Mountain Phoenix over Tibet

Emptiness And Empty Talk

2012-01-01T02:06:00.000-08:00

One of my Dharma buddies confided that she had a fall-out with her Lama. He walked out on her in a private conversation after she raised a point about “nuns’ unequal treatment in Tibetan Buddhism”.

I wanted to exclaim: “Welcome to the club! Welcome among the once-bitten-twice-shy-women-in-Tibetan-Buddhism!”

The girl asked what he thought about the restoration of the full ordination for Tibetan nuns which, depending on the story, either never made it to Tibet or was disrupted once it arrived there. The basic problem was that modern-day nuns in the Tibetan monastic system could not move beyond the novice stage (Getsul) to become fully ordained Gelongma (“Bikshuni”) and proceed in their studies like their male counterparts due to this procedural issue.

What’s the big deal?

I guess not being able to become a Gelongma as a nun is like not being allowed to move beyond high school as a girl in lay life - an outrage, in other words.

Some nuns found a work-around by going to China, Korea, Vietnam or some other Asian country where it’s still possible to receive full ordination. Only with this ordination can they hope to study the complete set of scriptures just like the monks. The nuns who do not go outside but decide to stay within their order live as eternal novices.

I don’t know whether my Dharma buddy was contemplating on becoming a nun but I knew her Lama was a modern and erudite person; kind and soft-spoken, leading an exemplarily pure life of a renounced monastic, trained to love all sentient beings without discrimination from childhood on, and intelligent enough that the irony of our traditional view “We Tibetans don’t have a gender problem; every woman has the possibility to be reborn as a man in her next life” was not lost on him.

She raised the topic because he seemed trustworthy and empathic enough to acknowledge the legitimacy and timeliness of the nuns’ cause. A Lama of his stature would never be against the restoration of the nuns’ full ordination and thereby deny equal opportunity for all members of the Sangha. My buddy for that matter was also a reasonable person, not a male-hating, frustrated Inji feminist who was up to breed discord among the Sangha, as some may perhaps suspect.

But although both Lama and student were down-to-earth people, they still didn’t see it the same way: The Lama basically said a disrupted transmission lineage – to nuns or whoever - could not be fixed just like that through an act of goodwill, a majority vote by the Sangha or a word of command by any Lama from the top. Only the Buddha himself would be in a position to restore the nuns’ full ordination, no one else had the power or legitimacy to do so. That was his final word on this topic.

I empathised with my friend and her disappointment: The answer basically made the issue unsolvable. This is real life: Where on earth should the Buddha come from all of a sudden and restore the nuns’ ordination? Please.

This was the sad end of her discussion and all I could think of as a reaction was to share my own disastrous “feminist incident” - misery loves company.

I had a showdown with a Tibetan Geshe not long ago – ironically about the same topic: nuns’ full ordination. The Geshe, who seemed merely happy that I attended Buddhism classes, jokingly suggested I’d become a nun so I could devote more time to study and practice. His well-intended comment didn’t go down well with me. I heard myself say: “I’d never become a nun because they cannot become fully ordained like the monks and are always in an inferior position, that’s not nice.”

The Geshe replied it was not discrimination but a historical development: The transmission was discontinued because there weren’t enough nuns to keep the order alive and only the Buddha (there you go again) could revive it.

The Geshe’s line was all too well known. It was the same as propounded by arch-conservative patriarchs like Samdong Rinpoche. Longtime Professor of Buddhism and a former Prime Minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile - himself an officially recognised reincarnated Lama or Tulku - Samdong Rinpoche’s line rejected the notion that the nuns’ full ordination was an equal rights’ issue. As propounded at international Buddhist conferences to help restore the nuns’ full ordination, this line reduced the concern to a mere technical problem that needed to be resolved within the Buddhist “code of conduct” (Vinaya) which he expounded so conservatively to the letter that the entire discussion degenerates into an unbearable technical debate delaying any pragmatic solution.

It was enough to make me weep.

This type of conservative thinking blocked the opening of Tibet and excluded the outside world in the past. And now it was blocking the opening of Tibetan Buddhism and excluding women. In my eyes, it was a tragedy of epic proportions. They were babbling about the importance of re-establishing the Gelongma ordination so the Tibetan Sangha would be complete. But their acts were obstructive. When you looked at proceedings from conferences about this topic, all they do is treat the concern as an academic debating exercise.

The most worrying part though was that even modern, otherwise progressive Lamas, as my Dharma buddy’s example showed, could share this conservative attitude when it came to helping nuns gain an equal position in the Dharma. This was unsettling and showed just how much more persuading the nuns and their supporters had to do.

The Geshe and I argued back and forth for about 30 minutes with no winner, only ill feelings on both sides: He thought I was a foreign-bread Tibetan kid too heavily influenced by Inji girls who were out to breed discord (trukshin lang) under the pretext of equal rights (sic!) and I accused him and “the male-dominated Sangha” of sabotaging nuns equal rights by hiding behind the Buddha who is not here to take a position and twisting the law of cause and effect (“it’s the nuns fault if they have lost their transmission”). I even had the face to say something like: “Geshe-la, for someone who enjoys all the privileges of the system, it just doesn’t look good (lembo mindug) to tell those less fortunate that they have to be satisfied with their position.”

Old habits die hard. I pretty much emptied my entire arsenal of gender equality and Buddhist feminist arguments acquired over the last twenty years over the poor man’s head. I realized too late that I was unable to have such a conversation without my ego interfering. In hindsight I should have just shut up and smiled at the Geshe’s suggestion to become a nun.

How can we hope to improve the situation for women in Buddhist institutions, if talking about their inferior position and the cultural male bias - which we haven’t even mentioned - makes everything worse? Looking at my friend’s and my experience, direct verbal confrontation was not a good idea. It risked upsetting everyone including ourselves. But what would be a good way to approach this topic more effectively?

Even in the world outside the Dharma and the teacher-student relationship, Tibetan society has been slow to read the sign of the times: In other countries, government agencies and women’s organisations take up the gender topic and spearhead the push for equality and social change through education and policies. With every generation, people become more gender-neutral and fixed gender roles are starting to crumble.

In the Tibetan context, the public focus is on human rights abuses perpetrated by China and, as far as gender is concerned, on women-specific human rights’ abuses such as forced abortions and sterilisations or torture of nuns. In recent history, gender discrimination in our own rows has always been overridden by our political problem with China. So with no serious taker for the gender issue even in our times, the cultural male bias that sneaked into Buddhism unchecked for centuries is staining the Dharma more callously than ever - while the people and the world around us are becoming more gender-neutral day by day. This is the context within which the monastic representatives of Tibetan Buddhism teach today.

Instead of using the new situation to adapt, many try to preserve the old ways by using the Buddha as a scapegoat: They cite that he was against women entering the Sangha in the first place and use that as an argument to generally oppose women playing a bigger role in the Dharma.

But others say the only reason why the Buddha was not forthcoming in ordaining women in the beginning was because (Indian) society at the time was anti-egalitarian and the Buddha was skillfully taking social customs into consideration in order not to upset society. In other words, the Buddha’s action at the time was a “preliminary” advice, not a final stand.

Sure, we are all looking at the situation with our own preconceived ideas okay, but in the Buddha’s absence, we simply have to work with something. We can’t just say: “Oh, he’s not here, so we can’t do anything, we’re not authorised”. That’s so fatal.

Personally, I find it hard to believe that the Buddha should have had any bias. I believe if he were among us today, he would give both nuns and monks equal rights so as to not upset society because societal gender norms have profoundly changed.

But the Tibetan monastic Sangha doesn’t seem to share this view. They prefer to believe that the Buddha classified women as lower, less capable and less worthy. Some even deny the validity that from a worldly aspect, nuns’ full ordination is an equal rights issue that needs to be resolved. Even the Dalai Lama, who is the only person I can think of who comes close to the historical Buddha, and who takes a laudably progressive position on this topic, can’t seem to make the Tibetan monastic community move in the right direction.

When your counterpart is mentally that rigid, no matter how much one values dialogue and consensus-building, it’s clear that you will look for other ways to move forward. That’s a very human reaction. So when nuns are given a hard time to become fully ordained in the Tibetan tradition, they will get ordained in other traditions - which they are already doing - or they will make their way outside monastic Buddhism, which they are also doing.

Especially outside Buddhist institutions, women seem to be on the advance: What was once the prerogative of aristocratic ladies and elite monks is available to any serious woman practitioner today. Every girl is free to study, meditate and practice at any level based on her interest and individual capacity irrespective of her social background. Whether girls use this new opportunity is up to the individual but there is nobody making restrictions. This is the advantage of our times. Maybe that’s also a reason why some nuns don’t go on about obtaining the full ordination any longer: They’ve figured out that there is another way outside the male-biased monastic system. No more waiting for other’s grace, you help yourselves, that’s the attitude, dear Anila-tso!

As for our personal situation, maybe we have to be realistic. For one, the Buddha did appear in the form of a male, that’s a historical fact. For another, many would probably agree that it is extremely difficult to come across a Lama who fulfills all the ten requirements of a suitable spiritual guide as outlined in the scriptures. Even meeting a Lama who fulfills only the minimum six, I am convinced, is very rare to encounter. So then when “gender-neutral outlook” is not part of such a spiritual guide’s skill-set, should we allow that to overshadow the teacher-student relationship?

Maybe turning away from a “realised master” because he has conservative gender views, is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater: The gender part we girls can figure out ourselves, for that we don’t need a Lama. But for the other part a Lama’s guidance is indispensable. This way we may be able to carve out a path for ourselves. In the patriarchic Tibetan world, the cleverer give in.

But unfortunately the general problem with the conservatism in Tibetan monastic institutions persists even if we find a personal arrangement.

Well then, if it’s so difficult for the monks to understand that the current practice is far from “normal” and if restoring the nuns’ full ordination is such a difficult problem to solve, why don’t the wise and compassionate ones among them just reincarnate as women in the meantime?

Taking female rebirths would be a genuine contribution towards gender equality. The advantage of this method is that the decision to reincarnate into whatever body is entirely at the personal discretion of the respective Lamas: No approval from an institution or the Buddha required! No more lame excuse to do what is necessary to prove that gender is irrelevant, ha!

Having more officially recognised female Tulkus would really help everyone to let go of their idée fixe that a Buddhist master “usually” comes back as a man. When you hear all this talk about remembering the kindness of the “mother” and regarding all sentient beings as your kind “mother” you wonder anyway why they haven’t chosen female bodies for the longest time.

… or maybe they have all along!?

We really do have plenty of female Tulkus but they all go unrecognised because society with its male fixation only looks for the ones in boys’ bodies - when I think about it, it can only be that! Lamas must reincarnate as girls just as often as they reincarnate as boys, because Lamas minds are trained to understand emptiness, move beyond duality. So there must be just as many female Tulkus as there are male Tulkus. The only reason why we don’t have more officially recognised female Tulkus is the people looking for reincarnations have a male-biased mindset. They have gender-jaundice and they don’t realise it. And when you tell them, they won’t accept it.

In this regard, the Dalai Lama’s occasional statements that he may come back as woman are really welcome. If only this isn’t one of his jokes! If only he dared to do it! Once the top shot among the monks shows that it’s practicable, the ice could break and those people who are in charge of identifying a Lama’s reincarnation would finally begin to look comprehensively through gender-neutral eyes.

It takes two - a boy and girl - to produce humans. Neither is “better”, both are indispensable: Only in a human form, it is said, does our mind-stream have a chance to work with Dharma at all. When mind has no gender and emptiness is beyond dualism, what is there left that would speak against reappearing as a girl?

Please Kundun and all other compassionate Lamas out there: Come back as girls in your next life! Teach us a powerful lesson so emptiness does not remain empty talk when it comes down to gender.

With reverence for the Buddhadharma
Mountain Phoenix

The "Holy Mountain Of The Outlaws" Revisited: A Journey Through Modern-Day Konkaling

2011-11-28T10:06:00.000-08:00

In my head, Konkaling was “remote” even for Tibetan standards. If somebody had told me we would be going there this summer - yes, that very place Joseph Rock went to survey for the National Geographic ages ago and at the peril of his life – I would have replied: “No way, not with kids, and not on this trip, maybe some other time.”

