TIBETSPACE

SIGN THIS LETTER IF YOU SUPPORT HIS HOLINESS AND THE TIBETAN PEOPLE

In conjunction with The Community, an organization that links Nobel Peace Prize winners with artists and other organizations that support efforts to establish a global initiative for peace, Archbishop Demond Tutu has sponsored a letter of support for His Holiness and the Tibetan people.  It takes less than a minute to fill it out and submit it.  You can access it here. 

So take a minute, read the material, and if you agree with its aims, sign it and submit it.  A small action that might well lead to substantial results.

ECONOMIST INTERVIEW W/ PROFESSOR BARNETT RE TIBET & CHINA

The Economist, one of the most reliable and intelligent news outlets in the world, has a 13-minute interview with Professor Barnett of Columbia University on their website.  Among other things, Professor Barnett discusses the current state-of-affairs in China, focusing on the long-terms effects of the current crackdown in Tibet.  As always, a very intelligent and balanced consideration of the problem.

SOUTH AFRICA BARS HHDL FROM PEACE CONFERENCE IN JOHANNESBURG

First California reneged on the resolution supporting Tibet, and now South Africa--home of Tutu and Mandela, two great humanitarians--has declined to give His Holiness permission to visit South Africa (story here).  The Dalai Lama was scheduled to attend a peace conference in Johannesburg--specifically, to discuss what role soccer, of all things, might play in fighting racism and xenophobia.

The Chinese, of course, "urged" South Africa to rethink their invitation as His Holiness's arrival in South Africa might harm their bilateral relations.  South Africa and China marked the ten-year anniversary of their diplomatic relations last year.  And of course South Africa, like the California Assembly, gave in to China's veiled threats.

Yet another effect of the world financial crisis comes home to roost, and the Chinese use it further to inhibit the Dalai Lama's program of world peace.

So--with China now firmly ensconced as our world bully, and with most nations quaking in fear when China threatens its disfavor, it is time to bring some serious questions to our legislators. 

More on this later.

ANOTHER MONK DEAD BY HIS OWN HAND

Another monk, this time of Amdo Golok Ragya monastery in Gyulgho township, Machen county, Qinghai, committed suicide by drowning himself in the Machu River.  His name is Tashi Sangpo, and he's pictured to the left.

Say a prayer for him.

It's early morning, Saturday, and raining here as I read of this latest suicide in Tibet.  The world, or my world, at least, seems affected by this latest death.  I have previously posted about this unfolding tragedy, and I don't have much more to add.  But the number of Tibetans who find life impossible under Chinese rule seems to be increasing; I don't have any definite figures.  Maybe someone does and will share them with me.

In the final three years of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr. began to expand his civil rights movement into a human rights initiative that focused on the three evils of racism, militarism, and poverty.  He began to see the deeper links that unite all human suffering.  And began to envsion ways to excavate those links and bring them into public view. 

He began, in fact, the renovation of consciousness within a political arena.  It was a destabilizing initiative, one that sent shock waves through his own community of supporters, and might well have ultimately led to his assassination.  After all, if it's difficult to break a bad habit like smoking, imagine how difficult it will be to stop thinking of anyone anywhere as somehow, someway different from yourself. 

Imagine then trying to break a habit of perception . . . that's what King would ask us to do now, but he wouldn't attempt this in retreat and seclusion.

He'd do it in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

NOW THAT WE HAVE THE VIDEO . . .

Note:  If you haven't seen the new video showing the full extent of Chinese brutality surrounding the March 2008 protest in Lhasa, have a look at it.  It's a graphic video so be forewarned.  For more commentary before you watch it, click here.

We live in a culture of the starkly visual . . . written testimony, word-of-mouth, radio broadcasts, nothing holds a candle to the image.  Since the 19th century, when photography announced itself as our new way of being in the world, our new way locating authenticity in a world that seems increasingly inauthentic, we do finally believe what we see.  And only what we see.

