Blood Brothers : Ani Sakya Left Behind a Successful Legal Practice and a Comfortable Seattle Life to Join the Tibetan Government in Exile. He Took With Him an Extraordinary Legacy, Western Ideals and a Never-Ending Tie to His Best Friend.
It dusk on a fall evening in 1967, my brother and I journeyed beyond our Seattle city block to play basketball at Eckstein Junior High. Standing beside a portable blackboard, jumping up and down with a length of chalk in my fist--the odd man out of this particular game--I kept score and hoped someone would injure himself so that I might take his place.
My thoughts, then, were mean-spirited and self-absorbed, and when a smooth-skinned Asian boy with exotic features suggested I’d made a scoring mistake, I cast in his direction a stream of curses and described his mother as a bitch. I’d heard this insult used only the day before and, with no understanding of its deeper implications, tried it out in the easy manner of a veteran of such invective. I was 11 years old.
The boy whose mother had been debased neither hesitated nor uttered words. Instead, he efficiently threw me to ground, where both bones in my right forearm snapped, an incident that would join our lives forever and which forever shocked something out of me--though I remained reckless for many years to come, I chose words more carefully afterward and studied people more closely.
The next afternoon the Asian boy’s mother marched him into my room at Children’s Orthopedic Hospital, where I lay with my arm in a cast. He stood beside my bed, hesitant and confused, and she spoke his name under her breath as a kind of warning, an insistence. “Ani,” she whispered fiercely.
He looked at me out of dark, angry eyes and tried to twist free of the moment. But his mother was a strong woman, determined and dignified, and she held him to what they had come for. “You landed on your arm wrong,” Ani tried. “I . . .”
“It was my fault,” I said. “I started it.”
In halting English, the boy’s mother wished for my recovery and expressed regret that my injury had occurred. Had her son revealed to her that the incident came down to protecting her honor? He listened to her apology in silence, his face furrowed in consternation, and then the two of them exited. I was alone with my shame.
Soon enough, in junior high, this Ani and I would play on the basketball team together, reluctant teammates initially. Taller than he, and heavier, I took him beneath the hoop during practice and posted him up to get my points. Basketball had rules that constrained his brand of strength and allowed me on occasion to prevail. In this way, without knowing it, we became friends. At all hours of the night, beneath the light of street lamps, we played in the wind and rain. We played against other boys, we played against them hard, but when it came to each other there was the question of my arm, and it forced us to handle matters delicately. A single incident can pervade one’s entire future. Cause and effect, karma.
ANI WAS THE SON OF TIBETAN REFUGEES, THE second of five sons of the Sakya family. His Tibetan name was Kunga Dorje, or “joyous thunderbolt,” but his family called him Ani, short for Ananda, the Sanskrit version of Kunga. The Sakyas made their way to Seattle after fleeing with thousands of other Tibetans from Chinese aggression in 1959.
In the years before I met Ani, I’d read, in a swoon, of exotic places--Shangri-La, Machu Picchu, the Khyber Pass--and paged through atlases and encyclopedias in wistful solitude. Tibet was a place I specialized in, a dreamscape I discovered in “Lost Horizon”--limitless peaks, monks in saffron robes, the snowbound Roof of the World. “Remote” was the key word in the books I found at the Seattle Public Library. Six million farmers, nomads and monks lived three miles above sea level, in a country roughly the size of Western Europe tucked in between India and China. They worshiped a God-King called the Dalai Lama, and revered holy men who, it was said, could levitate, bend coins and converse with astral beings telepathically. Tibetans ate barley-flour dumplings and drank yak-butter tea, dwelt inside yak-hair tents and spent their time turning prayer wheels and prostrating themselves toward their capital, Lhasa, where the Dalai Lama sat cross-legged in the Potala, a fantastic palace with roofs of gold and a thousand treasure storerooms.
