TIBETSPACE

ROBERT THURMAN, ONCE AGAIN, ON TIBET, CHINA, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

The indefatigable Robert Thurman on Tibet, China, and the simple question, 'Why the Dalai Lama matters.'  And atheism, and the political right, and anything else that crosses his mind and fall within the wide arena of Tibet and His Holiness.

WELCOME TO TIBETSPACE

Welcome to TIBETSPACE, a blog in the process of changing. Begun as a site for all things Tibetan, all things Tibetan has dramatically expanded as His Holiness has created conversations that continually transcend traditional cultural boundaries.  So I will try to chart some of those conversations here, always keeping His Holiness's views in mind, but also trying to show how long those views are.

AMERICANS & GLOBAL WARMING: WE DON'T BELIEVE IT!

In light of the story I posted here yesterday concerning the melting of the glaciers around Mt. Everest--including stark photographic evidence--I was surprised to find that a new poll released by the Pew Research Center reveals that fewer and fewer Americans see solid evidence of global warming.  In April 2008, 44% of Americans saw climate change as an important issue; that number dropped to 35% by October 1, 2009.  This is an alarming development for three reasons.

1. First of all, we've become such a media-driven society that if the story isn't on our corporate-controlled news sources, we lose focus, and the topic fades from view.  Media-generated ADD.  Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was released in January, 2006, at the Sundance Film Festival, and later picked up 2 Oscars.  In October, 2007, Gore and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won a Nobel Peace Prize, partly due to the success of the film. That's called buzz, and because we're buzz-addicted, Americans were still concerned in 2008 about those belching smokestacks that kept showing up in their nightmares--and they had a film that dramatized their concern, and the Pew figures reflected the fact that global warming was on our radar.  But that's yesterday's news.  And the Pew figures now reflect that as well.
2. Second, it means the bad guys are currently winning, or manipulating the media more effectively than the good guys. Accepting the facts of global warming involves accepting a methodology--empiricism--that if applied to other hot-button topics like, say, the age of the earth or the beginning of the universe, would embarrass a large segment of the conservative power base in this country. As long as conservatives can divert attention from the results of honest scientific research, they gain ground.
3. That climate change is causing the glaciers in Tibet to dry up will directly impact human rights both in Tibet and in India.  When water supplies are endangered, particularly in population centers like India, administrative policies regarding the distribution of water become politically charged and water becomes a bargaining tool.  The UN currently does not recognize in its definition of refugees an "environmental refugee," but it will eventually have to address this issue, particularly in the light of this latest poll finding.  (China is already deeply aware of hydro-politics, as I pointed out in an earlier post.  One of my Tibetan friends whose family lives in eastern Tibet has been told that within several years the village where he grew up and where his family still lives will be under water due to the dams that are currently being built by the Chinese.  No provisions are being made to relocate these Tibetans; they will be, in effect, environmental refugees.)

Awareness is the first step toward speaking truth to power . . . it's a cliche, I know, but one that has truth behind it.

OBAMA & THE LAMA: FIVE MORE THINGS TO THINK ABOUT

Obama's decision not to meet with the Dalai Lama hasn't gone away.  In fact, it's invited more voices into the discussion:  Vaclav Havel has weighed in, and organizations like Human Rights Watch have had their say as well.  A couple of days ago, Maureen Dowd at the New York Times spoke out, and even Frank Calzon, executive Director of Center for a Free Cuba, has compared Obama's emerging political vision as reminiscent of the realpolitik that characterized Henry Kissinger's tenure as Secretary of State.  And The People's Daily in China lost no time reporting the snub, an unambiguous victory for them. Clearly, Obama and the Lama have hit an international nerve.  When something like this happens, when Americans become over-wrought about the way a Tibetan monk is treated, I think it points to other issues lying deep within the hearts and minds of those same Americans.  Perhaps many of us feel that His Holiness is addressing issues, important issues, that receive scant attention in our daily political discourse.  Five things to keep in mind as you make your way through this complex piece of international hand-wringing:

