Book Review
The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (Hardcover)
by Pico Iyer (Author)
Seduced by the Dalai Lama
He may be a global icon of goodness, as Pico Iyer's biography reminds us. But is the Dalai Lama the political leader Tibet needs?
By Louis Bayard
Mar. 25, 2008 | "Dalai Lama for Prez '08!"
The woman wearing that particular T-shirt was in the middle of a lat pull-down when I saw her, so I couldn't pose the question that came straight to mind: "Doesn't the guy already have a job?"
But as events of the past two weeks have shown, the 14th Dalai Lama may just be looking for a new line of work. A series of violent Tibetan protests against Chinese rule has provoked a massive counteroffensive by the Chinese government. Hundreds of alleged protesters and sympathizers now sit behind bars; Tibetan exiles have demanded a United Nations investigation of China's crimes, past and present; and calls are mounting for an international boycott of the Beijing Summer Olympics.
It's a volatile situation, getting only worse, and as ever, Tibet's spiritual leader has hewed to his "middle way," critiquing the extremism of both Tibetan rioters and Beijing riot breakers. While the Chinese government has gone to its usual hysterical lengths to paint the Dalai Lama as an instigator, it becomes clearer with each passing day how little he is consulted by young Tibetan radicals chafing after years of inaction.
In short, the future of Tibet, as a nation and as a people, could well be decided by parties other than the Dalai Lama, and this may be a happier development than many Tibetophiles realize. It might even make a happy man of the Dalai Lama. While still in his 30s, he was complaining to Trappist monk Thomas Merton about having to set aside spiritual devotions for the hard work of politics, and in recent years, he has talked repeatedly of stepping down -- even hinting that he may be the last of his reincarnated line.
Can the Dalai Lama, considered by many of his followers to be a living god, really fire himself? This question has real urgency for Tibetan Buddhists and, for the rest of us, some poignancy. As Pico Iyer's fortuitously timed biographical essay, "The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama," reminds us, Tenzin Gyatso never asked to be anything. "He was found at the age of two by a search party of monks, led to him after rainbows arced across the northeastern skies of Lhasa, a star-shaped fungus appeared on the pillar of the Potala Palace, and the head of the corpse of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama repeatedly moved in a northeasterly direction."
Rainbows ... swiveling heads -- there was no gainsaying omens of that order. But no one could have guessed that the god-child who emerged from such a shamanistic web would reemerge years later as such a globalized figure: earthy and earthly, amiable and enigmatic.
In part, we can attribute the Dalai Lama's transformation to his innate Catholicism. As Iyer writes, he "takes as his political model a Hindu (Gandhi), works closely with many Christians (Tutu, Václav Havel, Jimmy Carter), and lives in a country (India) that has the world's second-largest Muslim population."
More than enlarging his theology, though, he has opened his appointment book, making himself available (or so it would seem) to anyone who wants him. Today, nearly half a century after being forced out of his Himalayan enclave, he is in constant touch with world leaders, he is regularly feted by Hollywood and lionized by Madison Avenue, and his instantly recognizable face is plastered across T-shirts, bumper stickers and Apple ads. Children and CEOs and even Bobby Brown vie to touch his maroon robes. He's a touchstone of unassuming goodness, a giggling, belly-poking saint.
Iyer's challenge, then, is to get a private fix on a man who belongs, in some measure, to everyone. Iyer, a highly regarded essayist and novelist, has a knack for domesticating the exotic, and he's particularly gifted at setting scenes, which may be why his first instinct is to map his subject's terrain. In the performance of this task, his tread is both light and telling. His descriptions of Tibet convey, better than any propaganda, that region's steep decline. (The Potala Palace is now circled by swan boats, and Chinese officials, seeking to substitute flesh for spirit, have flooded Lhasa, the capital city, with hundreds of karaoke parlors and brothels, creating "a look that would not be out of place in Atlantic City.")
Even finer is Iyer's description of the Tibetan exile community in Dharamsala, India, a "wild bazaar of the sacred and profane" where monks stream out of Internet cafes, shops bristle with Tibetan tchotchkes, and a meditation center offers the following schedule: "Breakfast/ Impermanence and Death/ Suffering/ Selflessness/ Dinner/ Equanimity." Tibetan lads use their martyr mystique to woo girls and sponsors; signs like "Tibet Memory" and "Lost Horizon" wallow in old-fashioned Orientalism; and a thriving industry of beggars feeds off blissed-out Western tourists. (Not just Americans, either. At certain times of year, fully half the population of upper Dharamsala is Israeli.)
