TIBETSPACE

SELF-IMMOLATION NUMBER 57 IN OCCUPIED TIBET

A couple of days ago, the 57th Tibetan took his own life.  By fire.  That number 57?  The count started on February 27, 2009.  That's more than one a month.  

Once a month, then, for the past 44 months, a Tibetan has decided that China's occupation of Tibet warranted an act of martyrdom.  And for each one of those who decided to take this final step, there are thousands, even millions, who stand in solid sympathy with this action.  These martyrs (now saints in the minds of many Tibetans) had their own reasons for undertaking this dire action.  But they all shared one reason:  to call attention to the current plight of the Tibetan people, all 6 million of them, who daily face torture, beating, and deprivation of their civil & religious rights at the hands of the Chinese.

The Tibetans have succeeded in that central aim.  Most of the world who pays attention to human rights, or who follows the Dalai Lama, or China, or India, or Tibet, or human cruelty, will know that, currently, the Tibetan people are suffering.

That's the easy part.  But as the Tibetans burn, and publicize their plight, and call our attention to their plight, each of them hoped, as they died, that those who saw what was happening would do something about what was happening.  Not only for those Tibetans who are currently living under this regime, but for future generations of Tibetans and for all those whose daily lives are diminished by the Chinese Communist Party.  They hoped we might do something.  

That's the hard part.

What can you do?  Realize what you're up against.  After the ordinary political mechanisms are exhausted—blog, Facebook, Twitter, emails, donations, letters, protests—realize that our national economy is dedicated to trading with China, and that while your letters are important, it will take more than letters to stop this profit-making machine and ask it to rethink its strategies in light of the welfare of 6 million Tibetans.  

I'm going to say something I can't verify:  Lloyd Craig Blankfein, the current CEO of Goldman Sachs, doesn't care enough about the human rights violations in China either to resign in helpful and enlightening protest or to counsel against investing in China until the Dalai Lama is allowed to return to Tibet.  You will not change Mr. Blankfein's mind, I suspect, nor will you alter Goldman Sachs' policies.  You already knew this.  And maybe you even knew that stopping Mr. Blankfein, and what he represents, was beyond your capabilities.

But here's something you can do.  You can remake yourself, a little each day.  And you can do that by repeating to yourself three times a day—set your watch—one of the Dalai Lama's teachings that you find moving.  Maybe one on compassion.  Or maybe on nonviolence. And attach this teaching to an image of Tibetan suffering—a nun or monk in chains; a self-immolator engulfed in flames; an elderly Tibetan in Lhasa; a young Tibetan unemployed and increasingly removed from his heritage.

Do this every day for two weeks.  And then three weeks.  And then try it for a month.

You will then begin to make decisions, even say things, that reflect your awareness of how deeply the roots of human cruelty lie within you.  And within all of us.

And here's what typically happens next.  You signed that letter that came from the latest Save-Tibet nonprofit, and it went to your senator, and you got up the next morning and saw that number 58 killed herself in Amdo, and you thought, logically enough, that your letter did no good.  You felt tired.  Maybe numb.  You didn't save the Tibetan people, after all.

But then you recalled the teaching you'd memorized, and you saw that your capacity for disliking the Chinese had maybe gotten a little smaller.  Next, it occurred to you that no single group of people is ever responsible for any single tragedy, and that the responsibility for problems of this complexity sits on many shoulders, and that the source of this tragedy in Tibet has many authors, and you, who for so long said nothing about the violence in your own heart, are no longer surprised that the only reasonable and logical response to international violence, after the letters are written, the protests organized, the tweets tweeted, is to address the violence that runs through your own works and days.

And so for a month you have done that.  And you feel better, better enough to continue for another month.  Slowly, you see the nature of the struggle for peace has goals that the media often misses, but that you don't.  You don't miss these goals because you've relocated the source of the struggle from Tibet, which you've never visited, to your own heart, which you see now you need to visit more regularly.  You see that a deeply peaceful heart that shows up for five minutes in the middle of an argument with your best friend or your spouse is a great victory for the quiet, unpublicized struggle that you've engaged.

