The Dalai Lama is a holy person first and a politician second. It is worth remembering this during his visits to Seattle and elsewhere in America, in the current emotionally charged atmosphere over China’s Olympic Games.
When I met him in Dharamsala, India, the Dalai Lama said his mind was on “Shoonya”, a Sanskrit word for emptiness experienced as profound serenity. It was in 1990 and he was coming to terms with China’s suppression of uprisings in which several hundred people died.
He subsequently spoke of the cultural destruction of his beloved nation. This year, he formally called it cultural genocide.
He spoke of Shoonya to build everyone’s inner strength to live through the repeated tragedies of his people. For him, Shoonya is emptiness so full that it operates like a seed containing all the unexpressed possibilities of hope, peace, success and happiness.
In 2008, this understanding gives him the courage to tell his people not to shed blood for freedom. Instead, he wants all of us to sow such strong seeds in the Shoonya of our own hearts that China will lose the will to subjugate Tibetans by force.
I empathised because my mother had described the innate dignity of destitute Tibetan refugees escaping from Chinese occupation through the Himalayan town of Shimla in the 1950s. She took their misery to heart partly because her own family had arrived in Shimla as refugees from Pakistan just a few years earlier.
The Dalai Lama is trying to perpetuate a brave tradition of non-violent acceptance and dignity in today’s harsh world. In despair hides the sapling of hope, if the path is one of non-violent “Satyagrah”, another Sanskrit word meaning “Insistence on truth.”
China is trying to draw a veil by switching off the Internet and stopping foreign journalists from reporting freely on the spot. It is vilifying the Dalai Lama, but he alone has the moral authority to revive cultural resurgence in Tibet and grant the domestic peace to China that guns and repression can never bring.
He is telling his people as well as their outraged friends in all countries that the way to pacify the bigoted rulers of Beijing is to insist repeatedly on the truth. That truth is Tibet’s priceless contribution to human spirituality, including its struggle to keep alive traditions of belief, language and culture against the rising tsunami of modern Chinese materialism.
Determined insistence on this truth will do more to save Tibetans than humiliating Beijing through boycotts. The Beijing government has indoctrinated its people to hate the Dalai Lama and Tibetans as evil forces trying to dismember the nation. The people will see any successful boycott as a public humiliation of Han Chinese and will blame Tibetans not the Beijing regime.
The challenge for the rest of the world is to ensure that the Chinese person-in-the-street does not react with disproportionate violence towards innocent Tibetans. Beijing does not care to be loved by the world. It wants to perpetuate its domestic power and be feared by its people.
It will deal with the Tibetans on its own terms behind opaque curtains after the Olympics. The angrier the Han Chinese, the more face Beijing will gain through brutality against Tibetans when the time comes for revenge. The regime’s domestic opponents will also get a clear message.
All of us may come to bitterly regret the Dalai Lama’s moderation, if China bears down with full force on the Tibetans later this year. But it is only realistic to recognize that neither the US government nor anyone else has the power or political will to protect Tibetans against a combination of Han Chinese anger and the regime’s cruelty.
Beijing is unlikely ever to leave Tibetans at peace since greater Tibet equals nearly 25% of China’s territory and contains wealth like oil, gas, uranium and lithium, all of which are very valuable currently. These are hard to extract but investing in them is coming closer each day with rising prices. China has the necessary know how and the money.
Above all, Tibet is probably the world’s richest reservoir of fresh water and the starting point of major Asian rivers. A few decades from now, when world powers fight over water instead of oil, Tibet will be a global El Dorado.
Perhaps, the only way to prevent Chinese punishment for Tibetans later this year is to find a means of protest that does not damage the Olympics while making foreign disapproval very clear. All foreign athletes competing in Beijing should agree to sit on the ground in silence for three minutes at the opening ceremonies during their parade, and before each event throughout the Olympics.
Beijing will not be able to blame foreign governments because the athletes do not answer to those governments. It will blame the International Olympic Committee but insisting on the athletes’ expulsion would simply ruin the Games. The IOC may also benefit by recognizing that it can no longer interpret the sporting spirit to include coercing athletes to ignore intense human suffering.
The impact on the people in China through TV and the media would be huge. They will see athletes using a non-violent and dignified method of expressing their disapproval of cultural genocide without disrupting the Games.
No government in Beijing could disregard this bad publicity in the eyes of its own people. Above all, it will hesitate to impose vengeance upon Tibetans afterwards because ordinary Chinese will be forced to think again about its propaganda.
