The End of Tibet

Today, however, China has adopted a subtler and more sophisticated approach to Tibet. Its new president -- Hu Jintao, the official who once imposed martial law on Tibet -- got smart. He knows that heavy-handed repression only serves to spark international protests, emboldening dissenters in other parts of China. He also covets the billions of barrels of oil and gas recently discovered in Tibet, resources that could help fuel energy-starved China's rapid industrialization. So Beijing has enacted a new policy it calls "grasping with two hands" -- co-opting Tibetans while quietly silencing those who still demand freedom. Rather than putting soldiers in the streets and shelling monasteries, Hu has set out to undermine the core of Tibetan identity: the monkhood.

In Tibet, senior monks known as lamas have historically wielded both spiritual and secular authority, essentially running the state while laying down principles for society to follow. In Lhasa, elderly women still walk in circles for hours around the holy city every morning, murmuring prayers for the lamas' health. In eastern Tibet one day, I watch as pilgrims prostrate themselves before a senior monk. Women push their ill relatives close to the lama, desperate for a prayer of healing. "For older people, their whole lives revolve around their spiritual leaders," says a Tibetan whose elderly mother spends her days walking around Lhasa and praying to her favorite monks. "They will follow monks anywhere."

In public, China has announced new policies promoting tolerance of Buddhism. Beijing has lavished funds on restoring the Potala Palace, for example, and thrown open monasteries to tourists. But across the city from the Potala, a senior monk living in a crumbling earthen hut describes what is really happening. "Plainclothes security are all over the monastery," he tells me. "There's never a time when the monks are together that the public security bureau isn't watching them. The Chinese hold 'patriotic campaigns,' and all the monks are forced to renounce the Dalai Lama."

Like many Tibetans I speak with, the monk asks that his name not be used, for fear of reprisals. Chinese security agents, he says, have cracked down on interactions with foreign visitors. "When I first came here, it wasn't illegal for monks to talk to foreigners," the monk says. "Now it is."

Inside the monasteries, Chinese authorities dominate the education of new monks, barring boys who have any background in political action from becoming lamas and placing strict limits on the number of students. "Management committees" staffed by Chinese officials control monastic activities and indoctrinate monks in Chinese ideology. "The monks will never recover," says one lama. "We cannot have enough boys studying at monasteries, the traditional knowledge is vanishing, and we could just die out. In twenty years, what will be left?" Another monk is even blunter: "This is the end of our entire religious society," he tells me.

Thanks to the new tactics implemented by Hu Jintao, the systematic assault on the monks has received little notice outside Tibet. "China has been skillful in creating a facade of social and political freedom," says one human rights activist who asked not to be identified. "They're not out there cracking the heads of monks, the way they did in the 1980s."

But many Tibetans believe that China continues to back violence against those who defy Beijing. On the evening of February 4th, 1997, monks in the Dalai Lama's central compound in Dharamsala were translating Tibetan scriptures in a room fringed with golden curtains. As they worked, six men armed with knives rushed into the room, attacking the translators. The assassins slit the throat of Lobsang Gyatso, a senior monk and close friend of the Dalai Lama, stabbing him so fiercely that blood splattered the walls. Two other monks who were translating near Lobsang were hacked to death. Though the compound contains priceless artifacts, the killers took nothing of value.

Indian police blamed the killing on Dorje Shugden, an obscure Tibetan Buddhist sect that opposes the Dalai Lama, and many Tibetans believe that China has quietly provided financial support to the Shugden. "Monks who follow Shugden get promoted in China," says one Tibetan monk. "They get support for their monasteries."

At the center of china's campaign to undermine Tibet's monks is the Panchen Lama -- the Buddhist leader who ranks second only to the Dalai Lama. The Panchen not only possesses enormous power in Tibetan society, he also helps select a new Dalai Lama when the previous Dalai dies. Like the most powerful Tibetan lamas, the Panchen is chosen through an ancient process of reincarnation, in which the soul of the dead monk is rediscovered in a young boy. This unique tradition of finding reincarnations is essential to the power of lamas -- Tibetans believe that through rebirth, the soul of Buddha himself lives on in their leaders.

The search for a new Panchen can take years. To find the chosen boy, monks crisscross Tibet's rugged landscape, consulting oracles, visions and markers in the sky or in the waters of Lake Namtso, a turquoise pool perched in the Himalayas, some 15,000 feet above sea level. The searchers may find thousands of children before identifying the one. In the ultimate test, the monks hand a chosen child the dead man's possessions. If the young boy is truly his reincarnation, he recognizes them as his own from his previous life.

For centuries, Tibet had followed these ancient traditions to find its leaders. But in 1989, the year Hu Jintao imposed martial law on Tibet, the tenth Panchen Lama died of a mysterious illness he contracted shortly after he publicly criticized the Chinese government. Many Tibetans believe he was poisoned, and Beijing never allowed an investigation into his death. Suddenly, China had a chance to take control of Tibetan Buddhism. All Beijing had to do was select its own Panchen. Then, when the time came, the Panchen would choose a puppet Dalai Lama beholden to Chinese authorities. The supreme spiritual leader of Tibet would answer directly to Beijing.

The complete story of the selection of the new Panchen Lama has never been told. But one senior monk who took part in the choice, the Arjia Rinpoche, fled Tibet in 1998 and now lives in exile in America. When I located him late last year, I discovered that he had written an unpublished memoir that describes China's role in the selection. Although no writer had read the manuscript, the Arjia agreed to let me review it. It was delivered to me by courier, like an old-school intelligence document, in an unmarked manila envelope. In stacks of pages, the Arjia spills his life story. When I called him, he talked for hours, like a man who had been waiting for years to reveal himself. He kept returning to one date: November 29th, 1995.