1. First, we need to be clear about the different job descriptions of a Tibetan monk and an American president. Bureaucratic institutions designed to reflect and encourage a set of well-defined ethical practices among its members are called monasteries or convents. Bureaucratic institutions that are designed to let its members have a say in charting their own course through the future, paying less attention to ethical practices, are called democracies.  Leaders of each institution will operate from a radically different set of principles when it comes to engaging whatever political reality confronts them.  So, in one corner, we have Barack Obama, the leader of the free and purportedly secular world (America isn't secular, but that's the advertisement), and in the other corner, we have the leader of the monastic world, the most famous monk in modern times, Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.  That's a substantial difference in orientation, and it's a difference that can't help but characterize their responses to the world around them.
2. Sometimes, we need to look at what's very plain and obvious:  monasteries and democracies have different takes on how you behave in the world at large because, for one thing, they have different relationships to the world.  The citizens of a monastery and the citizens of a democracy define their missions a little differently.  Democracies--I'm thinking of ours--tend to look after themselves before they look after others; that's why domestic issues win elections and international concerns, including human rights, lose them (unless we're under attack). Monasteries, on the other hand, at least Tibetan Buddhist ones, while fighting hard for their own survival in India, are following their own tradition and trying to relieve the suffering of others because that's the way their particular platform is put into motion.  If it's civil defense you're looking for, or better roads, or indoor plumbing, or a military-industrial complex, then you're more likely to find these things in a developed democracy; if it's the alleviation of spiritual suffering you've got in mind, you might try a monastery before you make a pilgrimage to D.C.  The discourse coming out of the Capitol will often be defensive in nature; that coming out of Dharamsala will often be altruistic in nature.  We need both, and at different times in our history, we need one more than the other.  Just now, those who wished the President would have met with His Holiness most likely felt the need for a little more altruism in the national conversation.
3. So, people get anxious about how the Dalai Lama is treated when his area of expertise--human suffering and how to remedy it--seems to be one of the areas of expertise we most need to consult.  As you've noticed, there's a great deal of human suffering going on at the present moment, and since 9/11, Americans have become more cognizant of how quickly this suffering can arrive.  But in an environment where apocalyptic facts are the daily headlines, one fact has gone unnoticed.  In his monumentally important book, Planet of Slums, Mike Davis writes that "for the first time the urban population of the world will outnumber the rural.  Indeed, given the imprecision of Third World censuses, this epochal transition has probably already occurred."  Americans, particularly our students, are registering the effects of this fact subliminally.  They are rightly concerned about their futures. To cite a few more facts from Davis's book:  the present urban population of the world--3.2 billion--is larger than the total population of the world when John Kennedy was inaugurated. China added more citizens to its cities in the 1980's than did all of Europe, including Russia, during the entire nineteenth century. And with these urban populations come slums:  there are now hundreds of full-fledged slums on earth, and they range in size from a few hundred to a million people.  The inequities inherent in living conditions of this sort breed the host of problems that we see confronting us every day:  poverty, disease, war, famine, terrorism, and oppressively entrenched class structures. In short, human suffering.  And there's little on the horizon that seems capable of reversing this trend in the developing nations whose populations are growing-- which means, in turn, that their slums are growing.  It is no longer a problem of the developing world; it has become the world's problem.  And altruism of the kind His Holiness describes has intriguing advantages for all of us.  No wonder many Americans want our leaders to listen to him.
4. Because the world is becoming smaller as its population inexorably grows, and because our media make us instantly aware of the suffering and inequity that accompany this growth, we expect our leaders to address this suffering.  For the first time, Americans are being exposed to the kind of inestimable human suffering that has been readily visible to anyone traveling, for example, in India for centuries. Walk through one of the slums of Delhi, and you realize that no democracy in the world can solve this problem because there are two problems here:  one of them is economic and systemic--Will somebody please send food and shelter?--and the other one is, for lack of a better word, philosophical--Will someone please explain why suffering of this magnitude occurs in the first place?  And when it becomes obvious that the food isn't coming and the system isn't being repaired quickly enough to supply it, and that Obama, and leaders like him, can't solve even these kinds of food-supply problems, Americans want to hear from someone like His Holiness who has some insightful things to say about the questions that perennially plague us all: Why, we want to know, does suffering exist, why is it inevitable, why does it never go away, and what can each of us, in our small, insignificant way, do about it?  
5. Because this second kind of suffering, this philosophical suffering (which doesn't have a shred of philosophy about it to those who are currently doing the suffering), is becoming more and more a part of Americans' daily diet on television and the internet, Americans are interested in what people like His Holiness have to say about it. That's only natural.  As I've indicated, this kind of suffering is part of his area of expertise--he isn't a policy-wonk, but he is a spirit-wonk. And so we're confused when Obama doesn't meet with His Holiness, who gives good advice on this problem, because the Chinese, who have been recently in the business of creating this problem, tell him not to do so.  But we shouldn't be confused at all.  Only rarely do we find leaders of democracies who embody the kind of spiritual values that can address the particular pressures that most Americans are feeling now. Obama can't do it, but then few political leaders could straddle both of these worlds. (And remember:  Hillary Clinton told the Chinese in February, 2009, that human rights, from the American perspective, would be secondary to economic concerns.  This has been announced policy from the beginning.)  Obama's refusal to meet with His Holiness shows that he is, perhaps, more political, in the cynical sense of that term, than many had thought or hoped he would be.   That the story won't go away shows that Americans, along with the rest of the world who questioned Obama's decision, are finding themselves in need of the kind of counseling that only His Holiness and others like him can give us. Suffering, of the philosophical sort, is now squarely on the American radar, and frankly we're stifled by it. We need help in understanding it, and we're a bit undone when a leading authority on it is rebuffed by our President.

