Posted by lagna on January 05, 19100 at 00:33:07:
________________WTN-LWorld Tibet Network News _________________Published by:The Canada Tibet Committee Editorial Board:Brian Given, Conrad Richter, Nima Dorjee, Tseten Samdup, Thubten (Sam) Samdup WTN Editors:wtn-editors@tibet.ca ______________________________________________________________________Monday, December 27, 1999 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ISSUE ID: 99/12/27Compiled by Nima Dorjee -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Life in Old Tibet 2. Partners in Exile 3. Why Buddhism, Why Now? And why in America? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- All the articles in Today s WTN is fromCivilization- The Magazine of the Library of Congress.The special feature is edited by Prof. Robert Thurman. Due in no small part to the soaring popularity of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, it seems Buddhism is everywhere these days -- from Hollywood to the fields of Indiana to the business best-seller list. Our special section examines the remarkable spread of Buddhism in the West, and looks to Tibet for the roots of this compelling tradition.CivilizationDecember/ January 99/2000 issue.http://www.civmag.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Life in Old Tibet -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A clear-eyed reminiscence By Kyabje Gelek Rinpoche Born in 1939, Kyabje Gelek Rinpoche is a blood relation of the 13th Dalai Lama and the son of one of the top incarnate lamas in Tibet. Due to its sacred lineage, Rinpoche's family held a revered position in Tibetan society and lived comfortably in downtown Lhasa and on nearby estates. While still a young child, Rinpoche was recognized by the regent of Tibet as the reincarnation of a famous abbot. He was educated at a monastery in Tibet through 1959, when he was forced to flee to the sanctuary of India. He relocated to the United States in 1987 and now lives in Michigan. Below, Rinpoche offers some memories of his early years in independent Tibet.When I was five or six, my tutors discovered I could memorize texts very easily -- 30 or 40 pages in a few hours. The tutors would meet me in the evening to hear me recite what I had memorized. Some-times I would fall asleep while still reciting. They would figure out that I was sleeping and make me stand up. But I would lean against the wall and sleep standing up, still reciting. Then they made me stand near a window three stories up -- even there, I leaned my back to the side of the window, fell asleep, and kept on reciting until they carried me off to bed. Maybe that's why they called me an incarnate lama. When I went to the monastery, I received strict training and lived in rather sparse accommodations. It was quite cold and the routine was rigorous -- getting up early in the morning, praying and studying in poor light, having very little time to play. I was 11 years old when the Chinese arrived. They called themselves liberators, but we did not know from whom they were liberating us. What they told us, since we were the elite, was: 'We are here to liberate you from the Western clutch, the control of the imperialistic power.' Actually, there was only one Western person in all Tibet at that time -- a Mr. Ford, who worked in Chamdo as a radio operator for the governor of Kham. So the whole Chinese army had to come to Tibet to liberate us from one single Western radio operator. They quietly told the simple Tibetans that they were liberating them from us -- Tibet's privileged classes and institutions. There was a great Tibetan acting prime minister at the time named Lukangwa, who was famous for dealing firmly with the Chinese. He used to say, 'We will not attack anybody -- this is the religious side of our government commitment. On the other hand, whoever attacks us, we will not let them go easily, no matter what it takes -- this is the rule of the secular law. We will fight you, no matter if we finish all our arms, if you cut them off at the shoulder. And if you finish all the human beings in Tibet, then the environment will fight you.' So the Chinese tried to make conversation with him. They asked, 'How many cups of tea do Tibetans drink per day?' He answered, 'It depends how good it is. If it's good, we'll drink a hundred of them. If it's bad, we won't even take a drop. Do you understand what I mean?' The first way the Chinese 'liberated' Tibet was with silver coins. When I was 12 years old, I was a member of the editorial board of a daily newspaper and received 300 silver coins every month as a salary. But I never spent a single day in the office and I never saw the newspaper. My teacher used to tell me, 'This is poison. Leave it over there. One day they will make you pay it back.' So we put the coins in the corner of the house somewhere in a box. That's how the Chinese first came to Tibet, trying to win the goodwill of the people. Some Westerners imagine Tibet as Shangri-la, but we always believed Shangri-la lay somewhere to the north. The Tibetan climate is harsh and unforgiving: very cold, dry, and dusty, without much snow. At times, we had great difficulty finding food. But as the Dalai Lama has said, Tibet was unique in the quality of the culture, the rigor of the education -- even the simple, good human beings it produced. We were fortunate to have available to us the living tradition of the Buddha's wisdom and compassion. