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-The
Escape Route
Interactive
overview China-Nepal-India area map with route designated at ABCNEWS.com
website
Larger,
more detailed China-Nepal-India area map
The New
York Times Magazine on segment 1
High resolution
map of central Tibet
(warning
:
map is 1.5 megs)
Map of western
Tibet and Nepal
ABCNEWS.com
on segment 2
A
sketch/map of the Kali Gandaki River valley from Lo Manthang to
Jomosom
A satellite
map of the Annapurna region
Nalandabodhi's
route verification report on segment 3
Overview map of the States of India
Bihar
map
Uttar
Pradesh map
Haryana
map
Himachal
Pradesh map
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The
Karmapa's Reported Route from Tolung Tsurphu,
Tibet to Dharamsala, India.
With the
publication of two ground-breaking articles over the past few days,
the Karmapa's entire route out of Tibet has been reported. Although
no one in the Karmapa's party has officially gone on record to verify
the escape route, it has been the subject of intense investigative
journalism and hence we are fairly confident that a generally accurate
outline has been provided. The journey breaks into three main segments,
and each segment has been reported in a separate article. In this
comment, we bring each of these parts of the puzzle together to provide
you a roadmap of the escape route, an interactive look using the hypertext
facilities of the entire web. To follow it, you need to know how to
use your browser's forward and back buttons, and it helps if you know
how to open separate browser windows (control-N) and navigate between
them (alt-tab).
Introduction:
A bird's eye view of the entire route is marked on the interactive
map at the ABCNEWS.com
website
. A larger, more
detailed China-Nepal-India
map
depicting the area
shown in the ABCNEWS map (without route marking) is also available
on the web.
1) Tsurphu, Tibet
to Nyechung, Tibet-Nepal (Mustang) border. The Karmapa's journey
started in Tsurphu Monastery, in Tibet. This segment reportedly
was traversed in a Mitsubishi S.U.V. Tsurphu is west of Lhasa, but
the main roads are nearer Lhasa, 20 miles or so to the east. Once
on that main road, the Karmapa headed west through Tibet to the
Mustang border at Nyechung,
just north of Lo Manthang in Mustang. The route through Tibet is
reported in its most precise detail in Isabel
Hilton's March 12, 2000 article in The
New York Times Magazine. You
can follow the route Hilton describes on the following two maps:
1) a high
resolution map of central Tibet (warning:
map is 1.5 megs), and 2) a map
of western Tibet and Nepal
.
2) Lo Manthang
to Nepal-India border. The second segment of the escape was
on horseback and by helicopter. In an in-depth investigation of
this high-suspense Annapurna circuit trek,
Rita Beamish, writing for ABCNEWS.com
in an article published March 8, 2000, details the dramatic trip
down a river valley and over a forbidding pass through the Annapurna
Mountain range to Manang, then on by helicopter to Kathmandu. To
help you follow this segment, we have linked to a
sketch/map of the Kali Gandaki River valley from Lo Manthang to
Jomosom, and
a satellite
map of the Annapurna region.
Additional photographs of the route at trekkers' sites on the web
are available in the comment
on Beamish's article
.
3) Nepal to Dharamsala,
India. Various media outlets have in the past months reported
on the route in India once past the Nepal border. We reviewed them
and reported our findings in Nalandabodhi's
route verification report
dated February 5, 2000. Detailed maps of the route are available
here: States
of India,
Bihar,
Uttar
Pradesh,
Haryana,
Himachal
Pradesh.
We trust you will enjoy your virtual travels.
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UPDATED
The
New York Times Magazine
Another
map of China and Nepal
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Flight of
the Lama is a sterling
piece of investigative journalism about the Karmapa's escape from
Tibet. Isabel Hilton, writing in the The
New York Times Magazine
, provides fascinating
new details about and insights into the Karmapa's escape. As the initial
clamor surrounding the Karmapa's stunning arrival in India has slowed
a bit, there has been time for seasoned reporters to sift through
the complicated facts and make informed judgments about them. Hilton's
article is an example of what can be done by good journalists with
the time and interest to get to the heart of the story.
Hilton provides extensive, new details of His Holiness' dramatic
journey. In addition, with the ample column-space provided by the
magazine format, she has been able to bring a more contemplative,
illuminating and informed focus to the implications for Tibetans
and Tibetan Buddhists of the Karmapa's unexpected arrival in India.