Good for you.  Say that.  "Good for you."  And repeat the teachings.  One more time. And visualize the images.  

Walk straight.  

You listened deeply to the instructions that have now been beamed at you 57 times.  And you're doing the only thing that you can do—engaging the fight for peace and nonviolence and tolerance on the only field that matters.  The field of your heart.

Good for you.

HHDL ON CNN WITH PIERS MORGAN

If you missed Piers Morgan's interview on April 24th with the Dalai Lama, you can watch it now. It's a wonderful session, given the format, with Morgan asking His Holiness several questions that you always wondered about. 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, YOUR HOLINESS, WITH REFLECTIONS ON THE MOST IMPORTANT SENTENCE YOU EVER WROTE

"I fled Tibet on 31 March 1959."  

This sentence, which begins His Holiness's autobiography, Freedom in Exile (1990), is the most important sentence the man has written to date. Or at least that's my opinion, and the case I will try to make as a kind of homage to this long and significant life on the occasion of the Dalai Lama's birthday.

First, the sentence itself:  It's simple, clear, forthright, and factual, which is how much of the world views the man today, two decades after he wrote the sentence, and over five decades since he left Tibet.  Or, as he said, more accurately, of course, "fled tibet."  

Because the Chinese were after him, that's clear, and Lhasa was in revolt, and had he not fled, disguised as a soldier, no less—the ultimate and post-modern nod to nonviolence—we wouldn't be reading this sentence now, and we wouldn't be wishing this man a happy birthday and giving him long-life blessings as he turns seventy-seven.  

Many more, Your Holiness, many more.  We need you.

If you start looking into Buddhism's arrival in the West, though, you'll eventually run up on this sentence (as long as we're talking about sentences):  “The coming of Buddhism to the West may well prove to be the most important event of the twentieth century.” Arnold Toynbee, the imminent British historian of the last century, is purported to have said this, and the statement pops up all over the internet, as does the question, "Did Toynbee really say this?"  No one knows; not even Google.  But it points us to a sentiment that His Holiness elicits from many of us in the West:  the Dalai Lama has carried on his back, over the last half-century, to all corners of the earth, his message of nonviolence, peace, compassion, kindness, love and human rights, which also, by the way, is identical to the version of Tibetan Buddhism that he offers up for public consumption everywhere he goes.  No religious tradition that I am aware of—assuming you consider Buddhism a religion, which the Buddha didn't, and which many others, myself included, don't—no other religion, however you define it, has had such an influential spokesperson.  His Holiness is simply the hardest working man in the spirit business.  That our lives have been enormously enriched by His Holiness is an understatement.  So he fled Tibet, and many of us in the West have benefited.

But let's look at the other side of this issue.  Suppose His Holiness had never needed to write that autobiography?  Or at least if he did write one, it began with another sentence altogether. Suppose his autobiography had begun with the sentence, "I have lived in Tibet, in relative peace, for seventy-seven years."  Suppose there had been no Chinese invasion, no forced exile, no cultural genocide, no torture, no slaughter, no deforestation, no shrinking of the Third Pole, and no arrival of Tibetan Buddhism in the West at the hands of the ablest religious diplomat the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen?  What then?

Many of us in the West can't imagine our lives without His Holiness's teachings, without his example.  And he doesn't work alone.  Other great Tibetan teachers have arrived in his wake, and some came before he arrived in 1979,  and many of these have been equally capable and adept at explaining to us the nature of reality in a way that connects immediately with our day-to-day lives—a kind of Spiritual Physics for the Masses.  Maybe Toynbee was right.

