Andre Migot. Candler. YOung-Husband

          Due to staying down at the Samye Ling, and the Holy Isle earlier in the year, I've had access to some old and, no doubt, out of print books about folk exploring Tibet. I've read about six or seven though I can't remember all the authors or titles.

           The most sympathetic books seem to have been written by the French. Andre Migot's "Tibetan Marches" is particularly good. It was published in the 1940s. The boy was trying to get to Lhasa when Tibet was the forbidden land, and he didn't make it. But it is a wonderful account. The best thing about it is that Migot becomes a Kagyu (like me!) and has a real interest in the culture of the people.

           The joe who acted as the interpreter for the Young-Husband expedition by the Brits to Lhasa in 1903 is quite good as well, O'Connor, I think. He'd learnt Tibetan and obviously deeply regretted the massacre of the Tibetans at the Hot Springs.

            A better account of this is written in The Unveiling Of Lhasa, which is by a Daily Mail correspondent, Edmund Candler, and  very well written, especially considering the circumstances. ..."written mostly in the dry cold wind of Tibet. often when ink was frozen and one's hand too numb to feel a pen." Unfortunately, you can see all the justifications for imperialism shining through. He says to one point that the British are more evolved than anyone else!!

            The Tibetans had built a defensive wall across a valley and the British forces (Indians, Gurkhas, etc among them) just walked up to the wall. They were supposed to only return fire and the Tibetans didn't open fire. When they'd walked up to the Tibetans and crossed the wall and surrounded them, the Tibetans were supposed to give up their arms. Candler points how how this part was bungled, shots were fired and then the British forces mowed them down, just as they mowed them down whenever they encountered "natives" with great courage but primitive armaments.

            Candler is unable to give an explanation as to why the Tibetans started to walk away as they were getting massacred. They didn't run. They walked.

            The magic charms didn't work against the British bullets. Both the French and British accounts of Tibet paint a picture of a place that was completely medieval. Nobody washed. There were no wheeled vehicles at all. Most of their beliefs to us are superstitious crap, such as illness being caused by evil spirits. They thought the earth was flat and shaped like a shoulder of mutton, or that's what one lama told O'Connor, the boy who interpreted for Young-Husband.

             The interesting thing about Andre Migot is that he realised something else was going on here with all this juju about gods everywhere, magic pills and whatnot. I think folk like moi need to cherry pick our way through this stuff. What's useful and what's not? I'm not interested in what I can't see and don't know, but there is something wonderful about Tibetan buddhism. I don't care what anyone believes or thinks, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and some of these joes and josephines really know how to meditate.

             This is my first day off smoking after smoking for six days. I'll be fine so long as I can keep the too dumb to meditate at arm's length.