Tibet
and Its Guardians
-
between
China
and the West (2)
This
article was first published in New View
magazine Issue 49 - 4th Quarter Autumn 2008
Following
on from part 1 (New View 3rd
Quarter Summer 2008) this article will consider the question: "Why are
China
and the West so concerned to be the guardians
of
Tibet
and its people?" from three aspects: economic, political and spiritual.
Tibet
on the Economic Chessboard
In
April 1904 the British geographer,
Halford
J.
Mackinder, wrote a hugely influential essay in The
Geographical Journal (Vol. 23, No. 4) titled “The Geographical Pivot of History”.
It focused on the supreme geopolitical importance of what he called
"the Heartland" -
the region from
Eastern Europe
through
Central Asia
and
Northern Tibet
to eastern
Siberia
. His slogan was : Who rules
East Europe
commands the Heartland
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island (the Eurasian
continent) Who rules the World-Island commands the World.
His ideas about the central importance of the Heartland and the
World
Island
would go on to influence German geopolitics expert
Karl
Haushofer, who introduced them to
Hitler. They were also noted by Zbigniew Brzezinski (picture), former National
Security Adviser in the Carter Administration in the
US
(1976-1980) and current foreign policy adviser to presidential candidate
Barack
Obama.
(1) The Russophobic Brzezinski made
them an underlying axiom of his master text of global strategy, The
Grand Chessboard (1997). Then, in March 1999, the
U.S. Congress adopted the Silk Road
Strategy Act [updated 2006], which
defined America’s broad economic and strategic interests in a region extending
from the Eastern Mediterranean to Central Asia... The successful
implementation of the SRS requires the concurrent "militarization" of
the entire Eurasian corridor as a means to securing control over extensive oil
and gas reserves, as well as "protecting" pipeline routes and trading
corridors." (2)
Brzezinski
's book makes clear how crucially western policymakers regard control over
Eurasia, which includes 75% of global population,
America's
global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its
preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained...most of the world's
physical wealth....60% of the world's GNP and about three fourths of the world's
known energy resources". ...
Eurasia
is geopolitically axial. A power that
dominates
Eurasia
would control two of the world's three
most advanced and economically productive regions.. A mere glance at the map
also suggests that control over
Eurasia
would almost automatically entail
Africa
's subordination. ...
Eurasia
is the chessboard on which the struggle
for global primacy continues to be played.(3)
Brzezinski
has tended to stay focused on
Russia
as the main threat to western interests and rarely criticises
China; he knows the interest that his political mentor,
David
Rockefeller, has had in that country since his first visit there in 1973. That same year
Rockefeller
established the influential thinktank and lobby group, the Trilateral
Commission, which was intended to link the elites of
N. America,
Europe
and
East Asia, and made his protégé
Brzezinski
a leading light in it. It is noteworthy that Tibet nowhere figures in
Brzezinski's book, though, like the government in Beijing,
he is no doubt aware of the natural resources of Tibet:....
some of the world's largest uranium and borax deposits, one half of the world's
lithium, the largest copper deposits in Asia, enormous iron deposits, and over
80,000 gold mines.
Tibet
's forests are the largest timber reserve
[in
China]...
Tibet
also contains some of the largest oil
reserves in the region. On the provincial border between Tibet and Xinjiang
[there] is a vast oil and mineral region
in the Qaidam Basin, known as a "treasure basin" [with]
57 different types of mineral resources with proven reserves including
petroleum, natural gas, coal, crude salt, potassium, magnesium, lead, zinc and
gold. These mineral resources have a potential economic value of 15 trillion
yuan or US$1.8 trillion. Proven reserves of potassium, lithium and crude salt in
the basin are the biggest in
China
....
Tibet
is perhaps the world’s most valuable
water source, .... the source of seven of
Asia
's greatest rivers which provide water for
2 billion people. He who controls
Tibet
’s water has a mighty powerful
geopolitical lever over all
Asia. (4)
Here
is one important reason why, in a world where the Great Powers
and mega-corporations increasingly compete for resources,
China
is concerned to keep control of
Tibet
and why certain forces in the west are equally determined to prise
Tibet
from that Chinese control.
Brzezinski
may well have avoided mentioning
Tibet
in The Grand Chessboard because he
seeks to 'manage'
China
by granting it regional hegemony, such as it last enjoyed in the days of
the Manchu dynasty (1644-1912). Brzezinski believes that China wants to return
to its former position as the centre of the world, or at least, of the East
Asian world, and he thinks China will be satisfied with a regional
hegemony, because he knows that China has never been an aggressive state that
sought to conquer the world, and that consequently, western fears of a Yellow
Peril that would sweep all before it like the Mongols are unrealistic. In this,
I believe, he is partly right, for
China
has never been a nomadic culture like the Mongols or the Manchus; the settled
urban and agrarian culture of
China
always feared attacks from the wandering shamanistic nomads on its own borders.
