The Dalai Lama And His Government — Catch-22 Tibet

Shashi Kei
Sep 5, 2018 · 10 min read

It has been 60 years since the Dalai Lama fled Tibet to set up an exile government in Dharamsala. As the third generation of Tibetans drifts with uncertain future in exile, most Tibetan refugees today have not seen their homeland nor lived as serfs and slaves as the Tibetan populace was prior to China’s annexation. And yet a deep sense ultranationalism accompanied by animosity towards China persists due to very effective indoctrination that the Dalai Lama’s exile government, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) has championed.

The 14th Dalai Lama

Faced with a powerful nemesis and finding itself with no military or economic might, the CTA has instead laid claim to 2 very powerful weapons in its assault against China — the Dalai Lama and the Buddhist religion. In the name of the Dalai Lama, the CTA commandeered Buddhism as a political tool and with that, created pockets of anti-China insurgents and agitators any place in the world where the Buddhist faith is being practiced. According to the CTA’s narrative, the proper practice of the Buddha’s teachings compels the practitioner to fall behind all of the Dalai Lama’s thoughts, which by extension, translates into the CTA’s policies and its political aspirations. The Dalai Lama is presented as a Buddha and hence all Buddhist adherents owe him a duty of obedience. In this, the CTA places the Dalai Lama at risk of being compared to the infamous Pope Boniface VIII, the megalomaniacal pontiff who decreed that salvation is not possible unless the people subject themselves to him completely. Similarly, one is not a proper Buddhist unless one supports the Dalai Lama ergo, CTA. This is notwithstanding the fact that the Dalai Lama is not even the absolute spiritual head of his own lineage, the Gelug, let alone of Buddhism overall.

Being in exile accorded the Dalai Lama more power than any of his predecessors or any Tibetan Buddhist figure, as the world became intoxicated with the Shangrila myth. It is upon this privilege and power accorded to the Dalai Lama that the CTA draws its legitimacy. In the decades since the Dalai Lama escaped Tibet, the Tibetan leader commanded immense vogue and created a significant global space within which the CTA has increasingly worked its mischief, often undermining the Dalai Lama’s efforts.

The sabotage

A number of incidences bear testimony to this. For instance, in July 2017 amid a tense standoff between India and China, the President of the CTA Lobsang Sangay decided it was an opportune time to raise the Tibetan flag at Pangong Tso Lake, which lies between India and China. That injudicious act infuriated China, a result inimical to India’s seeking of a peaceful solution to its border woes. To redress the injury, the Indian Foreign Secretary subsequently instructed all government officials to refrain from participating in Tibetan events organized to mark the 60th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s exile in India. In essence, the CTA significantly diminished almost 60 years of goodwill the Dalai Lama had built with the CTA’s generous host.

More recently the Dalai Lama’s effort to close the gap between Dharamsala and Beijing with accord on spiritual matters has been brazenly thwarted by his own government. In April 2018, the Dalai Lama acknowledged that the China-enthroned Panchen Lama Gyaincain Norbu is, in fact, the “official Panchen Lama” a statement that effectively endorses China’s legitimacy in recognizing and enthroning high lamas. This represents a complete reversal of the Tibetan leadership’s past stance, which asserted that Gyancain Norbu is merely a political stooge and a false incarnation of the popular 10th Panchen Lama. Given the importance of the seat of the Panchen Lama deemed to be the highest-ranking Tibetan Lama in China, the Dalai Lama’s admission of the Chinese Panchen Lama was clearly designed to thaw relations with Beijing and draw parties back to the negotiation table. The head of the CTA, Lobsang Sangay was present with the Dalai Lama and his proclamation on Panchen Gyancain Norbu was made and so there cannot have been a miscommunication. In response, two days later the CTA published on its official website an article critical of the Chinese Panchen Lama and demanded the release of the real and official Panchen Lama Gedun Chokyi Nyima which the article claims had been kidnapped by the CCP in 1995. To be sure that its point was not lost, another two stories were published on the CTA website in May 2018, both critical of the Chinese Panchen Lama. In essence, these stories demolished whatever foundations of friendship the Dalai Lama was construction with Beijing.

