Appendix A: The Immured Monks of Tibet

In his fascinating record of the British Mission to Lhassa under Col. Sir Francis Younghusband, published in 1905, the Special Correspondent of the Times who accompanied the expedition wrote of a visit to the monastery of Nyen-de-kyi-buk, twelve miles west of Gyantse, more than half way to Lhassa from Darjeeling. The monastery belonged to the Nying-ma Sect of lamas, who practise immurement. This horrible self-immolation is said to be voluntary. The young monks are immured first for six months. They are then left at liberty for a time. The second period is for three years and ninety-three days. The third period is for life.

“Only this morning,” said the Abbot to Mr. Percival Landon, “a hermit died here after living in darkness for twenty-five years,”

It is hard to believe that such cruelties can be practised, but Mr. Landon and his companion were taken to see all that could be seen of one of these ascetics.

“We climbed about forty feet,” Mr. Landon wrote, “and the Abbot led us into a small courtyard which had blank walls all round it, over which a peach-tree reared its transparent pink and white against the sky. Almost on a level with the ground there was an opening closed with a flat stone from behind. In front of this window was a ledge eighteen inches in width, with two basins beside it, one at each end. The Abbot was attended by an acolyte, who, by his master’s orders, tapped three times sharply on the stone slab; we stood in the little courtyard in the sun and watched that wicket with cold apprehension. I think, on the whole, it was the most uncanny thing I saw in all Tibet. What on earth was going to appear when that stone slab, which even then was beginning weakly to quiver, was pushed aside, the wildest conjecture could not suggest.

“After half a minute’s pause the stone moved, or tried to move, but it came to rest again. Then very slowly and uncertainly it was pushed back and a black chasm was revealed. There was again a pause of thirty seconds during which imagination ran riot, but I do not think any other thing could have been as pathetic as that which we actually saw. A hand, muffled in a tightlywound piece of dirty cloth, for all the world like the stump of an arm, was painfully thrust up, and very weakly it felt along the slab. After a fruitless fumbling, the hand slowly quivered back again into the darkness. A few moments later there was again one ineffectual effort, and then the stone moved noiselessly across the opening. Once a day water and an unleavened cake of flour is placed for the prisoner upon that slab, the signal is given, and he may take it in. His diversion is over for the day; and in the darkness of his cell, where night and day, noon, sunset and the dawn are all alike, he, poor soul, had thought that another day of his long penance was over.”

Lhassa, vol. i. p. 222.