Tibet's Road Ahead: the Dalai Lama's birthday

Barbara Demick (Monday, July 7, 2015, latimes.com); Wisdom Quarterly

Monks, Buddhist nuns, and other Tibetans take part in a Tibetan Uprising Day protest march held in Dharamsala, India, on March 10, 2014 (Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times).

• Phurbu Tsering takes part in Tibetan Uprising Day, held at the Tsuglagkhang Temple of the Dalai Lama Complex in McLeod Ganj, India, on March 10, 2014. Tibetan Uprising Day, March 10, commemorates the 1959 Tibetan uprising against the presence of the People's Republic of China in Tibet. It also was the time when the Dalia Lama fled Tibet and went into exile. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama lives in McLeod Ganj, where this ceremony took place.

A view of the Himalayas from Dharamsala with Buddhist monastic in foreground (LAT)

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The 14th Dalai Lama turns 80 this year.

To hear the Dalai Lama laugh, his face lighting up in a beatific smile, it is easy to forget the cascade of disasters endured by the Tibetan Buddhist movement over the course of his life.

 

Yet the list is long, and growing longer, as an ascendant China consolidates control over Tibet.

 

On the cusp of the Dalai Lama's 80th birthday Monday, which he will mark during a three-day visit to Anaheim [Orange County, Southern California, Los Angeles adjacent], China's rising economic clout is slowly strangling the movement for Tibetan independence and, in the process, nudging the charismatic Tibetan spiritual leader off the world stage.

Under Chinese pressure, South Africa refused to grant him a visa last year to attend a gathering of Nobel laureates. Even Pope Francis [head of the corporate body of the Holy Roman Empire's church with its office/capital at the Vatican in the Holy See just outside of Rome], presumably worried about the fate of Chinese Catholics, declined to grant him an audience in December. 

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The 94,000-strong Tibetan community in India, which for years has operated a government in exile headquartered in this mountain resort, is shrinking as a result of tighter Chinese controls on borders and passports that keep the 6 million Tibetans living in China from leaving.

 

At the same time, after a decades-long exodus, a new phenomenon is occurring: Tibetans are quietly requesting Chinese documents to go home, implicitly acknowledging that China's rule over Tibet is here to stay.

Tibet: Central Asia to the west, Nepal and India to the south, China to the north and east

 
"Everybody knows that the economic situation is better over there than here,'' said a Tibetan engineer in his 30s who is preparing to return soon and asked not to be named for fear of reprisals. "We're paid very well back in Tibet and people feel it is better to go back home than to live here in a shack.''

 

(Tricyle.com)

And yet Tibetans at home are not happy. Since 2009, 140 Tibetans have immolated themselves to protest Chinese policies that limit their freedom of movement, speech and religion, especially their right to venerate the Dalai Lama.

Exiled from his homeland since 1959, the Dalai Lama views these setbacks and challenges with the air of a man who meditates five hours a day and takes a transcendental approach to adversity.

 

"I don't consider China powerful at all,'' he said during an interview at the sprawling complex of Buddhist temples here. "They may be powerful in their economics and weapons, but in terms of moral principles, they are very weak. The whole society is full of suspicion and full of distrust."

 

Looming over any discussion of Tibet is a simple actuarial fact: The Dalai Lama is in his final decades of life. At some point, Tibetan Buddhists will be faced with the loss of a man who has been revered as both a secular and spiritual leader and has given their Free Tibet movement a sense of moral authority throughout the world.

On the cusp of the Dalai Lama's 80th birthday, many Tibetans wonder whether their struggle for autonomy and religious freedom will soon be lost. Desperation can be seen in the number of self-immolations that have occurred since the religious uprising of 2008 -- more than 140 to date. Some Tibetans have lost faith and are beginning to return to Tibet, which is now occupied by China (latimes.com).

 
That has set in motion in recent months a scramble for succession of a uniquely Buddhist variety, because the Dalai Lama's successor is by tradition the reincarnation of his holiness. In March, the Chinese government once again signaled its intention to have a role in designating the legitimate heir, a plan that prompted the Dalai Lama to suggest that he may break with tradition and appoint his own successor or that he may not be reincarnated at all.

"Reincarnation is not the business of the communists,'' he said.

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Born on July 6, 1935, the 14th Dalai Lama began life as Lhamo Dondrub in a village in China's Qinghai province. As the story goes, the deceased 13th Dalai Lama was found with his head turned in that direction and a search party was sent to identify his reincarnation. They were delighted to find a precocious toddler who could correctly identify the Dalai Lama's walking stick, rosary, and drum.

 

He was brought to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, at age 4 and assumed rule over Tibet as a 15-year-old in 1950.

• COMMENTS (White Lotus at 7:38 pm July 4, 2015) @FLATIMES Actually the Dalai Lama has used his position as spiritual leader of the Tibetan people and Nobel Laureate to give much of his time and his advice to make the world a better place. What have you done?  Add a comment. See all comments.

Tibet had been run as a de facto independent country in the chaotic early 20th century, but it had not been formally recognized. In 1949, Chinese Communists claimed power in distant Beijing and proved to be a force that the Himalayan mountain kingdom could not overcome.
 

Exile: Himalayan flats, Dharamsala, India

For China, the 965,000-square-mile region known as the Tibetan plateau, spread over strategic high ground in the center of Asia, is a crucial buffer from India, Nepal, and Bangladesh.
 
Encompassing roughly one-quarter of China's landmass, it is the source of most of Asia's largest rivers, supplying water to nearly half the world's population. It also has the largest reserve of uranium in the world.
 

The struggle to subdue Tibet has shaped the character of modern China, forcing it to become the kind of brutal imperial power the early communist ideologues once deplored. Beijing devotes inordinate military and diplomatic effort to defend its claim to Tibet, which it calls "an integral part of China since antiquity."
 
"The Chinese know that historically their empire was weak when control over the western borders lapsed,'' said Sulmaan Wasif Khan, a specialist in Chinese foreign relations at Tufts University.
 

With global warming ruining our planet, we must realize we are all inter-dependent.

 

Tibetan resistance to Chinese rule has been relatively nonviolent compared with ethnic disputes elsewhere, such as those involving Kurds or Chechens.
 
Robert Barnett, a Tibet scholar at Columbia University in New York, counts only about 20 Han Chinese (the ethnic majority in China) who have been killed by political violence at the hands of Tibetans since the 1980s. The death toll among ethnic Tibetans is higher, in the hundreds including those who have self-immolated with calls for the Dalai Lama to return.
 

"Wow! NOTHING! Just what I always wanted!"

If he dies in exile, though, that could change. "People may feel the Chinese forced him to die outside his country and caused him grief, and they could reap a terrible harvest of suffering,'' Barnett said.

At the heart of the dilemma is the Dalai Lama. Although he abandoned calls for Tibetan independence in 1979, embracing instead a "middle way" in which Tibetans would enjoy autonomy and freedom of religion and speech under Chinese rule, the Chinese Communist Party reviles him as a separatist.

"The Dalai party has never abandoned the use of violence to achieve their ultimate goal of full independence,'' the State Council wrote in a "white paper" on Tibet released in mid-April.

Rebirth is real; reincarnation is not (SAW)

So anathema is the Dalai Lama to the Communist Party that he is treated as the one whose name cannot be mentioned. Tibetans dare not speak of him in public. Walking down the street with a portrait of the Dalai Lama will get one immediately arrested in most parts of China. Tiny medallions are routinely confiscated and destroyed. More