No
sentimentalist about
Tibet,
Brzezinski
is much more interested in the 'Stans', the new states of
Central Asia, especially
Uzbekistan
(5). He is content to leave
Tibet
under nominal Chinese control, a diplomatic position that indeed, all western
countries, including
Russia, have maintained for over 200 years, and one that the present Dalai Lama
himself agrees with. However, while professing himself willing to see China once
more the regional hegemon, Brzezinski feels China must be kept under control,
and one means for doing this is the nationalities and minorities question, hence
his great interest in what he calls 'the Balkans of Asia', the Stans. Just as
100 years ago, the European Balkans were a point
of stress that the Great Powers could use to put pressure on each other, so
today is the region from Chechnya and Georgia in the west to Tibet and Xinjiang
in the east, where the USA can pressurise Russia, India and China by
manipulating ethnic issues. American power projected in this area also enables
the
US
to get close to the region's sources of minerals and oil, as well as Chinese
pipelines.
Drawing
boundaries, pulling strings, mouthing phrases...
The
political dimension to Chinese and western claims for guardianship of
Tibet
has two aspects – the boundaries of Tibetan control or autonomy, and human
rights. One problem often missing from western discussion of
Tibet
and which has always got in the way
of negotiations between Chinese and Tibetans, is the significant question of
which borders
Tibet
is to have (see map). Traditionally,
Tibet
consisted of three provinces –
Ü-Tsang,
Amdo and Kham, The Chinese have always been prepared to allow
autonomy for 'inner Tibet' (Ü-Tsang, yellow on map), which they now call
Xizang Autonomous Province, while the Tibetan Government-in-exile wants full
autonomy (not independence) over Amdo and Kham as well (orange and red), which
it claims has always been part of the greater Tibetan cultural area
historically. This would include the current Chinese provinces of
Qinghai
and most of
Sichuan. The Chinese have never been prepared to allow this, for obvious strategic
reasons;
Tibet
would then simply be too large and would extend almost as far north as
Mongolia.
For
46 years, from the time of the British invasion of
Tibet
in 1904 until the Chinese invasion in 1950,
Tibet's political status was in a kind of limbo. Recognised by the Powers as still
nominally part of
China,
Tibet
was left alone by
Beijing
in a de facto state of complete autonomy, as
China
descended into its 20th century chaos. The first western notions of
full 'independence' for
Tibet
emerged only in the context of the Cold War, after a Communist takeover in
China
began to seem inevitable in the late 1940s. CIA veteran
John
K.
Knaus' book Orphans of the Cold War:
America and the Tibetan
Struggle for Survival (1999) details the secret 1943 mission to
Lhasa
by the
OSS
(forerunners of the CIA) in which
Major
Ilia
Tolstoy
(grandson of
Leo
Tolstoy) and
Captain
Brooke
Dolan
II
established the first official contact between the Dalai Lama's government and
Washington
. Their expedition was a classic, daring 'forward manoeuvre' in the old imperial
Great Game tradition The two men swiftly fell for the Tibetan mystique and,
claiming that America was 'a great nation that supported the rights of small
countries', found themselves implanting in the Tibetans hopes of support for
independence that could not be fulfilled.
The
British, who for decades had maintained the only non-Chinese official
representation in
Lhasa
(a 'trade agency'), were at cross purposes over this
OSS
mission. The Viceroy in
New Delhi
loftily commented that it would not be 'sound' for
Britain
to hasten the process of American enlightenment 'in matters Tibetan'. He was
reiterating the traditional British position:
Tibet
remains part of
China. Meanwhile, in Lhasa, Frank Ludlow, the head of the British Mission was
encouraging the Americans and informed New Delhi: "some
good might result [from this first contact] with the President and people of a
great nation which champions the rights of small nations. It might also be
indicated [by the Allies] that
Tibet
regards itself as independent and is
different in race, physical features, religion and language from any other
nation." (6)
This
was the line the two Americans themselves took and which later would be followed
by hard-line ideological anti-communist elements in the CIA and the
US
establishment who wished to cause trouble for
China
within the context of the Cold War. The traditional British imperial position
would come to be adopted by the more realpolitik-oriented
elements in the
US
, especially after the 'pong pong'
diplomacy that preceded the visit to
China
by
Nixon
and
Kissinger
in 1972.
With
the outbreak of the Korean War and
China's invasion of
Tibet
in 1950,
Washington
began to study more seriously how it could benefit from the issue of Tibetan
independence. Recently declassified detailed documents have revealed the CIA's
Operation CIRCUS (1956-1969) that trained Tibetan guerillas, particularly
members of the martial Khampa people of northern
Tibet, in
Colorado
(1958-64) and then flew them out to
Nepal
for infiltration into
Tibet. The campaign included cooperation with Indian intelligence services and
frequent airdrops to Tibetan insurgents; it continued until
Nixon
's rapprochement with Maoist China in the early 1970s. With the failure of the
CIA-sponsored 1959 uprising in
Tibet, any American hopes for Tibetan independence faded.
Sam
Halpern, ex-head of CIA Far Eastern Operations, has cynically if realistically
commented: "Basically [the CIA's activity in]
Tibet
was just a nuisance to the ChiComms. It was fun and games. It didn't have any
real effect."(7) Most of the Khampa guerillas trained by the CIA, however, surely
did not see it that way; it has been estimated that probably three out of four
of them were tracked down and killed
by Chinese forces.