But there we were, the whole family driving along to Konkaling described in old travelogues as “holy mountain of the outlaws”, a dangerous, lawless place infested with bandits; a godless area where even the Buddhist monks pillaged, plundered and - hold your breath – murdered!

When I was a little girl, my grandpa would sometimes tell stories about how the infamous Konkalingpas would raid towns and caravans along the old trade routes and how as a child he would hide for days in a monastery or in the mountains fearing for his life.

Konkaling, July 2011

When I grew older I discovered books written by early travellers about the area. It became an interesting past-time to sit with my Pola in his room and cross-check what some of them had written in their accounts. He had a hell of a time whenever we talked about it. Often he could confirm points such as the name of a bandit chief or the raid of a specific town. His memory was amazing. He would recall things with such clarity as if they had happened just yesterday. He would even know what this person wore and that the pants were patched or something, down to such detail. Perhaps his memory was so sharp because he couldn’t rely on taking notes: He could neither read nor write as so many in his generation.

Konkaling, July 2011

Later I came across more recent publications such as “Khams pa Histories – Visions of People, Place and Authority”, which proved useful in explaining the origins of the communal banditry and lawlessness so prevalent in this corner of Tibet too far for from Lhasa's reach and too wild for the Chinese empire to control. The book outlined “the bigger picture” that helped put my Pola’s stories into a historical context.

He was always surprised at the accuracy in these accounts: What those chigyal (“foreigners”) were doing, what they knew and where they all went. Sometimes, when I summarised a story, he would interject: “Woyah, see? It always comes out! All the sordid details and the negative deeds they committed have now come out for the whole world to see!”

I didn't get it back then. Now as I’m older, I think these “Woyah” reactions were a confirmation of his belief in Ley Gyudrey or the Buddhist law of cause and effect: Even if you got away with your evil deeds in this life, there was no escaping Leydrey, it would take care of everything after all.

Daocheng County (Dabpa), Ganzi Prefecture, July 2011

If my grandpa were still around I bet it would blow his mind that I’ve been to Konkaling with his great-grandchildren. I miss the old man for not being around anymore.

Konkaling today is located in the south of the Kardze/Ganzi Prefecture in Dabpa/Daocheng County. Our first stop on the journey was the main monastery of the region, Konka Gompa. Back in the old days, Rock warned against visiting it because its monks were “notorious criminals” who went on looting expeditions between prayer sessions: Dollars to doughnuts that if you were insane enough to come here, they would rob and may even kill you.

But when we showed up almost almost a hundred years later, everything was peaceful. The monastery lay before us in tranquility and solitude. Nobody would ever have guessed its calamitous past from what they saw before them.

Gangkar Namgyel Ling or "Konka Gompa"

The formal name of the monastery, Gangkar Namgyel Ling had an innocent, quietly soothing, almost angelic ring to my Tibetan ears. The place was idyllic surrounded by lush green forests, and comfortably accessible via a decent road. Two elderly monks were sitting on a bench at the entrance gate with their Trengwa (“rosary”) reciting Mantras and observing the sleepy square.

In the old days, Konka Gompa was reportedly a “co-ed” monastery housing 400 members of the Sangha. But the two elders looking after the site were the only ones we saw. The head Lama or Gondag was Konka Lama, a 12-year old boy residing at his home nearby. Konka monastery also had quite a few monks studying in India, one of the elders said, but he kept his voice low.

To my surprise, a Chinese tour bus showed up out of the blue.

Between Daocheng and Sumdo

The next moment a bunch of tourists armed with parasols and fans swarmed into the monastery’s courtyard starting to take pictures everywhere. We hurriedly did our rounds inside the prayer hall. Chances were that once that noisy group was inside, it would get difficult to do Chonjay with them walking all over the place and the local Tibetan tour guide in a funny Chupa hurling the names of the various deities into a loudspeaker. You could see this display of irreverence and ignorance in places of worship all the time.

When we were about to leave, several fancy off-roader jeeps drove into monastery complex: More Chinese tourists, this time decked up with high-tech trekking gear. Strange that these people come here, I thought. Were they maybe on some kind of “Lhasa-To-Shanghai” car rally?

Although we weren’t delighted to spot Chinese tourists so deep in Tibetan country, the monasteries reportedly do not dislike them completely. Chinese often “donate” well. They would generously cram notes into the donation boxes you’d find in front of all the statues. Once in a while you could spot some genuinely pious looking people among them as well. Western visitors were perhaps more welcome, but they did not leave a financial impact worth mentioning, and monasteries too had their expenses.

Most of the time roads were in good condition, this section was
under construction when we passed

We hit the road before Konka Gompa would become a Chinese circus, driving ever higher into the mountains hoping to catch a glimpse of the three holy peaks that symbolized the Buddhist trinity of Avalokitsvara, Manjushri and Vajrapani. The peaks were considered the guardians of this region. Locals called them Konka Phun Sum (“Three brothers of the White Snow) or Ri Sum Gonpo (“Three Mountains Protectors”).

I still couldn’t believe where I was. It felt like Alice walking through wonderland. I had literally arrived in the place of my childhood stories.

The peaks finally came into sight when we reached the top of the pass where an observation deck had been built that was covered with prayer flags and where we did a Sangsol smoke offering as Mount Avalokitesvara – Chenrezig emerged out of the clouds on the other side of the valley. Below, a small village appeared with a narrow trail leading up the valley to Tsonggo Gompa, a small monastery nestled on the lap of the holy mountain. According to Rock, after each of their raiding trips, the bandits would withdraw to Tsonggo Gompa. Neither the Tibetans nor the Chinese would dare to persecute them.

Nyithen with trail leading to Tsonggo Gompa

The village in the valley below was Yading, known in connection with “Yading Nature Reserve”, which is listed as a site of UNESCO world network of biosphere reserves Actually Yading itself or Nyithen as was its Tibetan name, turned out to be nothing more than a hamlet with a good road through it. We guessed that they must have taken the name of the hamlet and applied it to the whole region known to old Tibetans as Konkaling and now marketed under “Yading Nature Reserve”.

Historically Nyithen or Yading couldn’t have played a big role. It had to be a recent creation with the nature park. I couldn’t remember having seen the name in old books nor could I remember my grandfather mention the name, nor have I heard of any famous or infamous Tibetans who hailed from “Yading” - Konkaling yes, but not Yading.

Now it was no longer surprising to have encountered a Chinese tour bus at Konka Monastery: Yading was famous in China! Along with Jiuzhaigou/Dzitsa Degu in Sichuan (troubled Ngaba County) and Shangrila in Yunnan (“Gyalthang” in good old Tibetan), it was one of the few Tibetan places apart from Lhasa that received plenty of “domestic” tourists. This is from a Chinese tourist guidebook about Yading we found in a shop in Daocheng:

Every place is a "Shangrila" or a "Shambala" - we may think
it's naive, but it works to target the Chinese tourist market

Surprise, surprise: Just like us, the Chinese tourists also wanted to go up to Tsonggu Gompa. In the old days, no Chinaman, it is said, dared to set a foot onto these lands, and no Tibetan from outside the area either for that matter. But there we were both walking around freely going wherever we wanted - as tourists. And while their ancestors robbed caravans and plundered villages to make a living, the descendants of the historical Konkalingpas now sold overpriced entry-tickets to Chinese tourists and took them on horseback to Tsonggu Gonpa charging them an exorbitant 200 RMB for a 20-minute ride up and down - robbing people the modern way!

I was pretty sure that without the facilitation of Dorje, a friend who hailed from Nyithen and volunteered as our local guide, his fellow Kongkalingpas would have extorted our little group without the slightest Bodrig Punda sentimentalities. We would have had to pay the same exorbitant prices as the Chinese tourists for accessing the Nature Reserve, parking fees, accommodation, food and horse rental. It was every man for himself.

End of the pony trail, from here to Tsonggu Gompa
it's on foot even for Chinese tourists

People seemed somewhat reserved: Not too friendly, not too hospitable which is surprising for a place that lives off tourism. But maybe that’s the general mentality of folks who live rather cloistered lives in the mountains? When we were about to enter Lithang Dzong earlier on the journey, our guide urged us: “When you’re asked where you’re from, just say your grandfather was from Lithang.” - Why? Lithangpas could sometimes be a bit “suspicious”of outsiders, the guide said, and establishing some kind of connection would only help. Well, in Konkaling it was similar. Some kind of connection was indeed helpful.

When walking through the woods up to Tsonggu Gompa, Konkaling reminded me of a Tibetan type “Sherwood Forest” where whoever passes through, has to pay a tribute. Maybe this was an inherited trait from their bandit forefathers and maybe also contemporary, mainstream Chinese culture of everyone-cheating-everyone was rubbing off.

Hiking up to Tsonggo Gompa through "Sherwood Forest"

The kids had their fun on horseback while we adults, as proper pilgrims, hiked up. I was the slowest in the group taking almost an hour for the short distance: Plenty of time for reflection. If my Pola could see me! He would shake his head in disbelief how times have changed: His granddaughter with her children on an easy-peasy Sunday stroll through a place whose name alone put the fear of god into the people of his generation!

Locals make a living by renting out horses to tourists

Although it was a foggy and drizzly day in Konkaling when we reached the Tsonggu Gonpa, the surroundings were magnificent. We could have been somewhere in the Rockies. Tibet had so much to offer in terms of experiencing nature. With all the densely forested hills around us, the place would be a symphony of colours in autumn, and in springtime, the meadows would be dotted with flowers and children wearing self-made coronals would run around barefoot.

Tsonggo Gompa, Joseph Rock's "bandit monastery"

The caretaker monk said the monastery houses around 40 monks with only one or two to be seen. Maybe they were all indoors studying? It was pouring with rain. The caretaker said Tsongo Gompa traditionally had no Gondag or Head Lama. I never knew there was such a thing. I thought every monastery had to be “owned” by some Lama.

The place was clean and tidy. Apart from the absence of a Sangha, which was more the rule than the exception in the monasteries we had seen so far, everything looked in order. The main images in the prayer hall were the Gelugpa trio Je Yabsè Sum. One side-chapel contained images of Dharmapalas, the other contained a large statue of Padmasambhava and Tara.

In the past, I’d never pay attention whether a monastery was this or that. Now in the age of Rimé political correct Buddhism almost the first thing that came to mind, whenever I met someone in robes or visited a new monastery was what Buddhist order they could be connected to.

Konkaling, July 2011

So this was the monastery where the lawless bandits used to hide after their raids? If the surrounding rocks could speak! There was no visible trace of the turbulent history of this place. There only was a plate at the entrance of the monastery saying Joseph Rock was here. It was so peaceful and serene up here, for a moment one could forget the political problems Tibet had.

I wondered whether the monks of Tsonggu Gompa knew that a fellow monk up in Tawo in the north of the Prefecture had set himself on fire only a few days earlier. We heard the sad news the day we left our hometown for Konkaling. A monk had told us secretly. We checked the BBC and found the headline but the article itself was blocked.

"Risum Gonpo" on a drizzly, foogy day in July 2011

The holy peaks kept hiding behind the clouds. In spite of the rainy weather, the surroundings were exquisitely beautiful. Konkaling was the perfect place for trekking and camping or go on “Kora”. The children would have loved the idea: Hiking around the peaks with pack animals, camp out overnight, eat meals cooked over an open fire and brush teeth on the banks of a clear mountain creek. We knew it was not possible this time, but we had received a foretaste.

Dorje said people were either herding cattle in the higher lying summer pastures, working in the woods or working in a government office in town at this time of the year. But during Saka Dawa everybody would be up here for circumambulation.

I could vividly imagine them racing happily and light-footedly around the peaks in record time.

Once I was on a Kora around Mt. Kailash: Equipped with the best of mountain gear, physically fit and mentally motivated. Still I was regularly overtaken on my walk by old, wrinkle-faced Molas and Polas in cheap Chinese rubber sneakers and thin nylon socks. Not only did they overtake me, their breath was so long they kept reciting Mantras while walking past me. Plus they had enough energy left to give me smile, do the rosary with one hand and turn the prayer wheel with the other. By the time I reached the summit of Dolma-La, the highest elevation of the Kora at 5,500 metres, the Molas and Polas had long been up there drinking tea and chatting. It took me two days to complete the Kora. The old folks finished in one.

