A secret spiritual history of the Tibetan people in Sichuan

A Lai is a writer with both poet endowment and scholarly temperament. He always comes alone like a hunter, always wandering outside the hot spots of the literary world. For him, writing seems to be about solving the ultimate proposition of self-existence-where I came from and where I will go. Therefore, over the years, he has always been obsessed with exploring and thinking about Tibetan culture. Especially in the face of the Sichuan Tibetan culture in the Kangba area that nursed him, he almost showed a certain obsession. From "Dust Settled" to "Empty Mountain", this is the most powerful proof.

Perhaps it was difficult to convey his perception and thinking about this land alone in the form of novels, and it was not enough to effectively sort out the past and present lives of this land. Therefore, A Lai used non-fiction writing to explore the lives of Tibetan people in Sichuan from the depths of history, and completed a long documentary work of more than 200,000 words,"Zhan Dui: Two Hundred Years of Kangba Legend"(published in the 8th issue of People's Literature in 2013). This work uses a Tusi tribe as a carrier to trace the fate of the Tusi tribe from the Qing Dynasty to the founding of New China for more than 200 years. It reconstructs the difficult and unique living conditions of the Tibetans in the intersection of Han and Tibet, and conveys Alai's modern reflection on Sichuan Tibetan culture.

The Kangba Tibetans have lived on the ancient tea-horse road since ancient times, guarding the fortress of Sichuan-Tibet transportation. Due to the influence of their special geographical environment and social system, they are different from the Tibetan people in Xizang and the Han people in western Sichuan. It is true that they also believe in Tibetan Buddhism, but they often deviate from religion. Starting from this existence, Alai carefully selected the most representative "Zhandui" Tusi as the object of investigation. From a micro history perspective, he quietly walked into the depths of history with the rise and fall of a small Tusi, resurrected the complex and bumpy memories of the Kangba Tibetan people. In Alai's own words: "The reason why I became interested in the local history that the Qing generation admired was because I realized that this local history was a microcosm and a typical example of the history of the entire Sichuan Tibetan area for hundreds of thousands of years."

History has always been preserved in people's memories in a concrete way. A Lai chose the "Zhandui" Tusi with the meaning of "epitome" as the inspection target in order to base himself on the concrete historical scene, see the subtle facts, and reproduce the Sichuan Tibetan people in vivid and vivid historical scenes from point to point. The spiritual legend and bumpy destiny of the Tibetan people. Therefore, in A Lai's writing, we see that "Zhandui" is a Tusi who is not satisfied with the status quo, ambitious, and unruly. They live in huge ravines deep in the mountains, but have never enjoyed the tranquility and tranquility of a paradise. Instead, they are constantly attacked by various historical turmoil and the temptation of power, so that they have to be involved in the twists and turns of history and use their own unique methods to challenge various hard realities.

This kind of challenge is reflected in the most common way, which is the behavior of "pinching the dam". In Alai's boyhood, men who liked to show heroism would insert a long knife obliquely into their belt. The sheath was made of cowhide and the knife was unsheathed. It was about three to four inches wide and two to three feet long. It was shining with cold light and sharp edges. In the dialect of Alai's hometown, this kind of sword is called "Jiaba". Later, the word was interpreted to mean "bandit". The mountain village where A Lai was born is at the mouth of a deep ditch. Ten miles into the deep ditch, there is a black forest. It is rumored that it used to be a place where Jiaba appeared and looted passing merchants. In the 1960s and 1970s, when A Lai grew up, the highways crossing the snowy mountains had long been opened to traffic, the post roads had long been deserted, and merchants had disappeared. In such an era, Jiaba naturally lost its soil to survive, leaving behind a sword name. Later, the atmosphere of dress also changed day by day. Most of the men in their hometown changed their Tibetan clothes with wide robes and large sleeves into short fights. The knives with no practical value gradually retired from life and only remained in the words of the pages.

Looking at a place, high mountains and cold water, deep forests and long roads, there are sometimes sword lights and swords, naturally suitable for survival in the dam. Many times, chieftains have no choice but to disturb the dam, and even some dam clamping behaviors are the result of the implementation or connivance of some local chieftains. In places where the productivity is extremely low and the people have to bear taxes and unpaid labor, the dam has become a long-standing mode of production, or a supplement to the lack of productivity. During the Qing Dynasty, Sichuan-affiliated Tibetan areas have been troubled by the situation of dams spreading out in all directions, and the imperial court and local authorities have taken great pains to achieve this. With the unique sensitivity and wisdom of literati, Alai firmly grasped this paradoxical term. On the one hand, he relied on the vast historical documents and in the meticulous combing of historical materials to present Zhan's crusade against "robbery" by various power departments from the central government to the local government; on the other hand, through field visits and mysterious religious thinking, he reconstructed the legendary life of Zhan Dui's leaders from generation to generation, especially Ban Gun and Gambulanga, and reproduced their "ranger" temperament. A Lai restored history with vivid writing and writing, restored the complexity and contradictions of the tribe, thus unifying the one-sided evaluation of the opposites formed by latecomers from different historical perspectives.

