The Potala - Tibet's Vatican
If all roads in Italy lead to Rome and the Vatican, all trails in Tibet converge on Lhasa and the Potala, the winter palace of the Dalai Lama. Before we reached Lhasa we caught a glimpse of its gold roofs from afar, and realized what the first sight of this building-one of the most striking and unique in the world -- must symbolize to the weary and devout pilgrim who has made the long trek over the mountain passes to his Holy City. Even foreign visitors of different faith, like us, are thrilled by this soaring mass of red and white masonry a mile or so out of Lhasa, dominating the city from Red Hill, one of the many rocky hills that rise unexpectedly, isolated from the high Tibetan plains.
From the time of the early missionaries every Westerner fortunate enough to reach Lhasa has added his bit to swell the glowing descriptions of the Potala. No steel or iron was used in its construction, yet it is such a perfect structure that Spencer Chapman, member of a British mission to Lhasa in 1936, wrote: "The Potala gives the impression not of having been built by man but of having grown there, so perfectly does it fit in with its surroundings." One heartily agrees with him that it is a supremely great work of architecture, having an indefinable quality of magic. And as he says, "in common with the few unquestionably perfect buildings of the world, the Potala has some transcendent quality derived neither from the inspired skill of some master builder or craftsman, nor from its historical association nor from the fact that it is the cynosure of innumerable religious devotees." Anyone seeing the "Palace of the Gods" would be aware of what Chapman calls its "divine excellence."
Every day in Lhasa we were conscious of the Potala. When we got up in the morning we looked out of our windows at its gold roofs, dazzling in the sun; when we rode home in the evening after enjoying the exuberant hospitality of a Tibetan official living on the edge of town, its vast white and red facade took on the appearance of an enchanted castle in a child's fairy tale; or perhaps because of its massiveness and a certain grimness, it seemed more like a sky castle of the Valkyries in Wagner's operatic "Ring." Wherever we went we saw some angle of the Potala, each more fascinating than the last.
Crowded as we were with interviews and parties and getting the reaction of leading officials to their pressing and critical problems, we were determined to devote as much of one busy day as we could to the winter home of the Dalai Lama. So we set off one forenoon to take photographs and make a tour of this fabulous building, the most famous in Central Asia.
Seen from a little distance or from the top of Iron Hill, where the College of Medicine stands, the Potala, in a vast circle of snow-peaked mountains and surrounded by a closer circle of green trees and parks, has an even more impressive setting than India's Taj Mahal, but unlike the Taj it is no exquisitely carved and filigreed marble gem.
What really leaves one a bit breathless is its tremendous size, the grandeur of its simple, almost austere façade and the way the foundations seem to rise naturally out of the rock. It is hard to tell where the hill ends and the building begins. The Potala is nine hundred feet long and a little more than that in height, from the street level-two-thirds the height of New York's Empire State Building. Indeed, it reminded us of an American skyscraper, towering as it does over the whole Lhasa scene. The walls slope slightly inward; and the long rows of windows, wider at the bottom than at the top, accentuate the symmetry and general effect. On the southern side, standing out above the immense white wall, is the central portion, colored a deep crimson, signifying special sanctity because of the chapels located in this section.
In September the yak-hair curtains which offer protection from the glare of the sun are removed from the windows and every September, too, the white walls are given a fresh coat of paint. We did not witness this annual housecleaning. The whitewash, mixed near the Potala, is carried in buckets on the backs of women and dashed up against the wall from dippers. The section of wall that cannot be reached from below is splashed with whitewash thrown out of the upper windows.