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Partners in Exile -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tibetans and Jews compare survival strategies in diaspora By Rodger Kamenetz In 1990, I attended a meeting of a group of rabbis and Jewish scholars with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, his exile home. 'When we became refugees,' the Dalai Lama told us, 'we knew our struggle was not easy, would take a long time, if not generations. Then we very often referred to the Jewish people. Through so many centuries, so many hardships, they never lost their culture and their faith. As a result, when other external conditions became ripe, they were ready to build their nation.' Here was an extraordinary moment in world history. The religious and political leader of one nation, exiled in modern times, called on the religious leaders of another ancient exiled people for the wisdom of their experience. The Dalai Lama asked the Jews for their 'secret' -- 'the secret of Jewish spiritual survival in exile.' The Jewish people have responded warmly to the Dalai Lama's question, and the relationship between Jews and Tibetans has grown in the decade since that first encounter. Tibetan educators have visited Jewish summer camps to learn how they might educate their own children living in exile in the United States, India, and Europe. The Dalai Lama was the first public visitor to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Jewish religious and lay leaders have provided strong political support for the Tibetan cause. And the Dalai Lama, in turn, has politicized his struggle for Tibetan autonomy, so much so that I call him a 'dharma Zionist.' Jewish history is full of exile, destruction, and loss: the Babylonian exile at the time of the Buddha, the destruction of Jerusalem and the second temple in 70 C.E., the Crusades, expulsions from Spain, Britain, and France, and the more recent horror of the Holocaust. There are many secrets of Jewish spiritual survival in exile, many powerful responses to the exile experience. In the dialogues in Dharamsala (often referred to as Little Lhasa), three pivotal points were touched on: the Jewish family, the synagogue, and the devotion to Torah. Judaism is a 'householder' religion, a religion of parents and children, and has been so from the time of the patriarch and matriarch Abraham and Sarah all the way to the present day. Blu Greenberg, a Jewish scholar and mother, explained to the Dalai Lama and his abbots the power of Jewish family life and its home celebrations: the weekly Sabbath meal, the lighting of Hanukkah candles, the Passover seder. However, as I looked around the room, I realized we were addressing a group of celibate monks! Tibetan Buddhism, in contrast with Judaism, is primarily a monastic religion. Another Jewish secret is the synagogue, a unique institution that began to develop with the destruction of the first temple and the first historical exile of the Jewish people: the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century B.C.E. When the second temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E., the Jewish people already had an institution that met their needs in the Diaspora: With no temple to serve as a religious center, the synagogue became a combination prayer and study center and community gathering place -- and also the model for the Christian church. So far, in exile, the Tibetans have focused primarily on rebuilding in India the monastic institutions destroyed in Tibet. Finally, the Torah and its associated commentary and literature, the Midrash and the Talmud, have sustained the Jewish people throughout the centuries. Study is a key value of Jewish life, and it was a dramatic moment when Rabbi Moshe Waldoks, of Temple Beth Zion in Brookline, Massachusetts, presented a Torah scroll to the Dalai Lama, who peered at it intently, as if he was studying the secret architecture of the Jewish soul. When I made a subsequent visit to the Dalai Lama five years later, the Torah was displayed proudly in his special meeting room. The Tibetans, too, have a strong textual tradition. When we visited the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, we saw stack after stack of texts written on the traditional flat leaves and wrapped lovingly in cloth. Clearly, Jews and Tibetans share a love of study of their essential teachings -- their Torah, their dharma -- and this love of study has sustained the Jewish people, just as it seems to be giving strength to the Tibetan leadership today. Jews and Tibetans have developed religious explanations for their historical predicaments. The prophet Isaiah interpreted the Jewish exile as a calling for Jews to become 'a light unto the nations' -- to spread their teachings about God throughout the world. Similarly, some Tibetans have interpreted their exile as an opportunity to spread their religious teachings, or dharma, throughout the world. Certainly, the enormous growth of interest in Buddhism in the West owes a great deal to the prominence of the Dalai Lama and other popular Tibetan teachers who have emerged since their forced exile in 1959.