As Westerners, though, we must remember that Tibetans rightfully tire of hearing us declaim ad nauseam about the somehow inevitable—maybe even ordained—spread of Tibetan Buddhism beyond its indigenous and original borders.  So we have to ask ourselves:  what is the cost of our happy discovery of a spirituality we had known relatively nothing about before the 1960's and one that has helped us handle the rampant materialism that is popping up everywhere from the reality TV shows that feature the howling housewives to the pyramid schemes that leave thousands defrauded of their retirement funds?  The answer to that question?  Here's a start at figuring the cost:  the lives of 1.2 million Tibetans; 6000 Buddhist temples; countless sacred manuscripts and works of sacred art; the severing apart of families; the continuing torture of thousands upon thousands of Tibetans; the enclosure of the Tibetan nomads; the attempted eradication of the Tibetan language; the re-education of the Tibetan people according to the propaganda spewed forth by the People's Republic of China. 

That is the price that was paid, and is being paid, by the Tibetan people for our own spiritual prosperity.

Let's make sure and keep this in mind as well, as we wish His Holiness a happy birthday.  

The Fourteenth Dalai Lama is indeed a gift to the civilized world, or what's left of it, outside of Tibet, and most of all to the Tibetan people, who are struggling mightily inside of Tibet now, where His Holiness and all Tibetans belong, should they ever be allowed to return there, or should they decide to do so, and should their choice ever be honored by the Chinese government.

THE TEXT PROJECT HITS YOUTUBE & WE NEED YOUR HELP

 

 

The TEXT Program (Tibetans in Exile Today) is an oral-history project directed by Professor Sidney Burris and Geshe Dorjee at the University of Arkansas.  The TEXT Program has three purposes:

1. To preserve the memories and stories of Tibet before the Chinese arrived by interviewing the elderly Tibetans who lived in Tibet before the Chinese invasion began in 1949 and continues today to destroy systematically the Tibetan people, their culture, and their environment.
2. To allow the Tibetan people to tell their stories, in their own words, in their own way, without intervention or influence from others.
3. To place Arkansas students on the front-lines of this oral history project, providing them an immediate and first-hand introduction to the issues that will define their own careers in the global village:  refugee life & immigration; human rights violations; national autonomy and independence; climatic change; and nonviolence.  We believe, and it has been our experience, that working with the Tibetans in this capacity indelibly shapes our students and renders them better able to make informed decisions regarding their own lives and the contributions they will make to the problems that confront them and their generation.

After a very steep learning curve and with the generosity of the University of Arkansas, The TEXT Program now has a YouTube channel affiliated with Arkansas's channel.  We will store our interviews there, and they will be available to the general public.

So—the central purpose of The TEXT Program at the University of Arkansas, and of our YouTube channel, is to spread awareness of the powerful and diverse array of voices that are currenlty rising from the Tibetan community in exile.  

Accordingly, the more our channel appears in Google searches, and the more its information is shared, the more visible are the problems faced by the Tibetan people.

How can you help?  It's very simple.  

You can increase our visibility by visiting our YouTube channel, and in the upper right-hand corner, click on the "Subscribe" tab.  When we post a new video, you will be contacted through the email account that you provide.  And that is all.  A kind of clicktavism, if you will, that requires little effort, but will have, we hope, a real impact.

Thanks for your help in this matter.  And if you feel so inclined, we'd be delighted if you encouraged a friend to subscribe as well.

 

TENZIN TSUNDUE'S 'KORA' TO APPEAR AS A DRAMATIC PRODUCTION

I learned yesterday in the Times of India that Tenzin Tsundue's book, Kora, a series of poems and stories, will be transformed into a play by Quasar Thakore Padamsee.  The play will be done in English, which will secure a larger audience for the questions that Tsundue and Padamsee will address.  Central among these questions, according to Padamsee, is a very simple one:  "What happens when words aren't enough?"

It's a natural question for the Tibetans.

For Westerners, it is often difficult to know precisely how the Tibetan struggle is faring.  Our news agencies are largely oblivious to it because China has become the world's factory in many ways, and we are their customers, whose silence is purchased with Chinese-made goods. And unless we happen to be in regular contact with Tibetans who will talk about these issues with us, we are left to put together our impressions from the scattered reports we gather from the various media sources that we do trust.

That Tsundue and Padamsee are working together on this project should bring another and necessary perspective to the complex issues that Tibetans face every day, both in exile and in Tibet.  Art opens avenues of conversation that politics must, by definition, avoid.  My only fear is that I won't get to see it.  

