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BUDDHA: Dalai lama still dreams of return to Lhasa


A deviation from recent deviant progamming on Buddha and a reasonable summary 
of recent events in Tibet.

WARNING: low level humor, medium level political content, buddhist concepts


http://www2.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/world/030596/world15_29009.html

DALAI LAMA STILL DREAMS OF RETURN TO LHASA
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Copyright © 1996 Nando.net
Copyright © 1996 N.Y. Times News Service

DHARMSALA, India (Mar 5, 1996 8:51 p.m. EST) -- Among the pilgrims who flock
to the dalai lama's home-in-exile in these Himalayan hills, many regard him
as a living god -- some of them Buddhist monks like the dalai lama himself,
others refugees from faiths and places far removed from his native Tibet.

Since he fled to India in 1959, the Tibetan leader has grown accustomed to
the cult of reverence in which Tibetans and non-Tibetans have enveloped him,
especially since his teachings on nonviolence earned him the Nobel Peace
Prize in 1989. But when the veneration gets a bit too much, the 60-year-old
Tibetan has a way of puncturing the balloon.

"In the 1960s, the Chinese Communists described me as a wolf in a monk's
robe, as a murderer and a rapist," he said in an interview in an old
bungalow here that is part of the compound given to the Tibetans by the
Indian government. "Then there are people who call me a Living Buddha."

"But these are two extremes," he said, breaking into a throaty chuckle. "In
reality, I am just an ordinary human being." If this were true, the dalai
lama could contemplate a quiet retirement here, after a life that was never
his own from the moment in 1940 when he was installed, as a 5-year-old
peasant's son, on the dalai lama's throne.

But recent years have underlined his importance as the spiritual and
temporal leader of Tibetan Buddhists, and Beijing's apparent determination
to whittle away his influence among the six million Tibetans in China.

The dalai lama has rarely been more alienated from the Chinese leadership
than now. In January 1995, 15 years of sporadic and ultimately unproductive
contacts with Chinese intermediaries on Tibet's future were broken off by
China. Since then, China has reverted to a bitter hostility, to the dalai
lama and to Buddhist institutions in Tibet.

Amnesty International says China began a new wave of arrests among Tibetans
monks, nuns and independence activists about the time it broke off talks
with the dalai lama. The rights group has published detailed reports of
beatings among those arrested, and Chinese officials warned recently that
they would close monasteries and nunneries if resistance continued.

The crackdown is a return to patterns that China has followed for decades.
Although the repression eased after 1979, when Deng Xiaoping began the
dialogue with the dalai lama by saying everything was negotiable except
Tibet's remaining part of China, the cumulative damage has been enormous.

According to pamphlets issued by the dalai lama's office, the Chinese have
closed or destroyed more than 6,000 monasteries and killed 1.2 million
Tibetans since Communist troops overran Tibet in 1950.

Along with the current crackdown, the old vituperation against the dalai
lama has crept back. Official Chinese diatribes have described him as a
"splittist" and a "traitor" for not accepting China's demands that he
acknowledge Tibet as "an inseparable part of China."

China also demands that he dismantle the Tibetan government-in-exile in
Dharmsala, and "stop engaging in activities to split the motherland,"
including his frequent overseas trips to promote Tibet's cause.

In November, the confrontation took a turn for the worse when China
engineered the installation of its own candidate for the position of panchen
lama, Tibet's second most important religious official.

The move, seven months after the dalai lama announced his own nomineee, left
Tibetan Buddhists with two 6-year-old boys, each identified as the
reincarnation of the former panchen lama, who died in Beijing in 1989 at age
50. The dalai lama's choice, Gendun Choekyi Nyima, has disappeared,
apparently into house arrest in Beijing, along with his parents and 50 monks
and Tibetan laypeople associated with his nomination.

Some Tibetan officials suggest there may even have been moves in the last
year by China's security agencies to mount an attempt on the dalai lama's
life in Dharmsala, or perhaps against senior members of his entourage.

In December, the Indian authorities arrested three young Tibetans who
crossed into India from Tibet earlier in the year in the guise of refugees.
According to Tibetan officials here, two men and a woman, all in their 20s,
are being held in an Indian jail after telling investigators they were
recruited by Chinese security agencies, trained in techniques of
infiltration, intelligence-gathering and weapons-handling and sent here to
keep watch on the dalai lama.