It's when Iyer turns his lens directly on his subject that he begins to lose footing. So rapidly that we may now conclude that the Dalai Lama cannot be directly observed without changing the observer. His charm, of course, is formidable, and he has added to it a component indispensable to good P.R.: access. Even Iyer, who has known the Dalai Lama a good long time, is dazed from the memory of meeting him the day after His Holiness won the Nobel Peace Prize and being spoken to "as openly and directly as if we were equals." And then to be invited to the Dalai Lama's 54th birthday party in the Malibu, Calif., hills! Famous faces crowding on every side! Cindy Crawford! Tina Chow!
Yes, one way or another, with or without his consent, Iyer has been seduced, and the language decays accordingly. The Dalai Lama, we are told, moves "at lightning speed from monk to head of state to philosopher-scientist to regular man." He is "a doctor of the soul" ... "on twenty-four-hour call for life" ... facing an "unending rush of emergency cases."
Let us step back a bit and admit that in a time of dreadful doctrinal certitude, the Dalai Lama has real allure. He goes out of his way to avoid converting people. He stresses the importance of science in contravening dogma. He urges his Tibetan followers to create a democratic constitution and governance -- "a coup against himself," Iyer calls it -- and unlike his good pal Pope John Paul II, he is even open to being succeeded by a woman (if he is succeeded at all).
"A religious teacher who is telling people not to get entangled or distracted by religion; a Tibetan who is suggesting that Tibet does not have all the answers; a Buddhist who, more and more, is urging foreigners not to take up Buddhism but to study within their own traditions, where their roots are deepest: at the very least, something quite radical is being advanced, it seems."
Something quite disarming, I would counter. In the warmth of the Dalai Lama's bespectacled gaze, we can more easily forget the less attractive aspects of his thinking -- his endorsement of nuclear weapons in India, his acceptance of contributions from Japanese terrorists. We can also, if we're really drunk on him, give him credit for changing the world.
But politics is not simply an extension of personality, and the fact remains that, under the Dalai Lama's watch, one of the world's great centers of Buddhism has been, in Iyer's words, "all but wiped off the map." Not a single nation currently recognizes the Tibetan government in exile, and the Dalai Lama's long-standing policy of accommodation and nonaggression -- he no longer calls for a separate Tibetan state, merely coexistence with the Chinese -- has failed to dislodge Tibet's occupiers by so much as a square inch.
Not all this failure can be laid at one man's door. You could even argue that the Tibetan cause was doomed from the moment Nixon pressed flesh with Mao. Or still earlier, if we are to take seriously Buddhist principles of karmic retribution. But when Iyer asks the Dalai Lama if Tibet's sufferings are a result of its "collective karma," he is greeted with gnomic fragments: "It's complicated ... mysterious." Which the bedazzled Iyer takes to mean that the answer "belonged to worlds I wasn't in a position to enter or understand." I take it to mean that the Dalai Lama lacks a good answer. (How many mountebanks have plied the same line: I could explain, but you wouldn't understand.) And perhaps it doesn't matter if he has the right answers anymore. The more vaguely he speaks, the more we fawn on him.
After all, he asks so little of us. For Western audiences, at least, the message boils down to the equivalent of a Benetton ad: Be nice, live happy. No profession of creed. No radical redistribution of income. (Richard Gere did pay for the bathrooms outside the Dalai Lama's main temple.) Not much self-sacrifice. (Feel free to wave your "Free Tibet" banner at the Chinese Embassy.) Not even much in the way of guilt for the 6 million or so Tibetans under China's yoke.
Hell, the Dalai Lama has forgiven China, so why shouldn't we? To hear him tell it: "Our real enemies are our own habitual tendencies toward thinking in terms of enemies ... Our terrors are of our own creation. The world itself is not so frightening, if only we can see it correctly."
