In front of the Jokhang Te~ple is a stone monument commemoratmg a treaty concluded between Tibet and China in 821-22 A. D. , in which both parties agreed to stay for the next 10,000 years in their respective countries: "Tibetans shall be happy in the land of Tibet, and Chinese shall be happy in the land of China."

        But it didn't work out that way. There are two widely divergent versions of what happened in the subsequent millennium, of the complex saga of Sino-Tibetan rela­tions. Some blame the fifth Dalai Lama­the Great Fifth, who built the Potala-for renewing the dormant patron-priest rela­tionship with Beijing established in the days of Kublai Khan, and thus placing Tibet under Chinese suzerainty.

        Robert Thurman, a professor of Indo­Tibetan studies at Columbia University, has a different take. Thurman was the first American to be ordained as a Tibet­an monk. He later derobed ("I realized the monk trip was really self-indulgent on my part and I should try to hack it in the world") and married a Swedish high-fashion model. Their second child, Uma, is the sultry star of Henry & June.

        "Central Asia was one of the world's great warlord breeding grounds," Thur­man explained. "It spawned many of the world's conquering empires-the Ti­betan empire of the first millennium; the Mongols, whose empire was the biggest in world history; the Ottomans, who were descended from the Uighurs of East Tur­kestan, immediately to the north of Tibet. So the lamas of Tibet were quite aware of the military natltre of nations.

        "In the seventeenth century," Thur­man went on, "the Oirat Mongols, who were 20 million strong, spread to the Black Sea, and they tried t!;j win the Great Fifth to their vision of a Pan­Tibetan-Mongolian bloc that would stand up to the Manchus, who were tak­ing over China. But the Fifth realized that a Mongol alliance would keep Tibet in the medieval pattern of a highly mili­taristic feudal nobility and a monastic elite, and he didn't want that, so he asked the farthest-away guy, who almost never came to Tibet, for a loose hege­mony: let the Manchus keep the peace in central Asia. In so doing he bought Tibet three centuries to practice the dharma undisturbed, and Tibet developed from a normally ethnocentric, warlike, imperi­alistic national culture to a universally Buddhicized, spiritual, peaceful culture.  Tibet evolved a unique personality constella­tion which I call' inner modernity'-as ad­vanced as the West is in 'outer modernity,' as extremely inward as we are outward.

        "The Fifth in fact created an extraordi­nary social experiment: a state with zero pollution, zero population growth due to the voluntary celibacy of 20 percent of the males, no military budget, and a completely harmonious relationship with its wildlife, its environment, and its neighbors. Isn't that what we're all look­ing for?"

        But wasn't Tibet pollution-free be­cause it was pre-industrial? I asked.

        "On the contrary," Thurman coun­tered, "it was an industrial society. The monasteries were factories, streamlined assembly lines for the most important product there can be-enlightened be­ings. But the only problem," Thurman conceded, "was that the Great Fifth also set things in motion for a society that couldn't defend itself. Whether he fore­ saw the destruction of the Buddhist state, whether he intended for Tibet to self-destruct-who knows? Who can know what goes on in the mind of an enlightened being?

        "But the most important point in this discussion," he stressed, "is that in all the centuries that the Chinese claimed Tibet as part of their empire they were never there! China's claim was never more than a court fantasy. There is no documentary evidence to support it, while the documentary evidence that Tibet gov­erned itself as an independent entity is extensive. It was like a delegation coming to Beijing from thousands of miles away and saying, We bring you England."

        The first serious attempt to take pos­session of Tibet didn't happen until 1910, when an army sent by the Man­chus took Lhasa, committing atrocities that now seem like a dress rehearsal for the current occupation. But a year later the Manchus were overthrown by the Nationalists, and Tibet was left more or less to itself until 1948, when the civil war in China ended with the Nationalists departing the mainland.