Even the most cursory histories of Tibet reported that the grandson of Genghis Khan sent 30,000 troops in the year 1240 to subjugate the Land of Snows. Godan Khan slaughtered hundreds of monks, looted whole villages and demanded of the Tibetans enormous tribute in gold and silver. Then, having come to admire the rarefied culture he was pillaging, he sought a spiritual adviser among the surviving lamas, settling finally on a man with a reputation for great wisdom--Sakya Pandita. Godan Kahn conferred upon him not only his favor, but temporal authority over Tibet.
Sakya Pandita, I read at the library, was succeeded by his nephew, Chogyal Phagpa, who was made Imperial Preceptor of Tibet by Kublai Khan in 1260. For nearly 100 years, the region of Sakya, in southwestern Tibet--a gray, barren expanse of wind-swept rock and treeless mountains and hills--was the seat of highest power in Tibet, the Sakya family preeminent. Thousands revered the Sakya Lama, who, they believed, was a bodhisattva, the highest order of reincarnated beings, an emanation of the Buddha who had achieved enlightenment and had many times returned to the world of suffering for the benefit of ordinary beings. Though his temporal dominance waned over the next centuries--in the 1600s, the line of the Dalai Lamas rose to power--the Sakya Lama remained enormously influential. There were Sakya monasteries, Sakya texts and Sakya sutras--an entire Buddhist sect nearly 1,000 years old.
I pointed all of this out to my friend: the coincidence that his family’s name was the same as that of the historical Sakyas, illustrious advisers to the Mongol Khans, rulers of Tibet long ago, the founders of a religious path down which thousands still trod. “It’s not a coincidence,” he answered resolutely, this boy I played basketball with. “My father is the Sakya Lama.”
IN THEIR HOMETOWN OF SAKYA, ANI TOLD me, his family had lived in the Phuntsok Palace. Ani wore the finest silken robes; a coterie of attendants followed his every move. In the palace, juniper incense burned; drums and cymbals sounded. His family ate from sleek jade bowls; his mother wore an elaborate turquoise headdress; his father, his hair in a braid, a single gold earring inlaid with turquoise in his ear, dressed in flowing red robes. The Sakyas sat on pillows and were entertained by dancers in yak-skin boots. They rode in sedan chairs to Khawu, a hot springs; they attended feasts and horse races.
His mother was from Kham, a region far to the east, where there were far-flung Sakya monasteries and thousands of Sakya followers. Much given to travel, the Sakyas journeyed more than once across the expanse of Tibet, fording swollen rivers in skin coracles, sleeping in tents and monasteries, crossing high mountain passes in wind and snow, riding on horses or yaks. Ani was born at Yilhung, in Kham, at dawn on Sept. 12, 1955. In honor of his birth, a flag was raised on a 30-foot standard at Yilhung’s main temple, where Sakya followers would celebrate Ani’s birthday each year for the rest of his life.
Only five years earlier, the Chinese had invaded Tibet, asserting a historical claim to it as part of the Motherland. The People’s Liberation Army occupied Lhasa and requisitioned the nation’s grain supply, causing widespread famine. Beijing instituted a policy of population transfer, bringing millions of Chinese to the country and making Tibetans a minority in their own land. The farms, forests and grazing land were collectivized; Tibetan children were forced to attend Chinese schools.
When the Tibetans responded with an armed revolt, the Chinese throttled them. Resisters were bound and beaten at first, then crucified, dismembered or buried alive. In 1959, the PLA rolled heavy artillery into Lhasa, and the current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, fled to India.
Ani was 3 1/2 years old when his family followed the Dalai Lama into exile. They crossed the border into Bhutan--burning their tent poles for firewood, subsisting on nettle soup--and from there staggered south to India. In Darjeeling, the Sakyas met an Asian studies professor from the University of Washington who arranged for their immigration to the Pacific Northwest.