Tempa Tsering, information chief in the exile government, said diaries taken
from the three showed they watched the Tibetan leader closely. "They told us
that they had been ordered to settle in Dharmsala and wait for further
instructions," he said. The Indian authorities have tightened the dalai
lama's security, assigning additional policemen to keep a round-the-clock
watch inside his compound in the village of McLeod Ganj, 6,000 feet up in
the hills above Dharmsala.

In the presence of a man who bears the titles of holy lord, gentle glory and
ocean of wisdom, there is an absence of the portentousness that often
accompanies a meeting with a president or prime minister. But behind the
jocularity with which he greeted a visitor, the dalai lama seemed like a man
with his patience wearing thin. At one moment he was joshing about his
chances of living another 20 or 30 years. The next he was discussing the
possibility that China may have entertained the idea of having him killed.

>From what he had been told, he said, the three young intruders had said they
had instructions to keep a watch on him. But whether this meant they might
have planned to kill him was something else.

"I don't consider that someone will want to threaten my life," he said.
"Personally, I have no enemies."

By discussing the possibility of an assassination attempt, he offered a
measure of the distance he and his onetime interlocutors in China have
traveled since the 1980s, when they held more than a decade of secret
discussions on Tibet.

The talks culminated in 1988 in a speech by the dalai lama in Strasbourg,
France, in which he offered publicly for the first time a formula he has
called "the middle way" -- a future in which Tibet would remain part of
China but with wide autonomy in all matters except foreign policy and
defense.

China denounced the formula, calling it "a disguised form of independence,"
but even making the offer came at a cost for the dalai lama. Tibetan exiles,
especially the younger ones, saw it as a betrayal of Tibet's claim to
independence.

China's return to a hard-line policy has found its clearest expression in
the machinations over the new panchen lama. Behind arguments about the
obscure procedures involved in divining which Tibetan child is the
reincarnation of the spirit of the dead lama, the two panchen lamas --
China's, and the dalai lama's -- seem like an embodiment of the two Tibets,
one favored by the dalai lama that would be semi-free, the other wholly a
captive of China.

To Tibetans, China's willingness to hijack procedures that are at the heart
of the mystique of Tibetan faith is almost the ultimate affront, the more so
since Chinese statements in recent months have heaped contempt on the boy
chosen by the dalai lama. The Chinese have asserted that he once drowned a
dog, "a heinous crime in the eyes of Buddha," and that his parents were
"notorious for speculation, deceit and scrambling for fame and profit."
China's nominee, Gyaltsen Norbu, has been presented as a paragon of Buddhist
virtues.

"My main concern is for the panchen lama himself," the dalai lama said,
referring to Gendun Choekyi Nyima, his own nominee, of whose whereabouts
Chinese officials have professed ignorance. The Tibetan leader said he
feared the boy could be subjected to brainwashing.

"It's a clear example of bullying and shortsightedness," he said of China's
actions.

Under pressure to find ways of responding to China's assertiveness, the
dalai lama has been confronted by Tibetan youths who have urged a return to
the kind of armed insurgency that was mounted against Chinese rule in the
1950s. But these youths, he said, should think things through.

"It's very easy to see these mujahedeen in Afghanistan and the Middle East,
but if we really put it in practice -- first of all, sufficient weapons,
from where? And how to send them to Tibet? Through India? Impossible.
Through Nepal? Impossible. One or two guns, maybe; nothing more."

In any event, he said, if Tibetans stuck to nonviolence, they would find
that things in China would change in ways that would make possible political
concessions that were currently unimagineable. Behind the stern mask of the
current Chinese leadership, he said, there are strong democratic stirrings
in China.

"I always believed that the Tienanmen Square massacre was a temporary
setback for the democratic movement," he said. A visitor here does not have
to go far to find people, some close to the dalai lama, and not all of them
young, whose respect for him as a spiritual leader is accompanied by a sense
that he is a dreamer. Among these people, it was a matter for black humor
when the dalai lama was quoted recently as saying he expected to be back in
the 1,000-room Potala Palace in Lhasa by the end of the decade.

While conceding that this may have been an exaggeration, the Tibetan leader
said he still believed a breakthrough would come within five years, and that
he would live to sit once more on the Lion's Throne that is the dalai lama's
traditional seat of power in Lhasa. If people think he is dreaming, he said,
they should look at recent history, for example in the former Soviet Union
and in South Africa.

"And so it will be in our case," he said. "We have had our own dark period
for 40 years, but for us too, things will surely change."

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