        There were three things Mao Tsedung wanted badly: Taiwan, Korea, and Tibet. All he got was Tibet. In 1950, he sent an army to "liberate the oppressed and ex­ploited Tibetans and reunite them with the great motherland," and also to protect them from the "forces of imperialism," which was a bit of a crock as there were only ten inji in the whole country and what was he doing there if not committing a blatant act of imperialism himself?

        The general population responded to the threat with feverish prayer and circumambulation. The Dalai Lama, who was only fourteen, fled to the Indian border, taking with him more than a thousand pack animals laden with treasure. But a few months later he was persuaded by his spiritual advisers, in­cluding the state oracle (who goes into a trance whenever an important de­cision has to be made), to return to Lhasa and try to work something out with Mao. The two leaders didn't meet until 1954.  The Dalai Lama had seen the possibilities for a synthesis between Buddhism and Marxism, but ended up deciding that Mao was "an enemy of the dharma."

        When he returned to Lhasa, the Dalai Lama found that the liberation had taken an ugly turn. The Chinese army and Ti­betan riffraff they had recruited were re­lieving people of their arms, livestock, and other possessions. Everything was being collectivized. Prominent families were being bound and dragged to the vil­lage squares for thamzing, or "struggle sessions," and were being forced to con­fess to their' 'crimes against the people," and those whose performance was unsat­isfactory were being executed on the spot. The Khampa went on the warpath, and the Dalai Lama, who wanted to emulate Gan­dhi's nonviolence, despaired. He had lost control of the country.

        In 1959 there was a major insurrection in Lhasa. Tens of thousands of Tibetans surrounded the Norbulingka Palace to protect the Dalai Lama from the Chi­nese, whose program was now clear. Their commander had invited him to a soiree at the barracks. Perhaps they would fox-trot to Bing Crosby records, which was the rage with Lhasa's smart set. But he was to come alone, without his guards. Under the cover of night and in disguise, the Dalai Lama and his family fled south again, the People's IJiberation Army hot on their heels, and he barely made it across the Indian border. A hundred thou­sand Tibetans, including the cream of so­ciety and the Lamaist hierarchy, fol­lowed, and at least 87,000 of those who stayed behind were slaughtered.

        Three months later, in India, the Dalai Lama gave his first press conference, in which he claimed that China's true aim was "the extermination of the religion and culture and even the absorption of the Tibetan race."
 

        The atrocities, which began in 1957, reached a peak during the Cultural Rev­olution years, from 1966 to 1977. Entire villages were obliterated, their residents crucified or disemboweled, burned or boiled alive, or dragged from the backs of horses. Children were forced to shoot their parents, disciples their teachers, nuns to copulate publicly with monks and to desecrate sacred images. All but 40 of the country's 6,254 monasteries were gutted, and their treasure-$80 bil­lion worth of ancient thankas and gold and silver-was shipped back in endless truck convoys to the motherland, where it made its way through Hong Kong to European auction houses and private collectors. Thousands of bundles of woodblock-printed scripture-l,200 years of research on the inner workings of the mind-were burned. In the mon­asteries that weren't razed, huge por­traits of Chairman Mao, looking like Big Brother, were put up. Tens of thousands of Tibetans were marched off to a grow­ing string of labor camps in the North, South, and East that made the Gulag look like Playland. Inmates were reduced to fighting over the maggots in each other's excrement. Only hundreds survived. Their appalling conditions are chronicled in John A ve­don's powerful book, In Exile from the Land of Snows.  There are incredible stories from this period: high tulkus (recognized in­carnations of "perfection­stage adepts," who, in theory, can choose the time, place, and womb of their rebirth) under torture stopping to inhale and shooting their conscious­ness out of their body and into their next manifesta­tion. Avedon focuses on the ordeal of Tenzin Choedrak, now the Dalai Lama's senior physician, who survived twenty years in prison and labor camps by murmuring millions of mantras and practicing advanced tum-mo heat-generating meditation, which helped him stay alive in his freezing cell and break down the barely digestible fare.

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