In that manner, Ani came to live in my neighborhood from the other side of the planet. His father and two uncles walked to campus each day, where they were interviewed by excited college professors. Like all Tibetans in exile, the Sakyas’ first task was to survive, their second to remember, their third to one day regain their homeland.
AS A CHILD ANI LONGED TO BE A FIGHTER PILOT WHO WOULD ONE day strafe the troops of the Chinese Communists in the same way they’d strafed his fleeing people. A superb athlete, he could climb a rope rapidly hand over hand without resorting to his legs or feet. He was victorious, always, at wrestling and gymnastics and held the record for our junior high’s obstacle course. No one in our class could out-sprint him, though over the course of a longer race he would eventually falter and fall behind. He lacked endurance in the same way a lion does, was built for short bursts of power and ferocity and, like a lion, was finely tuned and explosive.
In our high school years, we found our voices and believed ourselves kindred spirits. We conducted our friendship on a philosophical plane, discussing impermanence, the nature of the mind, cause and effect, God. We shared a romanticism that drove us one evening to cut our palms and mingle our blood--blood brothers, an eternal bond. Ani was often wound so tight as to appear incomprehensible to our school’s intelligentsia, who viewed him as a curiosity and a fine addition--at cornerback--to the football team. He was also the sort of intense and attractive young man who was the object of much female adoration. Ferociously energetic, joyful, in love with living, he was at times morose and withdrawn, too, grappling with the peculiar difficulties of his identity.
In Tibet, he said, he would have been a monk: the second sons of Sakyas had always been monks, while the first carried on the family name and, by tradition, became the Sakya Lama (among Tibetan Buddhist sects, only the Sakya path confers such status by blood rather than by consensus of high lamas). At birth, Ani himself had been identified as the latest incarnation of Khangsar Khen Rinpoche, a much-venerated lama, and as a living manifestation of the Buddhist deity of wisdom, Manjushri. At Spiti, in Northern India, an entire monastery prayed each day that he would choose to take religious vows and live among them as high priest.
Neither Ani nor his brothers were instructed much in Buddhism, nor were they pushed to take up the Sakya legacy, but the tug of religion and the impulse toward Tibet nevertheless remained strong in my friend. When thrown into disequilibrium, he would seek solace in fasting, prayer and prodigious exercise. On our trips into the mountains around Seattle, he would exploit the purifying possibilities there, casting off his boots to run barefoot over hills, or swimming across a freezing lake to haul himself out on a drift of ice. I remember him in a rainstorm on the Duckabush River, seated on a rock in the lotus position, subjecting himself to the torrent in silence while I huddled inside a hollow tree.
The Arthurian legends affected Ani deeply; he was moved to tears by the conflicted souls of Lancelot, Guinevere and Arthur, and he saw that the ideals of Camelot might apply to his exiled people. By now he realized that the liberation of Tibet was at best a far-off prospect. The Chinese were a people of enormous strength, governed by intractable and shrewd old men, and the Tibetans were relatively powerless. Their only hope was the Arthurian one: that since the Tibetan cause was just and right, the might of the Free World might be arrayed in its favor--might was for right, after all.
Late into the night, like a pair of young monks, we pondered how far the stars stretched out, what lay in the hearts of human beings, the vagaries of nature, love. Our minds meshed uneasily, for mine took pleasure in the straight truths of mathematics and believed only in what could be proved, and his wandered expansively. I took as my hero the crusading Ralph Nader (my father was a criminal attorney) and insisted that the laws of men could reflect the will of God. Ani spoke of reincarnation and the difficulties of meditation. From him I gleaned some inkling of boundlessness; I like to think that in part from knowing me, he found his way to the law.
GRADUATING FROM HIGH SCHOOL IN 1974, WE WENT OUR SEPARATE ways--I to the University of Washington and Ani on a soul-searching journey to India, where as a representative of the Sakya family, he was granted a private audience, in Darjeeling, with the leader of his people, His Holiness The Dalai Lama.
