I recently came across a beautifully written article by Sam Kriss, who I’d never heard of before. I was struck by how beautifully and intelligently he wrote. That led me to his Substack blog, Numb at the Lodge, where I noticed that one article was illustrated with an image of a wrathful Tibetan deity. Only part of the article concerned Tibetan Buddhism, and I’ve reproduced that section here. I hope you enjoy it, and that it leads you to read more of Sam’s work.
In his Tribune column from October 13th, 1944, George Orwell tells an interesting story. During the liberation of France, the Allies were capturing large numbers of not just German troops, but soldiers from many other countries pressed into service by the Wehrmacht. Among them were large numbers of anti-Soviet Russians, but Orwell’s informant had heard about two soldiers from somewhere much deeper in the great centre of Asia, who spoke no Russian or any other language known to their British captors. ‘A professor of Slavonic languages, brought down from Oxford, could make nothing of what they were saying. Then it happened that a sergeant who had served on the frontiers of India overheard them talking and recognized their language, which he was able to speak a little. It was Tibetan!’ Somehow, these wandering Tibetans had come down from their plateau, fallen into the hands of the Soviets, conscripted, captured by the Germans, and forced to man the defences in Normandy. The two men had fought on both sides of the biggest war in human history, but ‘all this time they had been able to speak to nobody but one another, and had no notion of what was happening or who was fighting whom.’
In Cambodia, Brian Fawcett provides some further details. The two Tibetans were peasants from Gyêgumdo in what’s now the Chinese province of Qinghai. They’d been making a pilgrimage to Lhasa, where they were planning to join a monastery. However, they got caught in a snowstorm, lost their bearings, and strayed into China. They were captured by bandits along the Lancan River, who headed north to join the Communists in Yan’an. At some point the Tibetans escaped and wandered aimlessly through the parched wildernesses until they were finally picked up by the Soviet authorities in Tashkent, given a rifle, and told to defend the socialist motherland against fascism. Fawcett provides one important addition to Orwell’s story: the answer to ‘the riddle of their unlikely survival and their profound, elastic passivity in the face of hardship after hardship.’ He explains that ‘for ten years, these two men had believed that they were dead… They had survived because from the very first days of their ordeal they believed they were dead men caught in an unpredictable bardo, or netherworld.’
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Both Orwell and Fawcett miss some significant details in the story of the wandering Tibetans. The two Tibetans were interned by the British at Château Ervance, which had previously been an SS fortress and was now a major Allied POW camp. And the translation was not provided by some old India hand, but by a fellow captive: SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Gosse. In 1938, Gosse had joined Ernst Schäfer’s SS expedition to Tibet, possibly to seek out the mystical kingdom of Agartha and the birthplace of the Aryan race, probably just to assess the Tibetan plateau as a possible staging ground for an eventual invasion of British India. During the trip, he had picked up a rough working knowledge of Tibetan, and a profound distaste for Nyingma Buddhism. Gosse grumbled that the Tibetan these men spoke was atonal and antiquated, more like the thousand-year-old language of the Gyubum than the ordinary speech he’d actually encountered up on the plateau. But he could make himself understood. Through Gosse, the British officers tried to explain to the Tibetans that they were not dead but actually just in a very distant country called France, and if they wanted, the British would provide them with passports so they could return to Gyêgumdo. The Tibetans said no.
A bardo is not quite the same as a netherworld: ordinary waking life is a bardo state; dreams take place in another. There is a bardo accessible through meditative trance. But the bardo the two peasants had found themselves in was the sidpa bardo, the bardo of becoming, the one we experience after death. Sidpa bardo is the interzone between one life and the next, the junkyard of earthly existence, packed with the detritus and runoff of worlds. This is where gods and buddhas take on their fearsome forms, and to pass through sidpa bardo involves suffering many frightening visions. Because this bardo state is made of unstructured waste-thought leaking out from all other bardos, it is always flickering, impermanent. You will see a world you do not understand, and you will see it in ruins. Every city you pass through is bombed. Every person you meet falls dead in battle. You will be attacked by demons and wild animals. But sidpa bardo is educative; the point of these visions is to prepare you for being born again. The entire Second World War had been fought solely to teach these two Tibetan peasants some secret for their next life. They believed they had learned that secret. They had no interest in returning to Gyêgumdo. They did not want the war to have been in vain.
Kriss has written some excellent satire, and my first thought was that he was inventing sources to create this amazing story, but I checked Orwell’s Tribune column for October 13 1944, and he does indeed discuss the story of the two Tibetans who ended up fighting for both sides in WWII, without having any understanding of what was going on. Based on that, I assume that the rest of Kriss’s account is accurate as well.
