Anna Louise Strong Reference Archive
In the first interview granted for years to any reporter, the Panchen Erdeni, just elevated to power in Tibet, told me that “the abduction of the Dalai Lama by reactionary serf-owners” was “the greatest sabotage of religion in Tibet” and that he hoped for the Dalai Lama’s return. Till then, he himself would take over the organizing of an autonomous Tibet “within the framework of a socialist China” and would begin “the democratic reform,” including the abolition of serfdom. That was in May 1959 and the Panchen Erdeni’s views of the Dalai’s return may change with the Dalai’s actions abroad and the Panchen’s own acquisition of power. A youth who was dispossessed and in exile half of his life, may change when he suddenly reaches the top, as the Dalai Lama also would seem to have changed in his environment abroad. I record it for the record of what the Panchen Erdeni said when his take-over began.
The view commonly held in the West that the Panchen Erdeni is only a poor substitute, even a “fake substitute,” for the Dalai Lama, or that in some way he is “under” the Dalai Lama or inferior to him, is incorrect. Another common view, that there are two trends in Tibet, towards China or towards India, and that the Panchen represents the first and the Dalai the second, was partly correct in part of the present century.
In the theology of Tibetan Buddhism, as we saw in an earlier chapter, the Dalai Lama and Panchen Erdeni are spiritually equal brothers, reincarnations of the two chief disciples of Tson Khapa. If one is considerably older than the other, they are known as “Father-and-Son,” a single term implying a unified being. In the sharply defined ranks of feudalism, only the Dalai Lama and Panchen Erdeni had first rank, all other Living Buddhas had second rank, while cabinet ministers had only third rank.
In temporal power the Dalai Lama had much more territory. The amounts have varied with the centuries and cannot be given with accuracy, for provinces and counties were never really measured, and power depended more on the allegiances of nobles and monasteries than on boundaries. In most of the present century, for those who insist on statistics, the Dalai Lama had 109 counties while the Panchen had only twelve. The impression that prevails abroad, that the Dalai Lama was overlord also of the Panchen’s counties, comes from the fact that most travellers to Tibet in this century were British or depended on British information. There was a long period when the British backed the Dalai Lama, while the Panchen, fearing for his life, had fled. The Dalai Lama of the early part of the century, the thirteenth incarnation, was one of the few who lived to a mature age and exerted political power. After fleeing alternately to India and to Peking from the ravages of the period, he finally settled down to make deals with the British, in the warlord period when China was weak. The Panchen on the other hand, fled in 1924 to the interior of China and refused to return at British request; he died in Chinghai. The present Panchen, born in Chinghai, did not reach his inherited possessions in Tibet till 1952. Since during this period, from 1924 to 1952, the Dalai’s ministers tried to take over the lands of the Panchen, while the British dealt with the Dalai Lama as the lord of all Tibet, travellers naturally reported him as the supreme overlord.
By contrast, the two French priests who travelled to Tibet the hard way in the nineteenth century, on foot over the great plateau, found in 1846-48 an opposite situation, in which the Dalai Lamas were pitiful infant victims while the Panchen was the strong man. In their two-volume account of the journey “Through Tartary, Tibet and China,” the “Lazarist priest and missionary apostolic” E. Huc recounts the demoralized condition of Lhasa, where three Dalai Lamas in succession had died in mysterious circumstances before taking power, and where people suspected the regent of murdering them, but did not dare speak out.
In this situation, it was the Panchen who, together with the Dalai Lama’s ministers, sent a secret appeal to the Chinese emperor, stating that three Dalai Lamas had died and they feared for the life of the next one, and asking the emperor to send an investigator. The investigator arrived, with the powers of the court of China, took testimony, not without torture, until finally the regent, not under torture but fearing it, confessed. He said he had murdered all three Dalai Lamas, the first by strangulation, the second by suffocation, the third by poison. He was not executed but given a sentence of life exile. Even this mild sentence caused a minor war in Lhasa, for the “Lamas of Sera,” being partisans of the regent, stormed 15,000 strong into the city, armed with lances, clubs and shot-guns, besieged the dwellings of the kaloons who had reported the regent, tore one kaloon to pieces and broke into the prison where the regent was confined. The methods of feudal rebellion seem fairly similar to those in Lhasa of the present year.