With all due respect to His Holiness -- and with all due apologies for my Western bias -- this is horseshit. And something very close to an insult to those who have lived and died in terror, the Dalai Lama's compatriots in particular. Would he have dared offer this counsel to the 1 million Tibetans who were directly or indirectly killed by invading Chinese? To the countless others who were raped, sterilized, electroshocked? What about those Tibetan parents who were forced to applaud while their children were executed? Would they be expected to believe their sufferings were merely illusory and passing?
If what the Dalai Lama professes is truly Buddhism, then it raises the question, finally, of whether a monk can be an agent for political change in such a complex and dangerous world. Certainly, many of his own followers have begun to doubt it. To talk about peace while Tibetans are being killed, suggests one dissident interviewed by Iyer, is "tantamount to manslaughter." A 28-year-old protester in Kathmandu, Nepal, recently told a reporter, "I'm Tibetan, but I've never seen Tibet. All my life, we've been campaigning peacefully -- and what have we achieved?" "Nobody takes the middle way seriously anymore," declares writer Jamyang Norbu. "This is not non-violence. It is appeasement."
We can guess how the Dalai Lama would respond. Change happens slowly; governments change even more slowly. "Every word and tiny act has consequences," Iyer paraphrases, "though often there are consequences we cannot and will not ever see." Then how do we know there are consequences? It is a leap of faith that many Tibetans are no longer willing to make, and one wonders how persuaded the Dalai Lama is. He's no fool, after all. He can see as well as anyone that his homeland is virtually lost, that the larger world is still far from being "one body," that the incremental, soul-by-soul transformation he favors may not be reaching the souls that need transforming. Even after winning the Nobel Prize, he was heard to wonder "if my efforts are enough." And so he speaks, not surprisingly, of stepping down.
When that happens, we will have time -- Pico Iyer and the rest of us -- to decide what kind of phenomenon the Dalai Lama represents. But it's worth remembering once more what he was before that search party of monks found him: a boy like any other. There is a haunting picture of him, taken not long after he was discovered, his grave face staring out from a carapace of priestly garments weighing nearly as much as he does. What a burden to place on a child: to be a god. What a burden to place on an old man: to be a savior. All these years, we've been willing to believe almost anything of him. Why can't we at last take him at his word? That he wants to be left alone?
-- By Louis Bayard
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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/03/24/tibet/index.html?source=sphere
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The Dalai Lama's moment of truth
His Holiness struggles to defuse mounting violence between Tibet and China.
By Erich Follath and Wieland Wagner
Mar. 24, 2008 |
At this summer's Olympic Games, Beijing's Communist Party wanted to present China as a gleaming new superpower. But its brutal suppression of Tibet has jeopardized this image -- and placed the Dalai Lama himself under pressure to keep angry Tibetans on a course of nonviolence.
He sits hunched over, as if the weight of the world rested on his shoulders, his famous and often so liberating smile frozen, his characteristic and consistently bubbling optimism dissipated. The 14th Dalai Lama seems depressed as he receives the world press in his Indian exile. He is a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who has apparently lost the support of all partners in peace, a god-king without a country.
He's at a loss over what to do about the bloody unrest in Tibet. He has called for an independent international investigation of the recent riots and military crackdown, knowing that Beijing will never agree. And he's urged the Chinese leadership to exercise restraint and respect human rights. But the Dalai Lama also preaches nonviolence to his fellow Tibetans. "I lack the means to defuse the conflict," says the world's most famous asylum seeker, a man revered by people around the world -- in Germany even more so than the pope.
"We would need a miracle for that," says the Dalai Lama, 72, whose real name is Tenzin Gyatso. (His title means "Ocean of Wisdom.") "But miracles are unrealistic." The Dalai Lama has even broached the idea of stepping down as the political leader of Tibetans and returning to private life. Over and over he says: "I don't understand the Chinese, I really don't understand them. This sort of escalation cannot be in their best interest."
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has called the Dalai Lama a "hypocrite" and holds him responsible for the recent violence in the streets of the Tibet's capital, Lhasa. Other leading Chinese Communists have heaped derision on the Tibetan leader in exile, calling him everything from a "divider of the nation" to a "wolf in monks' robes."
His native Tibet has again moved into the international spotlight, but not in a way the apostle of nonviolence welcomes. China, which occupies Tibet, has declared a "people's war" there and has largely cut off the region from the outside world. Tibetan Communist Party leader Zhang Qingli has called it a "fight for life and death." After a period of silence about the incident, the Communist Party in Beijing announced that there were 16 dead on the streets of the Lhasa. But Tibetan exiles believe the death toll is closer to 100.
