The young Chinese monk had traveled more than a thousand miles to study with Buddhist teachers here. He had built a crude cabin in the mountains, and made it his home. But then police decided to force him to leave, part of a campaign to control a sprawling religious settlement in this remote Tibetan region in Sichuan province.
As officers at a guardhouse finished the paperwork to expel him, the young monk pulled a hood over his shaven head to hide a smile. "I'm not really going," he whispered, before stepping into the freezing cold and moving down the road as ordered.
A few hours later, the monk returned, slipping past the police and climbing a narrow, twisting road through falling snow in a local vehicle. In a valley ahead, wisps of gray smoke rose from a vast encampment as crowds of monks and nuns in red robes strolled along paths among assembly halls, temples, market stalls and cabins.
"There are so many people here," said the young monk, Ji, who asked to be identified only by his surname. "How can the police make me leave if they can't find me?"
His expulsion and quick return to Larung Gar, one of the world's most influential centers for the study of Tibetan Buddhism, was a small twist in a profound conflict now unfolding in China.
Founded 24 years ago, Larung Gar grew into the country's largest monastic community, with as many as 10,000 residents, before the ruling Communist Party began trying to control it and to expel settlers in the late 1990s. Its struggle to survive the crackdown and maintain its independence from the party illustrates how the faithful are pushing the bounds of freedom of religion and association in China -- and what happens when the state pushes back.
The Chinese government allows people to worship only in party-run churches, mosques and temples, considers any autonomous religious organization a potential threat and routinely imprisons priests, monks and others. But Larung Gar's ability to survive and flourish suggests the party is no longer able to crush all independent spiritual activity, or is unwilling to risk the popular backlash that might result if it tries.
A quarter-century after China abandoned Mao Zedong's rigid version of socialism in favor of free-market reforms, the Chinese enjoy greater prosperity and personal freedom than ever under Communist rule. But the state still attempts to maintain control over a broad spectrum of society, from public affairs to the arts and religion.
The friction that results is a defining characteristic of life in modern China, where people are testing, and often redefining, the limits of what the authorities will permit. Controlling this popular pressure -- sometimes with repression, sometimes with restraint -- is one of the central challenges confronting the party as it seeks to preserve a monopoly on power at a time of rising social discontent and wrenching economic change.
Steering Clear of Politics
Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok, a heavyset man with a broad, weathered face, founded Larung Gar. A charismatic leader, the khenpo, or abbot, presented himself as the reincarnation of a teacher of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, and as a holy figure who could discover artifacts hidden by ancient Buddhist leaders. He was known as a brilliant scholar and an eloquent speaker, even in his later years, when he was partially blind and could not walk without support.
When Jigme Phuntsok established Larung Gar in western Sichuan in 1980, this desolate valley 13,000 feet above sea level and 600 miles northeast of Lhasa was entirely uninhabited. At the time, China was only beginning to recover from Mao's destructive Cultural Revolution, which hit Tibetan areas particularly hard and interrupted the education of a generation of monks and nuns. Jigme Phuntsok was one of the few senior lamas who made it through the period without being imprisoned or tortured, and his academy quickly came to be seen as a haven. Students flocked there from across Tibet and Tibetan areas in neighboring provinces.
For years, Larung Gar thrived. The khenpo's teachings tapped into Tibetan nationalism by recalling the glory of the ancient Tibetan empire, and he welcomed adherents of all Buddhist sects, not just his own. But as Larung Gar grew, Jigme Phuntsok was also careful to steer the community away from politics, his followers said, discouraging activities that might be viewed as supporting Tibetan independence, which is fiercely opposed by the Chinese authorities. Still, the party was never fully comfortable with him.
Larung Gar escaped largely untouched when the party cracked down on monasteries across Tibet in the late 1980s and the 1990s, jailing and defrocking thousands of monks who refused to denounce the Dalai Lama. Though teams of party officials began visiting Larung Gar on occasion in 1998, they never seized control or expelled monks for political reasons, as they did elsewhere.
