When the Forbidden Country was fi­nally opened to tourism, in 1983, cam­era-clicking foreigners naturally flocked to the sky-burial sites. For several sea­sons they were tolerated, but one day a party of particularly pushy voyeurs was stoned by some grieving relatives, and ever since then the sites have been off-limits, The burials still go on, how­ever, half a dozen a day in Greater Lhasa, my Tibetan guide was telling me as we looked up at the most popular site, behind the gilded pagodas of the Sera Monastery. These days, he con­fided, the bodies are often those of young monks or nuns arrested for pro­testing against thc Chinese. The men who do the dismembering are experi­enced at recognizing things out of the ordinary, and they report cracked ribs, kidney damage, and other evidence of torture.

         This jibes with the findings of various human-rights groups: one of the largest genocides any country has ever perpe­trated on another continues, Since the Chinese invaded the country in 1951, an estimated 1.2 million Tibetans--one­fifth of the population-have died of un­natural causes. Though the Chinese have been trying to appear more humane and lifted martial law a year after the Tianan­men massacre of June 1989, this seems to be no more than a public-relations ploy. All kinds of atrocities are still go­ing on. Paramedic teams are sterilizing entire villages. Pregnant women are be­ing dragged screaming into hospitals and forcibly aborted. Chinese obstetricians are administering lethal injections into the soft spots of newborn babies' heads. Nuns, who have come to the forefront of the freedom movement in recent months, are being stripped naked, mauled by dogs, and violated with elec­tric cattle prods. The new thing in the prisons is forcing inmates to give blood "donations" three times a day, releas­ing them, if at all, only when they are almost completely exsanguinated and at the point of death.

         Just as appalling is the fact that the systematic annihilation of the Tibetan people and their culture is taking place, for reasons of superpower realpolitik, without a word of protest from the lead­ers of the free world, those champions of liberty who are supposed to rush to the aid of small helpless states when they are gobbled up by their big nasty neigh­bors. Because of their Buddhist paci­fism, Tibetans are virtually defenseless against the Chinese occupation, which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has described as the most brutal Communist regime on the planet. "In general, we Tibetans are very religious-minded," the Dalai Lama, the country's exiled spiritual and temporal leader, reflected not long ago. "But believing the country would be saved without human effort, through prayers alone, resulted from limited knowledge. From this point of view, religious sentiment actually be­came an obstacle.

Circumambulating

         Every Tibetan wants, more than any­thing, to go to Lhasa, the capital of this vast, spectacular land hidden be­ hind the Himalayas, a third the size of China; to see the Potala, the sumptuous l,lOO-room palace where the fifth through the present Dalai Lamas lived; and to circumambulate the Jokhang, the great central temple in the city's heart, built by Songsten Gampo, the seventh-century king who adopted Bud­dhism. In the early eighties the Chinese lifted their ban on pub­lic worship in Tibet. But they had no idea that the religion was still so strong, that virtually 100 percent of the population was still nangpa, "within the faith," and continued to revere the Dalai Lama as the fourteenth incarnation of their rul­ing archangel even though he had been driven out of the country in 1959 and none of the younger generation had ever set eyes on him. It was he who held to­gether what was left of the Tibetar. iden­tity here and abroad, and a pageant of pent-up devotion, the likes of which had not been seen in the West since the days of Chaucer, soon reclaimed the land. 

         A decade later, the whole population seems to be on a pilgrimage. Wherever there's a shrine or a holy place to be circumambulated, a ring of Tibetans is usually shuffling around it, murmuring mantras, twirling prayer wheels, gener­ating good Karma for their next incarna­tion. The monasteries are full of long, swaying, softly humming conga lines of true believers, their awestruck faces illu­minated by blazing rows of yak-butter lamps as they make their way from room to room full of gaudy Buddhist art. Many are tall, red-cheeked, ready-smil­ing members of the Khampa tribe, from eastern Tibet. The women are decked out in massive turquoise and red coral jewelry and red-tasseled braids. The men wear long black robes, with silver daggers and charm boxes on their belts, and both sexes sport pastel-colored high sneakers from the People's Republic of China, to which they are supposed to be­long. They have been on the road for days, weeks, months. Some have pros­trated the whole way, measuring the tar­mac like inchworms: moving their hands, pressed together in prayer on top of their head, down to their throat, to their heart, then dropping to their knees and keeling forward so that every part of their body embraces the sacred earth, then getting up, spitting out the dust, striding forward a body length, and re­peating the process.