Since last weekend, tanks have rolled through the city's streets, and soldiers have been stationed at all key points, sealing off the Jokhang Temple in downtown Lhasa and the nearby Sera, Drepung and Ganden monasteries. Distraught Tibetans who have managed to find a functioning telephone or Internet access report house-to-house searches, arrests, beatings and torture. The Chinese apparently set an ultimatum that expired on Monday evening. Those who were recognized as protesters by the government who failed to turn themselves in and denounce fellow protesters by the deadline -- thereby accepting a supposedly "mild punishment" -- faced "the full severity of the law," as the Communist Party called it.
Eyewitnesses say that more than 1,000 people were arrested, with dozens of them paraded through Lhasa in open trucks, their heads bowed and their hands handcuffed behind their backs. More than 100 women and men had turned themselves in voluntarily, reported the region's vice governor, who claimed: "Some were directly involved in looting and arson." Qiangba Puncog, the region's governor, offered an accountant's assessment of the "serious crimes of the Dalai Lama clique," saying that during the riots of the last few days 214 shops went up in flames, 56 cars were damaged, and 61 police officers were injured.
Nevertheless, the Chinese failed to quell the resistance. The clashes between rioters and security forces continued on the outskirts of Lhasa on Tuesday, and in the city residents placed toilet paper on the streets -- a message calling on the Chinese to finally withdraw from Tibet.
But by midweek official TV broadcasts showed images of Chinese merchants clearing debris from their ruined shops, while others covered burned-out window openings with plastic tarps. The Communist Party leadership wanted to demonstrate that calm had returned to Lhasa. A reporter stood in front of a burned middle school to suggest that rioters had not even drawn the line at schools. And rumors, probably started by Communist Party officials, spread among the Chinese in Lhasa that the drinking water was contaminated. The Dalai Lama had ordered the water supply poisoned, a merchant told Norwegian tourists who were the last to leave the city, on Air China Flight 4111 to Beijing.
If Lhasa had become deathly quiet by midweek, though -- because few residents dared leave their homes to challenge Chinese forces -- protests spread like wildfire to other parts of the People's Republic.
Demonstrators took to the streets in Sichuan, Gansu, Yunnan and Qinghai provinces, where there are more Tibetans than in the so-called Tibet Autonomous Region, an arbitrary entity created by Beijing. According to Tibetans in exile, 39 people died during protests in these areas by Wednesday. Many of the demonstrators were monks and devout Buddhists openly celebrating the Dalai Lama, defying the ban on displaying his likeness, and swearing eternal obedience to their revered god-king. But
In Gansu province -- as photographs taken by two Canadian television reporters show -- demonstrators on horseback stormed down from the mountains and congregated in front of the Bora Monastery near the city of Hezuo. Together with monks and demonstrators on mopeds, the Tibetans surrounded a government building, took down the Chinese flag, and hoisted the Tibetan flag in its place before police and soldiers regained control over the area after hours of street skirmishes.
A few blocks away, monks from the Bora Monastery even broke into and ransacked Chinese shops. They deliberately spared the shopkeepers but didn't end their attacks until a lama interceded. Meanwhile, Communist Party leaders used government-controlled television to announce that they had the situation "everywhere completely under control."
The region, a popular tourist destination, is now deserted. Instead of the usual backpackers, hotels now house government security forces. Residents seeking to leave the Aba Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in the direction of Chengdu must pass through road checkpoints, where Chinese soldiers wielding machine guns search cars and trunks with metal detectors. Meanwhile, military trucks filled with young soldiers -- reinforcements -- arrive from the opposite direction.
Even in Beijing, roughly 50 young academics from the Central University for Nationalities dared to challenge the authorities by staging a sit-in -- and risking their freedom, or at the very least jeopardizing their careers. According to the state news agency Xinhua, professors convinced the protesters to return to their dormitories.
But the Chinese public was kept almost completely in the dark about most of the protests, as if a news blackout -- including blockage of the domestic feeds for CNN and the BBC, a ban on international reporting, and the expulsion of Hong Kong journalists -- could make the events go away.
