My husband, Jeff Stamps, a long-time student of world affairs, politics, and Buddhism, wrote this piece, which I hope you will read.
An Easter prayer for the Tibetan people
and their spiritual leader
By Jeff Stamps
This Easter, my prayer is for the Tibetan people everywhere and for their spiritual and temporal leader, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.
This global spiritual force, with his inclusive religious mantra, is an intensely-trained monk from the distant nomadic steppes of Shangri-La, the “roof of the world.” He also runs a government-in-exile from a generously-provided sanctuary in India.
The Nobel Peace Prize apostle of non-violence, the Dalai Lama is the Gandhi of our time, albeit with more spiritual depth but fewer political skills. Since his exile, he has held the same “middle way” view: cultural autonomy for Tibet, but not political independence. Today, he struggles with both the oppression of his people by the Chinese and with the now-unconstrained frustration of Tibetan youth demanding independence. Among all of us who love Tibet for whatever reasons, we share a deep sense that time for the Dalai Lama’s “middle way” and Tibet’s very survival is running out.
By “Tibet” surviving, I mean Tibetans as an ethnic group with roots deep into pre-history, a people treated as racially inferior (“barbarians”), as a coherent religious group of Tibetan Buddhists, and as a national group of several millennia standing. For the Dalai Lama’s strategy of non-violence to work, the world must find ways to help Tibet and China find a path that provides Tibetans the cultural and local autonomy they require within the Chinese federal system of governance.
There are four reasons the world should care about the Tibetan uprising at this time: (1) the preservation of an ancient and abiding culture; (2) respect for a very old spiritual tradition; (3) the act of genocide; and (4) concern for the environment.
(1) Preservation of an ancient and abiding culture
Tibetans and the Han Chinese share an ancient history. The Han Chinese carry one of the oldest gene pools of civilization on the planet, rooted in central plains and valleys that were epicenters of the early agricultural revolution. Tibetans represent the enduring presence of an incalculably-old nomadic culture, a natural product of their environment at the top edge of the human habitable range.
For millennia, the Han Chinese have feared the nomadic “barbarians”—like Mongols, Tibetans, and Uighurs. That’s why they built the Great Wall, a truly stupendous feat, born of fear, the same fear the Romans had of the (European) barbarians to their north and east. They, too, feared religious movements among their subject peoples, central to the story of Jesus represented today on Easter.
The repeated clashes between agrarian Han with the nomadic tribal states weave a tangled history indeed, few versions of which would agree with the official Chinese narrative. The Chinese story traces Tibet’s vassal status to the thirteenth century, just when in fact Mongol patronage of Tibet was leading to the establishment of the Dalai Lama position and its unbroken lineage to today’s remarkable holder of it.
Global human diversity is the key ingredient to the extraordinary creativity we need for global survival. We cannot afford to lose this vast and profound Tibetan culture and its place in our global mix of civilizations. That said, I can appreciate how the Han Chinese people would accept the Tibetan invasion and current oppression as unfortunate “excesses” natural to the generally generous process of bringing civilization to the backward Tibetans. This Chinese sense of cultural superiority ties back through countless generations.
Yet, I believe the Chinese and Tibetan people can work it out. I’m not sure China’s current government can. Not without a lot of pressure. But I’m hopeful about the next Chinese generation, the ones who struggle for simple access to the web.
(2) Respect for a very old spiritual tradition
The ferocity of the Chinese authorities’ response to the current protests points to a still deeper reason for their trepdiation. This barely articulated fear arises from the Marxist dogma of religion as the “opiate of the people,” still a central pillar of an state orthodoxy that has nevertheless abandoned many of Marx’s economic principles. Tibetans are deeply spiritual people with seemingly arcane rituals conducted in a language foreign to the Chinese.
State-sponsored atheism is a fixed part of the ruling oligarchy’s ideology. Chinese authorities fear any expression (e.g., Falun Gong) that might tap into the spirituality inherent in the core of Chinese civilization. Like many in my generation, my first exposure to Eastern religious thought was through the Chinese Book of Changes, I Ching, the philosophy of wholeness and yin-yang complementarity, perhaps the world’s oldest religious text. The physicist Neils Bohr introduced me (figuratively, of course).
We should all care about the Tibetan people as a carrier of a precious spiritual heritage that is profound, learned, practical, and gentle. As Americans, we can be most proud of our heritage of religious tolerance, a—perhaps the—founding principle of our nation.
At a time like this, the world so desperately needs people of extraordinary spiritual accomplishment. Here we have (a) a whole nation of Tibetans, (b) a small diaspora of perhaps 200,000 Tibetans outside Greater China, and (c) the exemplar, a man and a monk, Tenzin Gyatso.
(3) The act of genocide
“Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group." It is an international crime against humanity. The gravest.
As measured by all the standards in the definition, we have witnessed the slow genocide waged against Tibet over a half-century.
The Tibetan decimnation has come in four brutal spurts when the genocide was most vicious and (to some extent) visible:
- First in 1959, when China began its original (slow) invasion of Tibet, finally reaching Lhasa and forcing the young Dalai Lama to flee into exile.
- Second, in the 1960s during the rampages of the Red Guard, extraordinarily brutal and destructive throughout China, even more so in Tibet.
- Third, in the late 1980s as peoples all over the Communist world believed that the great monoliths were finally giving way. The Tibetan uprising was a precursor to the brief Tiananmen Square miracle-followed-by-atrocity and continuing decades of suppression of human rights and dissent in China.
- Finally, today, in a resurgence of cultural destruction that started several years ago ahead of the opening of the railroad to Lhasa and the beginning of what I fear will be the final chapter of the annihilation of Tibet as a meaningful ethnic, racial, religious, and national group.
As it prepares its public face for hosting the 2008 Olympic Games, China is steward to two great genocides today: the “fast” genocide of Darfur and the “slow” one of Tibet.
(4) Concern for the environment
A final reason the world should care: Tibetan is yet another “canary in
the mine” warning of ecological catastrophe. Here Tibet highlights the
juncture of the modern state and the cross-national demands of the
environment and energy. China is indeed bringing industrialization to
the high fragile Tibetan plateau—along with a staggering cost in
pollution, a huge import of unhappy Han, and an increasingly
marginalized Tibetan underclass in its own country. But this isn’t all.
China has just surpassed the US in the odious measure of planetary health, the amount of CO2 generated. Though its contribution to pollution has only just begun, it is accelerating fast. As an American, whose country has a carbon footprint that still greatly exceeds China’s in per capital production of greenhouse gasses, I have little moral authority on this matter, but Tibetans and other, especially indigenous, people do. A dear friend, Wangchuk Meston, risked his life to investigate the environmental impact of just one such project.
All the environmental portents worldwide are bad. Every new finding pushes critical tipping point benchmarks closer in time and faster in formation. In a few years of oblivious governing, China can single-handedly bring the world to catastrophe—push us all over the global warming tipping point. Tibetans exemplify the necessity of standing up to the ever-more-powerful Chinese state, something that few in the world are ready to do. But we must learn to do so in constructive dialogue.
We’re all interconnected. We know that. Let us all help the Chinese and Tibetan people find a way to protect a unique culture within a larger 21st-century Chinese civilization that embodies the harmony so central to its worldview.