Given my Kora history, it would take me weeks to complete the circumambulation around Risum Gonpo. But I knew I would come back here one day on a Saka Dawa and go on Kora around the holy peaks together with the other pilgrims. My Pola would have liked the idea too.

Lhagyelo! – Victory to the Gods!

Mountain Phoenix

Wild Iris, Konkaling

Please stop killing yourselves!

2011-10-18T11:08:00.000-07:00

The stories of self-immolations from Tibet are blood-curling and leave us all horror-struck. But are the public reactions to these suicides or attempts at suicide not just as shocking? All we do is use these sacrifices to attack the Chinese. There is no appeal to the compatriots in Tibet to please, please stop killing themselves for our greater good. Instead the public discussion focuses on the motivation why these mostly young people set themselves on fire.

We can argue till our mouths hurt that they set themselves on fire over “independence” and not “autonomy” or the other way round; we can also say it was for “altruistic” reasons and that they didn’t commit a “sin” in Buddhist terms; and the Chinese can argue until kingdom come that these were “illegal acts to disturb the social order”.

But all these discussions are perverse because they do not waste any words about the basic wrongness of suicide. Our silence gives Tibetan society a fundamentalist touch: We accept violent suicide as a justifiable act.

Is this really the message we want to send to young people in Tibet? That it’s “heroic” to violently kill yourself for idealistic reasons? Is it okay for the political groups on the Tibetan side to use them as cannon fodder to advance their political aims?

If the politicians and activists among us are unable to bring themselves to speak out against suicide, shouldn’t at least our religious leaders take up position? Isn’t it their responsibility to persuade our young that killing yourself is not what’s required?

Where is everyone?

Where is the Dalai Lama? Where is the Karmapa? Where is the Sakya Trizin? Why for Buddha’s sake are our religious leaders silent? Please speak to the people in the homeland that you do not approve of this act. Please tell them that we Tibetans must survive. Not speaking out against the self-immolations means tacit agreement. Blaming the Chinese and lobbying for Western support over these acts while not speaking out against them means tacit agreement.

It is our responsibility to do anything it takes to prevent compatriots from committing suicide for Tibet’s greater good. Would we ever tolerate if our kids intended to do that? Along the very same lines, we must discourage the young in faraway Tibet from killing themselves for the sake of our country. This is not the way to go.

People in Tibet know this is not the way to go. On High Peaks Pure Earth some of their voices are translated. They express what many people there feel: No matter how difficult the situation, “do not offer your body, the base of the mind, as a butter-lamp offering”.

Whatever the intention behind the self-immolations, it remains a misguided and wrong act. We must speak out against suicide. Tibet does not ask its people for a blood sacrifice. She needs each and every one of us to stand by her side – alive!

Om Mani Padmé Hum
Mountain Phoenix

Ain’t Nothing But A Bubble

2011-10-03T00:57:00.000-07:00

You know how they say women are better at multi¬tasking. I only know it is not my preferred mode. I like to do one thing at a time. But daily life can sometimes become so busy, you end up multitasking without realizing it - like the other day, when I rushed back from work for an appointment I had in an hour. But before I could go, the kids had to eat dinner.

I was certain I could finish the dinner in time: The pasta was cooking and the sauce – prepared ahead the other night - simmering, ready to be served. Everything was moving quite smoothly and I called the kids to set the table.

But just when we were about to eat, my partner pinged me from Tibet. Time was ticking and we hadn´t talked for few days so I had to let the kids skype with their dad.

Then, the phone also began ringing. I tried to ignore it but it kept ringing incessantly - halleluja! Welcome to Samsara! My stress was perfect. Nerve-wracked I gave in.

The Lord of Death strikes when you’re least prepared: One of my mom’s friends had passed away; she had terminal cancer.

Yama sent my whole stress dissolving into a vacuum.

Initial shock gave way to reflection: I remembered my own mortality, the limited time I have to practice Dharma while trying to be in a good relationship, raise children responsibly, succeed at the job and look after my Tibetan heritage. What would I like to see towards the end of my life looking back?

I cancelled the appointment and took time to eat dinner with the children. Then I enjoyed an extensive chat with my husband.

The lady was 65 years old. She came to this country in the early 70s where her husband died when the children were very young. She struggled as a single parent for many years before she accepted to remarry so her children wouldn’t have to grow up without a father. The new partner was also her late husband’s younger brother or nephew and more than 10 years her junior. My mom said a lot of people at the time found it strange that an ancient Tibetan custom was replanted into a modern Western country. How could one practice “taking-over-the-widow-by-a-relative-of-the-late-husband” in a place like this? What would the neighbours think?

But whatever the original intention of the custom, her new relationship worked out fine. Alas, her newly found happiness didn’t last long. Only a while later she was diagnosed with cancer. Over the course of the last twenty years, she battled and subdued it twice. When the cancer attacked her again the third time, she decided it was time to leave the stage and passed away without much suffering and in dignity. The last thing she wanted was for her to become a bed-stricken burden for her family.

In the Lamrim prayer Yonten Zhi Gyurma where people request the teacher’s blessing so strength, wisdom and compassion may grow in them, there is a stanza about life being so short and insignificant like a swiftly perishing bubble of water and when you die, your negative and positive karma would follow you like a shadow, involuntarily determining your next existence.

When I looked at Acha Wangmo’s life, the verse rang so true. What a life! Born in Tibet into an extended family before the Chinese takeover, left everything behind, traumatic escape as a teenager, marriage in India, then move to the West, become a parent, become a widow, remarry, in and out of cancer and then eventually die from it.

Her death was also a brutal reminder how lonely it was becoming with the two generations above me gradually taking the exits. All the elders in my grand-parents’ generation were no more. Most people in my dad´s group, including my old man, were gone too: As heavy drinkers and chainsmokers many died prematurely. Now also more and more ladies of my mom’s generation were beginning to pass away.

With those representing another era and serving as the bridge to my Tibetan roots gradually all vanishing, my own peer group, the first with no direct roots in Tibet, would soon accede as “the older generation”. How skillful will we be at maintaining and developing the culture? How successful will we be at passing on this heritage to our children? What does the future hold for Tibetans? Will the language still be spoken in generations to come? Will our children’s children still dream of self-rule when they grow up or more basic: Will they even think of themselves as "Tibetan"?

I can vividly imagine the pressure on so-called “Lineage Lamas” who carry the responsibility to fully master a certain type of knowledge and then have to ensure it is passed on into good hands. But the difference between a Tibetan lineage Lama and a Tibetan parent is that the former can come back in a new body to continue their unfinished work whereas we folks can't be sure we come back in a human existence, let alone a Tibetan one :--)))

The funeral rites for Acha Wangmo were graceful and moving. About half a dozen Buddhist monks lead the prayers with almost the whole crowd of around 150 mourners reciting along. It was a wonderful sight to have old-established Tibetans, new arrivals from Tibet, Tibetans from India and people from whatever Tibetan Buddhist schools and all walks of life, pray together side by side. For a moment, Acha Wangmo’s funeral bound us all together. This was a precious moment before we would all run off again to our samsaric hamster wheels.

The lady was really a piece of work. I would only see her once or twice a year at some social gatherings. She was always cheerful. She never gave the impression of someone who was going to die soon. With her deep, smoky voice she would crack jokes – often dirty ones – and slap herself on the thigh laughing out loud entertaining all the ladies at the table. Not very lady-like, but everyone knew what they would get if they dealt with Acha Wangmo. She was strong and straight as an arrow. When we would exchange a few words, she would often say ya, ya, tsering, ama’i - ”bless you my dear”!

That was the only side of her I knew.

I never knew the extent of her illness. Even one of her siblings whom I spoke to at the funeral seemed surprised that the illness was terminal. She kept the suffering and the worries all to herself not wanting to burden others or allow that ruin her positive attitude towards life.

When I was a little girl, I thought she looked like a Tibetan version of Angie Dickinson, that blond US actress I remembered from Western films with John Wayne that my dad enjoyed watching so much. But driving home after the funeral, suddenly Yadong's song Ganglha Metog (Snow Lotus) came to my mind. He sings about this woman who is likened to a snow lotus which, against all odds, withstands the harshest conditions and breaks through the thick snow cover to greet the sun in full splendor. Here's a link to the song on Youtube.

The snow lotus is not a beautiful flower aesthetically speaking. It reminds me more of a vegetable (cauliflower if you want to know the specifics) than a flower. Also in Tibet, they use it as a medicinal plant and make all kinds of things out of it such as tea. But the symbolism is exceptionally powerful: As with the Lotus flower that grows out from muddy ponds and doesn’t touch the dirty surface, Ganglha Metog is understood as an inspiration for humans to outgrow themselves.

Yes, life ain’t nothing but a bubble and we shouldn’t get all absorbed while we’re in it, that part I understood. But you still must give 100 % because, ironically, the very bubble is also your only ticket leading out of the crazy cycle. That part I frequently forget. Acha Wangmo helped me remember. She was a great lady. We will miss her humour, her directness, her warmth.

May she have a good next life and continue to inspire people.

Mountain Phoenix

Sleepless in Lithang

2011-08-31T11:54:00.000-07:00

I’ve always been dreaming to go to all those “legendary” places that I´ve marked in my Tibetan world. Over time, it was indeed possible to visit many of them such as the remnants of the palace in Guge or the fabled Mili kingdom of old. But this summer, Tibet was beyond my wildest dreams.

Everything started out normally with us planning to visit our relatives and friends. We weren’t sure until the last minute whether we would get to spend our summer family vacation in Tibet at all. Entering the country was the usual gamble with flight tickets all purchased but no visa in sight until the final hour. In the end, the god of good fortune was in charity with us: We were free to go.

With Lhasa closed until the end of July due to the “60 years autonomy” anniversary and security forces watching over parts of Eastern Tibet due to renewed protests, there wasn’t much choice with regard to where to go. Panda-watching in Ngapa County would have been lovely for the kids - especially with “Kungfu Panda - Part ll” being out this summer – but Ngapa, too, was in the heat with dissent and simply risky with children.

So this time our little family travelled overland across the southeastern section of the Tibetan plateau with Bathang and Lithang, two historical trading towns, among the highlights.

Immortalised by Dalai Lama number six in the folk song “White Crane”, Lithang was a place I really longed to see. It also looked very doable with children since the roads were in excellent condition. And although Lithang is another Tibetan area with “secessionist tendencies”, we were assured it was open.

Motor road across the stone desert of Haizishan

Lithang produced outstanding religious and secular leaders such as the 7^th Dalai Lama, Gyalwa Kelsang Gyatso, and the founder of the Tibetan resistance, Andrug Gonpo Tashi. It had special meaning in Tibetan national memory.

I was so excited about the prospect, I kept singing the line from “White Crane” in the car, all the way to Lithang Dzong with a faux, exaggerated eastern accent: Tharong jong-la mendro, Lethong kooné lewong yeah! – “I’m not going far, only up to Lithang, from there I shall return”.

After we finally made it to Lithang, I couldn’t fall asleep at night.

Maybe it was altitude insomnia, I had that once before. Or maybe it was simply my hyper-excitement about finally being in Lithang: Too drunk from the grandiose visual feast of driving across the alpine grasslands. I never saw a more majestic plain than the one about an hour’s drive to the west from the County seat or Dzong, which the locals call Bonyokthong.

"Bonyokthong", Lithang

Or maybe plain and profane, I simply couldn’t sleep because of the noisy room at this awful hotel, Shen Di (“Sacred Earth”)? With 260 RMB per night, it was by far also the most expensive hotel we stayed at. It was located in the middle of an intersection and almost falling apart. When I closed my eyes, I had the impression my bed was right in the street below on a pedestrian crossing with the traffic lights switching from red to green throughout the entire night although no pedestrians or cars were in sight.

Lithang was breathtakingly beautiful and often seemed untouched by modern civilization. A historic place for the Tibetans, and there we were standing in the middle of it all, breathing the pristine mountain air and gazing upon endless wide pastures.

Lithang

The Dzong, on the other hand, was depressing. It looked scruffy. There were a lot of metal workshops and a few Chupa shops along the streets as well as the usual Sichuanese restaurants. The whole town was explored in about an hour on foot. Often you would find a Xinhua bookshop with maps and some books about the local history in a County seat, but Lithang didn’t have one or it was closed down. There was nothing much going on in the Dzong it seemed.