Tenzin Gyatso invited my friend to drink tea, proffered small jokes, laughed boisterously, then asked a long series of personal questions--What work did Ani want to do? Did he have a girlfriend? Did he plan on furthering his education?--before presenting without fanfare a modest gift, a small statue of the Buddha. Greatly moved, Ani sought to prostrate himself. But His Holiness asserted that the gesture meant farewell and that he had no desire to say goodby to Ani--he preferred to someday see him again; their relationship was only beginning.
In Dharamsala, the seat of the Dalai Lama’s exile government--an abandoned British hill station almost 300 miles north of Delhi--Ani walked the grounds of Gangchen Kyishong, the compound of Tibetan government offices. Beggars wandered in the muddy roads and the hills lay eroded by the monsoon rains. It was the winter of 1975, and Dharamsala was wind-racked and cold, but my friend felt the first faint stirring inside that in this place so far from our youth together, he would someday come to live.
He returned home with his head closely shaved and wearing the saffron robes of a monk, an alteration so astonishing that my heart literally lurched in my chest when I saw him this way for the first time. He’d taken no vows in India, he said, but for many months had lived as a monk, exploring such a life from the inside.
Now, Ani put on Western clothes again and enrolled at the University of Washington. I remember him in those years as an insatiable reader, a bookish young man of great intellectual energy; if this were possible, his intense ferocity seemed to run even deeper. We sometimes took walks at 3 a.m., oblivious to the Seattle rains, ranting about Marx, Engels, Mao and Confucius. He graduated in 1979 with honors in political science; I took an English degree and became a public high school English teacher.
Eventually, my friend made his way through law school and metamorphosed into a downtown attorney. He married a Tibetan woman from a noble family who worked in Seattle as a graphic designer. He practiced immigration law and argued civil rights cases; for five years he worked as a public defender. Charismatic, passionate, hard-working to a fault, entirely in his element in an American courtroom, he compiled an enviable trial success record for a public defender. “He was far more persuasive than the average attorney,” recalls Jay Krulewitch, a colleague from those days. “He was a gifted advocate, born for the courtroom, and he commanded everybody’s respect.”
For Ani, these were good years in certain ways, troubling ones in others. He drove a sleek car, wore polished shoes, played tennis with greater fervor than I could muster and ate habitually in restaurants. The television or stereo was often on in his apartment--football games, boxing matches, action films, jazz music, the blues. But he seemed to me less than the sum of his parts, on hold, distracted. “I’m growing stale,” he told me one evening. “I have to change something soon.”
In July of 1989, my friend once more came face-to-face with the Dalai Lama, who was making a tour of the United States. There was another long and intimate private audience. His Holiness explained, smiling all the while, that his government-in-exile was in need of Western-trained attorneys. There were none, he added, in Dharamsala.
In the spring of 1990, at age 34, Ani sold nearly everything he owned and said goodby to friends and family. He and his wife were now divorced, and Ani returned to India, where he prostrated himself at the feet of the Dalai Lama and committed himself to the service of Tibet. “I needed to do something with meaning and purpose,” he wrote to me some years later. “It was only right, with my education and training, that I should give my life to the work being done to save the Tibetan people.”
THE WORK BEING DONE BY THE TIBETANS IN EXILE WAS THE WORK of holding back the flood of history so as to prevent themselves from being drowned. When, in 1960, the Dalai Lama took up residence above Dharamsala--population 26,000, a town that appears in the finest of fine print on maps of India--thousands of exiles joined him. They dedicated a shrine to Tibetans still suffering under the Chinese, strung prayer flags across the expansive hills and etched mantras into squares of slate. They reconstructed Lhasan holy sites, building a new Lingkhor, or holy walk, a debating courtyard for young monks and a great temple circumscribed by prayer wheels. The government-in-exile established monasteries, shrines and prayer halls, as well as a Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, a library and archive, a Tibetan Medical Institute and a Center for Tibetan Arts and Crafts.
