We visited the Potala Palace on our first full day in Lhasa. In the morning we went there to see the building from ground up. We were pleasantly surprised to find ourselves walking amongst an avid morning worship by the Tibetan people. They walked the streets with their prayer wheels swirling in hand, their eyes half-closed, their minds preoccupied with one scripture or other. They were not concerned with the tourists who took pictures of them as if this scene were anything new. Facing the Potala Palace, they bowed down completely, full body styled. Hands together, down to the heart, bowed to the ground, kneeled, and their bodies laid on the ground flat with their hands sliding along.

We noticed that the Tibetans like dogs, and they brought their pets along for this morning worship, dogs wearing lovely collars with big round religious bells. It was an awesome display of the Tibetan people’s faith, undeterred by the busy traffic along Beijing Road.  The Tibetans have embraced the pace of development without giving up religion, the root of their existence.

The hike up the Potala Palace in the afternoon was even more strenuous than the hike up four floors in our hotel, and we were embarrassed to find ourselves the last ones to arrive at the ticket booth, us being the youngest ones in our tour group. Soon enough I have entered the Palace, and was facing the burial altars for the former Dalai’s.

There are many kinds of burial in Tibet, and I will talk about the sky burial in an upcoming entry. The Dalai’s, though, have a special kind of burial called the “sitting burial.” When they pass away, people put them in sitting posture and build a burial altar for them, with special embalmment to preserve their bodies. The burial altars are different for different Dalai’s. The Dalai that contributed more to the wealth, development and well-being of Tibet are immortalized with more gold and treasures. We could tell that the Dalai that died young received less and had a smaller altar.

There was no altar for the Sixth Dalai, and that intrigued me.

The reason being that he wasn’t following one of the most important rules for the Buddhist monks, namely, celibacy. Legend has it that, because the Sixth Dalai was chosen when he was 15 years old, he had already learned the art of human love, and he would go out to the city at night to woo beautiful women with romantic poetry.

The main idea in Tibetan Buddhism and politics is that the living Buddha (the Dalai being the political leader) keeps reincarnating. One life after another, when one living Buddha passes away, he will reincarnate to his next life. The next Dalai is chosen amongst very young children, some one to five years after the death of the last one, when the child reaches five to six years old. It is believed that the living Buddha is living one life that doesn’t end. In his sixth life, the Dalai had romantic emotions; as he was capable of loving, he did not deny the nature that made him human.

The choosing of the Dalai’s seems inhuman to me, the foreigner, as how is it fair that a five year old is told to be the political leader of a people and to forego all the pleasure there is that life offers? Would he later come to question his own identity as the real Buddha reincarnated, and would he wonder whether Buddhism is the ultimate truth? The very idea of picking a Dalai goes against the precepts of western modernity, which upholds a self-chosen destiny.

I came out of the Potala Palace satisfied, having learned that, for once, the Dalai had known life as a common man.