View from Hotel Shen Di, Lithang

Yet all these young men standing around on the sidewalks in the middle of the day with broad rimmed glasses, some hooting around on colourful motor cycles with speakers - didn’t they have jobs? Or was there something going on, we didn’t know? On the main street it all seemed like something imminent was going to happen. We didn’t dare take photos. People somehow looked wary.

Police monitored the little town from small booths erected every twenty meters or so along the street. Police cars patrolled up and down. From my hotel room with huge windows and a lot of draft, I saw a small group of Western backpackers being quickly dispersed as they started a conversation with locals. It all looked surreal. Was this daily life or was this exceptional?

We hesitated to visit Lithang Gonchen close by. The atmosphere in town just seemed too tense. It was a shame. How can one come all the way here without paying respect to this famous monastery? We already missed the annual horse race which everyone said would begin as usual on 1 August. It should have been the first official festival held since 2008. But instead of the normal multiple-day festivities with the real party only getting started on the second day, it was a crippled version cut down to a single day – with us unfortunately arriving too late.

But things looked better the next day and we could visit the grand Lithang monastery after all. I was very happy.

Lithang Monastery

There was a lot of construction work going on at the monastery and many of chapels were not open. The international Buddhist flag was fluttering from the roof tops. An official announcement at the gate said there was an interregional religious gathering taking place. Was this the reason for the conspicuous police presence in town?

We also saw another, not so official-looking announcement posted at the entrance gate about the importance of the Tibetan language. It hung right next to that official announcement, which was kind of contradictory. But then as so often, things are difficult to interpret and understand since Tibet is not an open society:

Announcement on a "clean father tongue"; seal unclear

We managed to go for Chonje in the assembly hall. Although the dominant image was a gigantic statue of Je Tsongkhapa, we almost overshot it due to the many photos of the current Dalai Lama. You wouldn’t believe! And not just tiny photos hidden away, but large, poster-size portraits in full display, many of them taken around the time when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Every other meter there was a shrine with His Holiness’ picture. Was his picture not illegal here? Or did the monastery simply defy official orders? And why so many pictures? It sure looked a bit obsessive to me.

Afterwards, the monk-on-duty gave us holy water and Jendu. Then he asked about our Phayul or where we were from.

Among Tibetans living abroad, asking this question is considered politically incorrect by some. You are not supposed to think of your Phayul, you are supposed to think big. Every Tibetan kindly had to have only one Phayul and its name was “Tibet”. Digging deeper was unsolicited.

On the ground in Tibet however, it’s perfectly natural to ask people where they’re from since it is self-understood that every Tibetan in Tibet is also automatically from Tibet. And since speaking Lhasan or high Tibetan, as it is a practice among the Tibetans abroad, is not the norm here, where one is usually betrayed by one’s native accent anyway, holding back information about one’s Phayul could come across as weird.

We would have liked to interact more with people, especially the nomadic Lithangpas whom we met along our driving journey. We could often see their camps from the road. To help start a conversation, we would offer biscuits and noodles as a friendly gesture. Sometimes they would invite us into their Banak or black tent made of yak hair and serve fresh milk.

Nomad camp at Haizishan, Lithang

An unexpected problem was language. Heaven knows how Tibetan nomadic speech or Drogkay works. It sounds like Mongolian or something. They spoke differently from the Lithangpas in the Dzong whose Tibetan we could slowly follow. A friend said even he as a semi-nomadic Samadrog Lithangpa doesn’t understand them. Isn’t that strange? He said the Lithang nomads spoke the same language as the nomads in Amdo.

As picturesque life in the grasslands appeared to me, to tell you the truth, it would be very hard if I had to live here. I wasn’t keen at all on going into those tents. I’m probably getting old and fuzzy, but I can’t stand the smell of the smoke – whether from a wooden fire or a dried yak dung fire – all your clothes smell sour from it and perspire for the longest time. Their children often don’t go to school. The wind blows incessantly and it is cold even in the summer - virtually no child without a runny nose. Everyone sleeps, eats and prays in the same tent.

Inside a Banak in Lithang

Honestly, having to live like a Lithang Drogmo would be like being condemned to hard labour in Siberia. If the Chinese offered me one of those new row houses along the roads built to resettle nomads into communal life, Buddha forbid, I would probably go for it.

Lithang was breathtakingly beautiful. But it also came across as raw and archaic. The nomadic way of life is authentically Tibetan, no doubt. It’s the archetypical Tibetan way of life. If there is one thing we long for it’s the freedom and the simplicity of nomadic life. But does it hold a future for the people? Their whole world revolved around their animals.The people we saw in the streets of the Dzong looked out of place.

In Lithang you could see how the Chinese and the Tibetan worlds clash. The Chinese have no idea how to bring these people into the mainstream other than by using repression and violence. The Tibetans don't know how to make themselves heard other than by taking to the streets. They looked like extreme opposites with no common ground.

Nomad kids, Lithang

I had to think of what a man from neighbouring low-altitude Bathang had said about the Lithangpas. He said Lithang folks valued things such as big jewellery and impressive saddles. Comparing the two areas, he said:

“A Lithanpa would say: Look at this family’s son, what a magnificent horse he has! A Bapa would say: Look at this family’s son, what a good education he has!”

He also said people in Lithang felt insecure when having to deal with Chinese people. Bathang people, in contrast, knew no inhibition.

Were these the general differences between nomadic, high-altitude Lithang and agricultural, low-altitude Bathang? Did the Bapas really have an advantage because they had been brought into contact with the Chinese earlier than most other Tibetans in this area? Were the nomads of Lithang really too limited in their worldview, not flexible enough? Or was this the statement of a prejudiced, self-enamoured person from Bathang?

I wasn’t at all interested in going to Ba or Bathang. If the other counties further north of the Kardze Prefecture had been open, we wouldn't have gone to Bathang, that's for sure. A place like Dege was worth visiting. It had culture, handicraft, local architecture, and the famous printing press. But backcountry like Bathang? Please!

From Bapa Phuntsog Wangyal’s autobiography written by Melvin Goldstein and books like “Khams pa Histories - Visions of People, Place and Authority”, I imagined it to be a very Chinese town with lots of sinicised Tibetans and nothing interesting to see. Well below 3000 meters altitude, it was also lower than most other places: I bet elsewhere in Tibet, you won't see many men and women walking down the street in sandals with nylon ankle socks on. Just how hip is that?

But I must say Bathang was a positive surprise in other aspects.

In terms of architecture, the rural area outside the Dzong was as Tibetan as in any other place we had visited before. It was interesting to observe that every region had its own particular building-style. The farm houses near the Dzong were brown rammed-earth buildings with flat-roofs and colourful window frames. Further south along the Drichu, houses were painted white.

Traditional Tibetan houses along the Drichu, Bathang County

Traditional Tibetan houses at Bathang Dzong

The first thing we noticed when we entered the Dzong was how relaxed people were, and how friendly the police could be. We stopped by the road to look for a hotel. When I saw the police approaching, I immediately felt uneasy.

When we were only one day’s journey away from Lithang, a police car with four police officers inside blocked our passage at the intersection in Sumdo Township. They refused to let us continue claiming Lithang was closed although everyone else including the United Front people had said southern Kham was open. It smelled like corruption and police arbitrariness all over the place, but what to do?

My partner kept assuring me they would let us through. It would just take some negotiation. I should keep cool. It was one of those unpleasant situations you encounter in Tibet.

After a while, half a dozen curious Sumdowas had gathered at the intersection. In the course of the afternoon, we became friendly and one of them was really sweet. He said: “If these Gong An don’t let you through, come to my house, I’ll prepare tea for you.”

But luckily someone in our group knew somebody higher up in the local government whom he called up on his cell phone, who then rang up that nasty police officer in charge. After three nerve-wrecking hours in the middle of the intersection we could finally continue.

So when those Bapa police officers came over to our car, I expected the worst – like being made to leave the city at once. But then they only said we were not allowed to park there. When we told them we only needed five minutes to check out rooms at a nearby hotel, they said we could get the best rooms in Bathang at the Garden Hotel for 180 RMB per night. Wow, what great service and tourist information from the Gong An! And reliable at that because we did get great rooms with functioning toilet and a bathroom with plenty of running hot water!

The town was in a valley about the same size as the Dzong in Lithang, but it had more inhabitants. We hardly saw any tourists, Chinese or Western. Bathang looked like a sleepy, provincial town.

We were told all local cab drivers were Tibetan – in other Tibetan towns they were often mostly Chinese. Apparently, the local traffic bureau gives away cab driver licenses only to Tibetans telling Chinese candidates that their application is incomplete. The vendors in the local vegetable market looked Tibetan too. Usually, the local market is Chinese turf. Where were all the Chinese you’d always find in a Tibetan County seat? Where were all the descendants of those Chinese who were settled in Bathang by Zhao Erfeng, the butcher? People didn’t wear Chupa like in Lithang, yet the cityscape somehow still appeared Tibetan.

In Lithang and other places the government building is usually cordoned off by a wall and a gate. In Bathang, however, it was completely exposed with the stairs to the building being used as part of a public square where people would gather in the warm evening sun after a day’s work.

Bathang County Government, traditional Buddhist symbols
decorating the entrance

For Tibetan standards, the place looked prosperous. Agriculture was the main sector as in most Tibetan areas but with the lower elevation, harvest was better. I also realised Bapas are better educated than your average Khampa. Not only are they on par with the Chinese regarding education and training, but they also managed to preserve their Tibetan identity in the pursuit.

Many are proficient in Tibetan. They may not be up to the Amdowas, who seem unrivalled in this field, but among the people of Kham, Bapas are probably among the top, working in fields such as journalism and academia. Not surprisingly we learned that the head of Kham TV, a new television channel broadcasting to the Tibetans in Sichuan and Yunnan, hailed from Bathang.

We also learned that there haven’t been any protests in Bathang. Could it be that there was a correlation between open political protest and poverty? Could it be that Tibetan areas that did economically better such as Bathang were likelier not to have protests? Another place in eastern Tibet that hasn’t seen open protest is the Dechen Prefecture in Yunnan, which also does comparatively well mainly thanks to tourism. And does refraining from open protest mean people are happy under the Chinese?

A Bapa friend said Bathang folks are too smart to openly protest against the Chinese. Open protest meant risking to lose all the smaller and bigger freedoms they have acquired over the years. They may not be fond of Chinese overlordship but pragmatic enough to realise that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

When you think about it: What could the Tibetan leadership in India do for them? Would you risk your job and lifestyle over a beautiful dream, Tibetan self-rule? Maybe Dharamsala has to work harder to convince Tibetans like the Bapas that it would really be able to provide a political alternative?

Then there was the monastery.

Many monasteries in this part of Tibet have impressive-sounding names just like Bathang Chode Gon Ganden Phendeling. But they didn’t impress me: Many simply looked splendid on the outside but were void of content; monks were part-time monks, part -time nomads and family people, chopping wood, trading, picking mushrooms and so on and so forth. With many of the senior teachers and great masters either deceased or expatriated, it was also difficult to ensure the quality of the Buddhist teaching. And the closer a monastery was to a town the likelier the monks would be distracted - Bathang monastery was right in the middle of town.

Bathang Monastery

Boy was I wrong about Bathang monastery!

It is a jewel with no equal in that area. When we entered the courtyard, we heard loud voices of young novices chanting and studying Buddhist texts. There must have been over several dozen if not one hundred. I felt transported to a Tibetan monastery in India. Finally a monastery that was not only a splendid building but that was alive!

Lots of little monks studying, reciting and learning at Bathang Monastery

Then we went to pay our respects. Accompanied by a monk we were allowed to enter a few smaller chapels on the second floor which they opened specifically for us. Even here they had pictures of His Holiness. Not nearly as extravagant as in Lithang, but they did have them and they did display them openly. When it was time to leave, the monks invited us for tea into the monastery kitchen.

Bathang had a vibrant monastic community. We heard it was due to the influence of some monks who returned from India. That explained the similarity: Bathang monastery looked like a “monastic college” in Southern India with dormitory-style housing where four monk-students shared one room. The international Buddhist flag was also fluttering from the roofs.

"Monastic College", Bathang Monastery

After we left the monastery to go for circumambulation, we saw that the place also had a practicing lay community going for Kora and doing Mani. There were old folks in Tibetan clothes, youngsters in Western attire, and people that looked like they worked in some government office. Everyone seemed to be there in the evenings. It felt almost like Boudhnath, Nepal.

