You can read about it if you want to, and you probably should. There will be summaries of the Olympics, appraisals, assessments. The Globe and Mail in Canada have already added their own rather sobering contribution, and you can have a look at it here. For those of us who have devoted a portion of our lives to supporting Tibet and the Tibetans, we will have to take an inventory of our own ideas about the future of Tibet and the path that China has laid out for itself. China is a powerful country, and one that will have its say and its influence on the world stage.
Oppressive regimes such as China's--and North Korea's and Burma's--rely on a host of strategies to keep their country's population under control. Central among them is the institution of fear: fear of reprisal, fear of punishment, fear of deprivation, fear of death. And the goal of fear, of course, is silence. There is, just now, a blanket of silence over the global community regarding China, one of the world's consistent medalists when it comes to human rights violations. And while the Great Firewall of China has shut down access to iTunes, and while the Chinese have done all in their power to use the latest technology to prohibit the free use of technology among their citizens, their mastery of the televisual culture is being credited for attracting the peak audience of 1.2 billion that tuned in for the spectacle.
We might well allow all of this to divert us from our task. Eddie Vedder, the lead singer
for Pearl Jam, mentioned in an interview last year that the contemporary atmosphere was so filled with static and meaningless noise and chatter that it was sometimes hard to file it all down into a focused, coherent song. That it was sometimes hard to find the space to connect with the authenticity of the human experience. The mainstream media is partly to blame for this--great globs of oppressive eye-candy, television shows devoted to the celebration of radically insignificant human behavior, cable news shows pressing an ideology while disavowing a bias, telegenic news casters whose private lives ultimately become the subject of the news coverage . . . the celebration of the self, the rabid quest for celebrity status, the acquisition of power in that quest, those famous for being famous . . . all of this signals a drift away from the core of introspective knowledge that gave rise to the people and books and music that I have loved for decades and that changed the way I thought about my relationship to the world at large.
It is difficult in the current environment to look within ourselves, and the television spectacle that was the Beijing Olympics took full advantage of this. As 1.2 billion stared at the television, Tibetans were killed, imprisoned, and interrogated. His Holiness was denied an audience with President Sarkozy of France because the Chinese forbid him from meeting with him. Six more Tibetan hunger-strikers were taken off their cots and into the hospital, against their will. Two Chinese women in their seventies in Beijing were sentenced to a year of "re-education through labor" for legally requesting the right to protest. A documentary film made by two brave Tibetans, Leaving Fear Behind, was smuggled out of China, shown in Dharamsala, and the two filmmakers were arrested and haven't been heard from since. (BTW--the distributors have sent me a copy of the film, and we will be doing a benefit showing here in Northwest Arkansas soon.)
What then are we to do? Living in America, we are insulated from the kind of human suffering that finds 40,000 children starving to death each day in developing nations. We don't have starving families living under our porches, a common scene in Indian cities; we have fresh water; we have electricity; our political system is participatory and stable.
We often think of change in political terms: send food and water, build hydro-electric plants, install democracies. But while that kind of change is necessary and vital, that kind of change is effected by a precious few: engineers, social leaders, humanitarian workers. Most of us are taking out the garbage, raising children, paying bills.
What can we do? More than might be immediately apparent. We hear the phrase "raising awareness" continually, and we tend to think, "O, I see; I know about the human rights abuses in China and Tibet, so my awareness is thereby raised." That's a start, but it's not enough. Ken Jones, in The New Social Face of Buddhism tells an important story:
Self-awareness of emotional states is critical in every aspect of social engagement. How this awareness can help others as well as oneself is illustrated in the Samyutta Nikaya by a story about two traveling acrobats who perform hazardous feats on the end of a long bamboo pole. One said that their act would be accomplished safely if each watched and attended to the other. But the other and wiser one maintained that if each concentrated on doing his own part of the act safely and well he would thereby protect his friend as well as himself (105).
So we look to our own part of the act first . . . we examine our motivations for action, which we can only do in self-imposed solitude; we analyze our real place in our real
community of friends and co-workers, which we can only do in self-imposed solitude; and we realize that the front-lines of non-violence and compassion are wherever we happen to be standing, which we realize in solitude and enact in the family and the community. Sulak Sivaraksa has written extensively about the mechanics of effecting these kinds of changes, and I'd recommend starting with his extraordinary little book, Seeds of Peace. In his essay, "Religion and Social Change" he writes:
We have more than enough programs, organizations, parties, and strategies in the world for the alleviation of suffering and injustice. In fact, we place too much faith in the power of action, especially political action. Social activism tends to preoccupy itself with the external . . . Activists tend to see all malevolence as being caused by 'them'--the 'system'--without understanding how these negative factors also operate within ourselves . . . The opposite view--that radical transformation of society requires personal and spiritual change first or at least simultaneously--has been accepted by Buddhists and many other religious adherents for 2500 years. Those who want to change society must understand the inner dimensions of change (61).
The inner dimensions of change . . . most of us don't want to see monks tortured and murdered; most don't want to see seventy-year old Chinese women sentenced to a year of forced labor, to see 40,000 children starve each day . . . and no one, it appears, can stop it.
But everyone can turn toward that "inner dimension" to cultivate and grow those changes that would stop starvation, murder, torture, and unlawful imprisonment, if they were widely adopted. It isn't easy; in fact, it's easier to undertake social action because you're spared the realization that the violence you're confronting outside yourself is simply the fruit of the violence that you carry around within you. That's a difficult realization, but it's the one that leads to social change. And this is the project for a lifetime.
The fact is that meaningful, long-lasting social change cannot be divorced from this renovation of the inner dimension. And this renovation--unlike working for an NGO in in Africa or Tibet--is our common occupation, our common inheritance.
His Holiness has agreed to join an international non-violent action on Saturday, August 30 sponsored by the Tibetan Solidarity Committee. (See full story here.) The movement begins at 7:00 a.m., and will come to a close 12 hours later. Participants may choose to fast in whatever way is most amendable to them--they may avoid all food and liquid for the 12-hour period, or varying degrees thereof, but all are encouraged to spend the day reflecting upon those who are currently suffering under oppressive regimes. Fasts of this sort, particularly in America, allow us to develop, however minutely, a sympathetic awareness of deprivation. And if this seed develops into a stronger commitment to alleviate human suffering within our own orbit, then so much the better for all of us.
