The Dalai Lama on education – Part 1
So what was I doing halfway across the world in Mumbai? For that, I have to go back in time, and talk about the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people.
On March 17 1959 the 24-year-old Dalai Lama left the capital of Lhasa on a two-week journey across the Himalayas into India, as the Chinese military occupied Tibet, overcoming a tenacious resistance. He was accompanied by a small retinue of about 100 people, but many thousands more would follow him into safety in India.
The boy who would become Tenzin Gyatso had been discovered by a search team that had set out to find the child who was the reincarnation of the 13th. Dalai Lama. They found a two-year-old in a village in the Qinghai province of China who fit the bill:
The Lama Kewtsang Rinpoche of Sera Monastery was disguised in a cloak, but round his neck he was wearing a rosary which had belonged to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. The little boy seemed to recognize the rosary, and he asked to be given it. The lama promised to give it to him if he could guess who he was, and the boy replied that he was Sera-aga, which meant, in the local dialect, “a lama of Sera.” The lama asked who the “master” was, and the boy gave the name of Losang. He also knew the name of the real servant, which was Amdo Kasang.
The lama spent the whole day watching the little boy with increasing interest, until it was time for the boy to be put to bed. All the party stayed in the house for the night, and early the next morning, when they were making ready to leave, the boy got out of his bed and insisted that he wanted to go with them. (My Land and My People—the original autobiography of His Holiness the Dalai Lama)
The child was taken to Lhasa and formally enthroned at the age of four. He grew up only surrounded by monks whose job it was to give the future spiritual leader of the Tibetan people the appropriate education. He was all of 16 years old when he took on the job. Eight years later he would be crossing the Himalayas, travelling by night to avoid detection, for the sake of Buddha, dharma and sangha [1], to find a new home in India.
During the next few years the Dalai Lama would have long meetings and permanent communication with the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. While there would always be some tension between the two leaders – Nehru was understandably anxious not to do anything that might provoke China – there is no doubt that the Indian PM was sympathetic to the plight of the Tibetans, and specifically the immediate situation of the brave mountain people that had followed their leader into a new territory for which they were not at all prepared.
One main concern the Dalai Lama expressed was the education of the children and youth that were migrating, only slightly younger than himself. Nehru agreed to create schools to accommodate the children, and prepare them to access higher education in India's polytechnics and universities. Without such an opportunity, the Dalai Lama argued, his people would eventually flounder, never being able to integrate into Indian society. This did not happen because the Dalai Lama, and Nehru, were thinking ahead and understood deeply the value of passing on knowledge between generations.
But the Chinese occupation had created another serious educational problem: the training of the monks themselves. There were three major training monasteries in the Gelug tradition of the Dalai Lama in Tibet, going back to the early 1400s: Drepung, Ganden, and Sera. They had all been overrun by the Chinese.
So of course the Tibetans rebuilt them in India. They had been given and to establish a colony in Karnataka state in the south of India and there they built three monasteries with their temples called by exactly the same names: Drepung, Ganden and Sera.
This is where I was headed when I had landed in Mumbai at 1 am and experiencing that “what I am doing” feeling. But before I tell you the rest of that story, I have to talk a bit more about the Dalai Lama.
[1] The three treasures of buddhism: the Buddha himself; the Buddha's teachings; and the buddhist community.