VIDEO INTERVIEWS OF TIBETANS IN INDIA

The TEXT Project (Tibetans in Exile Today) is an oral history project based at the University of Arkansas and directed by Professor Sidney Burris and Geshe Thupten Dorjee.  The goal of the Project is to gather video interviews with the elderly Tibetans currently living in exile in India, and eventually to house them in an online archive that will be available both to scholarly and general audiences alike.  It is the assumption of the Project that traditional Tibetan culture is vanishing in Tibet, and that the elderly Tibetans who remember their lives before the Chinese arrived in 1959 hold valuable memories that need to be preserved.

To accomplish this, Professor Burris and Geshe Dorjee have traveled to India over the past two summers with fifteen students from the University of Arkansas.  Before leaving, their students have studied Tibetan history, culture, and philosophy; have familiarized themselves with the fundamentals of oral history; and have become comfortable with the new technology that supports digital HD video recording and editing.  

It is a further assumption of the TEXT Project that by allowing qualified undergraduate students to work on the front lines of Tibetan cultural preservation, they will come face-to-face with one of the few genuinely non-violent cultures left in the modern world.  As a result, two interests are well served by the TEXT Project:  the past history of the Tibetan people, as told by the Tibetans themselves, and the future of the global community, as defined by the younger generation that will shape it.

Over the past two summers, the TEXT Project has gathered some thirty interviews in Dharamsala, Majnu-Ka-Tilla in New Delhi, and Drepung Loseling Monastery in south India.  Students have spoken with monks, nuns, members of the Tibetan parliament, the President of the Tibetan Youth Congress, teachers at the Tibetan Children's Village, elderly Tibetans, the Nechung oracle, Tibetan merchants, and others, including members of the younger generation as well.

The Project has generated enormous student interest on the campus, and Professor Burris and Geshe Dorjee are currently investigating potential funding sources to begin the long, arduous--and costly--process of archiving the videos that they collected.

