From 'His Holiness: The Dalai Lama'--An Autobiography

From ‘His holiness: The Dalai Lama

I was born into  a family  of simple farmers who used cattle to plough their field and, when the barley was harvested, used cattle to trample the grain out of the husk. Perhaps the only objects that could be described as   technological in the world of my early childhood were the rifles that local warrior nomads had probably acquired from British India, Russia and China. At the age of six I was enthroned as the fourteenth Dalai Lama in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and embarked upon an education in all aspects of Buddhism. I had personal tutors who gave me daily classes in reading, writing, basic Buddhist philosophy and memorization of scriptures and rituals. I was also given several tsenshap, which literally means ‘philosophical assistants.’ The primary job was to engage me in debate on issues Buddhist thought. In addition, I would participate in long hours of prayers and meditative contemplation. I spent periods in retreat with my tutos and sat regularly for two hours at a time four times a day in a meditation session.This is a fairly typical training for a high lama in the Tibetan tradition. But I was not educated in maths , geology, chemistry, biology and physics. I did not even know they existed.

The Potala palace was my official winter residence. It is a huge edifice, occupying the entire side of a mountain, and is supposed to have a thousand rooms—I never counted them myself. In my spare moments as a boy, I amused myself by exploring some of its chambers. It was like being on a perpetual treasure hunt. There were all kinds of things, mainly belonging the belongings of the former Dalai Lamas and especially of my immediate predecessor, preserved there. Among the most striking of the palace’s contents were the reliquary stupas containing the remains of the previous Dalai Lamas, reaching back to the Fifth, who lived in the seventeenth century and enlarged the Potala to its present form. Amid the assorted oddities I found lying about were mechanical objects which belonged to the thirteenth Dalai Lama. Most notable were a collapsible telescope made from brass, which could be attached to a tripod, and a hand-wound mechanical time-piece with a rotating globe on a stand that gave the time in different time-zones. There was also a stash of illustrated books in English telling the story of  the First World War.

Some of these were the gifts to the thirteenth Dalai Lama from his friend Sir Charles bell. Bell was the Tibetan-speaking  British political officer in Sikkim. He had been the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s host during his brief sojourn in British India when he fled in 1910 at the threat of invasion by armies of the last imperial government of China. It is curious that the exile in India and the discovery of scientific culture are things bequeathed to me by my most immediate predecessor. For the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, as I later found out, this stay in British India was an eye-opening experience, which led to a recognition of the need for major social and political reforms in Tibet. On his return to Lhasa, he introduced the telegraph, set up a postal service, built a small generating plant to power Tibet’s first electric lights and established a mint for the national coinage and the printing of paper currency. He also came to appreciate the importance of a modern, secular education and sent a select group of Tibetan children to study at Rugby school in England. The thirteenth Dalai Lama left a remarkable death-bed testament, which predicted much of the political tragedy to come and which the government that succeeded him failed to understand fully or to heed.