TIBETSPACE

JON STEWART AND THE DALAI LAMA

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.  

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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.

CHARTER FOR COMPASSION

The Charter for Compassion is one of the organizations that is trying to respond productively to the widespread human suffering that has become part of the daily experience of the citizens of developed countries.  Never before has the middle class, normally insulated from such suffering, had access to the fundamental images of deprivation, torture, homelessness, starvation, and environmental catastrophe that our online capabilities serve up nowadays on a continual basis.  The point is that when exposed to atrocity, most people want to do something about it.  And with such massive exposure now in play, Charter for Compassion is trying to provide people with ways of facilitatingthat response.  So have a look at the video below, visit the website, and figure out your own response.  There are lots of implications to projects like this one, and I'll be looking at some of them in the future.

CHARTER FOR COMPASSION TRAILER from TED Prize on Vimeo.

GOING GREEN: CHINA AT THE FOREFRONT

China has emerged recently as one of the leaders of the Green Revolution, and while none of these innovations are showing up on the Tibetan plateau, they do point to the fact that financial incentives to protect and repair the environment, wisely conceived, will command more attention than ideological ones.  With just over a month to go before the climate change conference in Copenhagen, it's well to remind ourselves that behavioral changes--how we live our daily lives--must find creative ways to partner with the larger corporate structures that have been loathe to accept innovations that effect their profit margin.

Climate change, of course, directly impacts human rights, which is why the UN on March 28, 2008, issued a resolution stating as much (7/23).  The resolution declares unequivocally that the world's poor have "limited adaptation capacities" when faced with catastrophic climate change, and that specific areas of the world are particularly vulnerable.  The UN recognizes further that "low-lying and other small island countries, countries with low-lying coastal, arid and semi-arid areas or areas liable to floods, drought and desertification, and developing countries with fragile mountainous ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change."

In other words, countries in Asia and Africa, and places like Tibet, would be at special risk, not only because of the geographical conditions of these regions, but more importantly because of the population's limited ability to respond effectively to the changing conditions.

We have reached a critical period now when workers in the human rights vineyard must partner with those in the fields of climate change.  Their goal is the same:  to protect human life and to insure that the human community enjoys the fundamental set of rights and liberties that free societies have historically claimed as their birthright.  The notion of social responsibility now includes insuring a viable and life-sustaining ecosystem--that's also part of our birthright, and it's a relatively new amendment to it, but it's one that is currently having an impact on all of our endeavors.

To learn more about these matters, consult the website maintained by The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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.

VIDEO ON GLOBAL WARMING & THE TIBETAN PLATEAU

The following video by Ed Brashear, a photographer and mountaineer who has summitted Everest five times, reveals photographic evidence of the warming trend in Tibet and Nepal. 

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.

FIVE THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ABOUT OBAMA, HIS HOLINESS & THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

The recent decision by the White House not to receive His Holiness the Dalai Lama--exacerbated by the fact that it now involves one Nobel Peace Prize winner turning his back on another one because of pressure from China, a country on intimate terms with oppression--presents an opportune moment to have a look at the two men, side by side, in five areas, and to see that they don't really have a lot in common.  And that both men's work continues apace, on decidedly different tracks.