At Gangchen Kyishong, the Tibetans established an Assembly of People’s Deputies. Representative government, as the Dalai Lama often asserted, was vital to the hopes of the Tibetan people; without it there would be little international support for repatriation, and no effective argument against Chinese propaganda that relentlessly described the government-in-exile as the last bulwark of the old aristocracy. Modernization went forward, but the government was run mostly by exhausted traditionalists ill-prepared to propel Tibetans into the 20th Century.
It was to this world that Ani gave himself. Arriving in Delhi in December of 1990, he sought out the Dalai Lama at the Deer Park, where the Buddha had long ago delivered his first sermon, and received the Kalachakra initiation--a prolonged discourse delivered by His Holiness--amid tens of thousands of pilgrims. For four days, Ani pondered the Kalachakra’s teachings--emptiness, compassion, impermanence--stopping only twice for private audiences with the leader of his people. By January of 1991, he was in Dharamsala and had been appointed counsel for legal affairs to the Dalai Lama’s Cabinet. Living in an unheated room on the grounds of a monastery, passing winter nights in his American sleeping bag, drinking boiled water and subsisting on thukpa , a simple Tibetan noodle soup, Ani toiled long days without pay, a volunteer in the first representative government in Tibet’s history.
In 1963, Ani soon learned, the Dalai Lama had promulgated a constitution designed to take effect when Tibet was liberated. For the first time, Tibetans’ rights were enumerated--freedom of speech, religion and assembly; prohibitions against slavery and forced labor; safeguards in future judicial proceedings, and rights to liberty and property. The traditional prerogatives of the aristocracy were terminated and the power of the monasteries blunted. No one, however, would accept the Dalai Lama’s desire to divest himself of ultimate authority. When the final draft of the constitution was affirmed by the Assembly of People’s Deputies, it vested all executive power in the Dalai Lama and made the actions of the Assembly of People’s Deputies subject to his assent. The 1963 constitution, Ani saw, took his people only tiny steps down the long road to democracy.
Part of the problem was that a potent combination of religion and state had defined Tibet politically and culturally since before the Mongol subjugation. In this tradition, to divest the Dalai Lama of his political power would be an unthinkable heresy, akin to impeaching the Pope. To complicate matters, Buddhism asserted that the individual’s existence was little more than a temporary illusion, that one’s separateness from the universe was a hallucination, while democracy held the individual in highest esteem. So long as the government in exile contented itself with merely debating these issues, no progress could be made.
Into this quagmire stepped my friend, probably the only person on the planet who was both a reincarnated Tibetan lama and devotee of Western democracy. A product of both East and West, he was in the right place at exactly the right time.
BY SEPTEMBER OF 1991, ANI HAD BEEN APPOINTED CHIEF LEGAL counsel to the exile government’s new Supreme Justice Commission. He authored the Tibetans’ Judicial Code in an office with few lawbooks and no copy machine or telephone. His letters to me were detailed accounts of his professional concerns, of days passed in solitude and silence: “When I am not working I am reading, studying or praying. I live a simple, studious and serene life. . . . I am quite happy and feeling healthy.”
By return mail, I sent him books I’d culled from Seattle law firm libraries. I tried to set up conduits for attorneys to donate used texts toward the formation of a Tibetan legal library. Ani wrote to say that through these deeds I might be “developing a sort of karmic immunity from prosecution” should I one day run up against Tibetan law. Yet it was apparent from his correspondence that he was working like an old-fashioned scrivener and had little time for humor. Struggling alone, he hammered out a proposal for rules of evidence to govern Tibetan criminal proceedings, then another for rules governing civil procedure. Over and over, he found himself pushing forcefully for the Tibetan government-in-exile to adopt a full constitutional democracy.
“His Holiness The Dalai Lama,” he wrote to me, “is the glue holding our people together. When he’s gone our very existence will be at risk, and then only our laws will prevent us from disintegrating and perhaps even disappearing as a people. Our laws will be the only thing that can hope to replace the present authority of His Holiness. He’s getting older now, and we have precious few years to get things right.”
