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TP - Thursday,
April 16, 2015 By Thubten Samphel
By now it
is an open secret the degree to which respect for the Dalai Lama is growing
in China within the leadership and business circles and amongst the
ordinary people. The BBC's exclusive report on China's super-rich communist
Buddhists is the latest proof.
An aspect of the Tibetan leader little noted by scholars is the extensive
contacts he had with the revolutionary leaders who created modern China.
The Dalai Lama was in China for almost a year from 1954 to 1955. During
this period he learnt Chinese and the ideals of socialism as explained to
him by his Chinese hosts. More importantly, the Tibetan spiritual and
political leader met with the top echelon of the Chinese communist
leadership, including Chairman Mao Zedong, who, according to the Tibetan
leader, treated him as a "father would treat a son." His Chinese
hosts took the Dalai Lama in a grand tour of new China to bring home to the
Tibetan leader the benefits of socialism. He witnessed the effective
governance these leaders provided to turn their vast and impoverished
country into a modern and egalitarian society.
How did the new socialist China affect the views and shape the thinking of
the Dalai Lama? Did this experience later resurface in his worldview and
the governance he provided in exile?
At the time for the Dalai Lama and for China the world was fresh and new.
He was 19, in the prime of youth and open to the new world he saw being
re-created in China. For China the period was a fresh start, after a
century of humiliation under Western imperialism, enervating warlordism,
civil war, Japanese invasion and pervasive and crippling corruption. The
Dalai Lama visited China at a time when the country's revolutionary zeal
was at its height, when its collective determination to create a just and
equal society was unsullied by the ideological madness and physical carnage
that followed. It was a time when new China showed the Tibetan leader its
better side.
New China
in the person of Mao Zedong also showed Tibet's political leader and its
foremost spiritual master its ambivalence to Tibetan Buddhism. The Dalai
Lama recounts this episode in his autobiography, My Land and My People:
A few days
later I had a message from Mao Tse-tung to say that he was coming to see me
in an hour's time. When he arrived he said he had merely come to call. Then
something made him say that Buddhism was quite a good religion, and Lord
Buddha, although he was a prince, had given a good deal of thought to the
question of improving the conditions of the people. He also observed that
the Goddess Tara was a kind-hearted woman. After a very few minutes, he
left. I was quite bewildered by these remarks and did not know what to make
of them.
The comments Mao made during their last meeting shocked the Dalai Lama
beyond belief. My final interview with this remarkable man was toward the
end of my visit to China. I was at a meeting of the Standing Committee of
the National Assembly when I received a message asking me to go to see him
at this house. By then, I had been able to complete a tour of the Chinese
provinces, and I was able to tell him truthfully that I had been greatly
impressed and interested by all the development projects I had seen. Then
he started to give me a long lecture about the true form of democracy, and
advised me how to become a leader of the people and how to take heed of
their suggestions. And then he edged closer to me on his chair and
whispered:
I understand you very well. But of course, religion is poison. It has
two great defects: It undermines the race, and secondly it retards the
progress of the country. Tibet and Mongolia have both been poisoned by it.
Marx's
dictum that religion was the opiate of the people rode roughshod over
whatever personal regard or sensitivity Mao might have had towards
Buddhism. Before and during the Cultural Revolution religion was the target
of communist wrath. Monasteries were reduced to ruins, temples were
destroyed and monks were disrobed. This was an attempt by new China to
prevent the fumes of opiate from sullying socialism. In Tibet the
destruction of Tibetan Buddhism had an overwhelmingly political overtone.
There could not be two suns in the same sky. Buddhism must melt under the
rays of the socialist sun.
Despite
these, the ideas of socialism the Dalai Lama learnt in China stayed with
him. One is his articulation of the concept of universal responsibility, of
acting locally but thinking globally. As he says,
In Buddhist practice we get so used to this idea of nonviolence and the
ending of all suffering that we become accustomed to not harming or
destroying anything indiscriminately. Although we do not believe that trees
or flowers have minds, we treat them also with respect. Thus we share a
sense of universal responsibility for both mankind and nature.
Anyone
would think this kind of thinking comes entirely from his Buddhist
background, from the Buddhist concept of the interdependence of everything.
No, the Dalai Lama said in 2007 during a visit to Australia. The idea also
came from communist international, from the toiling workers and peasants of
the world expressing their solidarity with other suffering workers and
peasants.
In 1979 the Dalai Lama blessed the founding of a Tibetan Communist Party
(TCP) in exile by a group of young educated refugees. He hoped that the
Tibetan Communist Party in exile would serve as a bridge to those Tibetans
in Tibet who shared the ideas and ideals of a socialist Tibet. But this
ideological bridge between the Tibetan exiles and their compatriots in
Tibet collapsed when the TCP decided to close its communist shop.
But the
most far-reaching of the China experience which stayed with the Dalai Lama
was his ability and willingness to reach to the Chinese people. The need to
reach out to the Chinese became especially acute when in the wake of the
peaceful uprisings that erupted throughout Tibet in 2008, the Chinese
authorities used its awesome media firepower to stoke ethnic hostility
between Tibetans and Chinese. The Chinese authorities, as a part of the
state repression, were literally using the enormous public anger of the
Chinese on the hapless minority Tibetans. In view of this, the Tibetan leader
found it necessary to go out of his way to explain to Chinese scholars and
students the nature of the Tibetan people's struggle. The Middle-Way Policy
did not seek independence for Tibet. It sough real autonomy under a single
administration within the scope of the constitution of the People's
Republic of China. His efforts to reach out to the Chinese paid off. He was
able to win the trust and respect of a growing number of Chinese netizens.
In fact, there are some Chinese who are amplifying the Dalai Lama's voice
in China. Beyond the radar of China's censors and whispered in the din of
China's Internet chatter are expressions of Chinese support and sympathy. A
film, The Dialogue, posted on YouTube and premiered in Hong Kong late this
March, reveals that an increasing number of young Chinese on the mainland
are embracing the Dalai Lama's message of reconciliation and mutual
respect.
The
Dialogue is made by Wang Lixiong, a writer who is based in Beijing and
married to Tsering Woeser, a tireless blogger for Tibet. The film grew out
of the two conversations that Wang Lixiong organized between the Dalai Lama
and netizens on the Mainland in 2010. Later, he organized a videoconference
between the Dalai Lama and two Chinese human rights lawyers,Teng Biao in
Shenzhen and Jiang Tianyong in Beijing.
The
questions the two Chinese human rights lawyers and their compatriots put
before the Dalai Lama are the concerns and anxieties of Tibetans on both
sides of the Himalayas grapple with. The Tibetan leader answered questions
on his likely spiritual successor, whether Tibetans would be faithful to
non-violence after his passing away, how the issue of Tibet could be
resolved, the nature of Tibetan autonomy and relations between Tibetans and
Chinese. 1,543 Chinese submitted more than 300 questions. 12,771 Chinese
voted for the 10 best questions before the censors moved in.
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