Let us hope that it will be taped and made available to the larger English-speaking audience.  And thanks to Tsundue and Padamsee, for their continual efforts and good work.

IT'S KICKING OFF EVERYWHERE: FIVE THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND AS THE REVOLUTION GETS TELEVISED

If you're like me, and you don't work for the BBC or live in Cairo, you might have missed Paul Mason's important blog posting over a year ago, "Twenty Reasons Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere."  The "it" he refers to in the title are the democratic movements that have been sequentially kicking off throughout the Middle East, as well as the "occupy" movements that have popped up around the globe.  Mason has recently published a book on the subject that provides the back-stories for the twenty reasons he cites in his blog.  The book is called Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere:  The New Global Revolutions, and it's a necessary narrative of these movements, the personalities that drive them, and the social media that facilitate them.  Mason's a wonderful writer; he's a field journalist, and his prose bristles with the pressures of living in the field. 

As I was reading the book—which I'd recommend everyone do—I made some notes that ultimately pertain to what's happening in Tibet. Think China, think economic power, think oppression, and how it can be dissipated.

1. Free-market capitalism has gone South, and whenever it decides to return, it will do so badly damaged.  Few people trust it to solve our problems, even those who have profited most by its excesses.  The moment capitalism proves itself an unreliable system for acquiring more profit, the profit-makers will leave it behind.
2. The alliance between the emerging social technologies and the push for self-determination is not exaggerated.  The alliance is real, it's working, and it's undisciplined, so it has problems of implementation that lead to surprising, or unplanned, results.  This is why it seems, at times, chaotic.  But for those who are in the midst of the movement, the so-called chaos has a revisionary energy to it.  Regimes topple because the created chaos makes for a moving target of revolutionary bodies.  Regimes appear orderly in this model, and oppressive.  And they lose.
3. While self-determination and freedom, at least since Thom Paine's Rights of Man (1791), are regarded as natural human rights, the new social technology extends the dream of freedom and self-determination to populations that might previously have found that dream unattainable, unthinkable, or inconceivable.  The technology, in a very real sense, has become for political activists the Liberty-Making Dream Machine.  
4. Old folks, like me, think it's all about "the internet" because we've never gotten over the fact that we can read Tolstoy online, and because our eyes still sparkle when we think about the days before email. To the young people who are currently challenging these oppressive regimes, the internet is nothing more than a cup of coffee: always useful, almost always around, but always unreliable, because it doesn't do what a macchiato will do—focus, drive, and sustain at a very high bit rate.  For political change nowadays, you avoid the firewall by jumping over the firewall with texts, street art, graffiti, memes, music-sharing, and constant movement across the spectrum of expression available to the newly operative, political agents of change. A t-shirt with the right graphic, camera-phoned and messaged across north Africa, does more to promote social change and political reform than any sponsored bill in any deliberative house of duly elected officials.  "Due process" is now a mystifying phrase that in the current milieu has been relegated to a big, dusty dictionary that no one reads.
5. Knowledge is no longer a vertical proposition (except in universities) where you begin on the ground floor and work your way gradually upward through increasing complexities and an expanding network of relevance.  So authority no longer resides at the top, where in the penthouse are gathered those who have survived the trials and tribulations of traditional learning. Authority belongs now to those who most effectively use this text, or that song, or this picture, or that graphic to effect this change.  Period.  The knowledge base now has been levelled—it's a horizontal affair, and its relevance is judged by the changes it effects. If you decide to make the world a better place, most of what you want to read, hear, or see to bring about that betterment is readily available to you without being examined, tested, or credentialed.  Here's the kicker:  to a certain degree, this has always been the case (I'm thinking now about how many writers I love that avoided the American educational gauntlet . . . like, all of them?), but social media encourages visionary renovators to bypass the indoctrination of a standardized American university-think education.  This is a good thing.  And we have the new media to thank for it. So the old road is rapidly aging.  And if you're old like me you know the rest of the lyric. 
6. IMO.

