SPIRITUAL DISCOURSE Nuns debate a point at a Dharamsala temple

Experiment in Exile
Since the flight of the Dalai Lama in 1959, Tibet has been reinvented—in Dharamsala, India

By Pico Iyer

Even at 1 A.M., the road to higher ground is crowded. Minivans, buses packed with people, bicycle-rickshaws, trucks carting huge bales of straw, shawled figures, groups of pilgrims and dogs are all proceeding through the darkness, their way lit by occasional small fires. As the road begins to climb, however, away from the nondescript Indian town of Dharamsala and toward the "Upper Dharamsala" that is the site of many Eastern (and Western) dreams, the crowds and cars fall away. I find myself on a winding, narrow mountain passage, lights in the valley below, stars beyond counting above, and nothing around but barking wild dogs.

This is the place where the very notion of home is being reconfigured for the global age? Where a sad and piercing past is being turned into a bright new vision of the future? It's hard to believe, as I ascend a steep, unpaved path that soon will be clotted with Indian beggars, mothers with babies at their breasts and hands extended, and more packs of dogs. The heart of Upper Dharamsala, known as McLeod Ganj (an appropriately mongrel name that brings together an old British lieutenant governor of Punjab, David McLeod, and the Hindi word for "neighborhood"), is just two malodorous lanes, cluttered with shops and ragged wayfarers and the refuse, it seems, of many incarnations.

	PHOTO ESSAY Reimagining Tibet In Dharamsala, the Tibetan exile community is fighting to preserve their culture, one tradition at a time

Then the light comes up above the scrappy settlement on its little ridge overlooking the Kangra Valley, 480 km north of New Delhi. I hear chants from the temple across the way, a gong being sounded as the sun comes up above the snowcaps surrounding the 14th Dalai Lama's home. Scores of Tibetans are beginning the 20-minute walk through the pines around the Dalai Lama's house, muttering prayers as they speed along a dusty path next to prayer flags and stupas, spinning prayer wheels, as they used to do in Lhasa, stopping at one point to throw Tibetan tsampa barley flour up into the blue, blue heavens, wishing long life for their beloved leader.

Around me, matrons from Lhasa are buying bread from vendors outside the temple, and walking their children to the Tibetan school down Temple Road. Recent escapees from Tibet are setting up tables and preparing lattes and chocolate cakes at the sleek Moonpeak Café and at Chonor House, the elegant guesthouse run by Tibet's government-in-exile. Everywhere are monks in red, reciting sutras, sweeping their temple grounds, streaming into Internet cafés, and just whiling away their day in the shadow of Himalayan foothills, almost as if they were at home. What I'm seeing, improbably, is a vision of Tibet that you can never see these days in Tibet itself.

	FROM OUR ARCHIVES His Determined Holiness "For nearly three months since he first crossed over into India after his escape from the Chinese invaders, he had kept silent—but it was not for the want of anything to say..." Jun. 29, 1959 God-King in Exile "A knot of Indian government officials shifted position in the muddy street as they awaited the appearance of Tibet's Dalai Lama, who had now been more than a month on the trail..." Apr. 27, 1959 Long Day's Journey "As the M.P.s broke into wild cheers, [Prime Minister] Nehru produced the news for which the whole free world had been waiting..." Apr. 13, 1959 Archive links are premium content

HOME AWAY FROM HOME
For 46 years now, the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetan people has not seen Tibet, and the vast majority of his people have not seen him. The central historical moment for modern Tibet came, of course, in March 1959, when the current Dalai Lama, then 23, having seen the Chinese troops of Mao Zedong encroach upon more and more of his territory, and realizing that resistance would lead only to more violence, determined that he could save his land only by fleeing it. He would take the idea of exile to India, and try to infuse it with a classical Buddhist commitment to transformation.

How this innovation works—the Tibetans would draw selectively from the past, jettisoning what was out-of-date—becomes evident as soon as I walk into the traditional center of town. The shape of McLeod Ganj, I begin to see, is a mandala of sorts, the hub of a wheel whose spokes go off in six different directions. Follow one road and you will arrive at the Tibetan Children's Village, the headquarters of a nationwide network of schools that offer 17,000 Tibetan children a training in their culture so extensive that the majority of the students come from Tibet itself, sent away from home by parents who may never see them again but long for them to grow up Tibetan. Up the next road is the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, where traditional folk opera and music, and modern theater, are practiced and performed, then exported around the world. Down the alleyway behind is a classical, gold-roofed Tibetan temple whose quiet garden, where small monks sit in the sun, playing board games among the marigolds, could be in Lhasa.

A fourth road, if followed, will take you down, in 20 minutes or so, to the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, the dusty collection of buildings that marks Tibet's government-in-exile, and the Nechung Temple, where the state oracle still offers visionary advice while in a trance—as his predecessors have done since the 8th century. A fifth will take you to the Dalai Lama's modest house and the temple, monastery and Institute of Buddhist Dialectics that he has set up beside his abode. And if you follow the long mountain road down into the valley, past the old Anglican church where Lord Elgin (of the marbles) is buried, and the army cantonment that also recalls the days when this was a British hill station, you will come in time to a glittering retreat worthy of Shangri-La: the Norbulingka Institute, where Tibetans paint tankas, build statues and practice traditional wood carving with an intensity quickened by the challenges of exile.

Dharamsala is not really a community, in short, but an experiment, in which the Dalai Lama and the people around him craft a new incarnation of Tibet—a Tibet 2.0—that aims to be modern, open to the world and, for the moment, outside of what is traditionally, physically, Tibet. The idea reflects what one sees in Shanghai, in Vietnam, even in Cambodia: out of hardship, people will try to create possibility. As long as the Dalai Lama cannot go back to Tibet, Tibet must come out into the world, and in a new and improved form.

Continued...