The Lingkor at Bathang Monastery

I was surprised Bathang didn’t have a square for public dancing. Most Dzongs had such a square which was lively used. After all, this was Bathang, the place that gave the popular folk music genre Bashè its very name. But my partner jokingly replied, people here don’t need to go for dances in the evenings because they have better things to do: They practice Dharma!

Public square with Tibetan dancing in Dobba Dzong (Daocheng);
Replica of the three holy peaks "Risum Gonpo" in the background

Yes, Bathang was a pleasant surprise and I was glad after all we didn’t skip it on our journey.

A friend told us, the future would not be so good for Bathang since there were plans to build several hydropower stations, as well as a cement factory. 15,000 Chinese would be moved to Bathang, she said. Terrible prospect! But if anyone can somehow handle this renewed assault on Tibetan identity, it should be the Bapas. To an accidental external observer, they have done a pretty good job to maintain their Tibetan identity all the while integrating into the Chinese mainstream, obtaining a modern education and running their County well. I can only hope they will be able to cope with the new challenges ahead.

It was nearly five o’clock in the morning by now. Still no trace of sleep.

I decided to get up and prepare myself a cup of instant Nestlé “Red Cup” coffee. Before long, the kids would be awake. It was always better to be one step ahead of them.

As I was getting up, I heard a motorbike with speakers rush by. Phurbu T. Namgyal's Jelyong was echoeing through the empty streets of Lithang Dzong: "We shall meet again, my brothers and sister, we shall meet again; the time will come when all Tibetans will be united again…”

Demo!

Mountain Phoenix

Tantra Mantra Mumbo Jumbo

2011-07-05T13:46:00.000-07:00

As a newbie, when you study Buddhism, you come across “Tantra” sooner or later, and make a decision whether that’s something for you or not. As a Tibetan, you are born and bred into Tantra and you carry on as if it’s the most natural thing on earth. But the longer I dwelled upon Tantra or Vajrayana, the more it started to look like a huge superstructure built to explain Buddhism by adding complexity with a pantheon of gods, demigods, more strange-looking creatures, and a whole lot of mysterious rites to go with them.

Out of the 84,000 methods the Buddha is said to have taught to reach enlightenment, why on earth did the Tibetans pick this complicated one?

I would have liked to be more positive about Tantra since I was Tibetan and this was our natural creed. But I didn’t understand anything. To me it was Tantra Mantra mumbo jumbo, and so one day, when an introductory course about tantric deity meditation was on offer, I thought this could be the chance to change my perception. So I signed up hoping to gain some insight.

It turned out to be a good idea because I came back with two important personal takeaways: a)Tantra is an advanced meditation practice and nothing too mysterious b) I don’t need to bother about Tantra at my level of Dharma!

The Lama said there is nothing secretive or mysterious about Tantra. He said it is a meditation technique with specific deities (Yidam) and could be an effective method to gain insights quicker than the other methods, provided that the students fulfill three main criteria: Having embraced the Three Jewels; having realized in one's mind the three fundamental insights of renunciation, compassion and wisdom (aka having understood “emptiness”), and having an unshakeable faith in one’s tantric teacher.

Then the Lama said that expecting Tantra to lead to enlightenment, without having acquired the necessary mental preconditions, would be futile - like sitting in a jet expecting it to fly without fuel in the tank; or like trying to climb up to the branches of a tree without touching the trunk; or building a house by stacking floor upon floor without a proper foundation.

At the end, the Lama also cautioned that there have always been charlatans. He said there are people styling themselves as tantric masters since the idea to reach enlightenment in one lifetime was so tempting. The Lama said all the “strange” ideas about Tantra - did he mean sexual techniques? - could be traced back to impostors. He didn’t give any names but presumably he meant fake tantric masters. He only said genuine tantric masters do not exhibit any eccentric features; they are inconspicuous. Jetsun Milarepa, the Lama pointed out, was a shining example of an authentic tantric master.

But what about the hordes of gods and goddesses with multiple arms and heads, some copulating, some looking really pissed off? When Buddhism is atheistic what are all these gods good for and why would people have to pray to them? Isn’t that the epitome of idolatry? Luckily, someone asked just this question during Q&A whereupon the Lama graciously replied: “When we speak of ‘deity meditation’, many, who are normally dedicated Dharma practitioners, become disinterested or disapproving.”

It sure felt like he was talking to me.

Buddhist concepts like “emptiness”, “non-duality”, “no creator-god”, “compassion” and so on were cool because you could fit them into a Western-science driven mind. But “deity meditation” was esoteric, irrational, theistic, in short: dubious. Which modern Buddhist needs “Voodoo” stuff to gain enlightenment?

The Lama said feelings of inner rejection of the tantric path were a sign that the student is not mature. Apparently, tantric practice is indeed not suitable for all students and therefore should not be taught indiscriminately. It could facilitate your way to enlightenment only, when you had absolute trust in your teacher after a thorough examination of the teacher’s qualities. He said it’s written in the scriptures that a student can spend up to twelve years examining whether a teacher is a qualified tantric master.

Twelve years! Oh boy, I was shaking my head out of hopelessness. But real pros would probably say:” Twelve years are peanuts for a Buddhist because we are people who are trained to think in kalpa (eons)!”

Anyway, the Lama also said once renunciation, compassion and wisdom have been brought forward in our minds and absolute trust in the teacher has developed, that would be the point when the deity meditation comes in. Then progress would come quickly.

As for the multitude of meditational deities, he explained that some people respond better to Avalokitesvara and others to Tara and so on and so forth. It would depend on your personal situation. A qualified master would be able to show you the deity most suitable for you to visualise in meditation. You visualise yourself as the deity and to possess the qualities of the deity, you do not pray to the deity, in tantric meditation you are the deity, the Lama said.

And then he gave a typical Tibetan analogy comparing deities to food. He said just like some people prefer rice over noodles, some people used Yidam X over Yidam Y. It’s personal inclination. All foods sustain the body so what you pick is meaningless. The same goes with the deities. They are the food for your mind to work towards enlightenment.

I believe I gained some understanding of Tantra after this course. You basically develop your mental capacity from the bottom up. After the course, I took a shot at visualising my learning with an illustration. Not sure though if Theravada Buddhists would be happy with my illustration. It makes their path look so preliminary and I am not sure that’s their understanding as well?

The course helped me see that Tantra can be explained and understood in a perfectly rational manner. So I am okay with Tantra as an idea now!

Or so I thought, until some friends announced that they were going to the Kalachakra in Washington DC. Whether I was also coming?

Oho, Kalachakra: The biggest Tantra event the world over… - attend or not attend?

I’ve been to two Kalachakras since the Dalai Lama began teaching them to the rank and file. At the first one, I was a kid taken along by my parents. It was held near where we lived and every member of every Tibetan household in our town went. It never crossed my mind not to go. Nobody in his right mind would ever stay away from an event of this caliber. It was the mother of all events for us Tibetans.

I didn’t understand anything during the preparatory stage or the actual initiation. All I recall is everyone had those red ribbons around their foreheads at one point. I also remember we were asked to put a dry twig under our pillow at bedtime and watch our dreams. I didn’t take any of the vows that day so I never actually received the wang (“empowerment”) unlike some friends, who had to skip volleyball that evening: They were afraid to ruin their vows by unintentionally killing invisible insects in that lawn.

Twelve years later, I went to another Kalachakra. By then I was a graduate student and a confirmed atheist who went by her own conscience. Everyone who knew me found it strange: What does a godless Tibetan do at the Kalachakra? Well, this time, I was going for the cultural experience surrounding the Kalachakra, I told everyone who wanted to know. My first visit to Tibet was behind me and now I wanted to see how the Tibetans in the Indian settlements lived, and generally just be there and “observe”.

Again I attended all the sessions and listened attentively just as I had done during my first Kalachakra. But while I was innocent and clueless the first time, by the second time I had become opinionated: “You don’t need that to get your life together, it’s only important to be informed”, was my inner attitude. So no further deliberation necessary: When the actual empowerment came, I opted out again because I was a mere “observer” and I knew as much about it as the man in the moon.

Since then, countless Kalachakras have been given all over the globe and I missed them all. Shouldn’t I go now that I have started a genuine interest in the Dharma?

Still can’t decide!

The purpose of the Kalachakra ceremony is to become “empowered” through visualising the tantric master as the deity and yourself as the “child”, and in this condition, bring about the necessary mental transformation required to progress quickly on the path. The real work on the mind, however, begins after the Kalachakra when you’re home alone starting to systematically reflect and meditate upon what you’ve learned. Only when you follow through like this and achieve a mental transformation can you hope to have become “empowered”.

Well, then I’m definitely out, that’s as sure as eggs is eggs - but what about all the others?

I believe many who attend the Kalachakra hardly fulfill the basic technical requirements of a proper Tantra student either, because to be honest, these requirements are very difficult to reach. But maybe others have something I don’t? Maybe it’s unshakeable faith in the tantric teacher.

I guess to some extent, they are able to compensate their lack of technical expertise with this strength of faith. Maybe that’s what many Tibetans have always and successfully been doing because I do believe people manage to get inspiration and blessings from the Kalachakra this way even when they don’t understand the practice per se.

Perhaps most folks also attend with the more modest goal to collect wholesome actions for a positive rebirth and not with the big tantric goal to reach enlightenment in one lifetime. So for them the blessings (jinlab) they can hope to receive are probably just perfect. And since they never expected more to begin with, it all works out for them.

Whereas I have zero expectation, little faith, and a lot of questions.

Imagine: If I went to the Kalachakra with my current mindset, it’s as safe as the bank of England that I’d come back not having understood a thing - for the third time in over twenty years! Ouch!

Talking about questions, here we go: If the maximum ordinary people can hope to get out of a tantric initiation such as Kalachakra is “mere” blessings and inspiration, why not try and obtain these by following a basic teaching? Why “waste” a Kalachakra for that? Why, among a myriad of choices, does the Dalai Lama pick a complicated practice like Kalachakra for a public mass event. Isn’t that negligent? Isn’t that – excuse my language – casting pearls before swine?

Of course His Holiness is aware of the dichotomy between tantric practice and a public event. On the official website of the Kalachakra in DC he explains that he holds the empowerments because they attract a lot of people, but his ultimate aim is to improve people’s grounding in the Dharma via the preliminary teachings and not the initiation itself.

But even those who are more experienced in the Dharma will freely admit that it’s difficult to gain tantric insights by merely spending a few days in preliminary teachings. How appropriate is it then, I dare ask, to use the empowerment as some kind of magnet to draw people when clearly most of them aren’t qualified to apply it? What’s the purpose of sprinkling such an intimate and precious initiation indiscriminately over every Tom, Dick and Harry?

Kundun said himself we need to work on our Buddhism more when he recently came to Minnesota. He said he met people who were barely able to explain the meaning of “The Three Jewels” or the “Four Noble Truths” and he urged them to study. But if after more than one thousand years since the introduction of Buddhism to Tibet, we are still struggling with the basics, then what for Buddha’s sake can we do with a Kalachakra or Tantra?

I vaguely remember Gedun Choephel saying the Tibetans have a flair for complicated stuff and an ingrained slight for simple things. Rings true. I believe it’s not only obvious in the form of religion we practice but also in the archaic orthography and grammar of our language that a few literati insist on preserving. But I gave my two cents worth on the language topic and won’t go into that further.

It would have been lovely to attend the Kalachakra in DC this summer: Hanging out with a Tibetan crowd, enjoying the vibes of the event, letting our children immerse in the experience and connect, catch up with old friends, talk about old times - my personal sense of wellbeing would have been on cloud nine. Yet my head keeps telling me these shouldn’t be the reasons for going to a tantric initiation. I have the uneasy feeling that these might be what they call “the Eight Worldly Dharmas” or eight worldly concerns (Jigden Chö 8) and which you’re supposed to abandon.

Anyway, only because I have a mind that can’t handle Tantra and can’t fit in a Kalachakra, doesn’t mean others shouldn’t be interested or curious, or can’t fit it in either.

I wish all participants a happy and memorable Kalachakra with lots of positive impulses for their Dharma practice.

Sarvam Mangalam!

