Maybe, just maybe, there's one other person on the planet, aside from myself, who missed Stewart's take on Obama deciding not to meet with His Holiness.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Hell No, Dalai | ||||
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Maybe, just maybe, there's one other person on the planet, aside from myself, who missed Stewart's take on Obama deciding not to meet with His Holiness.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Hell No, Dalai | ||||
| www.thedailyshow.com | ||||
| ||||
Posted at 02:45 PM in Buddhism, Capital punishment, China, Current Affairs, Dalai Lama, Dissidents, Ethics, Human Rights, Monks, Non-Violence, Religion, Tibet, Tibet-China Relations | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted at 09:46 AM in Buddhism, Capital punishment, China, Current Affairs, Dalai Lama, Dissidents, Ethics, Genocide, Human Rights, Hunger Strikes, India, Mahatma Gandhi, Meditation / Neurology, Monks, Non-Violence, Nuns, Religion, Students for a Free Tibet, Tibet, Tibet-China Relations, Tibetan Youth Congress | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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:
Posted at 09:00 AM in Buddhism, China, Current Affairs, Dalai Lama, Human Rights, India, Monks, Non-Violence, Tibet, Tibet-China Relations | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
So, President Obama decides not to welcome His Holiness to D.C.. It's a political decision made by a savvy politician, and it's one that I suspect His Holiness wouldn't have made if the tables were turned and our President showed up in Dharamsala. He wouldn't have made such a decision because it would have never been necessary for His Holiness to make such a decision. The two men are driven by different necessities. You can take your pick.
Or you can hope and pray that somehow they are complimentary.
Posted at 04:58 PM in Buddhism, China, Current Affairs, Dalai Lama, Ethics, Human Rights, Mahatma Gandhi, Monastic, Monks, Non-Violence, Religion, Students for a Free Tibet, Tibet, Tibet-China Relations | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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.
Posted at 09:52 PM in Buddhism, Current Affairs, Dalai Lama, Human Rights, India, Monastic, Monks, Non-Violence, Nuns, Students for a Free Tibet, Tibet-China Relations, Tibetan Youth Congress | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
We are occasionally--very occasionally--treated in the media to commanding displays of authentic spirituality, and clearly when Desmond Tutu recently accepted the Spiritual Leadership Award from Humanity's Team, he provided us with one of these moments. While the Dalai Lama was unable to attend the presentation, he sent his representative, Sonam Tenzin from the Office of Tibet , who presented Tutu with a kata. Tutu's remarks concerning the Dalai Lama are reminiscent of the kinds of things that, well, His Holiness would say about Tutu in such a situation. These two gentlemen, coming from very different religious traditions, share a common spirituality that seems to grow in importance every day as our national borders begin to blur. The introduction in the video--heartfelt, sincere--goes for approximately five minutes, and then Tutu arrives, followed by His Holiness's representative. What Tutu has to say about the Dalai Lama is pure spiritual poetry.
Posted at 09:26 AM in Buddhism, Current Affairs, Dalai Lama, Human Rights, Monks, Non-Violence, Religion, Tibet | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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.
So, the first three ways to save Tibet. Four more in the next posting. Stay tuned.
Posted at 11:57 AM in Buddhism, Dalai Lama, Ethics, Genocide, Human Rights, India, Mahatma Gandhi, Meditation / Neurology, Monks, Non-Violence, Nuns, Religion, Tibet, Tibet-China Relations | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: buddhism, china, current affairs, international relations, non-violence, the dalai lama, tibet, tibet china relations
The global tech community was shocked recently to learn of Ghostnet, a cyber-snooping operation that orginated in the PRC and whose virus had turned up in over 1200 computers in over 100 countries, not an out-sized number at all, but discretely targeted, and thus harder to detect. You can find a link to the full 53-page report on Scribd (which you'll need to join to download, but it's worth the email address and password you have to give to get it). To summarize, the capabilities of Ghostnet are extensive, and the main computers of the Dalai Lama's office were clearly compromised. David Gelernter, a national fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, recently wrote, concerning the likelihood that China was the culprit in engineering and spreading the virus:
After the Dalai Lama's office sent an e-mail invitation to a foreign diplomat, Beijing diplomats happened to phone the same diplomat and discourage the visit. A China-bound traveler who had used the Internet to help put Tibetan exiles in contact with Chinese dissidents was stopped at the Chinese border, shown transcripts of the online exchanges, and warned to cut it out.
And so it goes. Gelerntner argues, persuasively, that what we're seeing here is the Second Cold War: "China is our new Cold War enemy, and her favorite weapons will also be novel: financial weapons, trade weapons, cyberweapons. Welcome to Cold War II."
