Interview with the Dalai Lama's oracle

 

Interesting.

Over the last two years, a sense of hopelessness has led more than a hundred Tibetans to set themselves on fire to protest Chinese rule. This has put Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and the government-in-exile in an awkward position: while they don't encourage the self-immolations, they lack alternative methods to affect Chinese policy. At the same time, the process by which the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan leaders consult and take policy positions is shrouded in mystery. The Dalai Lama and other exile leaders, for example, often get advice from oracles: powerful spirits channeled by a human medium, or kuten.

The chief state oracle is Nechung, Tibet's wrathful protector spirit. According to the Dalai Lama's 1990 autobiography, Freedom in Exile, the Nechung medium has participated in some of the key turning points in Tibetan history. During the 1959 Tibetan uprising, for instance, when it seemed that Chinese forces were on the verge of detaining the then 23-year-old Dalai Lama, the oracle told him, "Go! Go! Tonight!" The medium also wrote down the precise route the Dalai Lama should take to evade Chinese forces on his way to the Indian border.

The current, or 17th, medium for the Nechung spirit is the 55-year-old Thupten Ngodup. Born in Tibet in 1958, Ngodup experienced the early period of Communist Chinese rule and escaped with his family in 1966, the year Chairman Mao Zedong's disastrous Cultural Revolution began. He joined the exiled wing of the Nechung monastery in Dharamsala, India, in 1971.

"Dealing with Nechung is by no means easy," the Dalai Lama wrote in his autobiography. "It takes time and patience during each encounter before he will open up. He is very reserved and austere, just as you would imagine a grand old man of ancient times to be."

Nechung's current medium, a crimson-robed monk with a shaved head and an easy smile, is engaging and relaxed. But he's also politically attuned to the crisis in Tibet: when we met in February, he was preparing space for a billboard outside his residence to commemorate the Tibetans who have self-immolated. We sat together at Ngodup's home, located on the circumambulation route around the Dalai Lama's residence and temple, where servants brought us tea and sweets. The interview, conducted through a translator, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Dalai Lama temple