Published by: World Tibet Network News Saturday, January 24, 1998

By Jeffrey Paine

The Washington Post, Sunday, January 25, 1998

KUNDUN

A Biography of the Family of the Dalai Lama

By Mary Craig

Counterpoint. 392 pp. $26

THE STORY begins trailing clouds of mystery and wonder. In 1933, the 13th Dalai Lama prophesied that, though his reign had known only peace, Tibet must prepare itself for devastations unimaginable. Then, though in perfect health, he promptly died. (Many Tibetans would later believe he had willed himself to die so that his reincarnation would be old enough, when China invaded, to lead Tibet in its time of troubles.)

The old Dalai Lama expressed a final wish before he died: Lonely all his life, he would like to be reborn into a large family full of sisters and brothers. When his reincarnation was discovered a few years later as a toddler in a remote village, it turned out he was one of 16 children. Mary Craig, an English journalist and author of a biography of John Paul II, has had the inspiration to retell the history of contemporary Tibet using the vantage point of the present Dalai Lama and those six of his siblings who survived to maturity.

She scarcely could have chosen a more dramatic subject. When the boy Tenzin Gyatso became the Dalai Lama, his family of simple farm people was cast up into the most powerful nobility in Tibet and then, after China invaded Tibet in the 1950s, cast down to the status of refugees homeless in the world. The middle brother, Lobsang Samten, for example, was one moment Lord Chamberlain of all Tibet and, practically the next, a high school janitor in Scotch Plains, N.J.

It was this brother who provoked the Dalai Lama to a rare instance of fury. When Lobsang wished to discard his monk's robes and marry, the Dalai Lama raged, "Even a dog doesn't copulate while it's actually being beaten." In that metaphor the dog is Tibet, China is the beater; Kundun is the story of seven siblings who forewent personal pleasures and private lives in order to mitigate the worst blows falling on their country.

NARRATING THE EPIC of a family's and a whole country's journey from idyll to holocaust -- as Tibet, the last great medieval civilization, encountered in the same instant the modern world and the threat of extinction -- might have exercised the talents of Faulkner or Isaac Bashevis Singer or even Tolstoy. No literary artist, Mary Craig does not flesh out into three dimensions the Dalai Lama's family, who remain here little more than names -- names doing, however, quite interesting deeds. With her broad research Craig is less a biographer than an anthropologist who records, in Kundun, a whole way of life before it perishes. (The word Kundun, which means "the Presence" or "presence of the Buddha," is one name Tibetans call the Dalai Lama.)

Craig's narrative, encumbered with only minimal exegesis, benefits from the changed understanding of Tibetan culture that has occurred only recently. Even 40 years ago Tibetan Buddhism was dismissed (or prized) as an affair of magic, wizardry and superstition; the scholarly correctives to that misunderstanding, especially those by W.Y. Evans-Wenz and the German Lama Govinda, were so esoteric that a "No Entry" sign might have graced their book jackets. Today a generation of Tibetan scholars and teachers living in exile -- Sorgyal Rinpoche, Lama Yeshe, Tulku Thondup and Namkhai Norbu, among many others -- have mastered Western languages and Western psychology and given Buddhism a clarity and attraction previously unknown in the West. Because of its religious appeal, Craig suggests, the Tibetan struggle has gained a purchase on the world's

attention that other dire causes -- say, East Timor's -- cannot muster.

The idyll with which Kundun opens metamorphoses, by the middle of the book, into darkest, bleakest reality. In the Year of the Iron Tiger -- that is, in late 1950 -- 30,000 Chinese troops invaded Tibet from six different directions. Kundun at this point becomes a catalogue documenting tortures, dismemberments, beheadings, monks and nuns buried alive, children forced to shoot their parents -- one-sixth of the Tibetan population eventually killed, 6,000 monasteries destroyed and a culture razed. In 1960 the International Commission of Jurists declared the invaders' reign of terror to be the attempted genocide of the Tibetan nation and people.

But 1959 is the key year in Kundun, when word leaked out that the Chinese authorities planned to either kidnap or kill the Dalai Lama. The entire capital of Llasa, it seemed, rose up to shield their beloved leader while he and his family attempted a suicidal escape over the wintry Himalayas, an escape that, miraculously, landed them safely in India. Back in Llasa, the reprisals against the native population were merciless; in Beijing, Mao listened to a report of them with evident satisfaction, only to interrupt, "And what of the Dalai Lama?" When told that he had escaped, Mao sighed, "In that case we have lost the battle." As Craig narrates how China, for all its military prowess, dissipated the admiration its culture had been held in for centuries and how simultaneously the Dalai Lama became the world's most respected religious leader, she retells, oddly enough, in modern political idiom, the David and Goliath fable.

Jeffrey Paine is a writer living in Washington. His "Father India: A Western Adventure" will be published next fall.