It's not news to anybody that technology changes lives, and that it is currently changing our lives here in America, sometimes in ways that seem insufferable. It still isn't clear to me why anyone would want a Twitter update on my choice of an espresso over a latte as I'm standing in line to teach a class that my caffeine addiction will cause me to start a bit late. The problem is, however, that the technology in question reflects the gravitas of the culture that embraces it. So six students in Chisinau, Moldova--the only post-Soviet Union country that elected a communist government--started an anti-government rally recently using Twitter and instantly had summoned 10,000 students to the protest. (Read the NYT account here.) Our own election of Obama marshaled the text-technology in similar ways, and the cell-phone videos from Tibet have left a lasting record of the atrocities inflicted by the Chinese in Tibet throughout 2008.
So the new technology, like all new technologies, mirrors the intention and morality of those who use it. Twitter then, the very same Twitter, can be an agent of narcissism or an advocate for civil liberty. Twitter doesn't come with a user manual, a code of ethics, or even the vaguest guidelines for how the human animal might represent itself through its one-line updates. But all we have to do is read the updates and draw our conclusions: we are both magnanimous and narcissistic.
Recently, the Dalai Lama and his special envoy Lodi Gyari have called on all Tibetans everywhere to record their suffering over the past fifty years, a project that will clearly profit from the video and web technologies available today even to amatuers. (Our very own TEXT Project at Arkansas is an example.) Central to this effort is Harry Wu, the founder and director of the Laogai Research Foundation. If you don't know Mr. Wu's work, you need to become familiar with it. "Laogai" means "reform through labor," and the term generally refers to Chinese labor camps--where Mr. Wu spent 19 years of his life. He is now an American citizen and has taken up the Tibetan cause. He has curated an exhibit in Washington, D.C. on the Tibetan struggle, and he is a significant force in encouraging Sino-Tibetan dialogue. His ideas are in line with Martin Luther King Jr.'s who encouraged the poor whites in the South to understand that they had more in common with the poor blacks than they did with the middle-class white Southerners who were behind racism's corporate and cultural structure. Wu is making a similar argument about the Tibetans and the Chinese, and how they should be looking at what they hold in common. And he might well be right.
The economic problems in both Tibet and China--read about the struggles of one of China's billionaire women in the March 30 issue of The New Yorker--are fertile ground for unification across lines of race and ethnicity, the kind of unification that, if it occurred in China, would have an immediate and long-range global impact. As the Dalai Lama ages, and finally retires to his spiritual practice, and ultimately dies, the transitional period would benefit from this kind of economic revolution. In the meantime, the 17th Karmapa is waiting in line, but that in and of itself is enough for another posting . . . in the meantime, watch the following video for a good introduction to this extraordinary young man, and the problems that he currently confronts.
Follow this link to watch the video.
<a href="http://technorati.com/claim/aprtazbccu" rel="me">Technorati Profile</a>
Posted at 02:19 PM in Buddhism, China, Current Affairs, Dalai Lama, Monks, Non-Violence, Tibet, Tibet-China Relations, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
To all of you who responded to my posting of 24 March, and signed the letter protesting the South African action against the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Tutu has thanked you:
Mary Wald writes further about these issues on The Huffington Post. She includes comments from Archbishop Tutu as well that she recently received in an email correspondence with him.
The letter is still open for signatures at www.thecommunity.com. If you haven't signed yet, and you feel inclined to add your voice to the mix, stop by and do so; also send the link to your friends who might be interested.
As I mentioned in my last posting, these kinds of off-the-radar actions are extremely
important, and even, in my opinion, the driving forces behind political change in the new technological era (witness the Obama campaign). Here's what I said (and pardon the egocentricity of self-quotation):
But we can do something off the radar, something in fact, more powerful, more fundamental, and more effective than many of those who are on the radar, under constant scrutiny, can do. We can transform the fundamental ground of consciousness that in the long run will make the change we envision inevitable.
I mean, we recently signed a letter of protest regarding South Africa's treatment of the Dalai Lama, and within several days, we've got a response in our inboxes from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, thanking us for our commitment.
You're probably thinking what I'm thinking . . . we're having an effect, anonymously, off-the-radar, working the ground of consciousness.
Thanks for your help.
