Rev. Danny Fisher

This from the Agence France-Presse, via Precious Metal:

A 26-year-old man set himself on fire in Yangon’s most famous Buddhist temple in an apparent protest against economic hardship in military-ruled Myanmar, witnesses and police said Sunday.

Witnesses said the man bent down to pray at a shrine in Shwedagon Pagoda on Friday—a Buddhist holiday here—before standing up, dousing himself with petrol and setting himself alight with a candle.

The temple is one of the nation’s holiest sites and was the focal point for Buddhist monks during anti-junta demonstrations in Yangon last year.

Some witnesses told AFP that before the man’s apparent self-immolation, he said: “May we be free from economic hardship.”

A Yangon police official, who refused to be named, identified the man as Thaw Zin Naing from Ayeyarwaddy Division west of Yangon.

“He is recovering now at Yangon General Hospital. The chance for his survival is 40 percent,” the official told AFP.

“No one heard clearly what he shouted at the time,” he said, adding that the man was not associated with any political party or pro-democracy group.

Myanmar’s economy has been run into the ground by decades of mismanagement by military governments since the army seized power in 1962.

An overnight hike in fuel prices in August 2007 left many commuters unable even to afford the bus fare to work, and sparked anti-government protests.

The movement took off in late September when Buddhist monks led up to 100,000 supporters on to the streets in peaceful marches that became the most potent threat to the regime in almost two decades.

The junta responded with a bloody crackdown. At least 31 people died in the unrest, an investigation by the United Nations found, although Human Rights Watch put the toll at more than 100.

The Interdependent today highlighted a great quote from His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s recent interview with Newsweek. I included the same quote in my post about the interview, but it feels like it is one worth revisiting and underscoring indeed. It’s His Holiness talking about how he practices tonglen in light of all that is hapening in Tibet and China:

Every night in my Buddhist practice I give and take. I take in Chinese suspicion. I give back trust and compassion. I take their negative feeling and give them positive feeling. I do that every day.

Last week on National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition,” Scott Simon offered an especially powerful commentary on the recent protests and violence in Tibet and China. The description reads in part:

The protests of monks and others may not deliver freedom to Tibet anytime soon, but freedom is an effervescent ideal that can’t be bottled up forever.

Give it a listen–it’s well worth your two minutes and forty-one seconds.

This from the Washington Post:

A group of 30 Chinese intellectuals appealed to the Chinese government on Saturday to admit that its policy of crushing dissent in Tibet and blaming the ensuing violence on the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, was failing.

“The one-sided propaganda of the official Chinese media is having the effect of stirring up inter-ethnic animosity and aggravating an already tense situation,” the group said in an open letter posted on Boxun.com, a Web site for overseas Chinese. It was the first time a Chinese group had publicly urged the country’s leaders to re-think their response to two weeks of deadly protests in Tibetan areas across western China.

The government’s response to the Tibetan protests is a highly sensitive topic in China, and few people are willing to be quoted questioning its actions. Many of 30 people who signed the open letter are regular contributors to Web sites and blogs that provide alternative views of government policies. One other regular contributor, Hu Jia, went on trial last week on charges of incitement to subvert state power for posts he made on Boxun.com and comments in interviews with foreign media. If convicted, he faces five years in prison.

Dissident author Wang Lixiong is the first name on the petition. He and his wife, Tibetan poet and essayist Tsering Woeser, have been under house arrest in Beijing since the protests began, Wang told Radio Free Asia on Saturday.

[...]

The Web petition offers 12 suggestions for ways to handle the situation, including allowing independent media access to conflict areas. “Only by adopting an open attitude can we turn around the international community’s distrust of our government,” it said.

The petition asks the government to protect freedom of speech and worship, “thereby allowing the Tibetan people fully to express their grievances and hopes, and permitting citizens of all nationalities freely to criticize and make suggestions regarding the government’s nationality policies.”

It also urges the government to open a new dialogue with the Dalai Lama or otherwise reveal the evidence it has to back up charges that the violence was a plot by him to split Tibet from China.

Read all twelve of the intellectuals’ suggestions at Tibet Will Be Free.