Curious about the new life he was forging, I traveled to Dharamsala in June of 1993, journeying from Delhi in a twin-engine Doernier low over the plains of India. In the near distance lay the snowy peaks of the Dhauladhar range, rising abruptly to 17,000 feet out of the Kangra Valley. The Doernier landed at an airstrip 20 kilometers from Dharamsala, where a driver, sent by Ani, waited. Our way was thronged with travelers on foot: men pushing overloaded carts; dark-skinned women in saris carrying ponderous loads of firewood on their heads; children wearing neat British school uniforms. My driver careened through narrow blind curves, narrowly missing cars, motorcycles, pedestrians and cows, constantly laying on his horn.
Beyond the heat and noise of the lower valley, the road climbed through chil pine, ban oak and deodar trees, their shadows cooling the hillsides. Yellow-footed Indian mynah birds, lapwings, bulbuls, blue-backed dragflies and finally vultures-- Gyps bengalensis --soared above the forested mountains, their serrated wingtips held wide to the wind, white bands prominent on their breasts. Clematis, galium and Daphne peprashia , whose white flowers already had expired, grew in profusion along the roadside.
Negotiating a series of hairpin turns manned by Indian soldiers in khaki shorts, we came upon what remained of the summer military cantonment founded by the Raj in the 1860s. At Upper Dharamsala, or “Little Lhasa,” barefoot workers with rags around their heads installed plastic water pipes in the central street. A 6-year-old child squatted in the mud, filling a water bottle while a baby clung to her small neck. Boldly painted graffiti was everywhere: “Tibet for the Tibetans”; “Chinese Get Out Now!” Along the streets in the bazaar, sweater sellers and rug merchants sat implacably behind their wares, cross-legged on the ground.
I found Ani in his small single room, prayer beads wrapped around his wrist, on his wall a photograph of the Dalai Lama and another of his father, the Sakya Lama, a Tibetan calendar, a map of Tibet, a painting of the five founding fathers of the Sakya lineage and a drawing of the Shakyamuni Lord Buddha. He wore at his neck a gold and jade relic box inside of which rested fragments of the Buddha’s teeth, preserved, he told me, for centuries. Beside his bed sat a framed photograph of his parents and the Buddha statue the Dalai Lama had presented to him in 1975.
Ani meditated daily, prayed before meals and made his way each night along the Lingkhor, which circles both the Dalai Lama’s residence and the Tsuglag Khang, or Central Cathedral, that is today the highest holy site of his people. My friend resided 20 steps from this place, at the verge of a courtyard where monks engaged each night in stylized debate, slapping their hands and high-stepping ritually while asserting fine points of sacred texts. Nearby, pilgrims prostrated themselves and prayed beneath the soft glow of butter lamps.
Ani moved quietly in this world of the devout, among men dressed in sandals and saffron robes who greeted him with hands clasped prayerfully in front of them, sometimes ducking just a little or bowing their heads to the American attorney who was also a reincarnated high lama. At times, Sakya devotees sought him out, begging him to bless them or to name their babies, touch their foreheads, blow on their faces (his breath, they believed, might cure their ailments), or say prayers in their behalf. The former high school cornerback who led his team in interceptions, the attorney who wore impeccable suits and carried a briefcase and laptop computer, gracefully accepted these signs of reverence and awe.
On a Saturday, we walked the road to Bagshu, where the slate-cutters plied their trade and monks washed their robes in the river. We bought small gifts in the Dharamsala marketplace, modest remembrances I would carry home and distribute on Ani’s behalf among his friends and relatives. We ate elaborate meals in depressing hotels; we took tea together. Each noon, I visited Ani in his meager office and each evening in his meager room. Late at night, beneath an expansive canopy of stars, we circumambulated the Lingkhor. In this way, we took up our friendship exactly where we’d left off.