Until funding has been located to build properly the website that will house the complete interviews, Professor Burris and Geshe Dorjee--assisted by their students, of course--will excerpt the interviews and post them on a temporary site.  

Each excerpt will be accompanied by a brief introduction that sets the scene and discusses the significance of the interview's content.  Two have been posted already, and notice of further postings will appear here on TIBETSPACE.  

Stop by the new site and have a look.  And leave a comment; the TEXT Project values your opinion.

HYDRO-POLITICS & TIBET YET ONCE MORE

In an earlier posting,I discussed China's well thought out campaign to control the flow of water into India; it's a devastatingly powerful move to gain the upper hand in the political discussions that clearly lie in the Sino-Indian future.  Of course, Tibet is at the center of this discussion, and it's not too much of a stretch to assume that, were Tibet a free country, its leaders might well take a different view of how these mighty waters might be managed.  A new piece has just appeared in The Daily Times (Pakistan), and it provides more information on this important issue.  With globalization having moved from idea to reality, and with the climate heating up, as it certainly is, this is a problem that ultimately confronts us all.

TEN WAYS TO FREE TIBET (4-7)

Before I list the next four ways you can free Tibet, let me say something about the first three that I included in my last posting. 

1. Jill Bolte Taylor’s video, if it does nothing else, should alert us to the accuracy of what Tibetan meditators—and their Indian avatars—have been saying for several millennia.  We’re hard-wired to look at ourselves and the world around us in two ways:  one way engages the left hemisphere of the brain, which plans, orders, graphs, plots, isolates, analyzes, and sequesters everything we do, think, figure, calculate, and say; and the other side, the right hemisphere, removes those boundaries, undoes those calculations, dissolves our sense of an isolating self, and fuzzes the boundaries of our forms, placing us in larger, inter-connected energy fields (read:  quantum field).  The news here is that these two modes of perception can be united for each other’s benefit and that this state of unity has traditionally been called Nirvana, or the removal of ignorance, but that this now turns out to be as much a neurological birthright as it does an abstract and blessed state accessible only to the super-humans of sacred literature.  For Americans, literal-minded and empirical as we are, it’s helpful to have an outline of the neurochemistry of enlightenment. 
2. Over 9 million Native Americans died because our ancestors, with whom we share a culture and a way of looking at the world, arrived on these shores.  We are implicated.  I’m not suggesting undue penance and sackcloth.  I am suggesting accuracy in our self-perceptions because the way in which we view ourselves will impact how we view those we wish to help. 
3. If Gandhi is correct—and I believe he is—then our “inward freedom” should be greatly impacted by Taylor’s video because we can now begin to think of the inner liberation that Gandhi spoke of as neurological component of our species.  Like any other adaptive mechanism in the evolutionary process, inward freedom must be evolved by each of us if we are ever going to be able to help anyone in a substantial and permanent fashion.  There are tried and true ways to do this; avail yourself of them.

And now, the next four ways that you can save Tibet.

4.  Come to terms with Jamyang Norbu.   One of Tibet’s leading intellectuals and writers, Norbu has stood defiantly for Tibetan independence in ways that are learned, well conceived, and passionate.  He is, as T.S. Eliot once said of Samuel Johnson, a dangerous person to disagree with.  Read him—start with his blog, perhaps, look at the archives for interesting topics, and pay close attention to the comments.  But most importantly, you need to read the following excerpt from the Introduction to his collection of essays, Shadow Tibet (the book I’d most recommend):

Like alternate worlds in science fiction, two distinct Tibets appear to co-exist these days.  One flourishes in the light of celebrity patronage, museum openings, career ad academic opportunities, pop spirituality and New Age Fashions.  This is the Tibet that has captured the romantic fantasy of the West and which has drawn much of the attention that Tibet receives at the moment.  Here, Tibet is far more than the issue of Tibetan freedom and represents the unrealized aspirations of the affluent and the established for spiritual solace, ecological harmony and world peace. 