It was clearly the Panchen at that time who took the initiative in protecting the child Dalai Lama. The same Panchen was promoting a dream of empire which testified to his virile imagination if not to his political sense. When Living Buddhas and other high lamas came on pilgrimage to his palace at Shigatze, he signed them up in a secret conspiracy, according to E. Huc. He said that in his next incarnation, he intended to be born in the north, whereupon spiritual powers would help him annihilate the Hans, make alliance with the Mongols and then conquer the “lands of the Rus” (Russia), combining them all in a great Buddhist Empire on the style of Genghiz Khan. It was a dream even bigger than the “Greater Tibet” of the present Dalai Lama, and equally far from practical politics. The Panchen, however, was realistic in an aspect that counted. While the great empire was deferred to his next incarnation, he collected for it in this.
It will be seen that feudal rulers who are also gods have extravagant dreams, but their actual power, as well as their relation to each other, has depended on the state of the Chinese empire, the decisions of its emperors, the allegiances of nobles and monasteries, and the maturity and personality of the various Dalai Lamas and Panchens. The present Panchen Erdeni is in similar case. After a quarter century of exile — fourteen years’ exile of his predecessor and thirteen of his own, he was returned to what may be called his “ancestral lands” by a short paragraph in the 1951 Agreement between the Dalai Lama and Peking, a paragraph almost nobody else would observe.
The Agreement provided that the “status, functions and powers” of the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni should remained unchanged. Then, in paragraph 6, it was stated that this “status, functions and powers” means those of the 13th Dalai Lama and the 9th Panchen Erdeni “when these were in amicable relations with each other.” That simple phrase turned back the clock to the time before the Ninth Panchen fled into exile from the British and from the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, and thereby gave the seat at Shigatze and the area known as Houtsang to the present young man. A later action in 1956, made him the first Vice-Chairman of the Preparatory Committee for the Tibetan Autonomous Region, of which the Dalai Lama was Chairman. Still later when the Dalai Lama went in March 1959 to India, the order of the State Council made the Panchen the Acting Chairman, and therewith, the chief of local government in Tibet.
The Panchen Erdeni Chuji-Geltsang, to give him his double title and family name, is a young man of twenty-one. But the Panchen, like the Dalai, has “advisers.” And Chinese have experience in these matters for several thousand years.
His take-over of power was handled in very proper order. On March 28, as the Dalai Lama and his ministers approached the Indian border, the State Council of the Central Government of China dissolved the local government of Tibet and asked the Preparatory Committee for the Tibetan Autonomous Region to take over its functions. The Dalai Lama, who was chairman of this committee, being “absent under duress,” the Panchen Erdeni, who was first Vice-Chairman, was asked to serve as Acting Chairman, pending the Dalai Lama’s return. The Panchen accepted by wire from his castle in Shigatse. Thence he journeyed in state to Lhasa to become Acting Chairman for Tibet.
On April 5 at 3:10 in the afternoon, the Panchen’s car arrived in Lhasa and drew up in front of the great Daipung Monastery, where dignitaries of army and state and religion waited to welcome the youth. The younger folk presented flowers, the older men of standing exchanged formally the ceremonial scarves known as hata. The Panchen was then conducted to a “new palace” in the Shirtsit Lingka, or Park, while throngs of people burned pine needles and prostrated themselves as he passed. It was noted that he passed by the great Potala Palace and the Norbu Lingka Summer Palace, the palaces of the Dalai Lama, which two weeks earlier had served as forts for the rebels, and which now lay gleaming in the sunlight. A correspondent noted: “The willows in Norbu Lingka are turning green.”
A week of whirlwind recognition followed for the Panchen. A banquet on the 6th by political and military chiefs, with songs and dances of Tibet as program, was followed on the 7th by ceremonial visits to Jokhan and Ramogia Monasteries, for which the Panchen had two “Living Buddhas” as attendants. He worshipped and recited Sutras for two hours in each monastery. Correspondents from Peking used the occasion to note that the various sacred objects were still in place, especially the gold statue of Buddha brought to Lhasa by the Princess Wen Cheng of the Tang dynasty in A.D. 641, that thousands of Lhasa citizens prostrated themselves when the Panchen passed, and that the Panchen, speaking to the assembled lamas in the monasteries, assured them that “the Central Government has always respected religion in Tibet and will always continue to do so.”
