that the Dalai Lama had really made the selection.

The Dalai Lama weighed Chadrel’s proposal and studied the names of five boys secretly forwarded to him, including one favored by Chadrel. The Dalai Lama knew that by agreeing to allow China to announce the decision, he might be accused by exiles that he was parroting Beijing.

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So he called on Hilton and asked her to film him as he made the choice and then save the footage and release it only after the Chinese announced their decision. Then he could plausibly claim that he had made his choice before the Chinese did. Hilton obliged, after scrounging up a Finnish film crew who happened to be in Dharamsala and swearing them to secrecy.

It was a good plan, but no one knew if it would work. Word filtered out of China that Chadrel was under pressure from Chinese leaders to abandon the search committee and to use a Golden Urn, akin to picking the name of a boy out of a hat. Meantime, pressure from the Tibetan exiles pushed the Dalai Lama to consider announcing the choice first. The longer he waited, the exiles argued, the greater a chance that the Chinese would pick a different boy. The Dalai Lama tried to consult Chadrel but, unable to reach him, went ahead anyhow.

In May 1995, the Dalai Lama announced that he had selected Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, a 6-year-old boy, as the 11th Panchen Lama. It was a betrayal of his promise to Chadrel, who was immediately placed under house arrest, accused of leaking state secrets for his clandestine communication with the Dalai Lama. The boy disappeared as well.

Hilton generously allows the Dalai Lama to try to justify his decision and observes that no one knew whether Chadrel would ever have been able to succeed in his scheme had the Dalai Lama not preempted it. But the Dalai Lama confides to Hilton his anguish at what happened to Chadrel. “I feel,” he said, “that I committed the crime here and they took the punishment there.”

Indeed, they did. China ordered a purge of leaders in Tibetan monasteries and orchestrated a campaign in every monastery in Tibet to denounce the Dalai Lama and his choice for Panchen Lama. Chadrel was sentenced to six years in jail.

In November 1995, Beijing went forward with the Golden Urn. It was a sad spectacle: Chinese officials presiding over a Tibetan religious ceremony and choosing a second 6-year-old boy, Gyaltsen Norbu, whose parents happened to be Communist Party members. He has been trumpeted as China’s choice for the Panchen Lama ever since, but few people in Tibet seem to believe in his holiness.

The Tibetan people were left with an irreparable split between Beijing and the Dalai Lama. It seems, as Chadrel Rinpoche feared, that the institution of the Panchen Lama has been irreparably harmed and has weakened efforts by Tibetans to resist being overrun by China. The enduring, unanswerable mystery is what might happen if the Communist Party falls one day.

“The Search for the Panchen Lama” has its flaws. Hilton devotes far too many pages to the history of previous Panchen Lamas, as though she is dragging the reader along her own learning curve. At times, Hilton is also too credulous of the versions of events described by Tibetans sympathetic to the Dalai Lama. Most seriously, her account of the death of the 10th Panchen Lama quotes Tibetans who suggest that he was poisoned by Chinese security forces. That is far too serious a charge to leave to “the tenacious conviction” of many Tibetans, as Hilton terms it. I was left wondering whether she actually believed it and, if she did, why she did not make a stronger case.

Though Chinese security forces are certainly capable of anything, this killing seems improbable. The Panchen Lama was serving Beijing at the time of his death, and though he was outspoken in his criticism of Chinese rule, he was enormously useful to Chinese leaders, both in acknowledging their legitimacy and in mediating between Tibet and Beijing. After his death, no one could fill those shoes. When rioting erupted two months later in Tibet’s capital, Lhasa, the Chinese imposed martial law.

Martial law was eventually relaxed, but Beijing’s grip on Tibet has remained tight. Worshipers are not allowed to display photographs of the first boy who was named Panchen Lama. He is said to be under permanent house arrest, perhaps the youngest political prisoner in the world, in a remote part of northwestern China. The second boy is similarly imprisoned, if somewhat more comfortably, in Beijing.