Mountain Phoenix

Vive La Nouvelle Cuisine Tibétaine!

2011-06-14T23:50:00.000-07:00

I’ve always felt Tibetan cooking was not as bad as some people thought. But you could say I grew up on that food and am biased, which is true. So I was flabbergasted when Sandrine from work told me over lunch that she loves Tibetan food. And not only did she take notice of the existence of something like Tibetan cooking she even said it was her preferred cuisine. Mind you, this was coming out of the mouth of a well-travelled French woman.

When I asked her what her favourite Tibetan dishes were she replied: “You know, those Momo, they are so delicious and also that curry with the chickpeas, absolutely delicious!”

Sandrine is a commuter who works out of town for three days and then returns to the countryside for the remainder of the week to be with her family. When in town, she stays in a small room with no kitchen and eats out regularly.

“Is it authentique?”

Gasp!

Depending on your viewpoint, it could or could not be.

My reflex was: “Momo is as authentic as can be, chérie. We are the Land of Dumplings, the one and only Momo Country; our babies can say “Momo” before they can say “Mama” - and chickpea curry is fake!”

Momo

But what I actually said was more tempered: “Yes, it’s authentic. Momo is a typical dish. The chickpea curry is more contemporary Tibetan-style cooking, must be a specialty of that restaurant.”

Honestly, why should Tibetan cooking exhaust itself with classical best-sellers such as Momo or Shapalé?

Modern-day Tibetans enjoy the advantages of a globalised economy which obviously found its way also into many restaurants and private kitchens all over the planet: When we think about it, contemporary Tibetan cooking is as varied, nutritious and appealing as never before. In real life, Tibetan cooking has long been better than its reputation. Chickpea curry is only the beginning!

So while our cuisine admittedly didn’t start out as la crème de la crème who says it has to stay that way until doomsday?

Tibetan cooking has its humble origins in the simple diet of farmers and herders who subside on lumps of dough (Pak), salty tea with butter in it (Bodcha), and dried raw meat (Shakam). But our ancestors have also continuously been adding new dishes to their menu that became “Tibetan” in the course of time. Even typical foods such as good old Momos or the popular lamb and potato curry (Shamdrè) were foreign imports at one point.

Likewise, should we not consider Indian Dal Bhat a typical Tibetan food by now? For so many Tibetans abroad it’s a familiar dish. Along the same lines that funny Chinese jelly-salad mish-mash known as Liangfen should be included too. When my relatives in Tibet come into town for business, their day is done only after slurping a bowl of spicy Liangfen before they head back home. Boy, did my dad miss Liangfen when he came to this country first! He was so desperate for it he used corn starch since mung bean starch was hard to come by in those days.

Liangfen

Both Dal and Liangfen have also been thoroughly Tibetanised in name: Dal for us is Dali and Liangfen is also called Leping or Labing. The popular pickled radish we call sönlabu is also a Chinese import as the treacherous name reveals. Would it ever cross our mind to not consider it a typical Tibetan dish although suan luobu (“sour radish”) is Chinese through and through as well as all the other pickled vegetables called yancai? In point of fact the Tibetanised mispronunciation is the ultimate indicator that these dishes have become “ours”. For once we can say, in culinary terms, China is part of Tibet!

"Sönlabu"

So Tibetan cooking has always imported foreign foods and then naturalised them. The only difference between then and now is the improved, easy access to foreign foods and ingredients in our times. The trend confirms it: Tibetan cooks combine indigenous ingredients with a whole range of traditionally foreign ones to create new dishes for the Tibetan dinner table. Contemporary Tibetan cooking is evolving faster than in the old days and chances are it offers something for everyone’s taste.

I’m not much of a cook but as a married woman with children I simply have to cook regularly, so better try to do a good job in providing wholesome and tasty meals. I sometimes am also a wannabe nouvelle cuisine tibétaine cook. In addition, I try to pay attention to quality ingredients that meet Buddhist standards of avoiding harm: I opt for local, organic and fair trade produce; it’s more expensive but that’s supposed to be part of my practice of incorporating Dharma into daily life. Whatever waste is left from cooking is systematically recycled and properly composted. The habit comes in handy especially during these days when we’re in the middle of Saka Dawa, ha ha!

Happy hens

Enough theorising now!

Check out three real-life, field-tested recipes out of Mountain Phoenix’ green gourmet kitchen which expand the traditional Tibetan culinary experience and perhaps help to get a tiny step closer to enlightenment by starting out right with our dinner plates - served with some personal anecdotes as a side-dish:

Precious Banana Garland

(neo-Tib: Rinchen Banana Trengwa)

Precious Banana Garland

250 g soft butter

150 g brown sugar

1 pinch of salt

5 egg yokes

grated skin of 1 lemon

500 g ripe Bananas

4 tablespoons of lemon juice

1 shotglass of liquor

100 g Tsampa

80 g flour

15 g baking powder

75 g grounded almonds or hazelnuts

5 egg whites

Grease cake-pan and heat the oven to 200 degrees Celcius. Mix the butter and sugar; add egg yokes, grated skin of lemon and stir; peel and squash bananas, add liquour (use Arrak if you have or Cognac, Rum, Whiskey, anything will do) and lemon juice and mix; add the banana mix and sift flour with baking soda over the batter, add Tsampa, ground nuts and stir well; beat egg whites and gently fold into the batter; fill batter into cake-pan and bake for 70 – 80 minutes.

Of course the banana is not an indigenous Tibetan fruit. One of my friends was asked by a nomad who saw them pick-nicking in the grassland: “Aja, what’s that hand-like looking thing?” But where would all the cuisines in the world be if all their foods were cooked with indigenous ingredients only? The banana is as common in Tibet as anywhere else and is usually called xiangjiao. India-Tibetans know their banana inside out calling it kera; the politically over-correct too eat bananas opting for the long-winded and laboured shing tala’i drebo. I am a practical person. Some foreign loanwords just shouldn’t be Tibetanised, so I call the banana banana.

Garnished with the right accessories, the Precious Banana Garland makes also for a great kid’s birthday party cake or a small present for tea-party. Or try to bake the Rinchen Banana Trengwa with the best ingredients and a pure motivation - with that auspicious name you could then even use it as an offering to your Lama – kyabso chio!

Tsampa Biscuits

(neo-Tib: Tsampa Biscuits)

Tsampa Biscuits

80 g Tsampa

250 g flour

80 g ground nuts

1 teaspoon of salt

400 g chocolate

220 g soft butter

300 g brown sugar

2 eggs from happy hens

15 g vanilla sugar

Sift flour into a bowl, add salt; crush chocolate. Stir butter in another bowl until creamy; add sugar, eggs and vanilla sugar, mix well; add flour mix and stir into soft batter; add crushed chocolate, stir well; heat oven to 190 degrees Celcius; put baking-paper on baking-plate; make 4 cm big balls out of the dough and place on baking-plate (5 cm gap); bake for 15 minutes.

The first time I baked these cookies they were an instant hit with kids and adults alike. When I revealed there was Tsampa in them everyone was thrilled and surprised that these weren’t regular American-style chocolate chip cookies. Good old Tibetan Tsampa could be turned into something fun and even our men enjoyed the Tsampa Biscuits although Tibetan males usually don’t have a sweet tooth.

In Tibet you get all kinds of roasted barley flour varying from region to region. Use whatever Tsampa you have at your disposition, they all work. As for the chocolate, even the Hershey bars you find in Tibet will do the job. Dark bitter chocolate goes really well with whole-grain Tsampa.

You can be really creative with names for these new dishes. First, I wanted to name them “Rangzen Cookies” but that somehow reminded me of George Bush’s “Freedom Fries” and things like “Liberty Cabbage” so I dropped the name. Also if you are in Tibet, baking Rangzen Cookies could get you into trouble - “guilty of baking illegal cookies” so to speak. I don’t want to cause harm, remember? So I switched to harmless “Tsampa Biscuits” which would also be understandable in Tibet because “biscuit” is an old English loanword. My brother can pronounce it super well with a proper Tibetan accent: Tsampa Betscootring!

Risotto Tibetano

(neo-Tib: Itali Mingtag)

"Risotto tibetano"

Risotto rice

1 onion

rapeseed oil

vegetable broth

fresh highland mushrooms

salt, pepper, nutmeg
fresh Koriander

Graded Tibetan Cheese (Chuzhig)

Heat oil (any kind is ok but I recommend rapeseed since it’s common in Tibet), fry minced onion; add Risotto rice and stir-fry briefly; add vegetable broth until rice is covered and let simmer at low heat for 20 minutes; keep adding broth as the rice absorbs liquid, don’t let it dry out; wash mushrooms (Chanterelles and Matsutake are typical Tibetan) and brown them a bit in butter, then add to the rice; cook for 5 more minutes; season with salt, pepper and Dzati or nutmeg, also a typical spice; sprinkle graded Tibetan dried cheese over the Risotto and stir well leaving it in there for a few minutes to dissolve; garnish with some Sonam Penzom (Koriander) - and finito is your Risotto Tibetano - tataa!

I don’t remember whether you can buy Risotto rice in the big cities in Tibet. If not, just use a locally available short-grain rice, Sushi- or other kinds of sticky rice may work too. I will try it out next time I’m there.

What makes this dish “tibetano” are the local mushrooms, the Koriander, and of course the Chuzhig which substitutes for the graded Parmesan.

The Tibetan name “Itali Mingtag” goes back to my childhood. When my mom served Risotto when we were little, I remember my dad referring to this dish as “Mingtag”. He told us in the old days, they served a Risotto-resembling rice porridge in the monasteries when the monks were admitted to their finals. The candidates were called dgeshes ming-rtags-ba (no guarantee for correct orthography!) aka Geshe nominees from where the rice porridge served during the exams then got its name: Mingtag Thugpa. It was a heavy buttery, sticky, sweet-and-salty affair with raisins, dates, and chunks of meat in it. The dish was also known as Damcha Thugpa when served by the Khangtshens. I only know the dish from hear-say. Rather than Risotto maybe Mingtag resembles a Spanish Paella more or an Indian Pulao or maybe Cajun Jambalaya?

One day, when I’m that old woman with long white hair living in retirement in her little house in a corner of the Tibetan highlands, I would like to bring out a cookbook with wonderful recipes based on locally grown produce: Mountain Pesto (with wild garlic), Tibetan Ravioli with wild asparagus and ricotta filling, Tibetan apple pie, Tibetan peach jam and so and so forth. And I will have a hell of a time finding names for my creations!

Of course these imagined dishes as well as the ones I presented here are only Tibetan out of pure arbitrariness and labelling: I choose to emphasise the Tibetan ingredients over the other components and I try to stress some kind of “mindful eating” Buddhist ethics in food preparation. Kill-joys could easily say: “This is not how Tibetans eat! This is the fancy food of Westernised urban Tibetans!”

Well, some Westernised urban Tibetans consider themselves very kosher Tibetans too – Mountain Phoenix is one of them. I may not look like one and for sure I wash more often, but hey: Folks like me are as typical Tibetan as the archetypical grubby nomad living in a black tent. We come in all shapes and sizes, live scattered all over the globe in all kinds of dwellings, have all kinds of life-styles, eat all kinds of foods, and our heads are full of all kinds of ideas – long live our internal diversity!

And while not all Snowlanders may be equally fond of all dishes alike – Buddha knows I would only eat Pak and drink Bodcha if we were on the verge of a famine - contemporary Tibetan cooking is becoming more varied and richer, offering delicacies for all of us – and as we have seen even for some foreign culinary adventurers like Sandrine.

So let’s go back to our kitchens and invent more new Tibetan recipes!

Bon appétit - nyébo nanggo!

Mountain Phoenix

Could This Really Be It?

2011-05-01T02:48:00.000-07:00

The Dalai Lama publicly declared his withdrawal from politics a few weeks ago. While many have a hard time accepting a political future without him, I find myself standing diametrically opposed at the other end of the spectrum: I believe His Holiness’ withdrawal doesn’t go far enough to achieve the desired impact of modernising the Tibetan polity and making it survivable beyond his lifetime.

When I learned about Kundun’s decision to retire, I was very happy for him. If anyone deserves a break, it’s the Dalai Lama. He has been working tirelessly and in all conscience for others since he was a child. While teenagers elsewhere are not entrusted to run even a household, the 16-year old Dalai Lama had to run a country threatened by hostile forces. He did more than his fair share, we all agree, and for the rest of us it’s high time to wake up, we all agree too.