The celebrated Tibetan king Song Tsen Gampo -- the one who was converted to Buddhism by his two Buddhist queens -- built himself a combined fort and palace on Red Hill in the seventh century, but most of this was destroyed in later years by an invading Mongol army. On this site the revered fifth Dalai Lama began the construction of the Potala in 1641. It must have been as difficult to build as the pyramids of Egypt. For this architectural triumph was made with primitive tools -- the same tools that are used in Tibet today. Each stone had to be carried from a distant quarry by donkeys or on the backs of men and women, one stone per person lashed to the back with yak thongs. Most of the actual supervision of the work was delegated by the Dalai Lama to his efficient Chief Minister, Sang-gye Gyatso. The Great Fifth died in 1680 before the building was completed. Sang-gye Gyatso concealed for
nine years the departure of the Fifth to the "Heavenly Field." He gave out word that His Holiness had gone into retirement to meditate -- an explanation both acceptable and plausible to Tibetans. This enabled the clever Minister to complete the Potala. The faithful were willing to do all this heavy labor -and without payment-for and in the name of their living god, whom they still believed to be with them in the flesh, but not for the Minister, important as he was. The residence for the reincarnations of Chenrezi was almost fifty years in the building -- not so long when one recalls that the Gothic cathedrals of Europe were painstakingly built over a much longer period and that New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, started in 1892, is only two-thirds completed now, in spite of the advantages of rapid construction in our modern machine age.
The new palace got its name from a hill on Cape Comorin at the southern tip of India -- a rocky point sacred to the God of Mercy, whom the Indians call Avalokitesvara and the Tibetans worship as Chenrezi. The Tibetans themselves rarely speak of the sacred palace as the "Potala," but rather as "Peak Potala" (Tse Potala), or usually as "the Peak."
The fifth Dalai Lama did live for a time in the completed part of the Potala before he died. And the Regent, his Chief Minister, also lived there while he was bringing the stupendous undertaking to its conclusion.
Next to occupy the sacred headquarters was the sixth Dalai Lama, the first and only one in the whole line who strayed from the path of celibacy and virtue. This was a natural consequence of the Regent's concealment of the Great Fifth's death. Usually the Dalai Lamas are removed from their parents at a very tender age and impressed by their lama tutors with the significance of their divine origin and the importance of their duties to the people. But Tsang-yano Gyatso -- his name means Melodious Purity -- must have been between ten and twelve when he was "discovered." His character and inclinations were formed before the high lamas could take him in hand. He made it his concern to beautify the new palace and he planned and constructed the Serpent House below the north ramparts. Here he indulged in life's most worldly pleasures -- wine, women and the entertainment of dancing girls. Nor should one omit song. He composed poetry himself, mostly love songs, which are still popular in Lhasa. Obviously he should have followed the career of a charming young man about town, and not that of the incarnate God of Mercy.
Needless to say, devout Mongols and others doubted that Melodious Purity was the true incarnation of the Great Fifth.
He was finally seized and carried off by Mongolian troops, and was either murdered or died as a result of the rough treatment he received. It is interesting to note that the Tibetans themselves took no part in doing away with Melodious Purity. The monks at Drepung did their best to rescue him from the Mongols, who stormed the monastery where he was in hiding. Even today Tibetans persist in their loyalty to him and excuse his disorderly conduct on the ground that he had two bodies; one remained in meditation in the Potala and the other wandered into the streets and dissolute byways of Lhasa to test the faith of his followers.
Everyone who lives in Lhasa and all pilgrims to the Forbidden City make the sacred walk around the Potala at least once a year. It is a hike of several miles, always done in the clockwise direction, with the Potala kept auspiciously at one's right. As we puffed up the huge steps of the giant, zigzagging stairway we passed a number of Tibetans making the circuit. They were whirling their prayer wheels as they kept reciting: "Om Mani Padme Hum!"
The Potala contains more than a thousand rooms. On the lower floors are storerooms, government offices, kitchens and living quarters for two or three hundred monks, many of them young celibates in training, selected from the sons of the nobility and official classes. Some go into government service and some remain in the Potala, where the Dalai Lama has his own private monastery, called "The College of Victorious Heaven." Two of the four Tibetan treasuries are housed in the Potala. One -- the Trede -- is reserved for the Dalai Lama's private use. Another, "The Treasury of the Sons of Heaven," is a reserve treasury to meet the expenses of war or other national emergencies. Everything from butter and tea to gold, silver and precious gems is stored in the fortress-like lower depths of the Potala. The accumulated contents of these treasuries over the past two and a half centuries must be invaluable. It is said that yak butter in the Tibetan climate will keep one hundred years, but I for one would not care to experiment! To add a note of grimness, prisoners are kept, sometimes for life, in the dungeons below.