VIDEO—TENZIN TSUNDUE AT BERKELEY: THE WEST, CHINA & TIBET

For those of you who have been following TIBETSPACE, you'll know that one of my obsessions has concerned what Westerners can and can't do to help the Tibetan cause.  I've been concerned about this because I believe the danger involved with misperceiving our role in the unfolding Tibetan situation is very real.  And I further believe that our errors of misperception, once we uncover them, can lead us to surprising insights about ourselves as Americans who have a characteristic perspective on world affairs—a volatile combination of self-confidence and ignorance.  

At any rate, Tenzin Tsundue, one of the Tibetan community's most well-known and articulate activists, spoke in Berkeley in March, and what he had to say is something that all Westerners need to hear. 

The YouTube feed comes in two parts, which I've embedded below.  

SENATE RESOLUTION 356 PASSES

Senate Resolution 356 in support of the Tibetan people, and condemning China's abusive treatment of the Tibetans, has passed unanimously! See a full story here.

READ THE LAST WORDS OF JAMPEL YESHI. AND WEEP. THEN ACT

The letter that Jampel Yeshi wrote before he self-immolated has been translated and is now available at Burning Tibet. Read it as a Tibetan Declaration of Independence; read it as a Tibetan Human Rights document; read it as the last will and testament of a Tibetan patriot; read it as a blueprint of the Tibetan soul.  

But read it and remember these words, "Freedom is the basis of happiness for all living beings."

I believe this statement to be universally true, and I believe that the denial of this freedom amounts to nothing more than systemic violence.  And I believe, with Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., that systemic violence can only be dismantled through nonviolent direct action.

In June, 2011, my students and I spent time in Majnu Katilla (and in 2008 and 2009 as well), interviewing Tibetans for The TEXT Program, talking to anyone who would talk with us, and absorbing as much information as we could about the current plight of the Tibetans who are living in exile and about those 6 million Tibetans who are living heroically in Tibet.  Perhaps we passed Jampel Yeshi in the alleyways.  Certainly, Majnu Katilla will never be the same.  And our students left utterly changed.

Tibetans from Majnu Katilla and other areas in Delhi have now been rounded up and placed in jail in anticipation of President Hu's arrival, and they are thankful for what King called "the sacrament of incarceration." Majnu KaTilla's narrow walkways are patrolled now by Indian police.  (Read a wonderful NYT report here.)

Tenzin Tsundue, who was also arrested on Wednesday, refers to India as his "guru."

"My enemy, my teacher," His Holiness is fond of saying.

Long life to you Tsundue la.

And to Jampel Yeshi, who has now transformed Majnu Katilla into a place of pilgrimage, I have little to say.  I can only acknowledge the vast distance that lies between my attempt at homage and your own perfectly realized words.

SENATE RESOLUTION 356: SUPPORT TIBET

Senator Diane Feinstein and other senators have introduced Senate Resolution 356 which urges China to cease and desist from its persecution of the Tibetan people and reaffirms the "friendship" between American and the Tibetan people.  I would urge you to write your Senators and ask them to support this resolution.

In a letter that Jamphel Yeshi wrote before he self-immolated recently in New Delhi, he asked that if "you have any empathy, stand up for Tibet."

Here is one way of standing up.  On the right navigation bar of this page, under "Action Corner," you can easily locate your Senators and send them an email.  You may, of course write whatever you wish, but in the interest of time, you may also want to cut and past the following message:

Dear Senator . . . 

I am writing to ask that you lend your support to Senate Resolution 356 which requests, among other things, that the Chinese government suspend its brutal oppression of the fundamental religious and civic liberties in Tibet.  It also asserts that America is a friend to the Tibetan people and does not condone the abuse of human rights that China has visited upon these people.

The Tibetan people are making the supreme sacrifice for the restoration of their liberties, and I feel that is only right that we offer our support in their heroic struggle.

Sincerely, 

Thanks for your help in this important matter.  Feel free to re-blog this or forward the information.