It
is highly unlikely that the significant events of 2008 (the Tibetan riots of
March, the massive earthquake in May in the half-Tibetan province of Sichuan,
the insurgent violence in Xinjiang and Yunnan, the spectacular success of the
Olympics) will lead China to change its views on the issue of independence
for Tibet, nor does the Dalai Lama himself claim to seek independence but
rather, greater autonomy for Tibet within China. However, in recent years a more
militant campaign has emerged among younger Tibetan emigrés which does call for
full independence, and this 'Free Tibet' movement has been substantially funded
and supported by US intelligence agencies and NGOs. To this writer, a greater
measure of autonomy within
China, which has been the de facto position for the last three centuries, would
indeed seem to represent the best option for
Tibet. The problem is how great that 'measure' is to be. The Tibetan people's
movement is increasingly in danger of fragmenting as younger, more westernised
Tibetans lose patience with the Dalai Lama's more nuanced position or feel
rejected by his excommunication of the followers of the deity Dorje Shugden (see
part 1 of this article). The Dalai Lama has warned his own people against
resorting to violence but has also said that Tibetans should be in control of
everything except for foreign policy and defence; however, there is no way China
is going to allow the Tibetans any real control of the region's key natural
resources. They are too important to the economy of
China
as a whole and to her national defence and strategic interests.
With
China's increasing integration into global affairs and the steady decay of communism
itself, the West ought not to be thinking any longer of using
Tibet
as a weapon against
China. It is surely hypocritical of the western media, who lose no opportunity to
undermine or attack religion, especially Catholicism, to claim to support a
Tibetan Pope and the idea that he should re-establish
temporal and spiritual control over Tibet, a state of affairs,
incidentally, which only existed for some 300 years after 1642, when the 5th
Dalai Lama and his Gelugpa (Yellow Hat) sect was able for the first time to gain
temporal power over a unified Tibetan state with the assistance of the
Mongol warlord, Ghushi Khan. While there are monks in all the sects of
Buddhism, only in
Tibet
have monks and monasteries achieved any real degree of systematic political
power. This was never the case in
China,
Korea
and
Japan, where Mahayana Buddhism
also flourished. The Dalai Lama may feel himself to be in his heart, as
he says, "just a simple monk", but no Dalai Lama is in fact ever
"just a simple monk". He is regarded as a king and the incarnate
Bodhisattva of Compassion, Avalokitesvara (Chenrezig in Tibetan). We in the West
have had a faith – Christianity - according
to which a Being from another world than the physical entered this physical
plane in the Incarnation:
Jesus
is of the world, the
Christ
is not. This twofold nature of Jesus-Christ implies balance between the
material and the immaterial. Before Christ, Asian Buddhists, oppressed by the
pain of material existence, longed
to escape from the material into the immaterial and return to mankind's
spiritual roots. The western world by contrast, since
Christ
, has steadily turned its back on the immaterial and embraced the physical
plane, to the point where, since the 18th century, the educated
increasingly pour scorn on the very notion of a non-physical existence, a life
before birth and after death. As part of this intellectual rejection, the
concept of reincarnation – which has always existed in Hinduism and Buddhism
– was very largely excised from western culture, and
many westerners today still find this concept difficult to entertain. If we
accept the idea of reincarnation for a moment, it could raise the interesting
picture of numerous people walking around in the West today, who in their
previous lives were in Asia or other cultures with a looser connection to this
physical plane, souls who have a stronger yearning for a spiritual world or
something resembling it, than do the rest of the western community.
Whilst many such westerners rally to what they see as the cause of Tibet,
others, with neither of these motivations, may call for a 'free Tibet'
out of a straightforward, very modern but often very abstract idealism based on
their personal understanding of human rights, irrespective of whether they know
much or anything about Tibet and China. Meanwhile, other westerners who may have
no spiritual interests or inclinations nevertheless support the Tibetan cause
for psychological reasons, perhaps because they were bullied at school or by a
family member and therefore sympathise with underdogs everywhere. Those without
such personal experiences may nevertheless be more or less unconsciously
influenced by ideas that tell them that one should take the side of the
underdog, and that, for example,
Britain
went to war for the sake of
Belgium, Poland etc. – ideas which, on examination, sometimes bear little relation to
reality.
In
1918
Rudolf
Steiner
observed that often the deepest impulses in the West are fostered by nothing more powerfully than by the development
of feelings that are untrue but are sensed as in some way holy, that can
represent the people of the East....as barbarians. In this connection he
referred to the "crusading temperament in America: This
consists in the feeling
that America is called to
spread over the whole earth freedom and justice and I know not what other
beautiful things.(1.12.1918) In Britain too, the deep-rooted imagery of King
Arthur's heroes venturing forth to slay demons and right wrongs and of St.
George rescuing the princess from the dragon
influences
many Britons subconsciously to adopt this 'holier-than-thou' crusading
mentality.