1. Human Rights--Over the past fifty years, the Dalai Lama's role has expanded from serving as a political representative of the Tibetan people--both in Tibet and in exile--to being a spokesperson for human rights in general and standing as an advocate for the relief of human suffering wherever it might exist. Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. would have agreed with His Holiness. King's own career, broadening from a focus on African-Americans to include, finally, the American poor, whatever their race, bears ample testimony to this. Now in 2009, fifty years after Mark Charles Parker was taken from his jail cell in Poplarville, Mississippi and lynched, the American political scene does not have a national figure whose ideas are marching logically and inexorably toward the cause of human rights. Remember, you can't get elected to national office in America by running on a platform of human rights.  And remember this too: the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King, Jr. did not run for public office.
2. Chicago Olympics--If Obama wants to be re-elected, he has to campaign; and, by some accounts, his re-election bid for 2012 has already started.  The Chicago Olympics would have been a real boost to his campaign and a fine send-off in 2016, when the Olympics arrived and his term, if he is re-elected, would end. In the twentieth century, however, either the Summer or the Winter Olympics visited our shores eight times.  That's enough.  Sure, there are those who thought that Obama's failure to get the Games for Chicago signaled dire and ominous things about America's reputation abroad (of course, Obama hadn't won the Nobel Prize for Peace at that time--more on that later), but they were wrong. Rio simply needed it more than we did.  And they purportedly made a much better case.  But King didn't care, and His Holiness doesn't care, about these things because they don't have to care about these things.  They don't have to win votes. Obama's attention to the Olympics wasn't a distraction from the health-care issue; it was an attempt to get re-elected.  
3. Non-Violence--Now that the civil-rights workers who rose to prominence in the 50's and 60's are aging, non-violence as a cogent and indispensable tool for social reform has vanished from the national stage.  The Dalai Lama's recent pilgrimage to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis should remind us of what unites Reverend King and His Holiness.  I am thinking, of course, of Mahatma Gandhi. Both King and the Dalai Lama drew a great deal from Gandhi's fundamental notions of non-violence. His Holiness, Mahatma Gandhi, and Reverend King realized a central truth that extends from a subtle understanding of non-violence:  that the acquisition of material wealth carries with it ethical obligations that extend beyond personal gratification and security.  And this is a truth that doesn't fare well in America. Greed, in fact, is a form of internal violence that has far-reaching implications.  But you can't get elected in America by running on a platform of human rights and by pointing to the essential violence associated with gaining great wealth.  After all, Obama is a very wealthy man.  King wasn't; His Holiness isn't.
4. The Global Village--The global village is a sexy idea.  As a phrase, it's become ubiquitous.  But it's not complicated.  The global village comes into being when we begin to perceive that our neighbor's suffering has a direct impact on our own suffering; and that the best way to alleviate our own suffering is first to alleviate our neighbor's suffering.  Of course, if you translate this into political action, nationalism, domestic economies, defense systems, all of these things come under scrutiny, and elected officials cannot, if they wish to be elected, indulge such a powerful idea and scrutinize such sacred cows.  The American electorate will not return to office someone who becomes overly concerned with what is happening in Rwanda, Sudan, Darfur, Tibet, Cambodia, Burma, or Bosnia--even if that person believes that these humanitarian actions will have a direct impact on the quality of American life.   This, however, was precisely Gandhi's platform, it is His Holiness's platform, and Reverend King was moving gradually toward such an idea as well.
5. The Nobel Peace Prize--Even Obama, in his honest and eloquent remarks upon learning that he had received this prestigious award, admitted that he didn't deserve it.  When the committee, citing his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," stated that Obama had committed himself and his country "to a world without nuclear weapons" (read the full text here), it became clear that this was an award granted more to an imagined future than an accomplished past.  And it was granted, I believe, in deep gratitude by a European community happy to be rid of the Bush family. But the Nobel Peace Prize won by Reverend King, Mother Theresa, Sakharov, Walesa, Tutu, Wiesel, the Dalai Lama, and Suu Kyi is not the Prize won by Al Gore and Barack Obama.  They were granted for different reasons and serve different purposes.  As Jody Williams--who won the Prize in 1997--remarked, "he [Obama] is going to be sending 40,000 new American troops into Afghanistan just as he received the Nobel Peace Prize?  I think that is a contradiction that needs to be seriously looked at."  And Obama's fierce, conservative critics will do just that.  The point is that the Nobel Committee might have inadvertently given our very young and very inexperienced President an award that, in reality, points to his youth and emphasizes his lack of experience in dealing with the kinds of problems that have often occupied the prize winners that I mentioned above.  And they might have unintentionally given ammunition to his critics.  (For a brief round-up of the various angles to this story, start with The Daily Beast.)

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.

VIDEO: DESMOND TUTU ACCEPTS AWARD, PRAISES HIS HOLINESS

 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.