Only after all this mutual recognition, by political and military chiefs, by the lamas and the people, did the Panchen open on the 8th the first session of the Preparatory Committee, as the new local government under his acting chairmanship. His keynote speech noted that “all nationalities of the motherland” must take the road to socialism and carry out reforms, but “the time, the stages and the methods of reform should be decided in conformity with the specific conditions of each nationality.” The morning after this declaration, the Panchen left by special plane for Lanchow, where he was formally welcomed by the dignitaries of Kansu Province, thence by special train to Sian, where the chiefs of Shensi Province gave him a banquet and so to Peking to be greeted at the station by a throng of lamas and Buddhist leaders, including the Venerable Shirob Jaltso, and another throng of political personages, including Chou En-lai, the Premier of China. . . . It was a highly satisfactory launching for a young man.
I saw him speak in the beautiful Hall of Benevolence of the Winter Palace, addressing, in robes of gold brocade, the session of the National People’s Congress. He declared himself “incensed” by the “so-called statement” of the Dalai Lama released in Tezpur, and said that its ideas “were contrary to everything the Dalai Lama had said for eight years,” that its form “was not even in Tibetan usage” but was “clearly imposed by foreigners.” This brought a tart rejoinder from Nehru, who found the Panchen’s ire unseemly. Deputies of the Congress, however, told me that the Panchen was so angered by the Tezpur statement that calmer people had to work on him to restrain his comments within the bounds of decency.
Such anger was natural. Foreign intrigues, from the direction if not from the action of India, had caused the previous Panchen to die in exile, and kept the present Panchen from his home for thirteen years. Yet behind the anger with which he championed the Dalai Lama’s “patriotism” and expressed hopes for his return, he would have been either less or more than human if he had failed to feel some personal triumph in the sudden heights to which he, through the Dalai Lama’s absence, had attained.
My request for an interview was granted even before he made the speech to the Congress, but the interview itself delayed. This did not surprise me, for the Panchen was far, far better employed. I followed in the press his triumphs. Pictures showed him boating at a Sunday picnic given him by sundry chiefs of government in the old Summer Palace of the emperors; other pictures showed him at a banquet given by the Ministry of Defense. He was shown received by Mao Tse-tung and the secular chiefs of China, all exchanging hata in Tibetan style though Mao seemed to have a quizzical gleam in his eye. Then the aged and famous Chu Teh, Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Congress, tendered the Panchen a banquet at which Peking and Szechwan operas were performed.
Nor was the Panchen’s spiritual role forgotten. Between these political festivities he was received at the Temple of Broad Charity with tolling of bells and burning of incense. He prayed before the sacred “Buddha tooth,” and sprinkled before it spring water and barley from Tibet. He then mounted the holy throne in the temple hall and read “the three principles of the Dharma” to an audience of monks in orange and wine red robes, sitting cross-legged on the floor.
At the Lama Temple the reception was even bigger, for this is his own form of Buddhism, where scriptures are read in Tibetan. More than a thousand monks and nuns turned out, with “Living Buddhas” coming from Inner Mongolia. Here his approach was hailed by the blowing of conch shells and horns so big that each had to be supported by two lamas. Cymbals and drums were struck, incense burned, white powder spread on the floor in “auspicious” designs, and a long yellow carpet laid for His Holiness to walk on to the temple hall where he “recited Sutras to more than a thousand people.”
Impressed by these reports of pomp and circumstance, I wondered what was the proper way for me to greet the Panchen. Since even Mao Tse-tung gave him a hata, perhaps I also should buy one. I phoned the authorities who had arranged the interview. They told me not to bother. I couldn’t buy the right kind of hata anyway, they said, since these were hardly obtainable outside Tibet. Moreover the ceremony of exchanging hata was complex and depended on the exact feudal status of the participants. The forms were changing. If Chairman Mao had exacted a ceremony in the ancient manner, the Panchen would have had to kowtow and hit his head on the ground nine times, as fixed by former Chinese emperors. The mutual exchange by dropping them over the other’s outstretched arms, the way Mao had done with the Panchen, was, I learned, the greeting of equals. When the big delegation of journalists visited Tibet in 1955, the hata were dropped on their bowed necks, which showed their status pretty high but not as high as the Dalai Lama or Panchen Erdeni. What form was proper for an American woman writer, this had no precedent because it hadn’t happened. Better let the Panchen’s secretaries work it out; they would supply whatever was needed.
