Every year, an estimated 3,000 Tibetan refugees arrive in India to join its own billion-strong population. Risking their lives, they follow the footsteps of the Dalai Lama's own arduous trek into freedom in March 1959 to join what Salman Rushdie has so aptly called "that inexhaustible horn of plenty." Not plenty as in terms of economic opportunity, but as in the country's "plentiful" cultural and religious mosaic.
"He is here to stay," India's sprightly Defense Minister George Fernandes said when asked for his response to Chinese demands to hand over the Karmapa Lama. Only six months before the Karmapa's arrival, Fernandes, an Indian Christian who makes no secret of his fearless sympathy for the Dalai Lama, risked his career by referring to China as India's "No 1 enemy."
My own experience with India, the land of immense beauty and lush landscapes, began when I was born in a Himalayan town to Tibetans. In India, they have found a home away from home, which at times is more spiritually developed and geographically habitable than rugged Tibet itself.
birthplace of buddha
India is the birthplace of Buddhism and, for that matter, home to the most coveted of Buddhist temples and sacred pilgrimage sites, which the average Tibetans would not even dream of visiting if it was not for the Chinese brutality.
Indeed, many Tibetans say that the exile is a "blessing in disguise" or due to their good karma, for only the Tibetan elite would have the wherewithal to travel to India in the past. Centuries ago, adventurous Tibetan scholars crossed the Himalayas to come to India to study at the great Buddhist University of Nalanda and the more privileged spent enormous energy translating the Buddhist canons from Sanskrit to Tibetan.
Thumi Sambhota, a scholar-aide to the great seventh century Tibetan King Songtsen Gampo (whose claim to fame in Chinese history is his marriage to a Tang dynasty princess) created the Tibetan alphabet and grammar modeled on Sanskrit.
For more evidence on this Indo-Tibetan nexus, a popular Tibetan saying is a good place to start: "There were three who were most kind to Tibet: the Precious Guru (Padma Sambhava), the Lord Master (Atisha) and the Precious Master (Tsong Khapa)."
All but one of the trio were Indians. The legendary master Padma Sambhava, was an adopted prince of Afghanistan, then called Odiyana -- at the time a cultural part of the Indian subcontinent -- while Atisha, who played a major role in bringing Buddhism to Tibet, was born in Bengal.
Not for nothing did the former Indian Prime Minister Moraji Desai call India and Tibet "two branches of one bodhi tree." Thanks to famous Indian secularism, this Buddhist tradition, in all its ceremonial pomp, continues to this day. Every winter, Buddhists from all over the world go to Bodhgaya in the Central Indian state of Bihar to attend the teachings that the Dalai Lama gives at a monument which houses the great Bodhi tree, meditating under which the Buddha attained enlightenment some 2,500 years ago.
But the Tibetans' ease in India may be attributed more for its sheer diversity than to the spiritual bond. Hinduism has now all but replaced Buddhism as India's predominant religion. This inexorable Indian multiplicity continues to enthrall me even after two decades of traveling through the rambling subcontinent. The country stretches from the beautiful Buddhist state of Ladakh to the violent Sikh state of Punjab to the former Portuguese colony of Goa. India is a world in itself -- or, to paraphrase Indian novelist Pankaj Mishra, "many worlds." ("India is split into a great many separate worlds," Mishra wrote recently, "you can live in without knowing anything about others.")
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