Co-opting Buddhism

In his recent speeches made during world tours, the Sikyong (President) of the CTA, Lobsang Sangay frames the Sino-Tibetan conflict as the struggle between Communism and Buddhism masquerading the fact that it is more accurately a quarrel over who has dominion over the Tibetan nation — a communist regime or a feudal theocrat to whom the Tibetan people were regarded as mere chattel prior to 1959.

The CTA’s use of Buddhism is subtle but delivers devastating effect. An example is the Tibetan leadership’s 1996 ban of the worship of a popular Tibetan Buddhist deity, Dorje Shugden. The 2004 Human Rights Watch Report on Tibet dedicates an entire section on Dorje Shugden, articulating how the CTA’s diktat on the Shugden practice created deep divisions amongst Tibetans in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and worldwide. Banning the worship of Dorje Shugden was a calculated and deft strategy. Dorje Shugden was carefully chosen amongst the thousands of deities and divinities in the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon due to its popularity. This, after all, is an ancient deity widely worshipped in the Gelug, the foremost Tibetan Buddhist School that the largest percentage of Tibetans belongs to, and also in the Nyingma, Sakya, and sub-sections of the Kagyu. The result was unrests within the TAR, precisely what the China government fears due to the tendency of unrests to escalate into uprisings in China’s frontier regions.

As the Shugden controversy continue to tear at the fabric of Tibetan Buddhist communities worldwide, the CTA conceived the idea of Dorje Shugden being an instrument of the Chinese constructed with the aim to destabilize the reign of the Dalai Lama. It was a clever ruse and very few saw that it would have been foolish for the Chinese government to spark a controversy that would rile 6 million Tibetans within its borders and turn the TAR into a divided region, just to spite the Dalai Lama with his 150,000 refugees. Nevertheless, it was an effective step and Tibetan Buddhist worldwide became de facto Tibet activists.

A Noxious Assault On Freedom Creating Chaos

Whilst effective, this strategy exacts a very high attrition on communities dragged into supporting the CTA’s agenda, namely discord and disharmony in erstwhile peaceful societies not involved in Sino-Tibetan aggressions. Still, it is a cost the CTA seems prepared to inflict as we see in its recent interference in Taiwanese spiritual affairs. Since 1949 Taiwan and China have had fraught relations and as tension renews between the two nations under Taiwan’s new President, Tsai Ing-wen, the CTA wades in to introduce further enmity and mistrust between the small island nation and the juggernaut China.

Xi Jinping and Tsai Ing wen

In August 2018, the CTA via its agency Snowland Publications in Taiwan published a book with the title, “Tibetan Dharma Protectors, Deities and Demons”. The book was written in Chinese with a foreword written by Dawa Tsering, the CTA’s representative in Taiwan. At first glance, the publishing of an educational book on Tibetan Buddhism seems benign enough. However, on closer inspection, it bears all the hallmark of good propaganda material created with one intention — to use the Dorje Shugden issue to divide the community and blame China. With chapter titles like “How did Tulku Drakpa Gyaltsen (who arose as the said divinity Dorje Shugden) become an evil spirit”; and “The poison of Dolgyal (a derogatory name for the deity)” and “The consequences of propitiating Shugden” there is no doubt what the objective of the book is. Not a single page acknowledges the fact that the highest lamas of the Gelug and the Sakya, including the 14th Dalai Lama, had worshipped the deity. Dawa Tsering said in an interview with Radio Free Asia that Dorje Shugden “violates Buddhism” while sidestepping the fact that the very idea of a book that disparages any religion and seeks to create disharmony in a foreign state violates the simplest concept o freedom and decency, again undermining the work the Dalai Lama in portraying the Tibetan people as harmless and soulful citizens of a heavenly Himalayan nation.