So at three on a May afternoon I entered the large walled compound and the villa reserved for the Panchen and was received first by his secretaries in a very long, formal audience room, the same in which the assembled heads of Buddhism, under the Venerable Shirob, had done homage to the Panchen two weeks earlier. The secretaries gave me a white silk scarf some ten feet long rolled up from both ends into a double roll, and instructed me in its use. They then took the roll back and gave it to my interpreter. Hata, I learned, is used by the top strata of society and carried by “retainers.” My interpreter and I — she was now my “retainer” went upstairs to the Panchen’s personal sitting-room.
Sunlight streamed through the yellow silk drapes of two sets of double windows into a cream and yellow room. The overstuffed divan and arm-chairs of pale yellow were set on a large cream Chinese rug with an appliqued design of green leaves and deep pink roses at the corners. The walls were cream. A few large antique porcelain vases stood on the floor in proper places while rarer porcelains and jades were exhibited on the glass shelves of a mahogany cabinet. Near the door stood a highly modern long-and-short-wave radio. A low coffee-table, set with tea-cups, fruit and candies, was centered between the divan and the arm-chairs. It was a friendly room.
Into the room came a youth in a golden orange brocaded robe with sash of pale yellow, whose bare head was clipped so close that the dark hair seemed a neat, tight cap above bronzed skin. We rose; I extended my hands for the hata, palms up and close together. My interpreter placed the hata on them with the double roll upward. I moved my hands outward with a flick that sent the scarf unrolling on both sides to the floor. The Panchen received the scarf on his outstretched hands; his secretary whisked it away. Another secretary gave him another hata, which he then similarly presented to me.
This, in the hata ceremony, is the greeting of equals, which begins to be the fashion now. Four years ago, the correspondents were shown in Tibet that their status was lower than that of the dignitaries they greeted. But now, Mao Tse-tung having given an “equal” greeting to the Panchen, he did the same by me. Democracy, even in Tibet, advances. The Panchen, in fact, went even further. As my interpreter reached to take from me the hata the Panchen had presented, the young man thrust his right hand under the scarf and gave me a Western style hand-shake, saying: “How do you do?” in more-or-less English. Everyone smiled.
Despite the informal beginning, the conversation went slowly. Double translation, from Tibetan to Mandarin to English, takes time and loses much. The Panchen’s direct manner helped and so did the fact that my questions were written beforehand, and lay before him in Tibetan as he replied. We began with his personal biography of which there have been conflicting reports. Because of the double translation, I shall avoid quoting exact words, except where he repeated them for emphasis.
He was born, he said, in 1938 in Chinghai Province outside Tibet. In 1944 he was recognized as the reincarnation of the previous Panchen. Other candidates were proposed but on due consideration by several oracles and Living Buddhas, choice fixed on him. For several years more, however, he remained outside Tibet.
“The reason lay in the indifference of the kasha, the local government under the Dalai Lama,” he said. “They neither recognized me nor refused to recognize. They were indifferent.” (I did not ask whether this was because the kasha had designs on his territory; the question didn’t seem necessary.)
The recognition by the Central Government of China, which for centuries has been necessary for the lawful installation of Dalais and Panchens, was accorded by the Kuomintang in 1949. The “conferring of titles” was done on August 10, 1949, in a Chinghai monastery by a representative sent from the Kuomintang. Soon after this, the Kuomintang itself lost its title to Chinghai, being driven out by the People’s Liberation Army. When the Chinese People’s Republic was inaugurated on October 1, 1949, the Panchen soon wired his support of the new government and received its recognition as Tenth Panchen in return.
Since the Panchen at the time was only eleven years old, one assumes he had in Chinghai some shrewd advisers who saw how the political wind was blowing in China faster than Washington did. If the Panchen’s detractors say, as they do, that this makes him a “Communist puppet,” his supporters say that it shows him close to the loyalties of the people of China, including the Tibetan part of the Chinese people, large numbers of whom live in Chinghai. Also the fact that he grew to be eleven before he was ordained a Panchen Erdeni probably means that he knows a bit more of the lot of the common folk than does the Dalai Lama, who was taken into the great Potala Palace at the tender age of four.