         The inner circuit of the Jokhang is known as the Barkhor and takes about twenty minutes to perform, if you keep moving. But there are many distrac­tions, for the Barkhor is also the liveliest bazaar, the Times Square of Tibet, and the center of national life, swarming with all kinds of people. Pickpockets, street kids, and pretty girls done up in turquoise and coral mingle in the slowly turning throng of devotees with pale, edgy, baby-faced Chinese soldiers and gyan-yi-plainclothes operatives of the dread Chinese Public Security Bureau posing as beggars or itinerant monks (you can tell who they are because they wear shades and periodically raise side bags containing walkie-talkies to their ears).  If anything is going to happen, if there is to be another outburst of reactionary counter-revolutionary secessionism, it will probably be here, in the Barkhor. Like the flare-up of September 1987, in which twenty-one young circumambu­lating monks suddenly raised the out­lawed Tibetan flag (two snow lions against snow peaks) and began chanting for independence. A few days later, an angry crowd stormed the police station where the monks were being held and set it on fire. Or the riot in March of the following year, in which three Chinese policemen were stoned to death, and four Tibetans, one of them a fifteen­year-old monk, were gunned down-af­ter which Beijing's policy of "merciless repression" was imposed. Or the dem­onstrations in May 1989, which resulted in the deaths of 16 or 800 Tibetans (de­pending on which side's tally you sub­scribe to).

         My new friend Jules, with whom I was circumambulating the Barkhor one afternoon not long ago, motioned with his eyebrows up to a rooftop where two Chinese soldiers were standing in front of a mounted high-caliber machine gun and surveying the crowd. Jules was an antiques smuggler who specialized in Ming porcelain. We had flown to Lhasa together from Kathmandu, Nepal. I had come in squeaky-clean-no Dalai Lama pictures, nvthing to suggest, with my binoculars and field guides to the birds, butterflies, and wildflowers of the Hi­malayas, that I was anything other than who I said I was: a naturalist. But Jules was playing a more dangerous game. He had gotten a sixty-day visa for China, booked a flight to Ch'eng-tu, the capital of neighboring Sze­chwan, and simply got­ten off at Lhasa. When the P.S.B. officer at the airport asked for his Tibetan travel permit, he produced the visa and said ingenuously that he thought this was part of China. "At first the guy said I'd have to stay at the airport and take the next flight out,"  Jules was telling me. "But after several glasses of cognac and a ten-dollar bill slipped discreetly into his jacket pocket, he started to tell me the story of his life. There was an electric cattle prod on the table between us, the kind the P.S.B. routinely uses for interrogation. I picked it up and asked, 'What's this thing?'

" 'A shock,' he said.
" 'Did you ever try it on yourself? '
   'See what it feels like?' I jabbed it at him and he shrank back in terror. 
    The next morning he put me in a car to Lhasa."

Being the only inji, as Westerners are known in Tibetan (from" English­man"), in sight, we were objects of wide-eyed curiosity, particularly from some Golok nomads who had blown in from a vast, practically uninhabited prai­rie the size of Colorado known as the Changthang, "the northern grassy soli­tudes. " Three women danced around us holding up turquoise-and-coral neck­laces, earrings, and amulets, and asking cheerily, "Hello how much? Come on. Your last how much?" One of them pinched me encouragingly on the butt. "You too much," I told her.

         You wouldn't have guessed from the high spirits of the Tibetans what they have been through, or that they are liv­ing in a very ugly police state. Every­thing seems calm in the Barkhor, even festive. A group of Hor nomad girls were gaily spinning a row of cylindrical bronze prayer wheels along the wall of the shrine with the .absorption of teen­agers in a video parlor. Tibetan Bud­dhism has tremendous entertainment value. As a lama in Kathmandu put it, it is the Disneyland of religions.

         The faces of these people are extraor­dinary-so different from the pallid masks that the Chinese soldiers wear. When Tibetans smile, their eyes widen, the skin draws back, and their whole face expands and lights up like a bulb. Contentment and untroubled clarity radi­ate from their features, maybe because of their practice of the system for over­coming the suffering of existence that a Hindu prince named Siddhartha worked out 2,500 years ago after years of ascetic or­deals, finally becoming a Buddha, or enlight­ened being. In the 1,200 years since the system reached Tibet it has been refined in monasteries that produced their own Einsteins and Freuds, who did their re­search on inner science, tearing con­sciousness apart and scrutinizing it under clinical conditions. One Western practitioner describes the set of specific meditations and visualizations that com­pose Tibetan Buddhism as "not so much a religion as a completely down-to-earth and practical science of mind. The Ti­betans deal with the mind in a very pro­found way. They are masters of one­pointedness and interiorization, and until you get the mind sorted out you can't get anywhere in your spiritual practice."

         But one of the main teachings of the Buddha is that outward appearances are illusory, and so it is possible that the people in the Barkhor, outwardly all smiles and laughter, are seething inside, that what the circumambulators are chanting under their breath is not the fa­mous core mantra, Om Mane Padme Hum ("The Jewel in the Lotus"), but actually "Chinese, Go Home," and that this whole overpowering pageant of de­votion, which seems to be the only thing happening in Tibet, is actually a subtle kind of nonviolent mass protest, and un­derneath the apparent calm is a volcano.

         We pass a distinguished-looking old man wearing a lapel button that reads, to our amazement, I LOVE TIBET. FREE TI­BET.  I ask Rinchen, the hip young exile from the tour company who came in with me to see everything goes smooth­ly, to drop back and discreetly get the man's views. A few minutes later, Rin­chen catches up with us. "I asked the old man how the situation was and he said it's like being a dog that is taken around everywhere on a leash. You can't bring out your sorrow. Smoke can't come out your nostrils no matter how big the fire is in your heart."

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