The encampment was spared in part because regional party leaders in Sichuan adopted more lenient policies than those in Tibet. The khenpo also cultivated local officials. "Everyone who knew him respected him," said Zuzu, the former party secretary in Sertar county who served as the regional police chief from 1981 to 1996.
Even after Jigme Phuntsok visited the Dalai Lama in India in 1990, he managed to escape serious trouble. When party officials questioned him, he told them he considered the Dalai Lama a religious figure and did not discuss politics with him or support his cause, his followers said. He also told the party officials that he rejected a generous offer by the Dalai Lama's followers to remain in India, and turned down their request to speak on the Voice of America, Zuzu said. But most important, the monks who flocked to the academy frequented local businesses and deposited their savings in local banks. "Sertar is a poor place," Zuzu said, "and the academy helped our finances greatly."
Threat of Huge Crowds
Larung Gar is a 24-hour drive from the nearest city, Chengdu. The road snakes through a breathtaking range of mountains, but the miles are marked by falling rocks, icy surfaces and treacherous, cliff-side turns.
By the late 1990s, Chinese party officials outside the region began to see the khenpo and his quiet community in the mountains as a threat. For them, the first signs of trouble were the crowds.
When Jigme Phuntsok ventured out of the valley and visited other Tibetan areas, residents mobbed his vehicle and herdsmen descended from the mountains on horseback to greet him. Huge audiences gathered to receive his teachings when he visited other parts of China, too, including Guangxi, Yunnan, Jiangxi, Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang and Shanxi provinces.
One Tibetan official from a nearby county, who asked not to be identified, said officials in Sichuan began receiving complaints from counterparts in other provinces who were alarmed by the large gatherings. Before long, she said, Sichuan began responding by dispatching police to escort the khenpo back to Larung Gar. Eventually, they banned him from traveling.
But party officials were unwilling, or unable, to shut down his academy. Even today, Larung Gar is largely independent. At noon, the place is bustling with monks and nuns heading to and from classes, or chattering as they line up at small shops to purchase food and supplies.
As a gar, or monastic encampment, the academy is more loosely organized than a monastery -- and more difficult for party officials to control. There are no formal admission procedures, so monks who evade police checkpoints come and go freely, often returning to their home monasteries after a few weeks of study. Classes do not follow a strict schedule, so party officials have not been able to regulate what is taught. Residents also study on their own or privately with individual teachers.
Ji, the monk who sneaked back into the encampment, said he moved here in the summer of 2000. Like most students, he used funds donated by Buddhist friends to build a cabin -- a one-room structure with hanging sheets that divide it into a bedroom, study and kitchen.
A typical day for him and other students begins early and ends late. They prepare and eat their meals alone, most often rice and vegetables, or butter and barley bread. Beyond study and prayer in their cabins, there are classes on Buddhist texts, medicine, literature, history and philosophy, which can range in size from 30 to 500 students, and lively theological debates in the assembly halls.
Most of the students are ethnic Tibetans like Dorbcha, 30, a monk who spent two years in Larung Gar in the 1990s and returned for further studies in January. He said he traveled here to pursue a Buddhist education free from the restrictions imposed by the government elsewhere. "This is a special place," he said. "Religion is important to Tibetans, so Larung Gar is like a treasure."
But the academy has also attracted large numbers of Han, China's main ethnic group. There is rising interest in religion and spirituality -- from Falun Gong to Christianity -- as people try to cope with rapid social change and the vacuum left by the collapse of Maoist ideology.
Du Renzhong, 32, a computer programmer from Shanghai, recalled that he embraced Tibetan Buddhism and came to the settlement after weighing Christianity and Islam. "I came here to study because I'm not interested in the things people most think are important, like modern life or family," he said.
During the late 1990s, local officials tried to persuade Jigme Phuntsok to reduce the population of the encampment, sometimes even prostrating themselves before him, his followers said. But the khenpo told the officials that because he didn't ask the students to come to the valley, it would be wrong for him to ask them to go, said one senior teacher.
"He believed teaching was the most important thing," the teacher said. "On that point, he would not compromise."