Steiner
drew attention to the fact that what he called "the age of economic
imperialism", in which we now live, is marked by an absence of spiritual
values and a consequent culture of 'empty words and phrases'. Fine-sounding
words are used as impulses, to get people to agree to this or that ("the
will of the international community", "democracy",
"freedom", "the rule of law") but underlying them is
actually nothing but the desire for economic gain. This is because people would
not readily fight and die if their politicians urged them to do so for the sake
of another X million barrels of oil, but feel impelled to action to stop the
suffering in
Darfur, In Burma,
Zimbabwe, or
Tibet. "Free
Tibet
!" "To Save
Tibet
is to save the World!" they shout, ignorant of the complexities of the
issue or the clandestine funding and manipulation that may be fuelling such a
cause for ulterior motives. For example, an American organisation called 'the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED)' sounds a fine thing, yet it is but a
polite front for the CIA. Founded by the Reagan Administration in the early
1980s, on the recommendation of
William
Casey,
Reagan
's CIA Director, and designed to
pose as an autonomous NGO, the first acting President of the NDA,
Allen
Weinstein, commented to the
Washington
Post that, "A lot of what we
[the
NED
] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."
The
most prominent pro-Dalai Lama
Tibet
independence organization today is the International Campaign for
Tibet
, founded in
Washington
in 1988. Since at least 1994 the ICT has
been receiving funds from the
NED
. The ICT awarded their annual Light of
Truth award in 2005 to
Carl
Gershman
, founder of the
NED
. ...The ICT Board of Directors is peopled
with former US State Department officials...Another especially active
anti-Beijing organization is the US-based Students for a Free Tibet, (founded
1994) as a project of the US Tibet Committee and the NED-financed International
Campaign for Tibet (ICT). The SFT is most known for unfurling a 450 foot banner
atop the Great Wall in
China
; calling for a free
Tibet
, and accusing
Beijing
of wholly unsubstantiated claims of
genocide against
Tibet
. ...The SFT was among five organizations which ...proclaimed the start
of a "Tibetan people's uprising" [for] Jan 4 this year and co-founded a
temporary office in charge of coordination and financing. ...Among related
projects, the
US
Government-financed
NED
also supports the
Tibet
Times newspaper, run out of the Dalai Lama’s exile base at
Dharamsala,
India. The
NED
also funds the
Tibet
Multimedia
Center
for “information dissemination that addresses the struggle for human
rights and democracy in
Tibet,"
also based in Dharamsala. And the
NED
finances the
Tibetan
Center
for Human Rights and Democracy. (8)
Wang
Lixiong
is a Chinese intellectual, a writer who is deeply sympathetic to the Tibetan
cause and yet is without illusions about how the Tibetan and foreign
representatives of that cause often operate. He and his Tibetan wife have been
under house arrest in
Beijing
since the disturbances in
Tibet
last March. Wang is well aware of how skillfully the Tibetans have quickly
adapted to western concerns and inclinations:
...the
14th Dalai Lama has now
become one of the most influential
figures in the international community, more welcomed in the West than
even the West's own religious leaders. There is no denying that through
decades of constant interaction with
the international community, the exiled Tibetans have
succeeded in establishing their own image, and consequently have become
the darlings of the international
community.
The
Dalai Lama...has learned well how to exploit Western social psychology and
manipulate the Western media to break into Western affairs. He has Western
advisers who have long served him, having hired the best legal firms in the
United States
to conduct extra-legal proceedings for
him. His speeches throughout the West
are invariably about burning issues in the West such as human rights, the
environment, peace, the anti-nuclear issue . . . with his values and language
also being particularly consistent
with the Western model. The cleverness of the Dalai Lama, who is well aware
of the Western humanitarian climate, can also be seen in that the
movement that he leads does not take
a purely political line. For instance, he avoids directly discussing Tibetan
independence, always saying that he is most concerned about continuing
Tibetan civilization. His suggestion
for settling the
Tibet
matter is to make
Tibet
a naturally and
culturally protected zone with neither an army nor environmental
pollution, a peace zone overseen by
the international community. Since this blueprint coincides exactly with the
Western ideal of a pure land, it has won widespread support. Meanwhile,
the Dalai Lama goes about saying that he is not just taking from the West, but
is giving the West a precious gift: Tibetan religion. On
5 October 1989
, the Norwegian
Nobel
Peace Prize Committee announced that it was giving the Dalai Lama the
Nobel
Peace Prize. All Western nations [then] threw open their doors to him,
and all leaders met with him. (9)
While
this Chinese writer has respect for the Dalai Lama as an individual and as a
leader of his people, one can see here that he has concerns about the Dalai
Lama's methods of advocacy on their behalf. From 1959 until 1985 the Dalai Lama
was not the cult figure in the West that he is today, moving easily among high
profile western political, scientific, religious, and artistic figures. In the
1970s and early 80s he had to content himself with bringing his cause to the
attention of the New Age movement, who were attracted to the awesome powers of
the seemingly authentic and enlightened Tibetan monks and spiritual teachers who
moved West in the 1960s and 70s. Through these young people the Dalai Lama would
later be able to connect with the environmental movement. Petra Kelly, a high
profile young leader of the German Green Party, for example, rendered especial
service in this regard. But from about 1985 the Dalai Lama began to break into
the western political establishment and a formidable 'Tibet Lobby' was formed. A
key figure in this process was the Dutch lawyer Michael van Walt van Praag, who
became the Dalai Lama's personal legal adviser.(10)
After Tiananmen Square in 1989, American criticism of China greatly increased;
that same year the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the
following year The Voice of America began broadcasting programs in Tibetan; in
1991 van Walt van Praag managed to enable the Dalai Lama to address Congress in
the USA. He had thus 'arrived' in
political terms. He went on to meet
President
George
Bush
(Snr.), who began to refer to
Tibet
as an “occupied country”. With his Nobel Peace Prize as the door-opener,
the Dalai Lama was welcomed in all kinds of western political circles, right or
left, red, blue or green; he was made welcome everywhere. Major entertainers and environmentalists, wrote the German magazine Der
Spiegel, have found a common denominator in their commitment to the kingdom on
the roof of the world.