And yet the news quickly circled the globe, mainly thanks to media-savvy young Tibetan politicians in exile. They spread their message throughout a worldwide network and triggered a massive outcry against Beijing. From Athens to Amsterdam, from Washington to Wellington, and from The Hague to Tokyo, demonstrators took to the streets to show solidarity for the repressed Tibetan minority. In Berlin, hundreds demonstrated in front of the embassy of the People's Republic of China. The protests were especially strident in neighboring Nepal and India, where more than 80,000 Tibetan exiles live.
In Taiwan, where elections will be held on Sunday, events on the roof of the world have suddenly taken center stage. Beijing considers the island nation a renegade province and hopes that the Kuomintang Party (KMT), which is the Taiwanese party most closely aligned with the mainland Communist Party, will win the election -- which would bring Taiwan closer to "reunification." But now the widely favored presidential candidate, KMT's Ma Ying-jeou, finds himself on the defensive. He has condemned what he calls "repression in Tibet," and he's considering a boycott of the Olympics, echoing the sentiments of some European politicians.
The events in Tibet and elsewhere have turned into a major public-relations disaster for China's leaders. Suddenly the ugly face of Chinese communism is omnipresent again, as images of past injustices are conjured up. The 1989 massacre on Beijing's Tiananmen Square, when the party's tanks mowed down peaceful demonstrators and up to 3,000 people were killed, has been on people's minds; so has the violence in Lhasa in 1959, when more than 80,000 Tibetans died in the wake of a failed uprising that led to the Dalai Lama's forced exile. It's all happening as Beijing hoped to bask in the glow of the Olympics. This preeminent celebration of sports is more than just a prestigious event for China's leadership. Beijing associates the Olympics with its return to the stage as a world power.
The countdown to this new era has been running for seven years. The 1.3 billion citizens of the most populous nation on earth have been well primed. Beijing wants to suggest it has joined the United States as a superpower -- backed up by certain economic facts. China already has the largest foreign currency reserves of any nation, and it will likely be the world's leading exporter in 2008. The West looks up to us again, Beijing implies to its own people, with its imposing new towers and new Olympic sports facilities.
Last Tuesday, at his annual press conference to conclude the Beijing meeting of the National People's Congress, Premier Wen -- already playing jovial host -- insisted that the "smiles of 1.3 billion Chinese " will be returned by the smiles of all of the peoples of the world. But his performance also revealed that this time Beijing can no longer ignore global outrage over its repressive policies in Tibet. Speaking on live TV, the premier seemed genuinely anxious to respond to reporters' questions.
But then Wen proceeded to rattle off the party's hackneyed phrases, insisting that the Dalai Lama's claims that he seeks a peaceful dialogue, not independence for Tibet, are nothing but lies. On the other hand, he was also forced to address a French reporter's request to allow the foreign press to travel to Tibet, promising that Beijing would "look into" the matter.
But why is China jeopardizing its reputation in the world in such a dramatic way? What is it about Tibet and the Dalai Lama that has triggered the Communist Party leadership's extreme reaction? And how much of the escalation can be attributed to young, radical Tibetans who no longer support the Dalai Lama's peaceful "middle way," instead seeking confrontation with their Chinese occupiers?
Even more important, what exactly happened in Lhasa? And what is happening there now, while the global public is kept in the dark?
Beijing sees the unrest in Tibet as an attack on the country's territorial integrity and sovereignty, and a large majority of Chinese share its views. Ninety-two percent of Chinese belong to the Han ethnic group, and from their perspective Beijing is merely defending China's best interests in its dealings with Tibet.
If the People's Republic were made up entirely of Han Chinese, of course, the government could have saved itself the trouble of blocking reports about the Tibetan riots on the Internet. The popular Internet portal Sina listed up to 470 Web sites with tens of thousands of comments from enraged Chinese. One user wrote that the government should "not relent in the struggle against terrorists," while another insisted that Beijing should "protect the fatherland and fight the separatists."
This outpouring of anger cannot be dismissed as a consequence of nationalist indoctrination, a strategy China's communists hope will keep them in power in their new age of capitalism. The fight against rebellious minorities along the outer edges of the massive country, in strategically important regions blessed with mineral resources, also touches on a deeply rooted Chinese fear of national disintegration. They call it "iuan," or chaos.
