Rev. Danny Fisher

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This from the Washington Post:

Security forces in Tibet have arrested 16 Buddhist monks on charges of planning or carrying out separatist bombings that authorities said were inspired by propaganda from the Dalai Lama, the New China News Agency reported Thursday.

The arrests, which the official agency said took place in May, refocused attention on Tibet after nearly a month during which the devastating earthquake in Sichuan province has dominated news from China and eclipsed a still-intense security crackdown in the restive mountain region.

Since rioting March 14 in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, security forces have arrested scores of Tibetans, many of them monks, and sentenced them to prison for crimes including arson, murder and inciting subversion against the state. In addition, thousands of monks have been forced to undergo what authorities call patriotic education, designed to inspire loyalty to Beijing’s rule and discourage support for the Dalai Lama and his exile group in India.

A group of Hong Kong and other Chinese-language reporters allowed into Tibet this week on a government-supervised trip said they saw armed police posted at major intersections in Lhasa. The police had been withdrawn earlier, they reported, but returned in force because of what authorities in Lhasa said were fears of renewed unrest before the Olympic Torch relay passes through later this month.

In addition, authorities said they feared unrest could bubble up again as thousands of Buddhist pilgrims gather in Lhasa beginning this week for the annual Saga Dawa festival, marking the Buddha’s birthday according to the Tibetan calendar. “It cannot be ruled out that there will be some bad people who will try to sabotage the event,” Pelma Trilek, Tibet’s executive deputy chairman, told the visiting journalists.

Trilek said the fears in part were based on comments made by the Dalai Lama during his recent European tour. The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual and temporal leader, said in London that he feared renewed trouble if talks between China and his government-in-exile broke down.

The next round of exploratory talks has been scheduled for next week in Beijing but have been postponed indefinitely. It was unclear what effect the arrests announced Thursday would have on the prospect for another round or, ultimately, moving on to substantive negotiations.

“We hope the Dalai Lama can create the conditions for the next points of contact by his concrete actions,” Qin Gang, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said when queried about the delay.

The dialogue between Beijing and the Dalai Lama’s representatives resumed May 4 in the southern China city of Shenzhen. China agreed to restart the meetings after many foreign leaders, including President Bush, said it was the best way to solve the tension that led to the March 14 arson and rioting, which killed 18 civilians and one police officer by official count and spread to a number of other Tibetan-inhabited areas.

The bombings and bombing plots reported Thursday took place during April in eastern Tibet’s Mangkam county, the New China News Agency said, quoting the regional Public Security Bureau. It did not say whether anyone was killed or injured.

One bombing hit an electricity transformer on April 5 and another hit a local police station on April 8, a security spokesman was quoted as saying. A third bombing April 15 hit an unidentified resident’s home, he said.

In addition to the 16 arrested in the three cases, the spokesman said, police are seeking three other Tibetans on suspicion of involvement. All the arrests were made in May, he said, without explaining why they were being announced only now.

“According to the local police, all the suspects have confessed to their crimes, claiming they had been listening to foreign radios for a long time and were following separatist propaganda from the Dalai Lama,” the agency said. “They said March 14 had inspired them.”

While visiting Ye Olde Integral Options Cafe the other day, I noticed a remarkable piece Bill had posted by Robert Augustus Masters. Entitled “On the Reluctance of Most Spiritual Teachers to Include Psychotherapy In Their Work,” Masters’ piece begins with some blunt (but I think right-on) assessments:

Not so many spiritual teachers include psychotherapy to any significant degree in the work they do with their students, even when it’s obvious that the spiritual practices they are giving are not really working for some students, especially with regard to not addressing — or not sufficiently addressing — their deeper wounds and needs and psychosocial difficulties.

Rather than then having such students engage in some psychotherapy (and for the purposes of this essay, I don’t mean conventional talk therapy, but body-including, emotionally literate, truly integral psychotherapy), further spiritual practice is typically recommended, as if the only answer is to stay with the spiritual path prescribed by one’s spiritual teacher. If fault is assigned, it is almost always placed on the student, with none or very little brought to the spiritual system or teacher. (Such lopsidedness frequently characterizes dysfunctional relationships, generating endarkened shame and its compensatory offshoots.)

Many spiritual teachers/paths seem to view psychotherapy per se as something their students don’t really need, or as something, at best, to be done before getting into spiritual practice, or, now and then, as possibly something for seriously troubled students. Regardless of its transformational capacity, psychotherapy tends to be viewed by many spiritual teachers as simply a reinforcer of egoity (which in its conventional forms it unfortunately often is).

And why don’t more spiritual teachers recommend and include psychotherapy for their students? Part of the reason may be that they themselves have never done any psychotherapy, or have had a less-than-positive experience with it. Spiritual teachers who state or imply that psychotherapy is a lesser undertaking than spiritual practice, a mere dwelling and digging around in one’s personal history, are, however unwittingly, shaming those students of theirs who really need some psychotherapy, spiritually bullying and “shoulding” such need into a relatively mute and passive position.

Personally, I think there’s a lot of wisdom in the piece. It’s certainly essential reading for those in positions of spiritual leadership. Read the whole thing here.