Hilton writes with the sure hand of someone who is familiar with
Tibetan Buddhism (she is the author of a forthcoming book on the
Panchen Lama), and we highly recommend that you take the time to
carefully read Hilton's piece. The details reported by Hilton on
the escape compliment Rita Beamish's story released Wednesday for
ABCNEWS.com. While Beamish wrote about the arduous Mustang trek
over Thorung La Pass, Hilton's article concentrates primarily on
the details of the Karmapa's dash from Tsurphu Monastery to the
Tibet-Mustang border.
Hilton also brings to the facts about the physical journey a valuable
perspective on the accompanying religious, political and social
nuances of the Karmapa's situation: "More than two months later,
the consequences of the lama's dramatic flight are still being played
out. As he stole off into the night, the Karmapa could not have
suspected that within days of his arrival in northern India he would
be regarded by many as a possible future leader of the 100,000 exiled
Tibetans, the potential temporal successor to the exiled ruler of
Tibet, the Dalai Lama. . . . It is also unlikely that he anticipated
the worldwide sensation his flight would cause, or the diplomatic
crisis it would touch off between India and China -- a crisis so
severe that the Karmapa himself would be forbidden to speak publicly
of why or how he fled."
Hilton provides far more extensive details
on a number of points than have appeared elsewhere in the press.
For example, she describes a number of incidents involving the Karmapa
in Tibet in which he refused to follow the directions of his keepers,
including his refusal to read speeches prepared by party leaders.
Hilton also shows great skill in presenting for the non-Buddhist
reader a sense of the Karmapa's spiritual motivations, such as her
remarkably clear explanation the Karmapa's obligation in carrying
on the oral teaching lineage of the Kagyu branch of Tibetan Buddhism.
The doctrinal traditions
for recognizing reincarnations of enlightened masters are complex
and quite precise, merging little-understood religious traditions
with Tibetan customs of ancient parentage. Hilton expertly manages
the feat of illustrating some of the complexities of the process
by providing a fascinating anecdote about a Tibetan prophecy of
Guru Rinpoche that bears directly on the 17th Karmapa. We elaborate
a little here on Hilton's observations.
Guru Rinpoche was the Indian master most responsible
for disseminating Buddhism in Tibet. He reached Tibet at the beginning
of the 9th Century A.D., and is said to have departed this world
in 864 A.D. Tulku Thondup, Masters of Meditation and Miracles,
p. 89 (Shambhala 1996). According to legend, Guru Rinpoche appeared
to the 19th century adept Chogyur Dechen Lingpa in a vision and
prophesied the names and circumstances for Twenty-one Karmapa incarnations.
(We are currently on the Seventeenth.)
Hilton refers to Dechen Lingpa as a "Kagyu monk," but
his lineage appears to be a bit more complicated. He did in fact
study under many Kagyu masters, but he was mainly known as a great
nonsectarian master and lineage holder in the Nyingma school. See,
e.g., Dudjom Rinpoche, The Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism,
pp. 841-48 (Wisdom 1991), Gyurme Dorje and Kapstein, trans. The
Karma Kagyu and Nyingma lineages are inextricably intertwined at
various junctures, many masters hold lineages in both traditions,
and at many points specific Kagyu and Nyingma teaching lines merge
and overlap. For example, the Third Karmapa, Rangjung Dorje (1284-1339),
held and originated Nyingma lineages, including "the instructions
known as the Innermost Spirituality of Karmapa (karma snying-tig)."
Id., at 572-574. See also K. Thinley, The History
of the Sixteen Karmapas of Tibet (Prajna Press 1980) (after
realizing the Nyingma snying-tig transmission, the Third
Karmapa brought "together the two teachings of Kagyupa 'great seal'
and Nyingmapa 'great perfection' into one stream).
Legend has it that Guru Rinpoche predicted Twenty-One Karmapas
in Chogyur Dechen Lingpa's vision. The latter explicitly described
his vision of the prophecy to Karmai Khenchen Rinchen Tarjay, Supreme
Abbot of Karma Monastery, who instructed artists to render the vision
in painted murals. Karmapa: The Sacred Prophecy (Kagyu Thubten
Choling 1999). In the painting, the Seventeenth Karmapa Urgyen Trinley
Dorje, is depicted under a pine tree in discussion with someone
who can be identified by his clothing as a Tai Situ Rinpoche, another
line of incarnate teachers who reincarnates over the centuries in
close connection with the Karmapa. The XIIth Tai Situ Rinpoche is
currently the Karmapa's primary teacher, and Situ Rinpoche's monastery
is in India. According to Hilton's report, the Karmapa is
said to have remarked when still in Tibet that the scenery in the
thangka illustration "did not look like the barren valley in which
Tsurphu monastery sits. It did, however, bear a striking resemblance
to the landscape" in India where Tai Situ Rinpoche is located.
