In Exile From the Land of Snows (3 page)

The PRC’s invasion of the Tibetan plateau removed, for the first time in history, the vital buffer balancing Asia’s dominant civilizations. Today India and China—comprising one-third of humanity—station 150,000 opposing troops across a 1,200-mile Himalayan front. Sixteen rounds of border talks have failed to resolve territorial disputes remaining from the 1962 Sino–Indian War, Tibet’s volatility grows, and, with India recently declaring China its main strategic threat, the future risks large-scale conflict.
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The Dalai Lama’s first Sino–Tibetan settlement bid—the Five Point Peace Plan presented to the U.S. Congress on September 21, 1987—addressed the danger in Asia by calling for the “transformation of the whole of Tibet into a zone of peace”—a demilitarized region whose traditionally neutral, nonviolent Buddhist heritage could restore mutual trust between the continent’s major powers. With China’s destabilizing megadamming of Tibetan rivers—holding hostage much of South and Southeast Asia’s water supply—the need for such comity has, again, increased greatly.

“A Tibetan settlement must come for India and China to achieve peace,” says Tempa Tsering, a former cabinet minister of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile.
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“And for that, the Chinese have to accept our right to self-rule. China, though, only negotiates if its opponent has the upper hand.” Some Tibetans, accordingly, ponder discord: either a second Sino–Indian war, in which one of Beijing’s regular incursions would goad India into a counterattack; or a low-intensity conflict, allowing Delhi’s high-altitude Tibetan commando brigade, the Special Frontier Force, to coordinate a popular insurgency, cutting off China’s isolated garrisons—as in the 1909–12 Manchu invasion. Even so, the vast majority of Tibetans favor a peaceful solution with a more moderate Chinese government accepting the framework for self-rule as outlined in the 2008 Government-in-Exile’s “Memorandum on Genuine Autonomy for the Tibetan People.” That, in turn, would enable the Dalai Lama’s return with renewed Chinese respect for his time-honored role as an ethical paragon. “His Holiness will win over young Chinese with the power of his compassion,” Tempa Tsering predicts of the last, best scenario.
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“Just as he personally created a worldwide Tibet movement, he’ll even more powerfully touch those who’ve been most brutalized—the Chinese people themselves. Then you’ll see
His Holiness giving, as he first hoped for in the 1990s, the Kalachakra Initiation in Tiananmen Square.”

Indeed, the Dalai Lama’s ability to assuage China’s “moral crisis”—by restoring indigenous Buddhist principles—has long shown its value. “Right from the beginning His Holiness said, ‘We don’t hate the Chinese people,’ ” recounts Tenzin Geyche Tethong, the Dalai Lama’s foreign secretary for forty years.
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“He constantly encouraged Tibetans and Chinese to develop trust and friendship. Finally I told His Holiness, ‘Please don’t say “we.” Say, ‘I have no hatred of the Chinese.’ He just laughed. But almost no Tibetan feels good about the Chinese. Everyone has family members who died in a prison camp, were tortured, or killed. Then, when China opened in the 1980s, His Holiness went all-out to meet and befriend mainland Chinese. And when they learned what had really happened in Tibet, many were deeply sorry. Some would get up, in front of hundreds of others, and shamefully apologize in tears. I was moved and shocked and then totally convinced that His Holiness had been right all along. When he said ‘Ordinary Chinese are just like Tibetans: we’re all the same human beings,’ he knew that honest observers, seeing injustice, would oppose it. It finally penetrated my thick skull that problems are solved by touching people’s humanity.” The thousands of Chinese who annually attend the Dalai Lama’s teachings in India share, no doubt, the same sentiment that widely greeted his first Taiwan visit in 1997, “Now we know what a real Buddhist monk is like!”

“Tibetan culture has great potential to benefit all of humanity.” Thus Tenzin Gyatso tirelessly describes his deepest motive for saving Tibet. And while altruistic principles and a profound philosophy—describing phenomena as illusory-like appearances ultimately empty of inherent existence—heighten Buddhism’s appeal, a pioneering exchange between Buddhist mind and modern material science shows more tangible proof of Tibetan expertise.

