Tibet's Living Buddha

• Share

Dogs bark in the Himalayan night. Lights flicker across the hillside. On a pitch-black path framed by pines and covered by a bowl of stars, a few ragged pilgrims shuffle along, muttering ritual chants. Just before dawn, as the snowcaps behind take on a deep pink glow, the crowd that has formed outside the three-story Namgyal Temple in northern India falls silent. A strong, slightly stooping figure strides in, bright eyes alertly scanning the crowd, smooth face breaking into a broad and irrepressible smile. Followed by a group of other shaven-headed monks, all of them in claret robes and crested yellow hats, the newcomer clambers up to the temple roof. There, as the sun begins to rise, his clerics seated before him and the solemn, drawn-out summons of long horns echoing across the valley below, the Dalai Lama leads a private ceremony to welcome the Year of the Earth Dragon.

On the second day of Losar, the Tibetan New Year, the man who is a living Buddha to roughly 14 million people gives a public audience. By 8 a.m. the line of petitioners stretches for half a mile along the winding mountain road outside his airy bungalow -- leathery mountain men in gaucho hats, long-haired Westerners, little girls in their prettiest silks, all the 6,000 residents of the village and thousands more. Later, 30 dusty visitors just out of Tibet crowd inside and, as they set eyes on their exiled leader for the first time in almost three decades, fill the small room with racking sobs and sniffles. Through it all, Tenzin Gyatso, the absolute spiritual and temporal ruler of Tibet, incarnation of the Tibetan god of compassion and 14th Dalai Lama in a line that stretches back 597 years, remains serene.

In Tibet, he explains later, Losar used to be conducted on the roof of the 13-story Potala Palace, with cookies laid out for the masses. "Every year I used to be really worried when the people rushed to grab the cookies. First, that the old building would collapse, and second, that someone would fall over the edge. Now" -- the rich baritone breaks into a hearty chuckle -- "now things are much calmer."

It was 29 years ago last week that the Tibetan uprising against China's occupying forces propelled the Dalai Lama into Indian exile. Yet the spirit of his ancient, fairy-tale theocracy is still very much alive in Dharmsala, a former British hill station 250 miles north of New Delhi. Here, attended by a State Oracle, a rainmaking lama, various medicine men, astrologers and a four- man Cabinet, the Dalai Lama, 52, incarnates all the beliefs and hopes of his imperiled homeland, much as he has done since first ascending the Lion Throne in Lhasa at age four.