Tourist temples in Tibet ...

Press, 4 July 1985, Page 20

Tourist temples in Tibet ...

By

ANTHONY BARKER,

of Reuter, in Rongbuk

Tibet’s new tourist route from the Nepalese border to Lhasa winds for 800 kilometres through the graveyard of a civilisation. Each turn in the dirt road reveals another gaunt ruin which 20 years ago was a colourful centre of life and a repository of Buddhist culture in a desolate upland valley. Where the monasteries and fortresses used to glow red or white, and golden rooftop prayer wheels flashed, pitted earth walls are sinking slowly into the barren landscape. On this one route I counted a hundred ruined structures. They are among about 3000 religious centres — almost all the shrines in Tibet — which were devastated on Communist Party and Government orders after 1959. The vast Ganden Monastery outside Lhasa looks like the remains of a blitzed town. The Yambulakhang Palace, Tibet’s oldest, is now a pile of stones on a hilltop. The present Chinese Government is trying to make some amends, to conciliate the Tibetans and in some instances to provide showpieces for an expected influx of foreigners when much of the once-forbidden mountain region is opened to tourists this year. Rongbuk is the world’s highest monastery, about 5000 metres above sea level in a broad valley crowned by Mount Everest. There, amid the rubble, a solitary stupa — a tower rising to a pinnacle — and a small temple hall have been reconstructed. Inside, a monk called Temba Gyentzen and his two apprentices are slowly painting intricate murals in red, green, and gold on the blank walls. “There were no photographs so we try to reconstruct what we can from memories,” the black-clad artist said. They are putting painstaking effort into the restoration, financed by the Tibetan regional government and by believers; but the

repetitive gaudy designs are a sad pastiche of the old murals in Tibet’s handful of great surviving monasteries. Rongbuk was smashed early in Mao Tse-tung’s 1966-76 Cultural Revolution by villagers, on Government orders. “They had received political education and were told the monastery was exploiting and oppressing them,” said 50-year-old Wur Gan, a farmer who took wooden beams from the monastery for firewood but is now working on the restoration. “I did not think anything of it at the time, but now it seems such a pity,” he told me. The 300 monks and nuns fled from Rongbuk. Now two monks and five nuns have returned to the silent wreckage. Villagers said the demolition was orchestrated by a group of Mao’s Red Guards who came to their remote settlement, Tibetans led by a Chinese. “The people said nothing. At the time they were afraid,” said Qu Tzong, another farmer. The Leftists said they had to smash the old to make way for the new, but they brought nothing in return for the past. Today, 19 years later, the village’s 25 grubby little children still do not go to school because it is too far to walk. The Cultural Revolution destroyed thousands of precious buildings and antiquities throughout China, but the frenzy in Tibet was particularly thorough because of an abortive rebellion in 1959, eight years after China had taken it over. The Red Guards saw the local culture as a barrier to Tibet’s full assimilation and determined to smash it. Ancient sutras — sacred writings — were burned and statues were melted for scrap or sold abroad. Unlike the great majority of today’s Chinese, almost all

Tibetans are fiercely religious. For the many semi-nomadic herdspeople, the monasteries were the stable centres of their lives. The monks nurtured all aspects of Tibet’s 2000-year-old civilisation, its literature, music, and medicine. Their monasteries were also a precious repository of Buddhist literature. “There is universal belief in Buddhism among the Tibetan people,” Tibet’s new Communist Party chief, Wu Jinghua, said in a speech to senior Buddhists this month. “The saving of all beings by Buddha is the Buddhist doctrine while the sole purpose of the Communist Party is to serve the

people wholeheartedly .• • This indicates we have the same aspirations to work for the people. The difference in beliefs is secondary." Tibet now has 50 functioning monasteries and 55 more are under restoration, according to the head of the official Buddhist association, Zhun Moling Tanzichlen. By 1989, it will have 200. There are limits to the support the secular-minded communists will devote to religion when the impoverished mountain region demands expensive investment in hospitals, schooling and industry. From 1975 until December, 1985, the Government will have given $8 million for restoration of wrecked buildings — the cost of one modern fighter aircraft.

Instead of rebuilding the Chokori medical school, a Lhasa landmark by the Potala palace which was shelled in 1959, the Government has built a new television mast on the sacred spot. Tibet’s serf system which supported the thousands of monks has been abolished — unmourned by the former serfs — so the economic basis for a full-scale monastic revival no longer exists. Many Tibetan intellectuals who could help in restoration died from beatings or in camps. Others fled into exile with their ruler, the Dalai Lama, in 1959 and refuse to return. Whatever China does, much of Tibet’s glory, the fruit of its genius over centuries, is gone forever.