This is why no Chinese government can afford to yield to Western pressure to make concessions to Tibet, even if the Olympics are jeopardized. The Chinese government finds itself in a Catch-22 situation. One goal was to use the games to plaster over a host of growing internal conflicts, including social tensions and ethnic uprisings. But now the Olympics themselves may have contributed to the widening of natural fissures in China's social fabric.
After it was awarded the games, Beijing proved receptive to criticism, but only of its foreign policy. It endured scathing condemnation by Hollywood stars like Mia Farrow of Beijing's backing of the Sudanese government and its role in the genocide in Darfur (in a 2007 Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Farrow characterized the 2008 games as a "Genocide Olympics"). This outcry prompted the Communist Party rulers to consent to a U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur and even consider participating in it.
But all hopes for an improvement of human rights within China have been in vain. Despite protests by organizations like Human Rights Watch, dissidents like Yang Chulin ("We want human rights, not the Olympics") and AIDS activist Hu Jia have been put on trial for "subversion." Although Li Baodong, the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, is permitted to exercise self-criticism ("China still has a long way to go to promote and protect human rights"), the regime in Beijing already paints itself as a role model when it comes to human rights. Foreign Minister Yang Jieche insists: "The Chinese people enjoy the full extent of human rights and religious freedom."
The Chinese Communist Party's deep hatred of the Dalai Lama is rooted in his gentle but firm insistence, when speaking with politicians from around the world, that precisely the opposite is true. He accuses the Chinese government of waging "cultural genocide," in the form of the deliberate mass settlement of his native Tibet with Han Chinese, a process that destroys Tibetan traditions. One reason Beijing has responded so vehemently to the attacks is that they are so difficult to deny.
Lhasa is a predominantly Chinese city today. As a result of Han Chinese settlement, promoted by tax subsidies, Tibetans are now a minority in their own capital. They make up only about one-third of its 400,000 residents. Bars and brothels have dramatically altered the character of this holy place, as have the soldiers patrolling its streets. The city's tallest building, surrounded by colored plastic palm trees, houses the headquarters of the secret police. The most successful businesspeople are Chinese, who make no secret of their disdain for the "backward locals."
Tibetans benefit the least from a rising standard of living, even though, from a material standpoint, they are better off than ever before. But they are spiritually starved, and the majority of Tibetans still cling to their spiritual and political father figure, perhaps even more so today. They know the 14th Dalai Lama has long been a democratically oriented reformer, and most Tibetans have at least enough contact with the government in exile in Dharamsala to know it has a freely elected Parliament. The Chinese Communist Party and its "People's Liberation Army," which in 1950 invaded Tibet -- until then a de facto independent country -- have yet to acquire a comparable level of respect among Tibetans.
The Tibetan people don't enjoy true religious freedom. They are permitted to perform their Buddhist ceremonies in the private sphere, and a few monasteries have been restored to be inhabited by monks again. But the party has carefully severed Tibetans' spiritual bond with their god-king. Anyone caught with a picture of the Dalai Lama is arrested and often tortured.
The Potala Palace, the traditional seat of the Dalai Lama, is being preserved, but merely as a tourist attraction, part of Beijing's effort to reduce Tibet to a spiritual Disneyland. Late last week, when unarmed monks were intimidated during a peaceful demonstration and then arrested, the Tibetans finally vented their anger. It was this rage that probably contributed to violence against Chinese police officers and business owners -- violence that Beijing's governors met with even sharper repression. The official reaction, in turn, led to several monks attempting to commit suicide, setting off a spiral of unrest interrupted only by periods of calm that can be attributed, at best, to exhaustion.
The Dalai Lama opposes any form of violence. He reacted with extreme outrage, even bitterness, to Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao's charge that he "and his clique" had instigated the bloody riots in Lhasa. Wen even claimed that he had "a lot of evidence" to support his accusations. "Hey, Mr. Prime Minister, come here and show them to me and the world," the Nobel laureate called out a press conference on Tuesday.
In truth, the world's most famous exile has always sought to accommodate the Chinese, beginning with Mao (he was long blinded by Mao's ideological powers of persuasion), followed by Deng Xiaoping and his successors at the head of the Communist Party.
