Published by: World Tibet Network News, Saturdsay, August 3, 1996

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Aug. 2. 1996

by Imbert Matthee

P-I Pacific Rim Correspondent

SEATTLE -- When Losang Lungrig grates and moves his silver funnel to "paint" the mandala with a fine trail of colored sand, the Buddhist monk is not supposed to think about anything but love and compassion.

But occasionally, he can not escape memories of the Tibet he left three years ago and the scenes of Chinese brutality he says he witnessed as a boy.

"When that happens, I must stop it and turn my thoughts to the celestial deities and the verses of the mandala," he said through an interpreter. "That will help my country politically and spiritually."

Lungrig, 30, Sonam Woeser, 32, and Thupten Sonam, 30, all from the Sara Je Monastery near Bangalore, India, are expected to complete the Wheel of Compassion mandala today at the Newmark Center Gallery in downtown Seattle. They started the sand painting on July 24.

It will be on display until tomorrow. On Sunday, the monks will ceremoniously dismantle the picture and throw the sand in Elliott Bay as a traditional gesture of detachment and self-denial.

The nine-day creation of the mandala is a meditative practice that brings a message of peace.

But the three monks, selected from thousands as the best in their sacred craft and invited to Seattle by the Tibetan Rights Campaign, hope their 5 1/2-month tour of the United States also will bring renewed interest in the plight of their native Tibet and their government in exile headed by the god-king Dalai Lama.

During the past year, China has stepped up its pressure on Tibetan spiritual leaders who have been calling for independence and for a world-wide campaign against an erosion of their ancient culture by a Chinese policy of assimilation. The confrontation has led to the worst unrest in Tibet since 1989. China reportedly has closed key monasteries and detained about 100 monks.

Politics and religion are inextricably linked in Tibet, where the traditional culture based on a branch of Buddhism called Lamaism recognizes the Dalai Lama as its head of state.

Earlier this year, Beijing banned pictures of the Dalai Lama and began home-by-home searches for his image. It also placed stricter controls on temples and monasteries where monks and nuns have called for independence.

"There's no (Chinese) tolerance for anything," said David Bachman, a China scholar at the University of Washington. "I think it's a general insecurity in Beijing preceding the death of (paramount leader) Deng Xiaoping."

Chinese officials defend their policies in Tibet, saying they will not tolerate the Dalai Lama's separatist activities. They advise foreign countries to stay out of China's internal affairs. "He plotted and incited disturbances in Tibet and traveled to foreign countries to beg for their support to internationalize the issue of Tibet," said Yu Shuning, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C.

"The Dalai Lama is a political exile supported by certain foreign forces working to split Tibet from China," Yu said. The latest standoff between Beijing and Tibet's exiled leaders began in May 1995 after the Dalai Lama identified 6-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as the proper reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, Tibet's second-most important spiritual leader who will eventually be involved in selecting a successor for the 61-year-old Dalai Lama.

Chinese authorities promptly detained the boy and came up six months later with their own choice, Gyaincain Norbu, whose parents are Communist Party members.

China's latest crackdown, similar to campaigns against dissidents in the autonomous regions of Xijiang and Inner Mongolia, has prompted western governments to condemn Chinese human rights practices.

It resulted in a diplomatic spat between China and Germany, whose parliament had passed a resolution criticizing "the violent suppression of Tibet."

And it was one of the reasons critics earlier this summer called for a withdrawal of most-favored-nation trading status for China.

The Clinton administration and Congress extended the normal trading privileges, saying human rights are best discussed outside the trade arena.

Locally, the Chinese crackdown in Tibet prompted members of the seven-store Puget Consumers Cooperative to vote for a boycott of Chinese products in June.

Since China invaded Tibet in 1950, the land high in the Himalayas has had a history of uprisings and crackdowns.

After a rebellion in Lhasa in 1959, the Dalai Lama fled Tibet and set up his government-in-exile in Dharmsala, India.

Bachman cautioned against an overly romantic view of pre-invasion Tibet, which was a poor feudal society with its own internal strife and top-down political system. But at least "it was their own system," he said.

Lungrig was 6 when he witnessed a public beating of pro-independence Tibetan clergy in Qamdo, his hometown in eastern Tibet.

The childhood trauma from the early 1970s still brings him tears as he describes how the monks and lamas were stripped of their robes and hung from ropes by their hands behind their backs before Chinese authorities forced the Tibetan villagers to punch, kick and verbally humiliate them.

Lungrig, who joined a monastery in eastern Tibet at age 17, fled to Nepal in 1993 by walking across the Himalayas, and then went on to India.

Lungrig, whose monastery gets reports from a steady stream of Tibetan refugees, said Tibetans suffer more now than when he left. Religious freedom in Tibet exists only nominally and many spiritual leaders have been put in prison camps, making toys, shoes, consumer electronics, hand bags and apparel products, he and Sonam said.

China's policies, which reward Chinese migrants who move to remote parts of the country with tax breaks and higher wages, has overwhelmed Tibetans' religion-based society, the monks said. They blame the Chinese for logging their region's forests and hunting its threatened animals.

Before the Chinese invasion, one in every five males was a monk in a population of about 6 million. Many were killed, forced to leave monastic life or escaped. Now, the region has only several thousand monks.

Gungrig, Sonam and Woeser, whose original monastery in Tibet was once the region's second-largest, hope their mandala will alleviate the sufferings of the Tibetans.

The trio is also raising money to accommodate the many Tibetan refugees who arrive at their monastery and elsewhere in India every month.

Mandala, Sanskrit for "circles," are designs of temples for the hundreds of Buddhist deities -- represented by smaller colored dots -- and are based on patterns dating to 600 B.C. The fine lines the monks emit from their "chakpu" or funnel, represents walls and doors.

Although the monks have to ban most thoughts while painting the mandala, they use their memory to lay out the intricate patterns, which are taken from written instructions and ancient Buddhist texts.

The sand is imported from Tibet and colored with vegetable dyes. It takes at least three years before the monks are allowed to work on a mandala after practicing first with uncolored sand on paper.

As they work in quiet meditation, the rasping sound of their tools is believed to express the Buddhist concept of emptiness or connection between all forms of life.

"The mandala benefits those who see it," Gungrig said. "It purifies them."