Posted at 11:09 AM in Buddhism, China, Current Affairs, Dalai Lama, Human Rights, Monks, Non-Violence, Nuns, Religion, Tibet, Tibet-China Relations | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
A tough week indeed for Tibet and the Tibetans. China claims to have reopened parts of Tibet to tourists, which means that parts of Tibet have now come once again under control of the Chinese police forces. France and China on Wednesday signed a diplomatic communique in which France restated its resolution that Tibet should never achieve independence and that the Himalayan region is unalterably part of China. (You can read the The New York Times account here.) Sarkozy's feeble recounting of France's history of recognizing China's sovereignty over Tibet was sad . . . a kind of 11th hour recantation of his recognition last year of His Holiness and the Tibetan struggle. China has also asked New Zealand to withdraw its invitation to the Dalai Lama who is scheduled to visit that country in the near future, but in an act of increasingly uncommon civility and bravery, Prime Minister John Keys pre-emptively approved the visa in spite of China's threats. And remember the Tibetan farmers of Kardze County, Sichuan Province, the ones who refused to plant their crops, risking their own security, in protest of oppressive Chinese policies? The Chinese have begun an "arrest and beating drive" that has left many Tibetan farmers injured and imprisoned. And the monk who was beaten so severely has finally died of his injuries.
The global financial crisis has helped the Chinese in their campaign to oppress the Tibetan people, and they're taking advantage of their leveraged position. In debt to the once booming Chinese economy, Western nations are now finding themselves being held hostage by Chinese demands to recognize China's rule over Tibet.
And because of our reckless economic policies, many of these states and countries are either softening or silencing their criticism of China's policies or publicly denying Tibet's bid for freedom. California, South Africa, France . . . who's next?
So what can we do? We can push back in the manner that is suited to our current situation, our current ability, and our current goals. We cannot all be freedom fighters; we cannot all command the audience of a Jamyang Norbu; we cannot all be elected officials in places of power.
But we can do something off the radar, something in fact, more powerful, more fundamental, and more effective than many of those who are on the radar, under constant scrutiny, can do. We can transform the fundamental ground of consciousness that in the long run will make the change we envision inevitable.
In fact, Secretaries of State, Senators, Chancellors, Prime Ministers, none of these exalted and capable people can effect the change we wish to see until we effect these very changes within ourselves. Remember: legislative change, or a change in diplomatic relations, or the acceptance of a new international policy, these are the last links in a series of changes that begin anonymously, at the ground level, within our own individual perspectives. Look at the passage of the Civil Rights Act in America, remember how many unnamed, committed individuals changed their minds, refurbished their perspectives, and did the unrecognized work that only changed minds can do, and so made the life and career of Martin Luther King, Jr. possible. The Dalai Lama's career has been made possible, not only by the scores of devoted Tibetans, both in Tibet and in exile, who support him, but also by the world community that has gradually become persuaded of the fundamental importance of human rights and non-violence in a world whose population is exploding.
But now the financial crisis has thrown our excessive spending and borrowing, both at the personal and national level, into dramatic relief. And so as we recover financially, as we find ways to weather the temporary advantage the Chinese have gained over those countries and states that I believe would otherwise happily support the Tibetan bid for fair treatment, we have to effect those gradual changes within ourselves that come through reading and writing and thinking about the abuses that are currently being administered to Tibetans who are living in Tibet. And we have to expand our concern with the Tibetan population to a concern with the fundamental issue of human rights.
The role model for this gradual change is Tsering Woeser, a writer who lives in
Beijing, who is in and out of house arrest, whose blogs are regularly shut down, and whose safety is constantly threatened by the authorities. Still, she has taken it as her life's work to record the atrocities, to note the heroism, and to chronicle the struggles that her people are undergoing, day by day. She has taken it as her life's work to provide us with the record we need to effect the changes that we wish to see within ourselves. She has published a new book too, The Snow Lion Roaring in the Year of the Mouse, a history of 2008 in Tibet. The Preface has already been translated into English and you can read it here. It is a monumental work of memory, of cultural memory, and we read it so that we don't forget the enormity of the struggle that many Tibetans underwent in the year leading up to the fiftieth anniversary of their exile. And reading it, we change our consciousness ever so slightly; we prepare the ground ever so gently for the change that must come; and we render more and more inevitable a tipping of the scales toward human rights and non-violence.
This we can do.
"Our Buddhist nature is able to forgive every experience," Woeser writes, "but forgiving does not equal forgetting." And so we read not to forget, we write not to forget, and we act not to forget.
Finally, a wonderful video, ten-minutes, narrated by Susan Sarandon, that just might inspire someone who needs inspiration, or empower someone who needs empowering, to undertake this work of personal renovation. Send it around. You can see it at the urbanZen Foundation web site.
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Posted at 04:24 PM in Buddhism, China, Current Affairs, Dalai Lama, Human Rights, Monks, Nuns, Tibet, Tibet-China Relations | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)