The political sense of the Panchen’s advisers was quickly rewarded. In 1951, when the Agreement was signed between the Dalai Lama and Peking, one of its clauses, as we have seen above, restored to the Panchen Erdeni his “status, functions and rights,” as they had been in the days of the Ninth Panchen before the estrangement and exile. A single flick of the pen in the new Peking, did what long years of effort by the previous exiled Panchen had been unable to do.1
The present young Panchen told me that he himself had gone to Peking in 1951, and discussed the details of the Seventeen Articles before these were signed by the Dalai Lama’s envoys. Again his advisers showed shrewdness. For through this new Agreement, the Panchen came in early 1952 to the palace of Shigatze and the lands of Houtsang, from which his predecessor had been forced in 1923.
Both the present Dalai Lama and the present Panchen came to Peking in 1954 as deputies to the National People’s Congress. They remained for several months. Mao Tse-tung personally took pains to bring the two young men together, the Dalai then 20 and the Panchen just 16, in the interests of Tibetan harmony. For the first time these two “spiritual brothers” became personally acquainted. People who saw them together in Peking say that they seemed to relax in each other’s company, each having for the first time an equal companion with whom he could be informal, but that when their retainers were around, which was most of the time, there was a terrible problem of precedence.
“We held several consultations about the future organization of the Tibetan Autonomous Region,” the Panchen told me. “We did considerable work together on this. That is why I feel that I know the Dalai Lama’s views. He expressed much pride in the achievements of our motherland, as he saw it in visiting many Chinese cities.”
Quickly the Panchen concluded his brief biography. In 1956 when the Preparatory Committee was formed, the Dalai Lama became Chairman and the Panchen first Vice-Chairman. In this past March 1959, when the Dalai’s ministers led rebellion in Lhasa and were beaten and fled to India, the Panchen became “Acting Chairman pending the Dalai Lama’s return,” which put him in charge of the local government of Tibet.
“More than this about my life would take too long to state,” concluded the Panchen.
What studies did the Panchen have to prepare for his life’s duties, I asked him. He replied that “before liberation” he studied only the Tibetan language and the Buddhist Sutras in that language. “These are still my main study,” he said. “The Buddhist classics are extensive; their study takes many years. I have in them two tutors. Since liberation I also study politics, especially the works of Mao Tse-tung and other government leaders. These works also are extensive and take time.”
In response to my query about his previous political power as Panchen, he replied that he “had the responsibility of leading the Kanpo Lija, which in my territory has similar powers to that of the kasha under the Dalai Lama.” He denied, what many foreign writers have claimed, that his territory was “under the Dalai Lama and under the kasha.” “The authority is parallel and separate,” he declared. “Many Chinese emperors have so stated.” There was no hesitation in the Panchen’s claim. One may add that various Chinese emperors recognized various arrangements, which adds to the complexity of any statement about politics in Tibet. The Thirteenth Dalai certainly usurped many functions of the exiled Panchen.
I asked him about the “period of estrangement,” those recent years when the Panchens were in exile. He replied that this was due to foreign imperialists who wished to “divide and rule.”
“In earlier times all Dalai Lamas and Panchen Erdenis were on good terms,” he asserted, with what seems over-optimistic retrospect. “The British imperialists sought disunity in Tibet and many high officials of the Dalai Lama worked with them. Because of their activities the former Panchen had to move to Chinghai. The estrangement began in the last years of the Ching Dynasty and grew worse under the Kuomintang. It was ended by Chairman Mao. The return of Tibet to the motherland and the ending of foreign extraterritorial rights, laid the base.”
I pressed the subject for it is an important point abroad. “It is said that two trends exist in Tibet, one towards China and one towards India and that you represent the first and the Dalai the second. Is this true?”
“That is a foreign way of putting it, and incorrect,” replied the Panchen. “Two such groups actually exist, but the division is among the different nobles under the Dalai Lama. The great majority of the Tibetan people, both lay and ecclesiastic, recognize that Tibet has long been part of China, and they especially incline towards China now, when the present Central Government has a good policy towards minor nationalities. This was the case with all the former Panchens and myself. Until now it has been the position also of the Dalai Lama and of many of his nobles. But some of his ministers and high nobles have always leaned towards the imperialists. These are the ones who took the Dalai Lama to India.”