So what do we make of these images?  Do they reveal anything that we didn't know before they hit the wires?  No.  Do they elicit new emotions in anyone who has been following the Tibetan struggle for at least the past year?  No.  Will they spur anyone to action who hasn't already taken up some kind of active response?  Probably not.

So why are these images so powerful, so moving, so deeply affecting?  First of all, the video was distributed by the Central Tibetan Administration in Dharamsala, and that gives it the government-in-exile's seal of approval:  a ratcheting up of the Tibetan government's counter-offensive.

But the images also move us because photography and film record, as no other medium can, the unalleviated presence of death in our lives.  In its unscrupulous comprehensiveness, the camera lens looks at death and torture and decay without flinching, without rationalizing, without moralizing.

Tibetan culture in Lhasa is dying an unnatural death. 

And only a camera can deliver that news without crying.

Which leaves the crying to us.  And that is why the video is so powerful, so moving, so deeply affecting.

HUFFINGTON POST WEIGHS IN ON CHINESE INVASION OF CALIFORNIA

The Huffington Post today weighed in on the story regarding the California Assembly and its decision to deep-six the resolution supporting Tibet and the preservation of its culture.  It's worth reading and showing your support if you happen to agree with its central point.  Stories of this sort occasionally get legs, and if it doesn't bring pressure to bear on the Assemblymen to pass the resolution, it at least exposes the the absurdity of China's version of Tibet's history and its central hypocrisy in dealing with the West.  As Christal Smith wrote in today's post:

When citizens around the world raise their voices against China's police-state crackdowns in Tibet, against imprisonment and torture of innocent bystanders, or the crushing of freedom to practice religion in Tibet, China tells the world to mind its own business. Tibet, they say, is an internal matter.

Yet by what measure of democracy can China's policies in Tibet, a country under occupation now for more than 50 years, remain an "internal matter," while at the same time China's one-party dictatorship is free to meddle in California's "internal affairs?"

So raise a voice.  It's the least we can do, right?

ALJAZEERA ENGLISH VIDEO ON TIBETAN INDEPENDENCE

Have a look at this brief video on Tibetan independence; nothing earth-shaking, but a good look at the current state of affairs in India.

CALIFORNIA ASSEMBLY RELENTS UNDER CHINESE PRESSURE

The California Assembly, one of the most award-granting assemblies in the country, recently saw a resolution honoring the Dalai Lama--and one sponsored by Sam Blakeslee, a Republican--get "tabled" for further discussion.  Read:  "executed."  According to an article in the LA Times, representatives from the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco had lobbied to have the resolution tabled, and apparently they were successful. China View reports excerpts from the letter received by the California Assembly on behalf of the Chinese government.  Here's a sample of the kind of the rhetoric, long a staple of the PRC, that is shot through the entire letter:

As the world economy faces a grim situation, it is all the more important for the most developed country and the biggest developing country in the world to cross the river in a common boat and proceed hand in hand . . . .

Of course, the Chinese here are being honest in their intimidation.  With the demise of our manufacturing sector, and the rise of our own debtor nation, China has an enormous influence on the health of our economy.  Their threat is direct and forthright:  Unless the U.S. wants the current fiscal disaster to worsen with China's implicit refusal to prop up our faulty financial structure, we must stop this nonsense about the Dalai Lama.  Our response:  Yessir.

The idealist in me feels real anger against those in California's Assembly who folded their tents in the face of China's veiled and bullying threats.  The realist knows otherwise.  The idealist in me makes heartfelt statements about the Tibetans' right to return to a free Tibet--a right guaranteed by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights--and the realist in me darkly suspects this will not happen.

But the truth of the matter is fairly simple.  The greed of our corporate excecutives--which is only the public flowering of the materialism that is currently rampaging through America--and their willingness to place private profit over the public good is one piece of a financial debacle that has landed us in China's debt.  And now China is  calling in its markers. 

So our inability to support Tibet, publicly, legislatively, institutionally, often arises from our own greed.

So anger at the Assemblymen of California is understandable, but unproductive.  Attention to our greed, to our attachment to destructive goals and the afflictive emotions that arise from that attachment . . . that's an economy that produces beneficial results.

