World Tibet Network News Wednesday, May 06, 1998

The Western stereotype is that Tibetans are tranquil people, but that doesn't account for the anguish of a Tibetan refugee in New Delhi after a former Buddhist monk burned himself to death in protest last week of China's decades-long occupation of Tibet.

By Don Lopez, Jr.

SPECIAL TO MSNBC

ANN ARBOR, Mich., May 5 -- A hunger strike by Tibetan refugees in India last week turned tragic when a former Tibetan monk set himself afire. In Tibet, human rights groups report, tensions are mounting as the Chinese government cracks down on dissidents and the Dalai Lama pleads for a nonviolent solution. Tibet is in desperate straits, but in the West, you wouldn't know it.

WE STILL THINK of this troubled land as Shangri-La - some magical place of enlightenment and peace. Just look in any bookstore for evidence of how we romanticize Tibet.

Time-Life Books is advertising a new series of coffee-table books called Myth and Mankind. There are five volumes: The Real Arthur; The Enigma of Egypt; Forests of the Vampire; Tibet's Lost Horizon and Dancing with Wolves. If these titles appeared on a multiple-choice test, the question would be: Which of the following does not belong in this list?

How many people would know that the correct answer is Tibet's Lost Horizon?

Unlike Camelot and Dracula's Castle, Tibet is not a legend. Unlike Ancient Egypt, it is not a dead civilization. And unlike Native American culture, it has not been effectively destroyed by colonial expansion, at least not yet. But for some reason, Tibet - an independent nation until its forced absorption into China 1951 - is offered to the public as a myth suitable for

framing in a coffee-table book. Blame it on the Shangri-La Syndrome.

The invocation of the myth of Tibet sometimes seems irresistible; without it the Chinese occupation and colonization of Tibet is just one of many human rights violations that demand our attention. What sets the plight of the Tibetans apart from that of people in Palestine, Rwanda, Burma, East Timor, Northern Ireland or Bosnia is the view of Tibetans as a happy people, devoted to the practice of Buddhism, living in peaceful isolation in a remote and ecologically enlightened land ruled by a god-king, the Dalai Lama. That land is now under occupation by the forces of evil. This is a compelling story, an enticing blend of the exotic, the spiritual, and the political. But it is a fantasy that is ultimately detrimental to the cause of Tibetan independence.

In the popular imagination of an increasing number of Western adherents of Tibetan Buddhism, traditional Tibet has come to stand as something from which they derive strength and identity, representing what we someday can be, an ideal to which we can aspire, an ideal that once existed on the planet in high Tibet. Tibet, in short, has become a stereotype, where complex differences and competing histories have been flattened into a sterile essence. Tibet has become a stereotype, where complex differences and competing histories have been flattened into a sterile essence.

Stereotypes operate through adjectives, which turn selected characteristics into eternal truths. Tibet is isolated, Tibetans are content, monks are spiritual. These adjectives, with sufficient repetition, become innate qualities, immune from history. And once such an essence has been established, it will sometimes split into two opposing elements. Thus, for the Western enthusiasts, old Tibet was an isolated land of peace where the populace devoted itself to spiritual practice. For Tibet's Chinese oppressors, old Tibet was a backward and feudal society, ruled by a corrupt Dalai Lama. The invasion of Tibet by the People's Liberation Army in 1950 was represented (and in many cases, continues to be represented (in films like Seven Years in Tibet) as an undifferentiated mass of godless communists overwhelming a beatific land devoted to ethereal pursuits, the victims of the invasion including not only the hundreds of thousands of slaughtered Tibetans but the sometimes more lamented Buddhist religion as well. In th

is world of stereotypes, Tibet is the embodiment of the powers of the spiritual and the ancient; China is the embodiment of the powers of the materialist and the modern. Tibetans are superhuman; Chinese are subhuman. China must be debased in order for Tibet to be exalted. In order for there to be a enlightened Orient, there must be a benighted Orient. In order for there to be the

angelic, there must be the demonic.

To allow Tibet to circulate in a system of fantastic stereotypes is to deny Tibet its history, to exclude Tibet from a real world of which it has always been a part, and to deny Tibetans their role as agents participating in the creation of a contested and complex reality. The ravages wrought by China's policies in Tibet, beginning with the invasion of the People's Liberation

Army in 1950, have resulted not only in the destruction of Buddhist monasteries, temples, texts and works of art, but in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Tibetans. This would seem to be enough to sustain the clear contrast with life in Tibet prior to the invasion. This would seem to be enough to compel support for the cause of Tibetan independence. This would seem to be enough to cause the United Nations to condemn China for its violation of human rights in Tibet. Fantasies of Tibet have in the past three decades inspired much support for the cause of Tibetan independence. But those fantasies are ultimately a threat to the realization of the goal. To the extent that we continue to believe that Tibet prior to 1950 was a utopia, the Tibet of 1998 will be no place, preserved only in glossy coffee table books and reduced from reality to myth.

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Donald S. Lopez Jr. is Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan. His most recent book is Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West.