Jul. 01, 2009 - Issue #715: The Bestest of Edmonton 2009
Dyer Straight
The mortality of the Dalai Lama
"The Dalai Lama equals non-violence, and without him there would be
violence," said Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free
Tibet, a couple of months ago. In Beijing, Chinese writer Wang Lixiong
agreed: "If ... the Dalai Lama does not return to Tibet before he dies, the
moment that he dies will see general riots across the Tibetan areas of
China." And he is going to die, probably fairly soon.
The Dalai Lama will be 74 next month, and he has been in hospital three times
in the past year. He presumably believes that he will immediately be reborn
as soon as he dies, but the traditional search for the child who is his next
incarnation could take years. Waiting for that child to grow up and become
the Tibetans' next leader will take several decades. That is a big political
problem.
The core of the problem is that his role as defined by tradition embodies
both political and religious authority. Religious questions rarely require
instant answers, and Tibetan Buddhism has flourished for many centuries
despite these recurrent 20-year gaps in the highest leadership job. Political
decisions, on the other hand, need to be made promptly—so maybe the
solution is to separate those two roles.
The Dalai Lama has been raising this possibility for years, only to have it
repeatedly rejected by his adoring followers. He brought it up again at a
congress of the Tibetan exile community not long after last year's bloody
anti-Chinese riots in Tibet, saying that his moderate, "middle-way" approach
to the Chinese authorities in Beijing, seeking only autonomy and not
independence for the country, was having no success.
Maybe it was time for him to take a back seat and let the younger generation
of leaders in the community deal with that thorny problem as they saw fit, he
suggested. The congress rejected the suggestion, reaffirming him as their
political leader. They simply could not imagine a future without him.
The Dalai Lama himself, however, knows that such a future will arrive. So
he has now released a video in which he urges the Tibetan exile community to
embrace democracy and stop depending on a political leader who is essentially
(at the risk of sounding disrespectful) picked at random. That may serve for
religious purposes, but for the material world something different is
required.
"The Dalai Lama held temporal and spiritual leadership over the last 400 or
500 years. It may have been quite useful, but that period is over," he says
in the video. "Today it is clear to the whole world that democracy is the
best system despite its minor negativities. That is why it is important that
Tibetans also move with the larger world community."
It's a nicely crafted statement that does not trample on anybody's religious
sensitivities, but what it means is that political leadership of the Tibetan
exile community must move from the Dalai Lama to an elected prime minister.
Such an office has existed since 2001, but until now its holder has deferred
to the Dalai Lama in all important decisions. That has to stop, says the man
himself—so maybe now it actually will.
That is a neat solution to the succession problem, but it has implications
that should concern the Chinese government. A Tibetan prime minister elected
solely by the exile community cannot hope to have the political authority of
a "living Buddha" within Tibet.
For almost half a century the Dalai Lama has used that authority to restrain
Tibetans from open revolt against China, always seeking negotiations with
Beijing on Tibetan autonomy and discouraging talk of outright independence. A
prime minister elected only by the diaspora could not do that even if he
wanted to—which he might not.
China has never appreciated the Dalai Lama's services, of course. In classic
imperial style, it assumes that material improvements in the living standards
of its subjects will make them forget their nationalist aspirations. When it
turns out that Tibetans have not forgotten them, as was brutally demonstrated
in last year's anti-Chinese riots in Lhasa, Beijing blames "outside
agitators" and "plotters" like the Dalai Lama, whom it calls "a jackal clad
in monk's robes."
In fact, he has been feeding tranquilizers to the Tibetan population for
decades, in the (probably accurate) belief that Tibet cannot win its
independence by violence. But a lot of Tibetans would like to try, and
Beijing will miss the Dalai Lama when he's gone. V
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries. His column appears each week in Vue Weekly.
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