The pressure on Jigme Phuntsok came to a head in 1999, when Yin Fatang, a retired senior military official who had once served as the party chief in Tibet, visited Larung Gar, local officials said. The officials said Yin was stunned by the size of the encampment and wrote a report to Jiang Zemin, then China's president, urging a crackdown.
By showing leniency and allowing Larung Gar to develop, Yin argued, Sichuan province was undermining the party's policies regulating monasteries and religious activity in Tibet. He warned that residents in Tibet could demand similar freedoms and that Larung Gar could become a breeding ground for Tibetan nationalism, officials said.
The party also appeared worried about the khenpo's ability to attract devoted followers and funding from a broad cross section of Chinese society. At the time, the party was struggling to crush the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which had been banned as a cult after staging a huge protest in Beijing in 1999. Stories about Jigme Phuntsok's mystical skills may have reminded party leaders of Li Hongzhi, the Falun Gong leader who claimed similar powers.
In the summer of 2001, police and other officials from across the region converged on Larung Gar, demolished about 2,400 homes and evicted several thousand residents. The party also attempted to set a limit of 1,400 residents on the settlement. The idea was not to wipe out the settlement, but to reduce its size and try to place it more directly under the party's control.
Authorities focused first on evicting the estimated 1,000 Han students, sometimes climbing on roofs and listening down smokestacks for voices speaking Mandarin. The officials also concentrated on Larung Gar's convent, expelling more than 3,000 nuns, witnesses said.
Thenkyong, 30, a monk who moved here in 1990 from a nearby prefecture, said the authorities posted notices on walls and buildings throughout the settlement telling residents to go home. Then, officials from his home prefecture found him and pressured him to cooperate.
He agonized over what to do, but eventually agreed to leave after officials told him that staying would mean trouble for his teachers. "Obviously, everyone wanted to stay. But the more that stayed, the more problems there would be for the monastery," he said. "It was a very difficult decision."
Thenkyong said Jigme Phuntsok "specifically instructed us not to try to stop this. He specifically advised us not to be violent and to remain calm." As a result, crowds of monks and nuns, murmuring prayers and wailing in grief, stood by and watched as their homes were destroyed. There were no large-scale protests or confrontations.
Thousands of people who had devoted themselves to Buddhist study, many of whom had no families and had planned to stay in Larung Gar until they died, suddenly found themselves adrift and homeless. Two nuns reportedly hanged themselves in despair. And many residents who had shown little interest in politics turned against the party.
Ji said he spent part of the crackdown hiding in the homes of Tibetan friends before fleeing Larung Gar. He found his cabin intact when he returned months later, but was angered to see how many others had been torn down.
"The government says China has freedom of religion, but look what it did," he said, pointing out a hillside that had been cleared. "In an authoritarian system, we don't even have the right to live in the mountains."
Soon after the crackdown, though, many of the monks and nuns who were evicted began to return. Those who lost their cabins moved in with those who did not. Residents are unwilling to discuss how many people live here now, saying that doing so could prompt evictions again. But judging from the size of the settlement, well over 3,000 people reside in Larung Gar, more than in any monastery in Tibet or the rest of China.
New students continue to arrive, too. But watchful local officials now occupy several rooms in one of the academy's buildings, and the party has blocked construction of new homes in the valley.
"That's the biggest problem now," said a senior teacher. "We'll be able to maintain what we have, but it will be difficult to develop any further." At the same time, he said, hundreds of senior monks educated at Larung Gar are teaching at monasteries across Tibet and the rest of China.
Despite orders to stop teaching, the khenpo continued to meet with small groups of students until he was hospitalized in late December. He died on Jan. 7, prompting another tug of war with the government. His disciples wanted to let his body lie in state for as long as possible or embalm it, so more of his students could return to Larung Gar and offer prayers. But the government wanted to cremate Jigme Phuntsok's body at an early date and limit the number of visitors.
Two weeks after the khenpo's death, the government prevailed, and his body was cremated. Police set up roadblocks across the region to discourage attendance at the ceremony, and monasteries across China were ordered to keep their monks away.
But a crowd of at least 50,000 made it to Larung Gar, residents estimated. Many monks said they evaded the roadblocks by hiking through the mountains.