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Tibet, the Dalai Lama, Feudalism, Slavery, and the Great Game
If you’re interested in Tibet and the Dalai Lama, this is what seems like essential knowledge.
1. Why do I care?
I have a ludicrous obsession with truth. I don’t mind when my friends joke about it: I know that being nice is more important than knowing the truth, and I’m much fonder of ignorant people who care for others than I am of knowledgeable people who care only about their cleverness. Many people of many faiths manage to be great people while believing things that are contradicted by facts, so when people’s beliefs harm no one else, I respect them. For most of my life, I took that approach to Tibetan Buddhism.
I became interested in Buddhism as a child, thanks to Dr. Strange and Green Lama comic books, the Kung Fu TV show, and Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. When I was seventeen in Washington, D.C., I spent a few months visiting a Theravada monastery once or twice a week. I liked meditation and the monk who taught us, but I was more interested in girls and art, so I drifted away. For decades, my impression of the Dalai Lama was the common one: I thought he was a pacifist vegetarian who had been driven from a land of herders and farmers by war-loving invaders.
Then I met two lovely people who were followers of the Dalai Lama, so I decided to learn more. But what I found contradicted everything I thought I knew.
2. Why does it matter?
Patrick French, a former director of Free Tibet, asked in the New York Times’ He May Be a God, but He’s No Politician:
The question that Nancy Pelosi and celebrity advocates like Richard Gere ought to answer is this: Have the actions of the Western pro-Tibet lobby over the last 20 years brought a single benefit to the Tibetans who live inside Tibet, and if not, why continue with a failed strategy?
So far as I know, no one has answered him.
Calling the Dalai Lama’s group “Pro-Tibet” is odd. That definition includes supporting a violent rebellion by Tibet’s feudal lords to preserve slavery. The parallels with the American Civil War are striking. You could argue that Tibet and the Confederacy should have been allowed to end slavery in their own time, but we must play the hand we’re dealt…
