2009-03-01, xinhuanet.com

The title of “Dalai Lama”, was not granted by the Dalai Lama himself, or created by Tibetan Buddhism, or conferred by the old Tibetan ruling class and still less by any foreigners. The title was actually granted by the central government of China’s dynasties and has multi-ethnic language features.

In the late Ming dynasty, Tibetan Buddhism proliferated into a number of sects, among which Sagya, Gagya and Gadang were most popular. However, many monks failed to follow Buddhist tenets; instead, they always served the devil by seeking fame and personal interests, disrespecting senior monks, indulging in entertainment, abducting, cheating or raping women. This resulted in grievances among the public in Tibet. At that time, Tsongkapa, a monk born in Qinghai Province, was learning Buddha Dharma in Tibet. Seeing all this, he felt that what these monks did was a long way from the actual requirements of Buddhism. Then he proposed a religious reform of all sects in Tibet, and vowed to create a new sect.

In 1402 and 1406, Tsongkapa finished writing “Treaties of the Staged Enlightenment” and “Tantra in Tibet: The Grand Exposition of Secret Mantra” respectively, laying a theoretical basis for establishing the Gelug Sect. He thought that Buddhism believers ought to first respect Sakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism, be devoted to learning Sutras, Vinaya and Sastra of Tripitaka Sutra, as well as the three trainings of precepts, concentration, and insight. That is, to abide by taboos, to esteem the Buddhas and Patriarchs, to be immersed in studying the original meaning of Buddhist scriptures, to cultivate oneself according to Buddhist doctrine, to free oneself from vulgarity, to study intensively sutras of Mahayana and Hinayana, as well as to practice both Esoteric and Exotoric Buddhism.

Tsongkapa’s reform soon won support from the Tibetan nobles and serf owners. In lunar January 1409, he held and presided over the first Pray for Blessing Dharma Assembly in Lhasa’s Jokhang Temple. Later in the same year, Tsongkapa had the Ganden Monastery built and appointed himself the chief abbot there, marking the establishment of the Gelug Sect.

With an increasingly higher influence, the Gelug sprang up in Tibet and Qinghai. As a result, more monasteries were set up, such as Drepung, Sera and Tashilhunpo, laying a solid foundation for the development of the Yellow Sect.

Tsongkapa’s success in the reformation enabled the Gelug to become the largest sect in Tibetan Buddhism. “Gelug” means that Buddhism believers should do good things and never do evil things. It is also called Huangjiao (the Yellow Sect) by the Han people because its followers always wear yellow hats.

Though it was the last to come into being, the Gelug had grown into the most powerful sect in Tibet with the energetic support of the central dynasty. This indicates that even a small sect would be able to become grand and influential in a region, so long as it gained support of the imperial court, the central government or a secular regime.

The title of “Dalai” first came from the third Dalai Lama Soinam Gyamco. “Gyamco” means the Sea in the Tibetan language, which is contained in the name of Dalai Lama of later generations.

In 1577, the 38th year of the reign of Emperor Jiajing of the Ming dynasty, Soinam Gyamco, Tsongkapa’s third-generation disciple, came to Qinghai, by traveling thousands of miles from Tibet, to publicize the doctrine of the Gelug Sect. At that time, Mongolian noble Althan Khan, who ruled Qinghai, was a Buddhist who believed in Tibetan Buddhism the most. Hearing that Soinam Gyamco had arrived, he extended a rousing welcome to the dignitary and conferred him the title of “the Overseer of the Buddhist Faith Vajra-dhara Dalai Lama” to express appreciation of his wisdom and talents.(…)
Read the rest of Dalai Lama Title’s Background by Eyes of Chinese (3,730 words)

© Leo Golan for Tibetan Incense Blog, 2009. |
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Post tags: China, Dalai Lama, History, Politics, Tibet

Tags: buddhism, China, Dalai Lama, History, Opinions, Politics

By EDWARD WONG, New York Times
Published: February 25, 2009

TONGREN, China — Snow fell across this mountain valley as red-robed monks in a prayer hall beat drums and chanted in tantric harmony, a seemingly auspicious start to Losar, the Tibetan New Year.

But a monk watching the ritual on Wednesday morning made it clear: This was a ceremony of mourning, not celebration.

“There is no Losar,” he said, standing in this monastery town on the edge of the Tibetan plateau. “They killed so many people last year.”

A few weeks ahead of the 50th anniversary of a failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule, and a year after a crackdown on renewed ethnic unrest in this area, Tibetans are quietly but irrepressibly seething. Monks, nomads and merchants have turned the joyous Losar holiday into a dirge, memorializing Tibetans who died in last year’s conflict and pining for the return of the exiled Dalai Lama.

An informal grass-roots boycott is under way. Tibetans are forsaking dancing and dinner parties for vigils with yak-butter candles and the chanting of prayers. The Losar campaign signifies the discontent that many of China’s six million Tibetans still feel toward domination by the ethnic Han Chinese. They are resisting pressure by Chinese officials to celebrate and forget.

“It’s a conscious awakening of an entire people,” said Woeser, a popular Tibetan blogger.

Tibetans here and in other towns, including in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, say government officials have handed out money to Tibetans to entice them to hold exuberant new year parties. On Wednesday, state-run television showed Tibetans in Lhasa dancing, shooting off fireworks and feasting in their homes.

At the same time, the government has drawn a curtain across Tibet. Officials have shut down access to many Tibetan regions to foreigners and sent armed guards to patrol the streets.

Here in eastern Qinghai Province, near the Dalai Lama’s birthplace, the boycott of festivities began as early as January, during the Chinese Lunar New Year. On Wednesday in Tongren, called Rebkong by Tibetans, one of the few bursts of firecrackers took place outside a Chinese paramilitary compound.

“The government thinks we should celebrate this holiday properly,” said Shartsang, the abbot of Rongwo Monastery. “Certainly this year people haven’t celebrated it in the same way they did in past years.”

Shartsang was one of more than a dozen monks interviewed over three days at Rongwo, called Longwu in Chinese. The 700-year-old monastery is a sprawling complex of golden-eaved temples and labyrinthine alleyways that is home to 400 monks. It draws pilgrims from across the Tibetan plateau.

The government has stepped up security across Tibet. Here, more than 300 security officers with riot shields were seen training in the stadium on Wednesday afternoon. On Monday night, a unit of officers marched in formation along a cordoned-off road.

Chinese officials are wary of the boycott’s mushrooming into larger protests, and of Tibetans taking to the streets next month, which marks the 50th anniversary of the uprising that led to the Dalai Lama’s flight from Lhasa. Most Tibetans revere the Dalai Lama, who advocates autonomy, but not secession, for Tibet.

Last March, China was convulsed by the largest Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule in decades. It began when the suppression of protests by monks in Lhasa led to ethnic rioting by Tibetans. Eighteen civilians and one police officer were killed, according to Xinhua, the state news agency. Riots and protests flared up across western China. Tibetan exile groups say hundreds of Tibetans died in the crackdown.

Rongwo Monastery was a locus of resistance. Even before the riots in Lhasa, monks joined Tibetan townspeople to protest the way the police had handled a dispute between Tibetans and ethnic Hui Muslims. More than 200 monks were detained in that incident. During the March uprising, security forces surrounded the monastery, only to be met by stone-hurling monks.

Over the summer, leading monks were detained in a nearby school and forced to undergo patriotic education, which meant studying Chinese law and being told to denounce the Dalai Lama.

Waves of crackdowns have fueled resentment.

“They broke into my room and took away all my photos of the Dalai Lama,” said one monk, 53, as he held up a pile of five empty glass picture frames. “Then they led monks away with their wrists bound by wires.”

… Read the rest of the article here.

© Leo Golan for Tibetan Incense Blog, 2009. |
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Post tags: China, Dalai Lama, Politics, Tibet

Tags: buddhism, China, Dalai Lama, Opinions, Politics

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.

© Leo Golan for Tibetan Incense Blog, 2009. |
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Post tags: China, Dalai Lama, Tibet

Tags: buddhism, China, Dalai Lama, Opinions

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.

(…)
Read the rest of Can Dalai Lama Choose His Reincarnated Successor? (919 words)

© Leo Golan for Tibetan Incense Blog, 2009. |
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Post tags: Buddhism, Dalai Lama, Politics, Tibet

Tags: buddhism, Dalai Lama, Opinions, Politics