Hollywood
meets Robin Hood —
Tibet’s Buddhism is the common denominator.(11)
In 1992 he showed up at the Earth Summit in
Rio de Janeiro
and on the Greenpeace flagship The Rainbow Warrior.
Alienation,
longing, pride and fear
The
Dalai Lama's triumphal progress through the West steadily increased in the 1990s
and peaked in 1998-9. Certainly, the cause of Tibetan Buddhism as a spiritual
path was facilitated enormously by the political cause of the Tibetan people,
which garnered sympathy even from people with no spiritual interests.
Omnipresent in the West in the 1990s,
from Vogue to Playboy, from religious conferences on ecumenism to scientific
seminars on particle physics, the Dalai Lama's success in the West's 'spiritual'
realm was especially evident in Hollywood, where in 1998 alone two major movies
about him were released and five others were in the pipeline.
Among numerous
Hollywood
celebrities,
Martin
Scorsese,
Brad
Pitt
and the Dalai Lama's own personal pupil
Richard
Gere
(picture) were
especially
voluble in their advocacy. Other doors were opened through actress
Uma
Thurman, the daughter of the Dalai Lama's first initiated westerner and pre-eminent
propagandist in the
USA,
Robert
A.
Thurman,
whom the Herald Tribune called the
academic godfather of the Tibetan cause. The readiness with which such
western cultural figures look beyond themselves and their own culture for
spiritual nourishment may be understandable but can yet be called into question.
Rudolf
Steiner
once remarked that: the hollow mockery of
a situation must be sensed in which the
British Isles
founded an economic empire that spanned
the world and then, when seeking profound mystical spirituality, turned to those
they had conquered economically – and are now exploiting economically
– in order to glean from them their spirituality. The
real obligation is to take one's own spiritual substance and pour it into the
outer form of the social organism. (lecture of 22.1.1920) (my emphasis)
Steiner
was speaking here about
Britain, but the same could well be applied to the West in general. What lies behind
the 'hollow mockery' of western
spiritual alienation? After the religious wars of the 17th century in
Europe, natural science came to dominate intellectual life; passionate 'enthusiasm' of
any kind was frowned on, and a cool, intellectual rationalism was valued.
Gradually, Europeans' pride in their new technical, scientific and intellectual
achievements, together with a parallel decline in understanding of spiritual
affairs, combined to produce something completely new in European history
- the cult of the modern. For the first time, Europeans began to feel
contempt and distaste for their own past, especially for the age between the end
of the
Roman Empire
and their own era. This was
accompanied by an arrogance towards the 'less civilised' cultures they were
encountering as they explored the wider world. As the teenager, full of his own
growing sense of self, often begins to feel embarrassed about his childhood,
forgetful or even contemptuous of it and of his elders, who he sees as
representing the ignorant past, so European intellectuals looked down on the
mediaeval past of their own culture and on other non-European cultures, with one
notable exception.
During
the 17th century, Jesuit priests (picture), impressed by much in
China, brought back the first detailed descriptions of Chinese society, culture and
philosophy, which found favour with many of the European intelligentsia. Reading
the Jesuit accounts, they felt that in
China, cool-headed philosopher-kings seemed to be in charge, technical science
honoured, objective examinations provided for a meritocratic, well-ordered and
rational society. Things Chinese, from porcelain, tea-drinking, silks and
rococo-style chinoiserie had by
about 1750 become the height of fashion in
Europe. Then came the inevitable reaction. From the mid-18th century,
stimulated by the publications of James Macpherson (the Ossian poems) and Horace
Walpole (the Gothic novel), the pendulum began to swing back for some to a
nostalgia for Europe's lost culture of magic, simplicity, Nature-worship, the
irrational, the numinous and the transcendent so that by 1800 the white powdered
wigs of the Augustan Enlightenment were very much out of fashion. For the next
100 years cultural life in the West would be swayed by the struggle between the
'rationalist' Classical and the 'anti-rationalist' Romantic/Gothic modes.