Interestingly, in the history of more than 200 years, from Qing court officers and soldiers, western warlords, Kuomintang troops, to Xizang religious troops and even the British army, all intervened in this tiny place in different ways, bringing modern civilization to this remote and poor place and stirring up the prosperity here. Taking the Qing Dynasty as an example, historical documents show that every encirclement and suppression of "Jiaba" is not only realistic necessity and urgency, but also reasonable and just. To this end, they repeatedly mobilized the elite soldiers of the Eight Banners to western Sichuan and sent imperial envoys. It can be said that they racked their brains and worked hard, but the result was that in the face of only more than 10,000 people, they could not end every time.

Although A Lai did not use fictional words to reproduce the embarrassment and helplessness of generations of Qing emperors, the incompetence and decline of the Qing court's rule had been fully exposed. It was not that some clear-headed officials did not fail to see the essence of the problem. For example, Lu Chuanlin put forward the idea of "changing the land and returning to the flow", but was dismissed as a result; Feng Quan wanted to continue the reform, but died in Litang; Zhao Er had a chest enhancement with "six strategies for border governance" and worked hard with Zhang Yintang and Lianyu in Xizang to "make Tibet change for thousands of years and the situation completely new." However, he encountered the Revolution of 1911 and eventually died under the knife of warlords. The Republic of China is here. Although there is the slogan and dream of a "Five Ethnic Republic", in Sichuan Tibetan areas, the border troops left behind by the Qing Dynasty, the newly trained Sichuan Army after the Republic of China, the Tibetan Army supported by the United Kingdom, and some self-restored armed forces of the abolished Tusi, self-organized armed forces organized by the large monasteries, etc., once again made wars frequent here. It was not until 1932, when Liu Wenhui's troops defeated the Tibetan army that the land gradually became peaceful.

In 1950, the 18th Army of the People's Liberation Army sent only one platoon and liberated the entire Zhanhua (renamed Zhanhua County in 1916) without fighting. This extremely "stubborn iron lump" in history has finally completely melted down, and the entanglement of "dam" for more than 200 years has gradually disappeared.

After the founding of New China, Zhanhua County was renamed Xinlong County. "Now going to Xinlong, I got off the plane from Kangding Airport in the morning, drove west through Daofu County, Luhuo County, and Ganzi County, and then turned south. Within half a day, I arrived in Xinlong County." A Lai wrote. Two hundred years ago, the Tibetans of Zhandui would never have imagined that from the county seat, there were roads connecting the countryside, and the farthest township could also travel back and forth in the same day. In hotels and teahouses, visitors from afar and locals talk about how to develop Tibetan areas and develop Tibetan areas, especially the development and utilization of tourism resources. What is interesting is that these tourism resources are dangerous mountains, passes and deep gorges that the Qing army could not overcome at that time, as well as those stone blockhouses in quaint form. Locals even hope to tap spiritual cultural resources from the tough folk customs and name them after Kamba. Unfortunately, this name has been registered by others. To take the next best step, they successfully registered a new name: Kangbahong. This red is the red on the heads of Kangba men, and it is also the red of heroes.

Moving away from historical records and interpretations in the written sense, we can hear the people's richer, fiercer, brave and unyielding spiritual memories. Through repeated visits and investigations, A Lai gradually discovered that those tribal leaders often had mixed images of gods and gods in the hearts of people, whether they were Ban Gun, Gambulanga, or Qingmei Zhima. It allows people to see that in this land,"a person often feels that he lives in two worlds", one is the real secular world, and the other is the spiritual world full of legends. There,"people are still rumored There are various magical stories, about the magic of eminent monks, about karma, and about human destiny."

Whether it is legend or reality, whether it is "bandits" or "rangers", in the vicissitudes of more than two hundred years, Zhandui is only a square inch of land. Although they live in a corner and seem to be far away from the center of the times, they are often influenced by various forces in history sucked into the huge whirlpool and endured countless major disasters. All kinds of plots and covet constantly use Zhanpei's place to compare wisdom and strength, thus condensing Zhanpei into a special historical model. Of course, for Alai, interpreting this model is certainly to break away from simple thoughts of historical progress, and at the same time to eliminate people's various super-objective imaginations of Tibetan civilians. The history of mankind has always spiraled repeatedly in various conflicts. The so-called "with the advent of civilization, barbaric society immediately disintegrated like snow in soup" is just people's wishful thinking.

More importantly, Alai also warned people,"In recent years, the trend of romanticizing the Tibetan border into Shangri-La has believed that Tibetan areas are a paradise where everyone is indifferent to material desires, devotes himself to Buddha, and has pure and kind folk customs. Those who hold this myth are kind and naive. When they see certain materialistic phenomena in society, they think they live elsewhere and yearn for a non-existent and pure world; the other are those who know the truth of history, but deliberately fabricate false illusions and have ulterior motives depends on everyone's reflection and vigilance." Man is a social existence. He can never live in pure ideals without his own environment.

A tribe with strong folk customs and known as iron knots has been scattered deep in memory; a long, complex and bumpy history of ethnic entanglements has gradually faded out of people's vision. As a descendant of the Tibetans belonging to Sichuan, Alai once again reconstructed this history through his own reflection and review. It is the secret history of the spirit. In a sense, it is also the secret spiritual history of the entire China people.