And this from the first essay in the collection, “Opening of the Political Eye:”

I am on no account putting the entire blame for Tibetan political regression on our Western friends, but they did substantially contribute to it.  Usually the presence of such tourists and visitors have only a marginal effect on the society they are passing through, especially in such large countries as India.  But Tibetan society in exile was very small, poor, and because of the tremendous dislocation it had experienced, extremely impressionable.  Through their constant disdain of Western rationalism, democracy, and science, Western travelers effectively discouraged Tibetan curiosity about the West, and encouraged Tibetans to revert to their old and fatal way of dealing with reality by burying their heads in the sands of magic, ritual, and superstition.

5.  Set aside eight minutes and watch this video, although at 3 ½ minutes you’ll get the point.  What you’ll see is a film, taken 12 years ago at Harvard, of a young Tibetan attempting to tell a young Chinese what has happened in Tibet.  Standing behind and to the left of the Tibetan is an American, concerned, wanting to help, but plainly irrelevant to the important dialogue that is occurring between the two principals, the Tibetan and the Chinese.  Remember this image of the Tibetan, the Chinese, and the sidelined American.

6.  Learn to micro-meditate.  A Tibetan friend of mine who spent six years in retreat told me that Americans could benefit greatly from learning to meditate for 2-3 minutes at a time, several times a day, or as many times a day as they feel comfortable doing it.  This means stopping for a moment at your desk, or while walking to the car, and breathing in and out ten times or more, doing whatever is required to take the left hemisphere of the brain offline and encourage the right hemisphere to boot up.  It’s not hard; it’s part of our natural evolution; and it works.  Our political positions will sharpen their focus if we can calm down for a couple of minutes a day.

7.  Memorize this fact:  At least 80% of the human population lives on less than $10 a day.   My guess is that many of you who are reading this blog live on more than $10 a day.  I do.  Materialism in America seems to have hit epidemic proportions, which is one of the reasons the gap between the rich and the poor is widening and devastating the culture.  But it is important that we remember this fact for two reasons:

a.    We begin by acknowledging our privilege and, like anyone who has great stores of resources that others need, we become more likely over the long run to part with some of those resources in creative, effective ways.  So acknowledge your privilege on a daily basis.
b.    Realize that, as Americans, your first-hand knowledge of materialism and its effects, both desirable and undesirable, is unequaled by any other culture in the world.  Tibetans, for example, know nothing about the dangers of materialism, and if you survive it, like any survivor, you can talk with authority about its devastating effects and its potential remedies.  That many Americans have felt that Tibetan culture holds just such a remedy is perhaps understandable in this context.  And whether or not Tibetans will be able to resist the Westernization that is occurring in India remains to be seen.  My prayers are with them.

In my next posting, I'll finish the 10 ways you can free Tibet, and follow that with a general discussion of the list.

TEN WAYS TO FREE TIBET (1-3)

I continually meet people who want to “do something” about Tibet and the Tibetans.  And who wouldn’t?  An entire people committed, particularly over the last 700 years, to the principles of non-violence, whose homeland has been occupied with varying degrees of brutality over the last half century, and whose leader has become not only an adroit ambassador for his country, but one of the most revered spiritual figures in the world . . . What’s not to like?  And don’t forget:  George Lucas, in Return of the Jedi (1983) had those cute little Ewoks speaking Tibetan. 

So if you google the phrase, “help Tibet,” you’ll get over 8.5 million hits.

Take your pick.  Many of these organizations have made substantial contributions to the Tibetan cause, and there’s a lot you can do that will make a difference.

But having been involved over several decades now, and with dramatically varying degrees of commitment, to understanding what Tibetan culture might reasonably offer Americans, I wanted to offer my own Ten Ways to Free Tibet, and then be done with it.  It’s not a manifesto; it’s not a declaration.  It’s just a list of suggestions that are offered here as tentative answers to persistent questions. 