China
was associated with the older inclination towards rationalism and both suffered
accordingly in the more avant-garde salons of
Europe
. In 17th century
Europe
only Jesuit priests had had really close experience of
China. As increasing numbers of traders and merchants came into real contact with the
country in the late 18th century, they declared that they were not
impressed – not least perhaps because the Chinese were not interested in what
the westerners had to sell. As
China's cultural stock fell, another Far Eastern stock rose – that of
Tibet
and the mystical
land
of
Shambhala
that was associated with it. These too had first been revealed to
Europe
by Jesuits. The first westerner in
Tibet
was a Portuguese Jesuit,
Antonio
de Andrade.
(12) It was another Portuguese Jesuit,
Estevao
Cacella
, who brought West word of the magical
land
of
Shambhala. In 1627, the year after Andrade, he entered eastern
Tibet
from
Bhutan
and died there three years later.
Translations
of Buddhist works into European languages steadily began to appear after the
Napoleonic era. As nostalgia for an imagined transcendent past replete with art
and spiritual beauty grew apace, the longing for a Pure Land of spirit and art
became overwhelming for many who recoiled from the burgeoning Industrial
ugliness and materialistic obsessions of the Victorian age. Many cultural
phenomena of the 19th century can be understood in terms of this
polar perspective of spiritual 'inflation' of the self and the spiritual
deflation of materialism which saw
Man as but a machine or an animal. Interest in Buddhism – or rather, what they
imagined to be Buddhism - grew
steadily as people became familar with, for example,
the works of Schopenhauer and then Madame
Blavatsky's Theosophical
movement; it was especially the latter which
familiarised westerners with the notion that spiritual teachers of great wisdom,
perhaps even the 'Hidden Masters' of world evolution, had always resided on the
high Tibetan plateau. Many westerners longed to escape into an imagined past of
nobility, aestheticism or simplicity, whether in the physical world, in the
wilds of
Africa
or the vastness of the Indian Raj, or for example, in the worlds of art.
Others
sought transcendence in political causes, in revolutionary struggle for some
romantic utopia, and were willing to
sacrifice themselves at the altar of some national deity. Concepts of other
dimensions, spiritual paradises, including Shambhala, were eagerly embraced by
sensitive souls, not least by those with a growing sense of guilt or shame at
what western humanity had done to itself, to nature and to non-western peoples.
Such sentiments and motivations, redolent of the later 'New Age' movement, were
rampant in educated circles in the decades before the First World War.
Suppressed by the wars of the mid-20th century, such spiritual
aspirations re-emerged powerfully in
the 1960s when so many headed east in search of meaning, while Tibetan exiles
and spiritual teachers headed west after the failed uprising of 1959, taking
with them the teaching of Shambhala, which merged vaguely into stories of
Atlantis and other lost civilisations, or combined with yearnings for brave new
Aquarian communities of the future. Western attitudes towards
Tibet
and Shambhala cannot be understood without taking into account this 200
year-old story of western alienation.
Chang
Chun-yi, who once served in the
Taiwan
government as chairman of its "Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs
Commission," commented:
"We
. . . have found that modernization brings many social flaws that can hardly be
remedied [and] we naturally long for the lost past . . . the Tibetan race that
lives there in relative isolation
from the rest of the world and is quite content with its intellectual lot also
has its ancient, unique, and
mystical religious traditions. All of which fits in nicely with the Western
concept of an ideal and lost past. So, in their minds,
Tibet
has become the world's last pure land,
sacred and inviolable. Unfortunately, Tibet is under Chinese Communist rule now,
with it being understood that the Han Chinese are stripping the Tibetans of the
right to pass on their own ethnic culture, using migration to eventually
exterminate the race, and conducting nuclear tests in that pure land that could
destroy the human race. How could that not fill post-modern Westerners who are
ardent nature and peace-lovers with bitter hatred, [and] arouse real sympathy?
That is a basic reason why the Western public takes such an absolutely different
and extremist stance on the
Tibet
matter than does their government, and is
the basic reason why the
Tibet
matter has
ultimately become an international one." (13)
The Tibetan Bulletin Online,
the official journal of the Central Tibetan Administration of the Dalai Lama
referred again in Nov. 2006 (Vol. 10. No. 6) to :
the desire of His Holiness the Dalai Lama that the Tibetan people must be
empowered to preserve and expand upon Tibet’s precious spiritual traditions,
which is of benefit to the whole of humankind, including the Chinese people. In
order to do this, the Tibetan people, inhabiting the whole of the Tibetan
plateau, which is one geographic and composite ecological unit, must be given
sufficient political freedom to ensure the continued survival and integrity of a
unique civilization.
Here we see the Tibetan claim, referred to earlier, to
the whole of the Tibetan cultural-geographical region. We see also the assertion
that Tibetan Lamaism is of benefit not only to
China
but to the whole of humanity. Buddhism may indeed be of some benefit to
humanity, but the rulership and guidance of modern society by all-male monastic
orders...?