I asked the Panchen Erdeni what changes had taken place in Tibet since 1951, the year when China’s Central Government began to send in representatives and personnel, both army and civilian.
“All reform was held back by the kasha,” replied the Panchen, “and yet there was considerable change. A net-work of highways was built, connecting Tibet with the rest of China, and linking Tibetan cities. Transport thus became easier; prices of goods went down. Some factories were built, some schools and hospitals, two experimental farms, two power-plants and many houses. The government also gave seed loans to peasants without interest and also many tools. But the social system was not changed. Serfdom continued as before.”
In response to my question the Panchen admitted that when seed was given to the peasants it had sometimes been taken from them by their owners, and the tools had also sometimes been removed. “But in all this the consciousness of the people greatly increased,” he said. “They demand democratic reform. Now that the kasha is removed and the rebellion put down, these reforms will take place. I wish to see them quickly for they will swiftly raise the standard of living in Tibet.”
How rapidly, I asked, did the Panchen think the Tibetan Autonomous Region could be set up and serfdom abolished?
“Very soon,” he replied, “because of the strong demand of the people.” He added that “when the democratic reform is completed, then we shall study how soon the time will be ripe for socialist change.” The words were a trifle bookish; his critics in the West would say he was just repeating the slogans. But they were the words by which nearly seven hundred million people were living, including several million Tibetans. Should a youth of twenty-one, immersed in the Buddhist Sutras, be asked to invent his own?
Some practical details he mentioned. The lands of the rebels, he said, would probably go directly to the serfs that work them. Already these serfs were promised the harvest they now sow. The final division of lands would have to be more carefully worked out, but would probably follow much the same lines of what this spring was an emergency measure to expedite sowing. “Lands of the upper class who took no part in the rebellion will be paid for,” he stated, “the Central Government is now considering various ways. It will be done after consultation with the owners.”
I had a final question about the “theocracy.” Would this be abolished by “the democratic reform”? The Panchen did not recognize the word “theocracy” despite Tibet’s long experience with the form. In going through two interpreters, from English to Mandarin to Tibetan, “theocracy” got lost on the way. So I made it simpler, and asked what changes he foresaw in the relations between religion and the state.
To this the Panchen Erdeni replied that the Preparatory Committee is a state organ and has no power over religion and cannot change religion in any way. In changing the state, no doubt changes will come in the relations between the state and religion, the form and extent of which cannot now be foreseen. Since the present Chinese government gives religious freedom and even compensates monasteries for losses suffered in the democratic changes, he thinks one need not fear.
I wondered if he really knew what he was facing. How fast his monasteries would decline when once the monks and nuns were free to leave without recapture and flogging. In every place it has happened, in Inner Mongolia, Kansu, Chinghai and Szechwan; when freedom is permitted in the monasteries, they decline. The buildings are handsomely kept by the Central Government’s aid, but the gifts of butter for the lamps from believers and applications of young men to become lamas, fall off. I should not myself like to have the job of recruiting monks and nuns for even the most beautifully redecorated monastery in the China of today. . . .
I did not press the Panchen Erdeni with the question. He would have to face it soon enough. I liked this young man of twenty-one who had come in gold brocade from the Middle Ages to give me a hand-shake that affirmed the modern world. I thought he was probably closer to the needs of the Tibetan people than the Dalai Lama was, just because of his years of exile among Tibetan peasants in Chinghai and the shorter time he had been handled by a council of serf-owners. I wished him well in improving the people’s lot in Tibet and I hoped he might go down in history with laurels to his name.
Besides I had been told that the Panchen already knows that Tibet’s long decline in population and consequently in strength, is considered to be due to the large number of its males who enter the lamaseries and engage neither in production nor in responsible reproduction, and also to the widespread syphilis that has followed like a destroying plague wherever the lamaseries went, in Mongolia and Tibet. I had been told that he was concerned over this. These are his problems now, as they are Tibet’s, along with serfdom, and questions of health and farms and schools. He had enough problems for a youth of twenty-one. Must he also be asked to reconcile the doctrine of the eternal evil of this earthly life, this wheel of change, with the modern Chinese zest for life?