The 14th Dalai Lama gave up his fight for a sovereign independent nation long ago, and now he calls "only" for true cultural autonomy for his Tibet. In several rounds of talks, most recently in 2006, his negotiators sought to shape compromises with Beijing's negotiating team, but failed completely.
The Dalai Lama pinned his hopes on the Communist Party's current harmonization campaign and its increasingly tolerant treatment of all religions. "I am the last Tibetan leader with whom there can be a peaceful transition," the god-king said last year. "And if I am to be an obstacle, I am prepared to withdraw from politics and continue my life as a simple monk."
He left many questions unanswered: whether he should have a successor, whether a woman could become a Dalai Lama, and whether the traditional search for a new reincarnation should be replaced with a sort of conclave in which the new Dalai Lama is elected by abbots. "Perhaps there will even be two Dalai Lamas after me," he said. "One serving at Beijing's pleasure, and one recognized by the Tibetans according to spiritual tradition."
The Communist Party, as an atheist force, has presumed to be responsible for reincarnations. In 1995 it appointed the Panchen Lama, the second-highest-ranking Tibetan religious leader, and abducted the boy designated by the Dalai Lama, along with his parents. The whereabouts of the family remain unknown to this day. Beijing's Panchen Lama has obediently condemned the "crimes of the Dalai clique."
The young Tibetan Buddhists of Dharamsala insist that the 14th Dalai Lama has put up with too much, far too much. Taking the nonviolent Mahatma Gandhi as his role model, as the Dalai Lama does, is all very well and good, they say, but the approach should also yield comparable results.
"Gandhi brought independence to India, and where are we today?" Kelsang Phuntsok, then-president of the Tibetan Youth Congress in Dharamsala asked provocatively in 2007. "The word 'violence' is not a taboo for me. At this point we are getting nowhere with the position taken by our revered leader. We are like the panda bears of international politics. Everyone cuddles us, but no one does anything serious on our behalf. We must take fate into our own hands."
When a member of the Youth Congress starved himself to death during a protest a few years ago, the Dalai Lama denounced his act. But young Tibetans celebrated him as a "martyr." It cannot be ruled out that some have thought of transforming their pacifist struggle into a resistance movement akin to the Palestinian struggle. But there is no concrete evidence whatsoever that last week's unrest in Lhasa was part of a deliberate military provocation.
In their campaign surrounding the Beijing Olympics, until now, young Tibetans have opted for creative rather than violent campaigns. They've unfurled "Free Tibet" banners at the Great Wall, used all legal means at their disposal and even presented the IOC with a list of athletes ready to compete as part of their own Tibetan "national team." They have launched rallies converging at the Chinese borders and staged PR-conscious demonstrations in front of embassies.
Now that the young Tibetans are trying to achieve a boycott of the Beijing games, they agree with the Dalai Lama's view that the event should be used to draw attention to the cause of their oppressed people.
Unlike the 14th Dalai Lama, however, the Tibetan Youth Congress will continue to fight for full independence. Young Tibetans think their god-king is simply not of this world when they hear him say: "In Buddhism, we are constantly concerned with how we handle our negative forces and emotions. I also pray for the Chinese. They, of all people, need our sympathy."
Dharamsala's wild young Tibetans have a sixth sense for understanding provocations by the Chinese -- when Tibet's Communist Party chairman Zhang says, for example, that the party is the "father and mother of the Tibetan people," and claims to know exactly "what is good for the children -- the Central Committee is the true Buddha of Tibetans." The Dalai Lama, when he hears this sort of rhetoric, says that he has "great understanding for the impatience of the young people," and that he must admit that his "middle way" has registered few victories so far.
Yet the Dalai Lama sees no alternative to his approach, no matter how fiercely Beijing's politicians demonize him. "As neighbors, we must live together," he says, "side by side."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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This article has been provided by Der Spiegel through a special arrangement with Salon. For more from Europe's most-read newsmagazine, visit Spiegel Online at http://www.spiegel.de/international or subscribe to the daily newsletter.
-- By Erich Follath and Wieland Wagner
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Website of His Holiness the 14rh Dalai Lama
http://www.dalailama.com/
http://www.thetibetsite.com/
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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Humane-Rights-Agenda/
http://humane-rights-agenda.blogspot.com/
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