Wallpainting in Punakha Dzong, Bhutan. The cosmology according to the Kalachakra-Tantra, on which the Kagyu-Astrology is based since the 3rd Karmapa, is depicted here.
Photos: Detlev Göbel
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Bhutan, Buddhism | Leo Golan | 
February 17, 2009 2:17 pm | 
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Sorrel Neuss, Guardian.co.uk
Sexual abuse in monasteries and oppressive feudalism in traditional Tibetan society has been factored out of the argument against China’s occupation, oversimplifying it.
Han Chinese guards deliberately obstruct the pilgrim route through Lhasa to the holy Jokhang temple by sipping tea at strategically placed tables in the middle of the road. In front of the Potala, the Dalai Lama’s former seat of power, an imposing guarded concrete square glorifies China’s occupation.
Tibet seems like as a celestial paradise held in chains, but the west’s tendency to romanticise the country’s Buddhist culture has distorted our view. Popular belief is that under the Dalai Lama, Tibetans lived contentedly in a spiritual non-violent culture, uncorrupted by lust or greed: but in reality society was far more brutal than that vision.
Last December, Ye Xiaowen, head of China’s administration for religious affairs, published a piece in the state-run China Daily newspaper that, although propaganda, rings true. "History clearly reveals that the old Tibet was not the Shangri-La that many imagine", he wrote "but a society under a system of feudal serfdom."
Until 1959, when China cracked down on Tibetan rebels and the Dalai Lama fled to northern India, around 98% of the population was enslaved in serfdom. Drepung monastery, on the outskirts of Lhasa, was one of the world’s largest landowners with 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. High-ranking lamas and secular landowners imposed crippling taxes, forced boys into monastic slavery and pilfered most of the country’s wealth – torturing disobedient serfs by gouging out their eyes or severing their hamstrings.
Tashi Tsering, now an English professor at Lhasa University is representative of Tibetans that do not see China’s occupation as worse tyranny. He was taken from his family near Drepung at 13 and forced into the Dalai Lama’s personal dance troupe. Beaten by his teachers, Tsering put up with rape by a well-connected monk in exchange for protection. In his autobiography, The Struggle for Modern Tibet, Tsering writes that China brought long-awaited hope when is laid claim to Tibet in 1950.
After studying at the University of Washington, Tsering returned to Chinese-occupied Tibet in 1964, convinced that the country could modernise effectively by cooperating with the Chinese. Denounced during the Cultural Revolution, arrested in 1967 to spend six years in prison and labour camps, he still maintains that Mao Tse-Tung liberated his people.
Caught between a system reminiscent of medieval Europe and a colonial force that brought forced collectivisation and similar human rights abuses, Tibet moved from one oppressive regime to another.
During the 1990s, Tibetans suspected of harbouring nationalist tendencies were arrested and imprisoned and in 2006, Romanian climbers witnessed Chinese guards shooting a group of refugees headed for the Nepalese border. China’s abhorrent treatment of "political subversives" has rightly spurned a global Free Tibet movement, diminishing the benefits that it did bring to society.
After 1959, it abolished slavery, serfdom and unfair taxes. Creating thousands of jobs through new infrastructure projects, it built Tibet’s first hospitals and opened schools in every major village, bringing education to the masses. Clean water was pumped into the main towns and villages and the average life expectancy has almost doubled since 1950, to 60.
Even so, in 2001 the Dalai Lama said: "Tibet, materially, is very, very backward. Spiritually it is quite rich. But spirituality can’t fill our stomachs."
Freedom for Tibet is not simply a case of liberation from China and the reinstatement of traditional values. Around 70 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line and enhanced spirituality alone will not improve economic conditions. Poverty is not quaint no matter how colourful the culture and the Tibet question is one that should be addressed from a rational, rather than an idealised viewpoint.
Nearby Bhutan, which has a similar Buddhist culture that it tried to preserve by banning television until 1999 and limiting foreign visitors, only held its first democratic elections in 2007. The Dalai Lama now promotes democracy, but Tibet may well have looked worse than it does today if the old order had been left to its own devices.
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Tags: China, Dalai Lama, Tibet
Opinions, Tibet | Leo Golan | February 13, 2009 3:23 pm | Comments (2)
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on 2nd of February urged China to resolve the ‘underlying issues’ in Tibet.
Addressing a joint press conference with visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Brown also indicated that his country sought improvement on the human rights front in the world’s most populous nation.
"The UK will continue through our regular dialogue to seek rapid progress towards all international human rights standards and I urge further dialogue on the Chinese government to resolve the underlying issues in Tibet," Brown said.
Brown tempered this implied criticism, however, by crediting Wen’s social and economic policies with "lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty".
Prior to Wen’s visit, Brown has been warned not to sacrifice human rights concerns to the prospect of boosting exports.
Wen’s visit has been marked by raucous street protests in London, which saw around 50 pro-Tibetan demonstrators gather outside 10 Downing Street on Monday. Five pro-Tibet demonstrators were arrested in London on Sunday.
Tibet saw massive anti-China protests in March 2008 resulting in a harsh clampdown from Chinese authorities.
Brown insisted that human rights concerns had not been forgotten in the bilateral relationship.
In a written ministerial statement issued in October last year, British government went on to acknowledge that the exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama has actually met conditions set by the Chinese government in order to have dialogue for a negotiated settlement on Tibet’s issue.
“Chinese Government has said that it is serious about dialogue and that it hopes for a positive outcome. It has set conditions for dialogue which we believe the Dalai Lama has met,” British Foreign Secretary David Miliband stated in the statement.
“No government which is committed to promoting international respect for human rights can remain silent on the issue of Tibet, or disinterested in a solution to its problems,” the statement further emphasised.
Source: www.phayul.com
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Tags: Dalai Lama, Politics, Tibet
News, Politics, Tibet | Leo Golan | February 4, 2009 12:22 pm | Comments (2)
By MICHAEL POWELL, The New York Times
January 31, 2009
The search for the present Dalai Lama commenced in earnest in 1935 when the embalmed head of his deceased predecessor is said to have wheeled around and pointed toward northeastern Tibet.
Then, the story goes, a giant, star-shaped fungus grew overnight on the east side of the tomb. An auspicious cloud bank formed and a regent saw a vision of letters floating in a mystical lake, one of which — Ah — he took to refer to the northeast province of Amdo.
High lamas set off at a gallop and found a 2-year-old boy in a distant village. This child, they determined after a series of tests, was the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.
There is little linear about lama succession in Tibet. And now, as the 14th Dalai Lama journeys into his 74th year, the question of how to pick his successor has come to preoccupy both him and his followers, as Tibet stands at an ever more precarious political pass.
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A photograph of a painting of the 14th Dalai Lama, who was discovered by Buddhist leaders as a 2-year-old, with the aid of signs. Kanwal Krishna/Agence France-Presse
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Buddhism, Opinions, Politics, Tibet | Leo Golan | February 1, 2009 1:39 pm | Comments (1)
Great post at http://olfactoryrescueservice.wordpress.com about Mandala of Deities Incense Series. Please visit a link to read this really good review.
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Incense | Leo Golan | January 30, 2009 4:03 pm | Comments (1)