Not only is it suspicious that an official of the supposedly democratic CTA is again conflating religion and politics, now the CTA is stirring trouble in another country who religious affairs is of no concern to any foreign government let alone an exiled and stateless administration whose primary preoccupation should be the welfare of its refugee populace and the fulfillment of the Dalai Lama’s wish to return to Tibet.

The CTA’s anti-Shugden book purports to expose Taiwanese Buddhist groups that it claims have been infiltrated by the Chinese government. The basis of this allegation is purely on account of the groups’ worship of Dorje Shugden, the deity that the CTA had pre-emptively outlawed despite claiming to be a democracy. According to the book’s line of thought, the evil government of China has corrupted Buddhism and therefore, even if a Buddhist practitioner has no interest in Sino-Tibetan politics, he should still oppose China as a means of defending the integrity of his faith. That makes him a supporter of the Dalai Lama and CTA by default.

The CTA’s act has far-reaching consequences. To begin with, it trespasses on Taiwan’s spiritual matters, rightly an internal issue that the CTA should have no say on. In launching a book that specifically targets certain Taiwanese Buddhist groups the CTA implies that all good Taiwanese Buddhists should disregard the country’s law that provides for freedom of religion, and instead obey the CTA’s decree. The CTA’s own treatment of Shugden Buddhists is nothing short of draconian and it publishes on its official website a series of official notices and parliamentary resolutions that compels the Tibetan populace to apply pressure on Shugden Buddhists to give up their faith. In summary, it legalizes witch-hunts on segments of the Tibetan community just because of their religion. And now the CTA wants the people of Taiwan to similarly turn on their own countrymen and splinter the Buddhist community in Taiwan. The deeply divided Tibetan community worldwide and the unrests in TAR such as reported by the Human Rights Watch in 2004 bear witness to the damage suffered by those who have listened to the CTA.

What the CTA aims to do — constrain the people’s choice of belief and at the same time plant dissension and bring strife upon Taiwan’s Buddhist community, contravenes the most fundamental international law that prohibits a State to interfere with the internal affairs of another State thereby compromising its sovereignty. This is notwithstanding the fact that the CTA is not legally a State by the definition of established International Law, although it behaves and demands to be accorded the privileges and status of one. In fact, for 60 years, the CTA has acted outside the ambit of every global regulatory body and the reach of international law, a convenience the CTA has exploited fully. Next, and given prevailing tensions between Taiwan and China, the CTA book that accuses Shugden Buddhists of being Chinese agents serves to induce further sentiments detrimental to the development of peaceful reunification between Taiwan and China. Stirring anti-China sentiments can only serve to damage cross-strait ties at a time when it is already frail.

A Simple Business Decision

It may perplex some to see how a government that claims to base its policies on Buddhist values such as ahimsa (no harm) engaging in such treachery to serve its political agenda. This is especially so when the Dalai Lama has become famous touting messages of peace all over the world and even to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. But there is a simple explanation — the CTA is, after all, an exile government and as such, its reason for existing holds only as long as the 150,000 or so Tibetans who followed the Dalai Lama into exile continue to be refugees. The CTA’s locus standi ends the moment the Dalai Lama’s spiritual and political plans are accomplished symbolized by his return to China-controlled Tibet. The success of the Dalai Lama’s work comes at the demise of the CTA, which will simply have no role in TAR. It will have to dissolve its core and supporting structures including the countless Tibet houses around the world that has drawn according to conservative estimates, at least an average USD 50 Million annually into its coffers for the past 60 years. This money is supposed to be applied towards improving the standard of living of the Tibetan refugees. But given the string of global propaganda campaigns that keep resentment towards China at a peak, critics cannot help but wonder of donations and grants have been used to bankroll its schemes. Should the Dalai Lama manage to draw the Chinese government into a settlement, this gravy train would come to an abrupt halt and career politicians like Lobsang Sangay will lose all prestige accorded him and instead have to return to his position as an assistant lecturer. Which politician-business would seek such an end? It is such incongruities between what the CTA portrays and its actions that lend credence to China’s labeling of the CTA as a “separatist government”.

Shashi Kei
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