It
has occurred to many observers that In another of history's great ironies, the
invasion of
Tibet
by the supposedly 'materialist' Chinese Maoists in 1959 drove the profoundly
'spiritual' teachings of Tibetan Buddhism to the West as many Tibetan teachers
relocated in
Europe
and
America. But is this actually the case? Could it not be that the Chinese Communists in fact share with the Tibetans
something of a magical, symbolic and 'mythic conception' of history:
...history for [the
Chinese] was not simply a scientific study. It had the features of a cult, akin
to ancestor worship, with the ritual object of presenting the past, favorably
emended and touched up, as a model for current political action. It had to
conform also to the mystical view of China as the Centre of the World, the
Universal Empire in which every other country had a natural urge to become a
part … The Communists … were the first Chinese to have the power to convert
their atavistic theories into fact.(14)
There
had always been a spiritual rivalry between the Tibetans and the
Chinese since the two cultures first 'met' in the Tang era. The
geomantically aware Chinese were only too conscious of the fact that, while they
claimed that
China
was the Centre of the World,
Tibet
stood at the roof of the
world, and
China's great rivers rose in
Tibet. The Chinese have long been
wary, even in some awe, of the much-vaunted magic powers that are said to reside
in the Land of the Snows. The Tibetan lamas were treated with respect by the
Chinese elite, especially under the (Manchurian) Ching dynasty (1644-1912). This
awareness gave rise to a kind of symbolic spiritual struggle between the
'magical' worldviews of, for example,
Chairman
Mao
and the current Dalai Lama.
We recall that the Dalai Lama's Yellow Hat (Gelugpa) sect had already defeated
the 'Red Hats' in
Tibet
centuries before. After ten
years of the Cultural Revolution, things looked bad for Tibet, but then, in
1976, China suffered a massive earthquake (over 200,000 victims), and shortly
afterwards Chairman Mao died. After his death, the Chinese reversed their stance
towards
Tibet
; their official gesture was
now to offer everything short of full independence, but this only had the effect
of stimulating Tibetan resistance.
The
question can arise, absurd though it may seem to some: could Tibetan Buddhism
take over
China
in the future and the
apocalyptic Shambhala myth at the heart of the Kalachakra Tantra become the
centre of an aggressive pan-Asian imperialism? This question is indeed not as
far-fetched as it seems. First, as Indian Buddhism all but died out in its
homeland and successfully rooted
itself in other Asian cultures, so Tibetan Buddhism could also transplant itself
elsewhere. Second, the Japanese and Koreans managed to fuse Buddhi
sm
with their native shamanistic traditions over a thousand years ago, and the
Japanese imperialist regime in the 1930s actually sought to rally Mongols,
Manchus and other East Asians
round the Shambhala myth and use it to turn them against the West. Third, the
feud between Beijing and Taiwan has been easing considerably of late, and in
Taiwan Tibetan Buddhism has established a real presence, with half a million
followers; hundreds of Tibetan Buddhist shrines have been built, and many
Tibetan lamas visit every year. It is indeed not far-fetched to imagine that
even as Han Chinese migrants and tourists pour into
Tibet
on the newly built railway,
two Tibetan spiritual trojan horses will make their way into Han China from both
Tibet
itself along that railway,
and from
Taiwan, as it gradually
reintegrates with the motherland. The Tibetans are already claiming that high
lamas are reincarnating in Chinese families in Taiwan. (15)
In
a speech made in front of Chinese students in
Boston
(
USA
) on
September 9, 1995, the Dalai Lama...
nonchalantly proposes Tibetan Buddhism as
China’s new religion:
"A huge spiritual and moral vacuum is ...being rapidly created in Chinese
society. In this situation, the Tibetan Buddhist culture and philosophy would be
able to serve millions of Chinese brothers and sisters in their search for moral
and spiritual values. After all, traditionally Buddhism is not an alien
philosophy to the Chinese people.".(16)
In
1997 the Chinese government refused a request from the Dalai Lama to conduct a
pilgrimage to the Wutai mountains in
Shanxi
province,
China
and discuss
Tibet's autonomy there with the
[then] Chinese
President
Jiang
Zemin. It is a location lamaism
believes sacred to the bodhisattva Manjusri (17),
who was traditionally associated with the Chinese emperor, and it is thus a
geomantically significant area. A kalachakra ceremony conducted in such a spot
could, in the magical Tibetan view, serve to launch 'a spiritual conquest of
China'. It is perhaps out of a
sense of wary respect for the assumed 'magical' power of the Tibetan monks that
Beijing has thus far shown its determination not to deal with the Dalai Lama
officially even while it maintains back channel contacts with his
'government-in-exile' and pushes the claims of Tibet's No. 2 religious figure,
the Panchen Lama, whom it has controlled since 1995?
Beijing
is well aware of the custom
that the Panchen and Dalai Lamas have to go through a formal process of
'discovering' each other's reincarnations, thus in effect 'selecting' the next
Panchen or Dalai Lama. Having chosen another boy, known as Qoigyijabu,
as Panchen Lama, the
Chinese authorities took the Dalai Lama's choice, a boy named Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, into
'protective custody' in 1995. If the government controls the Panchen Lama, it
has a chance to select who will be the next Dalai Lama.