WOESER, SUICIDE & TIBET

As Spring arrives here in the United States, and as the Tibetan New Year passes with great incident and suffering, Woeser, the astute and talented Tibetan commentator in China, has posted a piece in The Epoch Times on the recent flurry of suicides in Tibet. 

Suicide, of course, is a distinctly human form of tragedy.  While all of the major world religions take a stance on it--Buddhism sees suicide largely as yet another destructive act that arises from delusion--for each of us, particularly for those of us who have lost loved ones to such an act of self-destruction, suicide often seems an authentic gesture of sorts, a final message that living, however miserably, could never deliver. 

And so on February 27, 2009, after the Chinese canceled the Great Annual Prayer Festival in Sichuan, a 24-year-old monk from Kirti Monastery lit himself on fire and ran through the streets carrying a photograph of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.  The Chinese police shot him repeatedly.  He was removed to a hospital, and as of several weeks ago, nothing was known about his health, or whether he lived or died.  (Read a brief report at The Huffington Post.)

His name was Tabey, and this was the message he delivered to the Tibetan people, the Chinese, and the world community:  life in Chinese-occupied Tibet had become impossible for him in this incarnation.

Was this a reasonable action?  Most of us, deluded as we are, are currently incapable of answering this question.  It is said that Quang Duc, the Vietnamese monk who was famously photographed by Malcolm Browne in 1963 in Saigon, was actually the second choice for the immolation.  The story is told that a much younger monk had set himself the task, and when Quang Duc learned of this, he said, "No, no, you're too young for this, you have much life left; let me do it."  And so, doused with gasoline, he sat down, and he delivered his message.

Perhaps true renunciation leads certain individuals to see the full consequences of suicide, to understand that a temporary, but fully conscious evacuation of this particular mind-body complex can lead to greater awareness among those of us who are left behind to witness it.  And perhaps greater awareness can ultimately lead to an alleviation of suffering . . .

Maybe.  I don't know; I'm certainly not qualified to make such judgments.  But I do know that our witness to these suicides is vitally important; and that our witnesses will range along a broad spectrum; and that this spectrum extends from the Tibetans who recently declared a hunger-strike to death in front of the Chinese embassy in Brussels to the casual reader who remarks the untimely and tragic death of a fellow humang being.

All of these responses matter, and all of them ultimately register at the subtlest level of our consciousness.

So it is vitally important that we witness these suicides in Tibet; that we grapple with them as each of us are able; that we do not forget the starkness and bleakness that arise when we contemplate them; that we transform this starkness and bleakness into an authentic and durable compassion for the suffering they reflect; and that we use this starkness and bleakness to develop the knowledge that reveals to us the causes from which this suffering springs.

Maybe that's obvious.  But in the face of suicide and hunger-strike--in the face of high-octane human suffering--it's worth repeating.

EXPLORE.ORG--EXPLORE TIBET

I was recently contacted by the people at Explore.org about possibly posting a short video about Tibet.  I had a look at it, of course, and have embedded it below.  It's less than ten minutes long, and many of you will find much to like in it.  One monk's take on compassion is inspiring, and the many pilgrims on the way to Lhasa still astonish anyone who has room left in our over-astonished world for astonishment.  There is no mention made of the troubles that saddle Tibet, and it closes with the perennial and Western astonishment over finding that monks use cell phones and computers.  The filming is at times lush and quite well done.  I hope you enjoy it. 

As far as Explore.org goes, their email offered the following mission statement:

Explore.org is a brand new concept that combines philanthropy, travel, and learning. Led by Charles Annenberg Weingarten, with support from the Annenberg Foundation, the Explore team embarks on fact-finding missions to identify potential grant recipients and document the great works of non-profit organizations through films and photography.

This Tibet Special is the result of a fact-finding mission that took place in April 2006. On that visit Explore gave a grant to the Dickey Orphanage, which was used toward building their new home on the road to Drepung Monastery.

I hope you enjoy the video. Let me know what you think.