Toward the summit are numerous chapels, great audience halls and meeting rooms, as well as the spacious apartments of the Dalai Lama and his close advisers and attendants. But we did not have time to see everything nor would we have been permitted to do so, any more than a visitor to the White House can barge into all the private rooms and offices. We concentrated on the tombs of the Dalai Lamas and the summit.
As we climbed higher, we heard hundreds of monks chanting inside the vast building. There was the roll of drums, the clash of cymbals, the whir of prayer wheels and the throb of deep bass horns.
Along the west side of the Potala are the tombs of several of the Dalai Lamas. The sixth is conspicuously absent. The shrines are built somewhat after the pattern of chortens and covered on top with heavy gold leaf. It is the pure gold domes of these tombs that glisten so radiantly in the sun, and they are the first glimpse distant travelers get of the Potala. We entered the sanctified chambers where the bodies of the Dalai Lamas are entombed in their two- and three-story gold-capped pyramids. Hundreds of yak-butter lamps in gold vessels flickered in front of the crypts as the monks were conducting their services.
The tomb of the Great Fifth, sixty feet high, and that of the Great Thirteenth, even higher, are the most resplendent. From all over the lamaist Buddhist world the pious contributed generously to the building of the late Dalai Lama's shrine. The main chorten is encased with gold and richly encrusted in rare jewels, and the interior is filled with priceless old Chinese porcelain, jewelry, gold vases, and many other rare art treasures of Asia. Around the upper walls of the tomb a dozen of the finest artists in Tibet worked for several years on a series of frescoes. Exquisitely painted, they commemorate events in the strenuous life of the thirteenth Dalai Lama -- his exile to Mongolia and China, his flight and exile to India, the trains, automobiles and other strange objects he encountered in the outside world, processions of monks, Lhasa scenes and festivals as well as the Potala and other features of his life at home. Interesting, too, is an enameled piece at the tomb of the eighth Dalai Lama, who died in 1804, showing English people and houses of that period -- undoubtedly one of those done in China for the old East India Company. The Dalai Lamas during their own lifetime collected much of the gold, precious stones and currency required for their splendid tombs.
After we paid our respect to the tombs we climbed to the top of the Potala, among the golden roofs. The city of Lhasa lay at our feet to the east.
Directly across the way on Iron Hill rose the Tibetan medical college which I mentioned in another chapter. To the north and west, nestled at the foot of the mountains, were the great monasteries of Sera and Drepung, which we were to visit before we left. Many smaller monasteries, too, clung to the steep edges of distant cliffs. To the south we saw the Kyi Chu winding its way along the plain, making this district one of the most fertile in Tibet. Directly below us was a deep blue lake, with a small golden-domed monastery on an island in the center. It was an enchanting, almost unbelievable panorama. Only the whir of our movie cameras, photographing this breath-taking scene, reminded us that we were still creatures of earth, not of some mythical planet.
Below the wall on which we were standing we looked down on the winding road which is for the exclusive use of the Dalai Lama. He is carried up that path in a palanquin whenever he returns to his winter residence. Tibet not only permits no wheeled vehicles, but even the ancient palanquin carried by bearers is forbidden to all but the god-king, the Panchen Lama and the Thunderbolt Sow. The Chinese Ambans, at the height of their power, insolently arrogated it to themselves.
While we were on the roof we learned from one of our Tibetan companions that hail must not fall on the Potala or the Dalai Lama's summer palace or on the Jokang, the cathedral. Two lama magicians are employed by the Tibetan Government to prevent hail storms in and around Lhasa. During the rule of the thirteenth Dalai Lama hail fell one day on all three of these buildings. The late thirteenth often had a way of making the punishment fit the crime. Because the magicians "neglected" their special duty, he ordered them to plant several rows of willow trees.
As we made our way down from the Potala, we passed a granite shaft. The top of this monolith had fallen a few months beforp. Our Lhasa acquaintances offered an interesting interpretation. They claimed that the Communists had been winning in Asia because the top of that column had been broken off. To us their explanation only emphasized again how deep and widespread is Tibet's fear of the Communists to the north.

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