Indian Antiquary Vol 59

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, S Krishnaswami Aiyangar, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarka
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 203

SEPTEMBER, 1930)
SCRAPS OF TIBETO-BURMAN FOLKLORE
185
One cannot help admiring his wonderful performance, especially when one considers his physical handicap, for the portrait of him in the work discloses features hopelessly unlike those of the ordinary Tibetan. One has only to compare them with thoso of the Tibetans portrayed beside him, to wonder how after all he could have managed so complete a disguise. The whole performance shows an extraordinary amount of determination and endurance, and a certain capacity for riding roughshod over all opposition. This last shows itself in his dealings with the officials along the British f.ontier and in his callous deception of them. He deceived them deliberately, and nowhere shows any feeling for the plight in which his double dealing placed them. He was determined somehow to get to Lhasa, whatever stood in his way or who might suffer. The success of his private project was the one thing that mattered, and not till the last pages of his book do we find any hint that he ever thought of any one but himself and his scheme. “On the 16th April (1923) we arrived in Kalimpong and I was back in British India at last. That same day I went on to Peshok to be the guest of Major Bailey, the Political Offioer in Sikkim. We had a number of things to talk over, as I was sorry to find that my little escapade had quite unintentionally caused the Indian Government a good deal of trouble." It is not every official who would make a guest of a traveller who had treated him so badly as Dr. MoGovern treated Major Bailey. However, all's well that ends well, and we have many valuable folklore items to study as one result of the "escapade."
I should like here to raise a protest against the epithet, "mysterious" as applied to Tibet. Dr. McGovern calls his journey "a secret expedition through mysterious Tibet." Surely the time has now arrived when we may consider the "mystery" of Tibet to have been dispelled. The Tibetans are in fact very like their congeners in the world, and there is nothing mysterious in the history of the country. The long story of internal struggle and foreign incursion is much that has been the fate of other Oriental peoples, while the story of the present conditions obtaining in the country is comparatively modern-Buddhism having arrived about the same period as Islam arrived elsewhere, while the story of the first Dalai Lama dates back only to the days of Queen Elizabeth, and the fifth Dalai Lama became monarch of all Tibet only in 1645, in the days of Charles I.
However, the Buddhism that entered Tibet was of a debased Mahâyâna type, filled with the Saktism and Tantrism of the Hindus of Northern India, and the religion of the country has since degenerated back into the Animism which anciently dominated it, for Dr. McGovern, no doubt rightly, talks of the worship of gods and goddesses of the animistic kind. The arrival of the high priest to the throne meant in reality the Government of the country by a priestly caste, which has steadily kept it to themselves with all the determination that distinguishes ecclesiastics endowed with political power. For their purposes they have for some two centuries or more kept strangers out so far as they could, and that is the sole cause of the mystery,' which, in modern times, has surrounded the country. Otherwise the people are no more mysterious than the inhabitants of other lands. Indeed they are filled with the ordinary humanity of us all.
The Buddhism of modern Burma is altogether different from that of Tibet. It must have found its way into the country, both North and South, in the days of the Asokan missionaries of the third century B.C., and it suffered in the course of many centuries afterwards all the debasement that occurred in India, until a series of reformations took place from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries A.D., introducing a puritan form of the Buddhist faith from Ceylon, which finally spread itself over the whole country to the exclusion nowadays of the very memory of Mahâyânism among the educated. Among the people and the peasantry the old Mahâyânism and the indigenous Chinese form of Animism has naturally largely survived, so that we find in Burma generally a strong animistio faith overcast by a Hinayânist form of the Buddhist religion. The religion of the people therefore is a