So could this be it? Could this mark the long-desired separation of religion and politics with the return of Tibetan Buddhism to the root of the Buddha’s teaching, and the beginning of modern government in the exile polity? Could his announcement to retire from politics really, finally mark the long-overdue mortal blow to the old Tibetan system of merging the spiritual and the secular by no less a figure than the central person in the system, the Dalai Lama himself?

Pardon, but Kundun sometimes is not the best communicator.

As with past announcements, he had to follow up with an explanation for the shocked Tibetans at home and abroad. I too listened to the “clarification statement posted on phayul.com and couldn’t help notice a number of things:

As much as I welcome his decision to withdraw from politics, I must say the form he chose for the address was awkward. We see the Dalai Lama sitting on a high throne while the others are congregating at his feet. In my eyes, this seating arrangement shows how Kundun himself is a prisoner of the system: Has he become so used to merging his two roles that he doesn’t realise anymore that this type of hierarchical seating arrangement is okay for a Buddhist teaching but not for a political briefing? There is nothing authentic in one person talking down from a throne to a group of people sitting cross-legged on the floor about “it’s time you introduce modern government”.

Then there was the way he delivered the message: Frequent use of expressions such as hagoba chi-a (“note once and for all”) and the general non-use of honourifics made the tone of his speech patronising. It created the impression that the Dalai Lama displays a lack of respect for his counterpart. The impression was reaffirmed by the Dalai Lama’s body language which showed him talking with a wagging finger. Sadly, I didn’t see a modern political leader withdrawing from a post. I saw a typical traditional person speaking down to grown people like a duck takes to water.

But as much as it bothered me, nobody in the audience said anything although uneasiness transpired through the video to the viewer. Either it was all Mountain Phoenix’ wrong perception and there really was nothing wrong with the speech or the audience was in deed not happy, yet kept quiet, which doesn’t speak for mature, democratic behaviour.

Ideally at this point, His Holiness, sensing the unease, should have invited feedback to allow for a conversation but that didn’t happen. So the end of the video shows uncomfortable silence on both sides with Kundun fiddling about with a few loose leaves from a Buddhist text. - Again: What business do scriptures have at a political briefing?

In my eyes, the very event meant to clarify his earlier announcement to withdraw from politics was dripping wet with mchos-srid-zung-drel. It reconfirmed the impression that although our bodies arrived in the 21^st century, our minds have never really left the old system.

The most unsettling part in all of this, however, was what His Holiness did not address: He made no mention of all the other elected and/or appointed monks, apart from himself, who are still occupying posts in the administration and the parliament. If the Dalai Lama is serious about releasing the Tibetans to modern government, it is not enough for him alone to withdraw; it is indispensable to address the general withdrawal of the Sangha from politics altogether.

Removing himself alone won’t make the Tibetan polity secular as long as other people in robes further down the ladder continue to engage in politics. The Dalai Lama’s sole withdrawal would be an individual HR change at the very top with the basic nature of the exile polity remaining the same. In the worst case, another monk may be elected or appointed to high office in the future and the inauspicious cycle of Tibetan worldly dependence on Lamas is free to continue.

But alas, to my greatest discomfort, there was no word on this most important of all points!

And to further confuse the viewer, His Holiness dropped a remark in the video about: “We never called the Tibetan government-in-exile “the Tibetan government in exile”; we always called it “the central Tibetan administration”. - How do you even say that in Tibetan? He uses English in the video! Does anyone have an idea what he was getting at? I thought we and Dharamsala understand it to be the legitimate continuation of the Tibetan government toppled by the Chinese? And now it’s scaled down to “administering” the Tibetans living abroad?

In my eyes, the “clarification statement” raises a lot more questions than it answers.

But it looks like after the initial shock, many have already arranged themselves with the new situation and are now circling the whole discussion around technicalities such as amending the constitution, rather than showing interest in discussing a fundamental, structural course correction – or they are banking all their hopes on the newly elected prime minister without having to change anything about themselves.

When something becomes a norm in a society, like religious rule for the Tibetans, it isn't easy to propound change because by questioning the specific practice, automatically all the people who are used to it, feel challenged. For the Tibetans the political role of the Dalai Lama and the general presence of the Sangha in politics are not only very normal but highly desirable. As wrong as it is, many of us have reached the acute point where they become really nervous at the thought of being politically governed by anybody else but a Lama.

Have we truly lost all confidence in our own ability?

The only job a Lama has ever had is to guide inclined individuals on the path that leads to enlightenment. The job profile of a Lama does not include solving political problems, that’s mundane stuff and the people’s turf.

The cool thing about Buddhism, which we claim we are the son and heir, is its egalitarian nature: Everyone has equal potential to Buddhahood. There is no external savior. Even the Buddha himself couldn’t save anybody because nobody is above the law of cause and effect - you reap what you sow. Straight and simple.

The Buddha then showed people the path to enlightenment, but to actually walk the path is something everyone has to do themselves. It’s a dedicated personal effort. You not only have to do all the work yourself, but it’s only you who can do it. Doesn’t herein lie the beauty of the entire exercise called Buddhism? Have we forgotten?

Have we perhaps also forgotten that at the final stage of Guru devotion, the Lama dissolves into us, and we become the Lama? Our mind and the teacher’s become one. So there is not only no external saviour on the worldly level, there is no saviour on the spiritual level either. Only you can save yourself!

So when even in theory a Lama such as the Buddha himself can’t save anyone, how did we end up believing so firmly it could work in practice? Our idea of the Dalai Lama being capable of solving all problems on our behalf is so wrong altogether. It’s a Tibetan cultural creation superimposed on Buddhism and masquerading as such.

Maybe we have also forgotten that even from a purely religious standpoint, Lamas have never held the absolute position we tend to award the current Dalai Lama. Do we not take pride in the non-hierarchical nature of Buddhism because in our religion, people are encouraged to develop a critical mind and are free to debate with their teachers since Buddha Shakyamuni’s time? Not out of ill intention, but out of a deeply felt, genuine desire to understand and evolve?

Have all (former) monks in Tibetan society perhaps forgotten too? During a debate in the courtyard, don’t you have to present intellectually valid arguments based on the Peja to back your position? You wouldn’t just shout: “My Lama said so and he is smarter than you, so eat it!” You’d turn yourself into a laughing stock of the whole monastery if you did. So if we disapprove of this in a professional religious debate, then how come it’s okay to use it in worldly matters? Why is it socially acceptable to silence critical voices by merely stating the Dalai Lama is Chenresig and therefore knows better?

I believe we are hugely confused. We cannot keep concepts apart since we are so used to blending the spiritual and the mundane.

While on an ultimate or religious level, the Dalai Lama is Avalokitesvara, on a relative or worldly level, he is human – like the rest of us including the Buddha himself. But a lot of Tibetans don’t seem to recognise any longer that there are different ways of looking at things. They subconsciously blend the relative and the ultimate, the worldly and the spiritual, so that the person who is the Dalai Lama becomes the absolute authority on anything and everything. And to really let the corks pup they then understand this abstruse mixture to constitute “Tibetan Buddhism”.

Say that centuries of this type of muddle-headed thinking did not turn us into a people who placed itself under disability.

Can we not remember anymore that there was also a Tibet long before the emergence of the Dalai Lamas where our ancestors governed themselves? And have our minds become so narrow that we are unable to imagine a future where we will govern ourselves again free from religious influence?

Some expressed fear that the Dalai Lama’s withdrawal from politics could mean abandonment.

I wonder how this conclusion is possible at all. How could Avalokitesvara “abandon” anybody? The decision to resign as the head of government can only be looked at as the kind, gracious and farsighted step of a Bodhisattva who acts with nothing at his heart but the best interest of others. The Dalai Lama’s withdrawal from politics then cannot mean abandonment whatsoever, but really must mean the pure opposite: empowerment. Following our logic, his withdrawal can only be an expression of a Bodhisattva’s altruistic wish for us to begin our long outstanding emancipation. This is the only way to look at it. Any other conclusion is completely illogical.

Over 2000 years ago in India, when the Buddha finally returned home for a visit, his father, the king, was very pleased to see his son had become a religious leader with an impressive following. The Buddha’s religious prestige, the king reasoned, would help to strengthen his political power when ascending to the throne. But to his disappointment, the Buddha renounced the throne. Instead he told his father that his was the path of Dharma and not the worldly path of politics. In Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Old Path, White Clouds” the Buddha says:

“Father, I am no longer the son of one family, one clan, or even one country. My family is now all beings, my home is the Earth, and my position is that of a monk who depends on the generosity of others. I have chosen this path, not the path of politics. I believe I can best serve all beings in this way”.

We are fond of our country being called the abode of Buddhism. But more than 400 years ago in Tibet, we went the exact opposite way of the Buddha. We couldn’t resist and lifted a priest to the highest political office by making him ruler of the country. Some defensive voices might interject: “We didn’t invent it! Some Mongols forced it upon us!” But does it speak for us that we’ve kept it all this time, long after the last Mongol disappeared from the Tibetan scene? We hung on to it way into the 21^st century - after 1959 even without a physical state.

As a Tibetan, it feels terrible. I feel very bad for His Holiness who has always tried to do his best. But it’s no good denying what is plain to see: The path our ancestors chose was corrupted from the start. This is the harsh truth I believe we must learn to face.

The 14^th Dalai Lama, playing the central role in this ill-fated system, has worked to correct the system as far as possible. But as the clarification video on phayul.com shows, he is like a courageous patient determined to operate on himself: It doesn’t work well. This is why we absolutely must take advantage of the favourable situation the Dalai Lama is trying to create and press ahead with the complete separation of the spiritual and the secular.

Today could be the day where the Tibetans in the free world choose to discontinue on the wrong path. It could be today that we begin to correct past mistakes for good. As Buddhists we know there is nothing predetermined or eternally valid. We all are Tibet and it is completely in our hands to decide which way we want to go and what kind of people we want to be.

For some, including Mountain Phoenix, there is no question that we must pick up where we left off 400 years ago and reassume full control over worldly matters again. But we can only get there as a community, all of us together, and with many coming whole-heartedly to this conclusion.

Let us start the painful political discourse today and not deceive ourselves by believing the job is done now that we elected a new prime minister; or now that some officials have held meetings, redistributed tasks and amended the constitution to reflect the Dalai Lama’s absence - and then we continue about our old ways.

What we badly need, more than anything, is a change in mindset. I believe we need to relearn to relie on our own judgement for all matters regarding the worldly level. As Buddhists, we also know there are tools and techniques which can produce a change in mindset.

What keeps us from applying them?

Mountain Phoenix

April Fools and Crazy Saints

2011-04-01T01:13:00.000-07:00

I went to pick up my children from a kid’s birthday party the other day when I ran into an acquaintance who had just returned from Lhasa with a pile of books on Gedun Choephel in his luggage. My acquaintance said a group of disciples had finally published his Sungbum and he got the collection “just for entertainment”, which somehow sounded like an apology.

While a dozen kids were running around the house, we then began a conversation about the “Amdo beggar”. - What a welcomed change of subject after the exile-Tibetan election craze and the Dalai Lama’s recent surprise announcement to withdraw from politics!

Cautiously I said: “It’s good to know people are looking after his legacy. Gedun Choephel had an unusual style to say it politely, but he also gave the Tibetans a lot of new impulses in many areas. A lot of people at the time just weren’t able to appreciate, don’t you think?”

My acquaintance replied: “Yes, but you know, his Lobma only mention the positive side in these books and say nothing about his controversial works.”

Yes, it’s one-sided to mention only positive things. But then we’re not talking a work of science, are we? Disciples are encouraged to focus on the positive attributes of their Lama so they can proceed on the path, correct?

Maybe suspecting that I must be a fan of Gedun Choephel’s my acquaintance remarked: “I think he simply went overboard. There is a fine line between genius and mania. You know the saying isn’t there for nothing: "Sherab chälpa pe-la shag, Amdo Gedun Choephel ta bu.”

Huh?

The “saying” sounds more like a threat if I got it right: “If you need an example for misdirected intelligence, just take a look the Amdowa Gedun Choephel!”

