Opening the Door of Tibet

Abstract

To the best of our knowledge, no country, or region, has remained as forbidden to foreigners as Tibet. Geography and history have conspired with politics to make access difficult, and religious curiosity and practice has made it tantalizing and highly vulnerable to brute muscle power. But the High Himalayan wall has helped in moulding and shaping a set of ‘border people’, enduring the harshest possible physical conditions and overcoming them in a near super human effort. This is the main theme of this chapter. It is the outcome of the 8th Pundit Nain Singh Lecture delivered in Munsyari, the home land of the Pundit brothers. The author concluded that the real credit for opening the doors of Tibet should really go to Tibet’s founder-king Songtsen Gampo (617–649 A.D.) who sent Thon-mi Sam Bhota with 16 companions to India (Kashmir) to learn the Sanskrit language. After his return to Tibet he used his knowledge of the Brahmi and Gupta scripts to devise a Tibetan script. Atisha, Santirakshita and Guru Padmsambhav are but a few names who helped establish Buddhism in Tibet, while it declined in its country of birth. Nain Singh and Kishan Singh were following the footsteps of learned Buddhist savants like Santirakshita, Atisha and Padmsambhava, while the former simply abided by the request made by the Tibetan kings to extend to them the teachings of the greatest reformer India had gifted to the world. These ‘Pundits’ were filling up the ‘white spots’ with which our modern day scientific community is battling with.