China
has never been an
aggressive, missionarising culture in the religious sense; on the contrary, it
has often been open to receiving missionaries of various kinds over the
centuries, from Buddhism, Islam and Manichaeism to the pseudo-Christianity of
the Taiping rebels (1850-64) and indeed Marxism itself. The current Chinese
'neo-Confucianist', semi-Marxist elite cannot but be aware of the effects on the
Chinese
State
over the centuries of their
people's receptivity to ecstatic cults and religions. However, some conservative
circles in both East and West would like to push this Chinese fascination with
Tibetan Buddhism in a particular direction. There are those, for example, in
Japan
and
Taiwan
who hope that
...a Chinese
reactivation of the Shambhala myth could... deliver a traditionally anchored
pan-Asian ideology to replace a fading communism. As under the Manchus, there is
no need for such a vision to square with the ideas of the entire people.(18)
In
the West, the British former diplomat and ex-MP
George
Walden has this year authored a book (19) in which he raises the spectre that what he calls the normally
'sheepish' Chinese may be about to become
more 'wolfish', and 'Mongolian' in spirit. But a resurgent
Mongolia
has as its central totems
Genghis Khan and Lamaism, with its Kalachakra tantra teaching of the world
ruler, the chakravartin, who will
unite all
Asia
against the peoples of 'the
West'. Walden and others in the western media therefore are playing with fire, reawakening fears of a self-conjured 'Yellow Peril'. For whilst it has often
been noted that the peaceful religion of Mahayana Buddhism moved from India to
minister unto the martial peoples of northeast Asia – and Buddhism can
certainly be said to have contributed to 'calming' the Mongols - China is not to
be confused with Mongolia. The peoples of
East Asia
are as different from each
other as are those of
Europe; there is no amorphous East
Asian Yellow Peril. What there is in Tibetan Buddhism, however, is a religious
doctrine that could be used in a perverted way to unite the peoples of
East Asia
and turn them against other
peoples, just as the idea of the socialist brotherhood of Man was so used. For
just as the noble ideal of the brotherhood of Man was accompanied in socialism
by the nefarious doctrines of class struggle, the theory of surplus value and
the materialist interpretation of history, so the noble truth of Buddhism is
accompanied in Tibet by a doctrine of an apocalyptic racial conflagration,
rituals of male superiority that are manipulative of women and of the female
principle in general, and a social system of theocratic rule.
As
these two articles have indicated, the Buddhism of Tibet includes key elements
that are no more in harmony with the essential spirit of Buddhism than crusaders
and all-male monkhood are in harmony with the spirit of Christianity. It would
not be desirable for Tibetan Buddhism and its monks to take the place of the
presently fading Chinese version of Marxism and its Party cadres. If the notion
that this could happen at all seems absurd to some, they should look again at
how close-run a thing was the Great Taiping Rebellion of 1850-64. That movement,
based on a non-Chinese religion (a form of pseudo-Christianity), grew from just
two people to ruling over 30 million and might well have taken over the Chinese
Empire had not the West thrown in its lot with the Ching dynasty; between 20 and
30 million died in the conflict. This is not to claim that Tibetan Buddhism
would take over
China
by force (after all, it
'conquered' the Mongol Empire by peaceful
means) but merely to indicate that a
seemingly
harmless religious movement can indeed 'conquer' a vast State, as the
(picture: Panchen Lama, Mao, Dalai Lama) Romans
experienced some 1700 years ago. It
is not the conflict between the Dalai Lama and Beijing which poses a threat for
the West
and the world community, but rather, in contrast, a possible future cultural
conquest of the “Chinese dragon” by the “Tibetan snow lion”.(20)
Meanwhile, Robert Thurman, Richard Gere, and multitudes of Americans today
earnestly believe in a 'Buddhocratic' conquest of America by the monks of Tibet
and in the spiritual guardianship of the West by "His Holiness" the
Dalai Lama. Stranger things have happened in the history of the world. We need
to look not only at what is front of us, but to scan the horizon for what may be
in the process of emerging, both within our own souls and in the world at large.
NOTES
(9)
Wang Lixiong,
TIBET
: The PRC's 21st Century Underbelly
(14)
http://www.iivs.de/~iivs01311/SDLE/Part-2-14.htm
(18)
http://www.iivs.de/~iivs01311/SDLE/Part-2-14.htm
(20)
http://www.iivs.de/~iivs01311/SDLE/Part-2-17.htm
Terry
Boardman 2008
This page was created 30.9.2008
Last updated 22.10.09
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Ü-Tsang,
Amdo and Kham, The Chinese have always been prepared to allow
autonomy for 'inner Tibet' (Ü-Tsang, yellow on map), which they now call
Xizang Autonomous Province, while the Tibetan Government-in-exile wants full
autonomy (not independence) over Amdo and Kham as well (orange and red), which
it claims has always been part of the greater Tibetan cultural area
historically. This would include the current Chinese provinces of