But he would have many more and better advisers than any Panchen Erdeni or Dalai Lama had before, I thought of all those runaway serfs, who were now returned students going back to Tibet.
I took leave of the Panchen decorously and left him, hoping that this young man would know how to relate himself to all that other young life now expanding eagerly across his land.
Two evenings later I went to see a modern Chinese opera which concerned two Tibetan tribes on the grasslands, in blood-feud with each other, with a girl of one tribe and a man of the other in love. The old Romeo and Juliet story, with the Tibetan plateau for back-drop and with the People’s Liberation Army coming to unite the lovers, more successfully than did the ancient friar. Costumes and dances were brilliant; the snowy peaks above lush mountain meadows made me positively homesick for Tibet.
As the curtain rose for the second act a stir came in the audience just below the balcony where I sat. The people nearby broke into applause. A youth in orange robes, followed by a small retinue, was taking his seat in the central orchestra. The Panchen Erdeni had come to see the show.
It was a good show; he seemed to enjoy it. At the end when the colorful crowd of herdsmen, chiefs and women took curtain call against the back-drop of snowy peaks, the Panchen went on the stage to shake hands with the actors, and posed in the midst of them for news flashlights. The audience, already leaving, turned back in the aisles to look. He was a young man having a very good time, the most colorful figure there.
My thoughts flashed to the other young man, his “spiritual brother,” whose appointment to see another show of song and dance in Lhasa became signal for rebellion, and of how he had waited in his summer palace, held by armed rebels, while the news-photographer waited at the theater. I thought of him in India, making disputed statements. I wondered if the two young men would ever work together again.
A crowd of more than a thousand saw the Panchen off at the railway station, when he left on May 25 for Tibet. The station and the special train were decorated with red lanterns and silken banners. The Venerable Shirob came with a throng of orange and magenta robed lamas; government dignitaries saw him off and also Tibetan students.
Then news began to flash from all the homeward stations, showing that the Panchen was busy on his job. On June 4 he was in Chinghai at the famous Gumbum Monastery, birth-place of Tson Khapa, whose disciple the Panchen presumably was in the tenth incarnation. He took part in a ceremony in front of the noted “eight pagodas,” restored to their original grandeur last winter by repairs for which Peking gave aid. Lamas burning incense and holding flowers chanted the “Sutra of Auspices” for his arrival. Preceded by musicians, he walked slowly through the ancient temple, presented a thousand butter-lamps to the statue of Tson Khapa and seated himself on the throne beside the statue, sprinkling spring water and barley from Tibet. He offered a hata to Tson Khapa’s statue and to the statues of all the other Panchens, all standing in this place. He was given gifts in return: forty-three ancient Tibetan manuscripts, three “longevity Buddhas” and a small silver pagoda.
He was also entertained by the heads of government in Chinghai Province and the Communist Party leaders there.
In Lhasa great crowds met him with many lamas carrying religious banners. In a park near Potala Palace he passed three hundred Young Pioneers in red neckties having a picnic. When he had left Lhasa two months earlier the medical teams were helping the wounded and the women the rebels had raped. Order had been restored in the interval. People were working peacefully and work had been given to all the former unemployed in making new construction, and two hundred thousand pounds of seed grain had been distributed to peasants on the outskirts whom the rebels had looted.
As the young Panchen Erdeni passed to the suburbs to his new palace, he saw the fields green with the new grain.
1. Historical note. The Ninth Panchen fled to Inner Mongolia on November 15, 1923, and thence to other parts of China. The Thirteenth Dalai then took over the Panchen’s power and was reported ill-treating his people. In 1929 the Panchen approached the Kuomintang and asked for help to return. He was invited to Nanking to confer with representatives of the Dalai. The KMT gave the Panchen a title; this annoyed the Dalai’s representatives and recriminations broke the conference. In 1933 the Panchen sent representatives to Lhasa. The Dalai agreed that he might return. After preparations the Panchen started back but when he got as far as Yushu in Chinghai, he was held because the kasha would not permit him to come accompanied by Kuomintang officials and soldiers. The Panchen, believing his life not safe if he went unaccompanied, decided to stay in Chinghai. He died there December 1, 1937.