How His Holiness Practices
by Danny Fisher
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.
I’ve been meaning to post on this for a bit.
The situation of Tibet is far more nuanced, complicated, and screwed up than we generally see in the West.
There is, I think, enough hubris to go around for all parties involved in this, including the United States, which did its own CIA meddling in this area back in the ’50s, and those who think that the notion of a “Tibetan culture” is something that “needs to be preserved” without doing the obvious analysis that would lead to not-very-nice conclusions. (There’s uses of such ideas that basically are racist.)
All that said, of course we’re all against the continued violence and hope for some kind of better modus vivendi between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese, who have some nasty recollections of colonialism of their own, and perhaps are acting like the Israelis behave towards the Palestinians in perpetrating some rather nasty karma.
BTW, I hope at some point you go to Beijing and visit the Lama Temple there. When I was there I witnessed a Chinese tourguide giving an extremely frank discussion about the political situation of the Panchen Lama to some French tourists.
Like I said, the situation of religion and China is much more complicated and nuanced than you have heard in the United States.
Mumon: While I think we might understand what cultural preservation is a bit differently, I believe there’s truth to some of what you’re saying about how this situation is often presented. Issues like Tibet are often made much more simple than they really are. Personally, though, I don’t think I’ve missed the nuance here. You should take a look at some of the other recents posts: while my sympathies are with the Tibetan cause, I like to think I’ve been even-handed in terms of what items and news stories I’ve chosen to present. (I have not shied away from presenting video footage that shows Tibetan protestors committing acts of violence, for example. I think that needs to be seen, and people should hold in their minds that a number of the casualities in this conflict have been innocent Han Chinese.) Just because I’ve chosen to focus for a moment on this quote from His Holiness or have sympathy for his cause doesn’t mean I miss the nuance. I think that’s an unfair conclusion to draw. As I said, I think you make a good point about the way this issue gets framed in certain circles. I question, however, your choice of this blog as the place for these comments.