The Golden Lamps of the Potala

The sky, unusually dark and almost the color of violet ink illuminated the snow-crested mountain tops and I realized that Roerich's paintings are to life, and that the epic coloring of his Himalayan canvases is the real coloring of the Tibetan Plateau, one of the most inaccessible places on the globe.

Here lies legendary Shambala, the abode of wisdom, where earthly life comes face to face with the supreme knowledge of the heavens.
In the 1950s I was the first Russian orientalist to make the overland journey across Tibet. We made the trip by car along the newly built road-crossing 14 mountain passes and the upper reaches of the great Asian rivers: the Yangtze, the Mekong and the Brahmaputra. Now I found myself once again on the "the Roof of the World". But this time I did not have to spend three weeks on the road; the air route makes it possible to get from Chengdu to Lhasa in two hours. Regular planes land here at dawn and take off at once before the whirlwinds start over the mountains.

Walking slowly and cautiously, I made for the car to take me from the airport to Lhasa. A hundred kilometers later, I was standing, enchanted, before the red-and-white fa?ade of the Potala Palace. As if to accentuate its towering height, a kite was soaring above the golden roofs. And my thoughts turned to my meeting with the Dalai Lama on September14, 1955. Offering me hada , a ceremonial white scarf, the living god of Tibetan Buddhism said, "The white kite above the palace is a sign of the full autumn moon when Tibetans celebrate the harvest holiday, bathe in the hot springs and pick curative herbs. It is the best time to come here on your first visit and on your second too…"
Only now, re-reading Roerich's Shambala Shining, i realized the full significance of the fact that the private quarters of every Dalai Lama in the Potala Palace are traditionally decorated with murals, which depict visions of his future life. Does this mean that the ability to look beyond the horizon of time really exists?
With its majestic splendor, the Potala Palace would impress the inhabitants of any world capital. Thus the humble Tibetan pilgrim, who has always lived in a yak hair tent, must view the Potala Palace with great reverence. It is hard to believe that this 13-storey edifice containing 999 rooms was built on a steep mountain as long ago as the seventh century.
Unlike the majority of the famous architectural wonders of the Orient, the Potala Palace is built on a vertical plane. The palace dominates the city, in fact it dominates the entire valley and captures one's attention at once. Its walls are slanted like the sides of a truncated pyramid, seeming to reproduce the contours of mountain slopes.
The singularity of the Potala Palace is deeply stamped upon my memory. But now, having seen much of the world, I noticed another trait: the astounding resemblance of ethnic Tibetan architecture to the historical monuments of pre-Columbus America. So it is no accident that Tibetans immediately reminded me of American indians form the novels of Fennimore Cooper. They share the same clear-cut faces, the proud bearing of people used to carrying arms and the desire, shown by men and women alike, for ornaments like rings, bracelets and earrings. in this respect Tibetans are lake Gypsies who also originated from Asia for Hindustan.
But there is still further indisputable evidence to prove that the ethnic roots of different cultures had become interwoven long ago. in the oldest part of the Potala Palace, the Prayer Cave Vault, you can see the statues of the Tibetan King Songtsan Gampo (629-650) and his wife, the Tang Dynasty Princess Wen Cheng.
Having unified the tribes that inhabited the plateau, the king founded Tubo Dynasty (the word Tibet presumably originated form this name) and asked Emperor Tai Zong of the Tang Dynasty for the hand of one of his daughters.
During the Tang Dynasty the Chinese capital Changan (today's Xian) was one of the centers of world civilization, as it was the starting point of the "Silk Road" to Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe. So it is not surprising that Princess Wen Cheng brought along many scholars and craftsmen who laid the basis for many crafts and trades in Tibet.
Thus the neighboring nationalities established friendly contacts, and the "Tea Road" became a link of vital importance and has served as such for more than 13 centuries to this day. The palace, built in honor of the wedding of the Tibetan king and the Tang princess, took my breath away by the wonderful harmony of its contours and the magnificent combination of colors: gold, white, red, roofs of sheet gold, whitewashed walls and cornices of a reddish-brown, gold-like color, made of raddle-dyed reed.
Erected in the seventh century, the Potala Palace was damaged by lightning and afterwards almost entirety destroyed in the times of Landarma who was a bitter opponent of Tibetan Buddhism. But in the 17th century under the Fifth Dalai Lama, the palace was restored to its original form thanks to a fresco that had escaped destruction, and it has existed as such for over 350 years. The inside of the Potala Palace struck me at once with its gloomy massiveness, its steep staircases with worn stone steps, its narrow windows in walls one meter thick and its low ceilings lying on tetrahedral carved pillars made of wood.
In the central "red" part of the palace, next to the private quarters of the Dalai Lama, stand the burial stupas of his predecessors. In the biggest of them rest the remains of the Fifth Dalai Lama. This 15-meter-high, gem-covered stupa is coated by a metal with a dull greenish-yellow tinge, which makes you gasp with wonder. For the metal is extremely high purity gold! The huge butter lamps around it are also made of gold. They are enormous, each containing two or three buckets of melted butter. They burn dozens of pounds of butter in one day-enough for a whole caravan to carry.
Greasy soot coats the roof-beams, making the stone floor slippery and saturating everything with nasty thick fumes of stale yak butter. Tibetans burn it in lamps, boil their brick-tea with it and put it on their faces to protect the skin against the harsh effects of wind and weather. From the roof of the Potala Palace one can see the featureless contemporary buildings which cluster round the heart of Lhasa's old town, the Jokhang Temple. This was built by King Songtsan Gampo in 648 for the statue of Sakyamuni Buddha brought to Tibet by Princess Wen Cheng. At the same time as proclaiming Buddhism the state religion, he ordered the creation of Tibetan Script and the translation of all Buddhist scriptures.
According to the legend, the Sakyamuni figure emerged on its own from bullions of gold and has a strong resemblance to the young Buddha. The bottom of the statue is hidden under heaps of gems given by believers as offerings. They are guarded by black cats that do their job even better that watchdogs. Noiselessly, they prowl and will emerge from the darkness, pouncing on anyone who dares reach out and try to grab some treasure..
Statues of two fallow deer, flanking the "wheel of life", sparkle on the golden roof of the Jokhang Temple. Opposite the entrance to the temple there grows a sacred willow tree. and everywhere one looks there are pilgrims prostrating themselves.
in the first month of the Tibetan calendar a ten-day ceremony of worship of held on the square before the Jokhang Temple. introduced into the Tibetan area five centuries ago, the ceremony gathers over 100,000 pilgrims
There are throngs of them on ordinary days too. Here, like perhaps nowhere else in Tibet, you become conscious of how strong the religious feelings of the Tibetans are and how the conception of "this life as a result of the past and cause of the next one" is and important part of Tibetan Buddhism.