As to whether a 14 year old is sufficiently mature to make such
a definitive interpretation, or even to make his own decisions,
Hilton later in the article quotes Situ Rinpoche as once having
said: "'I'm scared to tell him anything,' he laughed. 'I'm 30 years
older than him, but I don't think I know any better than he does.'"
According to the traditions of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, then,
the Guru Rinpoche prophecy, memorialized in the thangka based on
Chogyur Dechen Lingpa's vision, is integrally related to the the
XVIIth Karmapa, Urgyen Trinley Dorje, who just arrived in India
from Tibet. (In what may have been an editing error, in the
portion of the article recounting the Chogyur Dechen Lingpa vision,
the article incorrectly references Tai Situpa's monastery, which
is elsewhere in the article correctly noted to be Sherab Ling, located
near Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh.)
Hilton
provides fascinating details of the departure from the monastery,
including a vivid portrait of the traverse out the window and over
the roof of the Mahakala shrineroom, extensive information about
the meticulous planning that was involved, and more information
on the route through Tibet to the border. To this end, we have located
another
map of China and Nepal
which showing
a more westerly detail of the Tibetan plateau, including the roads
across the border into Mustang. (Additional maps are in the ABCNEWS.com
commentary below.)
The planning was so detailed that two
in the Karmapa's party had weeks earlier obtained permits to enter
Mustang for business reasons, and brought back photos from the area
for the Karmapa to review. Hilton also provides a few dramatic paragraphs
on the near-disasterous sojourn around the army base in Western
Tibet. Hilton's report does not overlap Beamish's fine report of
the journey from Lo Manthang to Manang, focusing instead on the
arrangements before and after that perilous crossing. Hilton then
describes the events surrounding the Karmapa's astounding appearance
in Dharamsala as follows:
"[T]he Karmapa, painfully thin and windburned, with lacerated hands
and open sores on his feet, strode into the audience chamber of
an astonished but delighted Dalai Lama. 'It was a moment of great
emotion,' says one monk who witnessed the meeting. 'Leaving aside
everything else, they are two great bodhisattvas, and the understanding
and affection between them was very moving.' . . . Late that afternoon,
Tai Situ Rinpoche was summoned from Sherab Ling, his monastery in
Himachal Pradesh, three hours' drive away. After a brief reunion
with Tai Situ, the exhausted Karmapa went to bed and slept until
11 the next morning. As news of his sensational escape raced around
the world, the Indian and Chinese governments were caught off balance."
Hilton
provides a vivid description of the political reaction to the Karmapa's
arrival. She also offers a synopsis of the activities of Karmapa's
foe, Shamar Rinpoche, a disciple of the previous Karmapa, who has
inexplicably vigorously petitioned the Indian government through
the press and otherwise to repatriate the Karmapa back to Tibet.
She summarizes with the following: "How seriously the Indian government
takes these charges is unclear, but the row is certainly embarrassing
and damaging for the Karma Kagyu. 'There is no security problem
in Sikkim,' said a senior Indian government official. 'But Shamar
has some influence in some of the Indian intelligence services,
so questions are asked. Until they are answered, there will be no
final decision about the boy." (Perhaps Shamarpa has an Indian version
of Kim
Philby
as an ally
in his program to deliver the Karmapa back into the hands of his Chinese
keepers.)
Hilton concludes with an insightful revelation about the differences
between the ways of old Tibet, and modern realities, and how the
Karmapa's arrival might be a catalyst for bringing a new political
vision that comports with the new realities:
"A respected spiritual leader and already a forceful character,
the Karmapa could be well positioned to speak for his people in
the absence of the Dalai Lama or during the infancy of the Dalai
Lama's next reincarnation. The Karma Kagyu and the Gelugpa, the
Dalai Lama's sect, have been at loggerheads since the 17th century,
when the Gelugpa -- with the help of a Mongol prince -- pushed
its rival sect from power. But the era of theocracy in Tibet is
over. The Dalai Lama has tried to persuade his followers to discard
sectarianism, and he insists that the new generation of spiritual
leaders receive teachings from all four schools of Buddhism. If
the Dalai Lama keeps the young Karmapa close -- and succeeds in
passing on his own vision for the future -- Tibetans could find
a new leader, and China could face a new and formidable adversary."
The
New York Times Sunday Magazine is
at the New York Times' website.
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