Suicide and Self-Immolation in Tibet (video)

Editors, Wisdom Quarterly (COMMENTARY)

(ITN News)  Disturbing video from the Free Tibet group allegedly shows a Tibetan Buddhist monk after he committed self-immolation in Ngaba (Aba). Report by Mark Morris.

Suicide is never advisable. Running from suffering (dukkha) by running toward more suffering is no way to end suffering.
   
Self-martyrdom is no way to garner attention of a cause. The world knows Tibet is suffering. Decades ago when the CIA entered the Himalayas to thwart China, India, and Central Asian states and assert strategic control of the Himalayan region, it brokered a deal with the Dalai Lama and Tibet's church-and-state government. 
  
The result has been part of fallout of that devil's bargain.
  

Chinese police beat burn survivors to death and courts imprison others.

    

The Dalai Lama, technically speaking, by accepting such aid and advice from US imperial forces (the West's multinational Military-Industrial Complex) became a CIA operative. When did he ever renounce his membership? What did that lesser-of-two-evils choice do for Tibet?

   

It may have kept Tibet on the map. But the US can neither control China nor defeat it. In its attempt to subvert the world's biggest country, it has made Tibet a pawn.

   

As Tibet is seen to align with Western military forces and India, who hosts its government-in-exile in Dharamsala to spite China, China applies medieval police state special weapons and tactics (SWAT) on it. Those weapons and tactics are American exports.

   

Self-immolation only causes China humiliation, and it uses the loss of face to justify becoming more and more draconian

   

What do the US, MIC, NATO, or any other Western nation do? They secretly fund and train paramilitary forces around the world on how to use these exact same tactics against civilian populations.

  

In the meantime, Buddhism is misrepresented as applauding this form of suicide and self-directed violence.

  

(SVS) Stratfor's Rodger Baker, Vice President of Strategic Intelligence, examines the tactic of self-immolation as a way to galvanize protest movements.

   

Self-immolators are exhibiting nationalist tendencies far more than exemplifying any Buddhist teaching. 

   

A selfless act in line with anatta ("not-self," the impersonal nature of ego, the physical-and-psychological phenomena we feel closest to) or shunyata (the "emptiness" of all conditioned phenomena) would exhibit qualities the Buddha was famous for: 

• equanimity (non-bias), compassion, kindness, wisdom...

In desperation, to heat up a cold war with the Chinese Empire, guerrilla tactics are no way to win. We burn ourselves, we burn the other, and we both are the worse for it.

   

Of course, as humans, as Buddhists, as Americans, we side with Tibet. Of course, we side with the 14th Dalai Lama (a benevolent king/pope, who fortunately retired from his role as head of state). But we do not side with the forces of war.

  

It is not clear that the CIA is any better than the Chinese Communist regime putting into effect its own dreams of empire. 

  

Will the CIA/MIC win and deliver semi-autonomous Tibetan, Uygur, and Taiwanese regions to freedom? Not a chance. It is only exchanging one dictator for another. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" (The Who). Look what CAI/MIC plotted using Japan to ransack China's gold during the time of the pre-Communist government.

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