A short visit to the roof of the world

by Alex Buchan

Even at 12,000 feet, Lhasa, Tibet's capital city, is dwarfed by dark, triangular mountains. Tibet is a menacing place. The phrase often used to describe it, "The abode of the gods", is not a comforting one.It is so easy to get to Lhasa today that one forgets how many died trying to get here in the past. This city was the ultimate destination for a 19th-century missionary. It required great fitness to scale the Himalayas, great courage to face the bandits that killed so many evangelists and great cunning to disguise oneself as a native because foreigners were forbidden to enter this city. Merely to arrive in the city was to join the missionary immortals like Carey, Morrison and Judson.Even though few made it, the ones who tried became heroes. One of the most famous was Annie Taylor, who learned Tibetan while convalescing in northern India from tuberculosis. In 1892, she attempted to reach Lhasa from China, but was betrayed and robbed by her guides just three days short of her goal. Her exploits drew huge crowds on her return to Britain.A few years later, Petrus and Susie Rijnhart, both fluent in Tibetan, nearly made it, foiled by bad weather, desertion by guides and the death of their one-year-old son. On their way back, Petrus rode to confront some bandits trailing them and was never seen again. Susie staggered into a China Inland Mission outpost three months later.Victor Plymire of the Assemblies of God got the closest. He made it to within 15 miles of Lhasa, tantalizingly seeing the sun glint from the gold of the Potala Palace, the huge residence of the Dalai Lama. He turned back, however, for fear of his life.And then I, like so many others since the 1950s, reached Lhasa from Kathmandu in a mere four hours: one hour by plane, the rest by car. Politics and technology have made it easy to visit.

Spiritual curiosity drew me. I had two questions: "What is it about Tibet that exerts such a fascination over the Western mind and "Why have the Tibetan people proved impervious to the gospel?"

For 300 years, missionaries regarded Tibet as the fountainhead of worldwide Buddhism. Becoming a forbidden city to foreigners in 1792 only added to its drawing power. A few reached the city; scores died trying. Despite years of mission work, the Tibetan community of believers probably never numbered over 5000 in a population of four million in 1950, when missionary work formally stopped as a result of an invasion by communist China.

Today, apart from the towering Potala Palace, Lhasa could be any other Chinese city. The real Tibet seems to have fled to India with the Dalai Lama in 1959.

In the Potala Palace the only sound is the squeaking of brass prayer wheels, as a few Tibetan pilgrims ascend to the temples within the palace. A guide attempts to explain the different golden statues that preside over each temple. No guidebook can prepare the visitor for the sheer complexity of Tibetan Buddhist religion. It is arcane, complex, daunting. Maybe this is the clue to my first question. Tibet is full of complexities so dark and secret that it really becomes a vacuum into which you pour your own ideas.

A visit to Tibet's largest monastery, Drepung, makes two things very clear. First, the Tibetans are terribly oppressed. Second, the Tibetan people have no more knowledge of the intricacies of their religion than the average visitor does. The pilgrims come cruising into the temple with their butter lamps, glance at the statues, pour a little butter oil into the main lamp bowl, make a little moan and move on.

Given this ritualism, and the historically harsh rule by the lamas, it seems even odder that Christianity did not take root here. Perhaps it is understandable since 1950, since persecution tends to strengthen any kind of faith--especially when religion and nationhood are intertwined. However, this does not explain the poor returns of the missionary efforts of the 19th century.

The Catholics arrived first, when a Jesuit missionary lived in Lhasa 1716-1721. After 1792, foreigners were banned from Lhasa, and missionaries settled in more outlying towns. Their strategies were superb. They did medical work, produced scholars of Tibetan culture and presented their message in culturally clever ways. But few were converted.

American scholar Ralph Covell, in The Liberating Gospel in China, devotes two chapters to the missions to Tibet, and lists reasons why the missionaries had such low returns--inaccessibility, bandits (missionaries were a soft target because they were unarmed and usually carrying stocks of silver to support themselves for long periods) and opposition from the lamas (who viewed Christians as a threat and, since they had private armies, used direct methods of persuasion). Christians also sabotaged themselves in certain ways, argues Covell. In a land where the population was widely scattered, they preferred to itinerate. They often made a convert in a town, but didn't return for months, even years, only to find the convert back in Buddhism.

There are rays of hope for the church, though they are not for reporting yet. Suffice it to say, Tibet--like the rest of China--is not short of dedicated tentmakers and local Chinese Christians with a heart for Tibetans. Many Chinese house church movements have sent evangelists two-by-two to plant churches in the region; some have been jailed.

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