Dalai Lama Mixes Compassion With a Tough Stance

“I am just a simple monk,” the Dalai Lama said recently to a British journalist who visited him in Dharamsala, the mountainside headquarters of Tibetan exiles in India. “Maybe I am also the reincarnation of the Lord of Infinite Compassion. Sometimes I think so, sometimes not.”

The Dalai Lama laughed uproariously.

It was a scene familiar to those who know the Dalai Lama, who often impresses visitors with his gentleness and simple humanity.

But the winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize also has a tough side, a hard-bitten political side that enables him to wage a relentless international campaign to win a better deal for his people.

Angered Beijing

He infuriated Beijing, for example, when he appeared in Washington before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus two years ago to condemn Chinese actions in Tibet. Word of his congressional appearance helped inspire a series of pro-independence demonstrations by Tibetans in Lhasa.

The Dalai Lama was only 3 years old and known as Lhamo Dhondrub when he faced the key test that changed his life.

High monks from Lhasa, the far-off Tibetan capital, had come to the peasant boy’s home, situated in what is now China’s Qinghai province, to seek confirmation that the precocious child was indeed the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama, who had died in 1933.

The boy, born on July 6, 1935--just about the right time for a reincarnation, by Tibetan belief--had drawn the attention of traveling religious leaders by spotting prayer beads that had belonged to the late Dalai Lama. Claiming them as his own, he demanded that they be given to him.

Some months later, in the most important of a series of tests, strings of black and yellow prayer beads, walking sticks and small ivory hand drums were placed on a low table before the little boy. Some had belonged to the previous Dalai Lama, others were duplicates. Asked to choose among the objects, he picked out the genuine item every time.

Additional signs confirmed to the religious elders that they had found the 14th Dalai Lama, the latest successor in a line of Tibetan spiritual and temporal leaders believed to be reincarnations of Chenrezig, the Buddha of Compassion.

The little boy was still only 4 years old when he was brought to Lhasa, to be greeted on arrival by a joyous crowd of 70,000 monks and ordinary Tibetans. A few months later he was formally installed as the Dalai Lama, the worshipfully adored religious leader of his people. The rest of his childhood was taken up with Buddhist training.

In the autumn of 1950, when he was still just 15, Tibet faced a crisis as Communist Chinese troops marched toward Lhasa. The adult political and religious leaders of Tibet responded by investing secular power in him as well--three years before the traditionally accepted age.

Adored by Tibetans

It was the type of childhood that might give someone a sense of arrogance and self-importance. From the time of his earliest memories, the Dalai Lama has been treated with adoration by his people, who refer to him as His Holiness. On Thursday, after three decades in exile following an abortive 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule, he won the additional honor of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet this man, so respected by his people and the world, has never lost his humility, a self-deprecating sense of humor and an enduring devotion to nonviolence. That is much of the explanation for why he won the Nobel Prize, although there seems little doubt that the honor is also meant to help his people in their struggle to maintain their culture and identity against the encroachments of Chinese rule.

Since Oct. 1, 1987, his followers have launched four major protests in Lhasa, each suppressed by the gunfire of Chinese police. In each case, the initial demonstration was peaceful, but street violence erupted when authorities moved in. Total deaths--almost entirely of Tibetan monks, protesters and bystanders killed by police, but also including a few Chinese killed by rioters--number between 30 and 90, according to most estimates.

The Dalai Lama has repeatedly issued calls for the protests to remain nonviolent. But he has also called for them to continue.

He insists that nonviolence is both a religious imperative and a political necessity for his people, as a few million Tibetans seek to preserve their identity and customs against pressure from about 1 billion ethnic Chinese. The Nobel Peace Prize now constitutes world recognition for his cause and his methods--what he calls “a middle way.”

“Once your mind is dominated by anger, it becomes almost mad,” he explained to an interviewer. “You cannot take right decisions, and you cannot see reality. But if your mind is calm and stable, you will see everything exactly as it is. I think all politicians need this kind of patience.”