In 2011, in Washington, DC’s Verizon Center, the Dalai Lama told 20,000 attendees of Tibetan Buddhism’s largest rite, the Kalachakra Initiation: “During the last fifty years in India there have been twenty to thirty cases of
tukdam
, or death meditation; an advanced yogic practice in which the subtlest clear light consciousness is volitionally held, for nondual absorption in emptiness, after vital signs cease. In the longest case the meditator’s body remained, without decomposing, for almost a month. So, this is a completely new subject for scientists whereas for us Buddhists, who accept different levels of mind and energy, it is known.”
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But Tenzin Gyatso was not discussing Buddhist understanding of the subtlest psycho-physical substrates of the mind-body complex. He was giving, instead, a
paradigm-shattering hint—with results yet to be published—of EEG, EKG, and postmortem temperature readings during the eighteen-day 2008
tukdam
of the 100th Ganden Tripa, a great yogi whose body was the first to be monitored collaboratively between neuroscientists, at the University of Wisconsin, and the Tibetan Medical Institute in Dharamsala. “When the Ganden Tripa died,” the Dalai Lama continued, “they were able to clearly record, with electrodes on the body and head, for more than ten days. Now there might be some sign of some very subtle energy that survives death of the gross body,” he carefully suggested. Indian neurologists, who attended the experiment, more excitedly declared, “You must see this to believe it. We are simply speechless.”
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Finding neural and cardiac signals of a “dead” meditator’s core warmth, along with pliant invulnerability to decay (in India’s putrefying tropics), and erect posture would push neuroscience far past recent evidence of consciousness in level 3 coma victims. It would surely support Tenzin Gyatso’s long-held conviction that Buddhist contemplatives have “a tremendous scope” to help science correct a centuries-old error, conflating “reductionist method into a metaphysical standpoint,” of radical materialism.
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While one psychologist enthused “What other religious leaders have said to scientists, ‘Please determine the objective validity of my practices’? The Dalai Lama matter-of-factly states, ‘Modern science, compared to Buddhist knowledge of the mind, is still in kindergarten.’ ”
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Tenzin Gyatso, however, does not proselytize. Avidly promoting inter-faith harmony—for diverse creeds’ equal ability “to create good human beings”—he has “merely offered the Buddha’s teachings,” as Tibetans describe his global guidance, “for the peace and happiness of this world.” For more than a thousand years China has especially revered, in both popular and state religion, Tibetan Buddhism’s unique preservation of all Buddhist lore. One day, consequently, it must be that China’s contemporary leaders will cease assaulting a society which has so benefited their own.

“It is China’s intention to be the greatest power in the world” Lee Kuan Yew, modern Singapore’s founder, has written.
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“At the core of its mindset is the Middle Kingdom, recalling a world in which it was dominant and other states related as supplicants.… China’s strategy is to bide its time until it becomes strong enough to successfully redefine the [international] political and economic order.” Yet China’s self-professed “peaceful rise” is incompatible, Lee objects, with “inculcating enormous pride and patriotism in Chinese youth.… It is volatile.”
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Certainly Sinocentrism, fueled by aggrieved nationalism, cannot stabilize prosperity in an interdependent world. Hence China’s insecure grandiosity must evolve, as all progressive
Chinese advocate, into pluralistic self-worth. That won’t occur until China amends its largest crime, against another nation, in history—the destruction of Tibet. Tibet’s worst tragedy remains China’s greatest shame. If Beijing fails to restore Tibetan rights—and, most especially, if the Fourteenth Dalai Lama perishes in exile without returning home—the current Communist government will have seeded strife for decades, if not centuries, to come.

“There is a word in Tibetan—
sipa
,” says the Dalai Lama’s senior attendant, Lobsang Gawa, explaining Buddhist optimism. “It means ‘anything is possible.’ ” Buddhism’s account of reality—that dependent causality mutably governs apparent phenomena—inspires optimistic activism. Because good causes yield good effects, and bad can be removed, the future is improvable—and Buddhists are hopeful. “From the midst of suffering happiness is found,” thus Tibetans proverbially draw insight from tragedy. It is my hope, shared by millions of others, that China’s leaders will swiftly do the same.

—John F. Avedon, New York City, June 15, 2014

Notes to the Preface