Monk endured 33 years of torture in prison after Chinese invasion of Tibet
A guard, furious at his refusal to renounce Tibetan independence, tortured Palden with an electric shock baton in his mouth, knocking out all his teeth. For years he was unable to digest his food properly.
Palden Gyatso
Buddhist monk b 1933 d November 30, 2018
Palden Gyatso, who has died aged 85, was a Tibetan monk who survived torture, hard labour and virtual starvation during 33 years in prison after China’s invasion of Tibet. The Dalai Lama called his life ‘‘one of the most extraordinary stories of suffering and endurance’’.
He lived through one of the most harrowing eras in Tibetan history, witnessing executions during the Cultural Revolution and being forced to eat the leather from his shoes rather than die of hunger. He went into exile in 1992 and travelled the world to bear witness to his country’s suffering.
Palden visited Britain in 1995, reducing audiences to tears. He brought with him a collection of torture implements, still stained with blood, that he had smuggled from Tibet. When he travelled to Edinburgh, airport officials found he was carrying electric shock batons, handcuffs and knives (with a hook at the end for gouging out flesh) in his monk’s pouch. They detained him until representatives of the Dalai Lama could explain who he was.
Palden Gyatso was born in 1933 (like many Tibetans, he does not know the exact date) in the village of Panam, west of Lhasa. Auspicious signs accompanied his birth, his grandmother told him, including a rainbow that arced over the village at the moment he was born, while ravens that usually perched on the roof of the monastery clustered instead on his family’s home.
Palden, whose mother died a month after he was born, lived with an extended family of cousins, aunts and uncles – 29 altogether. On his release from prison in 1992, most of his family were dead, killed by executions, starvation or torture. Almost none had been able to visit him in prison, except for one relative who managed to deliver food occasionally. He later said that in prison ‘‘we all learned to live as though we were orphans, with no parents or brothers or sisters or even friends in the outside world’’.
Aged 10, he became a monk, studying until he was 16. He then moved to the largest of the three great monasteries of Tibet, Drepung, near Lhasa.
On March 10, 1959, he went to Lhasa on monastic business. He found that almost the entire population was on the streets, outside the Dalai Lama’s palace. The Dalai Lama had been attempting wary conciliations with the Chinese, but fears had grown that they would try to take him to China, and so crowds had gathered to protect him.
This was the beginning of the Tibetan Uprising: by the time the Chinese were firing shells into the crowd, the Dalai Lama was crossing the mountains to safety in India. Carrying his 72-year-old teacher on his back, Palden returned to his monastery. But Chinese officials were determined to punish anyone involved with the uprising and visited the monastery to carry out ‘‘re-education’’, often at gunpoint.
Palden was branded a ‘‘reactionary counter-revolutionary’’ and imprisoned. For about six months he was held in leg irons with a metal bar that made it almost impossible to walk, and could move only by shuffling. Palden relied on his cellmates for everything; he could not eat without their assistance. All of them were driven by hunger. ‘‘We thought of nothing else,’’ Palden wrote in his memoir Fire Under the Snow. ‘‘Some prisoners would eat the bones of dead rats or insects they found in the fields. I soaked my leather boots in water and began to chew on them. Soon there was nothing left.’’
Palden and other prisoners were forced to work for nine hours a day, frequently harnessed in a yoke and made to plough. If they stopped working, they would be beaten almost to death. Every day officials would come into the jail with a cart pulled by three horses. They would load the cart with people who had died overnight or in the plough harness.
Palden was made to witness many executions. He said once that some died of fear before they were shot. Prisoners were forced to remain silent and show no signs of grief. But often, they wept.
During re-education sessions, punishments were cruel and violent. When prisoners adopted a cross-legged posture, they were accused of showing feudal respect to the Buddha and were forced to squat.
A guard, furious at his refusal to renounce Tibetan independence, tortured Palden with an electric shock baton in his mouth, knocking out all his teeth. Another guard ran out of the room in disgust.
As a result, for years Palden was unable to digest his food properly. When he arrived in London on his first visit to the West, he discovered a taste for croissants with blackcurrant jam, cut into small pieces. Friends took him to a London dentist and he was given a set of false teeth; it was impossible to forget his beaming smile of joy afterwards.
He believed his eventual release was aided by pressure from groups such as Amnesty International and the International Campaign for Tibet. He remained intransigent in his opposition. When asked if he would continue to protest outside prison, he quoted from Mao’s ‘‘Little Red Book’’: ‘‘Wherever there is oppression, there will be resistance.’’
In his last years, monks at Kirti monastery in Dharamsala, close to the Dalai Lama’s temple, cared for Palden. Former political prisoners would visit him to talk about their lives and tell stories, often with much laughter; on one occasion a former monk reminded Palden of their names for their jailers – they called one particularly brutal guard ‘‘Saddam Hussein’’. – Telegraph Group