My working plan:  In this posting I’ll list three suggestions; in the next posting, four; and in the third posting, three, making for a total of ten.  I’ll eventually offer a bit of commentary, a very little commentary, on each item, hoping to provide a picture of the overall conceptual structure that stands behind the entire set of ten.  But for now, here are the first three ways to free Tibet.

1. Set aside 20 minutes and watch the following video. It's a recording of a talk given by Jill Bolte Taylor at a TED Conference on February 27, 2008.  (If you're unfamiliar with TED, correct that problem asap.  Their website contains a library of TED talks, and they're routinely amazing, jaw-dropping, and inspiring.)  Dr. Taylor, a neuroanatomist, suffered a massive brain hemorrhage in the left hemisphere, and her description of this experience lays the scientific groundwork for Americans to approach and potentially understand one of the most important legacies the Tibetan philosophers have left us.  Warning:  Don't even think about starting this video if you don't have twenty minutes to give to it because you'll completely ignore whatever you were supposesd to be doing.
2. Memorize this fact:  Before Western explorers arrived in America and began its colonization, noted anthropologist Henry Dobyns estimated the population of Native Americans to be approximately 10 million.  By the end of the 19th century, the number had dwindled to 250,000.  Over 9 million Native Americans perished as a result of our arrival on these shores.
3. Memorize this quotation by Mahatma Gandhi:  "The outward freedom . . . that we shall attain, will be only in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment" (from The Essential Gandhi, ed. by Louis Fischer with a Preface by Eknath Easwaran,  p. 165.)

So, the first three ways to save Tibet.  Four more in the next posting.  Stay tuned.

HYDRO-POLITICS AND HUMAN RIGHTS

You can do a lot of things with water, and recently China and the Bush administration have become the connoisseurs of the pain and suffering that water, or the lack of it, can bring.  China is moving along with its plans to build a hydro-electric dam across the Brahmaputra River in Tibet, potentially wreaking havoc on the Indian province of Arunachal Pradesh , and since the Justice Department was forced today to release its Top Secret CIA documents on water-boarding and other forms of torture, the Bush administration seemed equally fascinated with the destructive capacity of water. (China's plan has been in the works for several years.  Read a fuller account here.)

Two modern imperial powers, equally intent on maintaining their empires through coercive means.  And with Obama's decision today not to prosecute CIA officials who were responsible for this brutality, the United States gives up much of its credibility in negotiating with nations like China whom we accuse not only of tolerating, but actively indulging, conduct that violates our fundamental human rights. 

I wrote earlier about China and America belonging to the small group of barbarous nations who still practice capital punishment and carry it out in some places with a kind of righteous gusto.  Now I write about China and America belonging to that same group of barbarous nations who have been caught red-handed in violation of fundamental human rights and who decide to do little about it. 

Whether we prosecute or not, though, the fact remains that our country is guilty of human rights violations; and that our administration's disapproval of the Chinese torture of Tibetans is hypocritical, at best, and feigned, at worst. 

As a country, we argue now against human rights violations from a weakened position.

But there is another side to this issue that indicates some real progress in our country's support of human rights.  It is important that President Obama allowed the release of these sensitive documents; he did not extend Bush's rampant abuses of executive privilege.  He decided, in fact, not to fight the ACLU in their FOIA filing, and in doing so, he allowed the working manual for our little shop of horrors to become part of the public domain.  Surely, he felt that a simple revelation of these documents was enough, that if the goal is to stop such abuses in the future, and not to punish those who formulated and implemented these horrors, then such a public revelation will make it much more difficult for this to occur in the future.  And so we must read these documents, and make them part of our historical knowledge; we must enter them into the record of our national consciousness, making this inhumane practice less likely to rear its ugly head in the coming century.

It's the least we can do.

VIDEO: TIBETAN REFUGEES, PART 2

Below, the second part of the Martini documentary on the Tibetan refugee experience: