The Dalai
Lama's China Experience and Its Impact
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.