Ani was deeply committed to his work, and we talked endlessly about it. The Dalai Lama, he said, had recently made world news, publishing his vision of a future Tibet that would, in His Holiness’s words “uphold the ideals of freedom, social welfare, democracy, cooperation and environmental protection.” He’d also announced that he would step down as head of state once Tibet regained its independence. “All sincere and right-thinking Tibetans,” the Dalai Lama wrote, should “strive with a sense of pride and joy to attain the goals I have stated.”
My friend, it appeared, took this urging at face value: As part of his work for the Justice Commission, he had drafted a 50-page document entitled “Constitutional Democracy for the Tibetan Administration in Exile and the Future Tibetan Government in Tibet.” It was to be presented to the Assembly and other Tibetan leaders, including the Dalai Lama, in the hope of influencing the shape of Tibet’s democracy at its inception.
“You’re an English teacher,” he said to me, pulling the thing out of an envelope. “Can you take a short look at this while you’re here?”
For two long days, we sat together beside the little desk in my guest-house room, staring at the screen of Ani’s laptop, shuffling paper back and forth, drinking milk tea and debating the merits of particular words and phrases. What, in simple language, needed to be said? Eventually it boiled down to three points: Tibet must be governed by the rule of law; the three branches of government must be separate and equal, checking and balancing one another; the judiciary, to insure the supremacy of the Tibetan constitution, must be empowered to review governmental actions.
Ani had made his arguments in exhaustive detail, with ample references to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, to Alexander Hamilton, to the Enlightenment philosopher Baron de Montesquieu and to law review articles with titles like “Rethinking The Parliamentary System: Contributions From the Australian Debate.”
My contribution was to gradually wear him down, arguing always that less was more. In the end, we chopped his manuscript to half its former weight, then went off to celebrate over a final dinner.
The next day, Ani accompanied me down to the airstrip to say goodby. On the plane, droning back toward Delhi, the Indian sun streaking in through the windows, I indulged the happiness I felt for him. Unlike so many people I knew, my friend had found a meaningful life.
I ARRIVED HOME IN TIME to attend the consecration of the Sakya Monastery, housed in what was once a Seattle Baptist church. The monastery is the culmination of the Sakya family’s struggle to sustain its cultural and religious traditions in the West, and the Dalai Lama himself had come to give it his blessing. And so on a cool, cloudy morning in late June, the family gathered--all but Ani--to offer prayers to the leader of their people and to ask for his benediction.
I stood to one side while Buddhists from Seattle, Portland and Vancouver waited to prostrate themselves before His Holiness. Many were Westerners, all clearly moved by this moment in their lives, some with tears in their eyes. The exodus from Tibet, while tragic on a vast scale had also brought Buddhism to my hometown in the Pacific Northwest. The Sakyas had endured, righted themselves and were now flourishing again in a strange new country. Ani had traveled in the other direction, bringing the West back with him to his people, asserting by the very shape of his work that Tibetans must embrace modernity and, at the same time, remain Tibetans.
Everywhere in Dharamsala, I’d met young Tibetans who were fascinated by my camera and tape recorder; despite the strength and dignity of their culture, they were enticed by all that lay beyond. Ani, it seemed to me, had walked the opposite path and against the tide of the most troubling times in his people’s ancient history. He was where he belonged, I understood that, and at the same time I missed him. A part of me wanted him to come home; the rest knew he was already there.
“You and I have a special bond,” he wrote to me recently, “which transcends barriers of race and religion, and even the constraints of time and space. I know you will be with me always in this and the next life as you have in our previous lifetimes.”
It’s rare for anyone after 17 birthdays to have any heartfelt friends. So to have one like Ani is a gift for which I can only be grateful and about which I am sometimes mystified. Analytical, rational to a fault, skeptical about all things inscrutable--a modern Westerner in the bones of my being--I experience wonder and joy.