"Tibet Improvement Party"
Logo by Gedun Choephel

I had always thought of Gedun Choephel as a liberal door-opener who failed not because he wasn’t convincing enough, but because he was stopped by jealous people who were not as smart but came in superior numbers. My impression of Gedun Choephel had been heavily coloured by the non-spiritual part of his life: His arts, his travels outside Tibet, his historical research, and his involvement with the Tibet Improvement Party. I never even properly realised he was born a Tulku with a religious following.

If anything, my idea of Gedun Choephel was a reflection of my own wishful thinking: Finally a person in our recent history who saw the hopelessness of the Tibetan system which was fossilised down to the very fundament; finally a person who did something about it!

After I had brought my kids to bed that night, I fetched a couple of books about Gedun Choephel and began rereading them.

Slowly I noticed that my idea of the man was perhaps not so accurate after all. It sure looked too romantic and incomplete: Not only did I miss that he was a Lama, I was ignorant of the hugeness of his fallout with the Buddhist establishment. I didn’t notice his political naïveté in dealing with people in the Lhasa government either nor the wider implications of his works for the Tibet Improvement Party – and who knows what else I am still missing out on.

Politically Gedun Choephel was almost innocent for current standards. Would you send cartographic materials about a sensitive border area by regular mail when spies playing the “Great Game” are lurking everywhere? That’s what he’s said to have done after members of the Tibet Improvement Party based in Indian Kalimpong convinced him to take the long and not so obvious route back to Tibet. He jotted down all the historical border markers on the way for them. Clueless when he crossed into Tibet, he sent all the materials via British mail back to Kalimpong. The content was discovered, the Lhasa government informed and Gedun Choephel along with the leading members of the Tibet Improvement Party became suspect.

Reminds me of a good-natured friend who naively sent me print-outs of downloads from the internet about the kidnapped child-Panchen Lama to my workplace in Tibet. Hell was I scared when I saw what was in the envelope! I burned everything immediately and thought how lucky I was they didn’t open the mail. But a year later when my friend was about to enter Tibet, the police showed up at her hotel room in the middle of the night interrogating her about her motives for sending me “documents” a year earlier. There was no visible trace the envelope had been openend before I got it. They were watching us all along.

As for Gedun Choephoel’s religious involvement, all I had retained were his legendary debates in the Chöra and how he disguised himself as an unsophisticated Dobdob to defeat a learned, arrogant monk in debate and teach him a lesson in humility; and how he successfully argued that plants are also sentient beings like humans and animals; how the others, short of arguments, would beat him up in order to silence him. The guy was unstoppable. How I loved these stories!

But then I stumbled over a reference which made me think. In her biography of Gedun Choephel, Heather Stoddard writes he quit his Buddhist studies after eleven years shortly before completion because he found it meaningless to obtain the Geshe degree when he didn’t practice.

Isn’t that strange?

What’s the point in sticking around a monastery for eleven years, hanging out with people whose views you disagree with; studying stuff you can’t relate to, that you’ve never even intended to apply? Just to ponder on others’ deficiencies? To teach others a lesson how inadequate they are? For your own aggrandisement?

I really had nothing better to do with my spare time, so I dug deeper into Gedun Choephel religious thoughts reading a Buddhist text attributed to him (or at least parts there of). It was translated into English by Donald Lopez as “The Madman’s Middleway: Reflections on Reality of the Tibetan Monk Gedun Chophel”.

I didn’t understand a single argument in the book. It was all mind-boggling, metaphysical hair-splitting from the standpoint of a layperson with a mild interest in the Dharma. As far as I could follow, Gedun Choephel said “absolute reality” was beyond eternalism and nihilism. He said absolute reality could not be placed between existence (eternalism) and non-existence (nihilism) as propagated by some Lamas because it cannot be conceptually explained but only directly experienced in meditation – or something to that effect, I am not sure at all. Anyway, an ugly dispute arose and Gedun Choephel was called a heretic and a madman.

Personally I couldn’t care less. People who never heard about this theological debate reach(ed) enlightenment too, so why get excited about inconsequential differences?

But at the same time, I thought I got a sense of the depth and the sophistication of the points brought forward by Gedun Choephel. So I began to wonder why he went to such lengths to dispute standard views of the time: If you don’t practice, why care at all? Why waste precious time detecting others’ perceived mistakes in interpreting the Buddha’s - or in this case Nagarjuna’s - words? What is someone’s motivation for doing that?

I’ve come to the conclusion that Gedun Choephel must have cared after all: Truly and deeply. He just had a problem with getting his message across because more often than not, he hit the wrong tone - “c’est le ton qui fait la musique”, n’est-ce pas? But of course our whiz-kid had an answer to this as well: Stupid people don’t deserve better treatment - touché!

It sure must have felt good to triumph. But did he do himself a favour?

His goal was for people to take a fresh look at Tibetan Buddhism. For that he needed the buy-in of the opinion-leaders in the establishment. But the reaction he got from them was complete disagreement and personal discredit. There were so many who thought he was misguided, including his own teacher, that it entered the vernacular (”If you want an example for misdirected intelligence, look at the Amdowa Gedun Choephel”).

Yet in my eyes, he was not a blasphemer at all. In my eyes, he remains an innovator with the best of intentions even in the field of Dharma. But after reading “The Madman’s Middleway” I also believe that Gedun Choephel is himself to be blamed for a lot of the criticism he got. He could have written without hubris, mockery and cynicism. He could have written as Lamas are supposed to speak: With kindness, understanding, and tolerance, choosing his words carefully. But he decided not to. Instead he allowed himself to write as he lived: in excess.

As for his unforgiving critics, whose voices are also included in the book: Aren’t they the ones who teach: “Don’t look at the person, look at the Dharma”? And weren’t they the ones who looked at the person instead of the Dharma? Why didn’t they give Gedun Choephel a chance by objectively looking for the silver lining? When he gave them condescendence, mockery and pride, why did they have to give him back more condescendence, more mockery and more pride? If their position is superior, how come it doesn’t reflect in their demeanour? Why wouldn’t they make an effort to find out for themselves, without any prejudice and ignoring the polemics, whether there was some truth to what Gedun Choephel was trying to get at?

How sad there never was a meeting of the minds! How sad both sides didn’t meet to talk it out in goodwill! It looks like Buddhism as dialogue never happened. Instead, they preferred to write “hate mail” to each other from afar, what a waste!

Lhasa-based gallery and artists

organisation using GC's name

Isn’t it ironic that Gedun Choephel has become an officially lauded reformer and innovator post mortem? Both the Chinese side and Dharamsala claim him as a hero. Tibetan intellectuals on both sides love to associate with him using his name for all kinds of projects. But if he were really among us today, my gut feeling is few people on either side would like him. My guess is he would have remained the persona non grata he was back in old Tibet because had he not died so early, he would continue to hold up a mirror to the Tibetans - and to the Chinese, you bet! He would have continued to question and to disagree, and a lot of uneasy truths would have been put on the table. Can anyone seriously imagine Dharamsala being fond of such a person? Remember, this is the place where a harmless Miss Tibet contest prompts the Prime Minister to make a public comment and deem it “un-Tibetan”.

It’s so safe to find Gedun Choephel cool now that he’s dead and conveniently can’t talk back. There, I said it!

Actually Gedun Choephel’s life begs to be filmed. Why hasn’t anyone made a feature film about his life yet? For sure it would be a million times more exciting than the life and times of Milarepa where I expect the only climax to be how Milarepa conjures up a hail storm to kill his enemies - with the whole story placed against the single backdrop of a somniferous, arid Western Tibetan plateau, yaaawn.

Gedun Choephel’s life in contrast, has all the ingredients for a dazzling thriller: Shot on location in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Tibet, and the Himalayas; sharp intellect, sarcasm and humour; adventure, intrigue, hot sex with numerous partners in all kinds of positions; and a tragic ending! And imagine the cast: Over here the radiantly talented Renaissance man without humility; and over there the jealous and mediocre people in the Tibetan government who try everything to make his life miserable, steal his achievements, and keep him small and insignificant; and still a little bit further: a few unforgiving, grim-looking, dry Lamas with no sense of humour who demonise him as a threat to the Dharma not realising that their rigidity is an equal threat.

But a prophet has no honour in his own country.

Maybe Gedun Choephel should have tried his luck in Buthan?

Instead of returning to Lhasa where he was incarcerated to rot in prison before being released again only to die a little while later, I think he should have gone to Bhutan. He may have become a saint by now, just like Drukpa Kunley, the 15th century Tsangpa, who left Tibet and became famous for his crazy methods of enlightenment, blessing women by way of sexual intercourse and giving teachings in exchange for alcohol - “Bhutanese Arts of Love” if you wish!

In one region of Bhutan, drawings of huge male genitals’ are all over the house walls. And not only that, at the monastery, they will bless you with a gigantic wooden replica of the venerable Drukpa Kunley’s “very own”. I was almost knocked out by it. Have you ever been blessed by a phallus? Where in Tibet can you receive a blessing from a phallus? You get blessed by receiving a Khata from a Lama. If you’re lucky, you receive a cha-wang, or as the Gyalwa Karmapa used to do back when he was still in Tsurpu, bless visitors via a 3-metre long arm-extending cord. But blessed by a phallus? That’s only possible in Bhutan. The Bhutanese may have known how to appreciate someone like Gedun Choephel!

Another more recent Lama who would fit the series “crazy saints” is the late and controversial Trungpa Tulku. We find the same pattern of a life-style branded by alcohol and sex which is what we would associate with a rock star but not a Tibetan Lama. Even though he didn’t look nor live like a conventional Lama, he brought Buddhism to many people. Some say he was successful in doing it precisely because he dropped monastic conventions so he was better accessible. These days a film is screened about his life and times. I haven’t seen it yet but I saw that a trailer, “Crazy Wisdom”, is out.

Anyway, maybe it’s not just Lamas like Gedun Choephel, Drukpa Kunley or Choegyam Trungpa who are the misfits. Maybe it’s us. Maybe when they see how we act, talk and think, they can’t help but go nuts to finally produce a meeting of the minds?

Wait a minute!

Are we perhaps in the middle of that Buddhist parable about this king whose subjects all went nuts because they had drunk water from a poisoned well?

The king, who didn’t drink from the well, was the only one who remained mentally intact, but after a while, since he always ended up arguing with his crazy subjects, they accused him of being the one who was mad. To dissolve the impasse, the king then deliberately drank the poisonous water. Now they were all sitting in the same boat rocking in the same waves.

Perhaps that explains what’s going one here?

I am confused. Maybe next time our little ones need to be picked up from a birthday party, I’d better ask my partner to go.

April Fools :--)
Mountain Phoenix

Losar and the Chupa Prima Donna

2011-03-04T00:10:00.000-08:00

We had a heated conversation over dinner last weekend about what we would wear for the upcoming Tibetan New Year.

Dolma from the baby names story, who is pregnant with her second child, was craving for some fried chicken, so three of us girl-friends took her out for dinner to this restaurant in the country side. The smell of roasted meat makes me feel nauseous but I went along anyway. Who wants to complicate things for a pregnant girl? I’m not crazy, I’d rather feel nauseous.

While my companions were munching on crispy chicken wings, breasts and thighs, I was slurping a liquid, vegetable Lasagne. Had it been served in a bowl with chopsticks, I could have mistaken it for good old Tukpa, it was that liquid.

So what to wear on Losar? Rigzin was fastest to decide. She is probably the only Tibetan female in the whole country who owns only two Chupas – one brown, one grey. No hassle either over finding a matching apron, the Pangden, since Rigzin, a die-hard single, could go without.

No idea why but among Tibetans abroad the Pangden has something to do with your civil status. In the Tsang area in Tibet, all females wear this apron - even little girls. Maybe women wear it as a secret weapon? Western girls carry pepper spray in their handbags ready to spray it at any attacker; Tibetan girls wear their Pangden - ready to flap it at any aggressor while spitting out and exclaiming: “Tui”!

Dolma joked: “Rigzin, you’ll never find somebody if you wear those grandma colors. Guys won’t even spot you in the crowd! Why don’t you wear something brighter? If you like those dreadful grey and brown colours at least opt for dashing brocade instead of provincial wool, please!”

Yeah, the thing about colours and materials! Once we had uniforms made for the staff of a small guesthouse in our corner of the highlands. We thought they turned out beautifully: Tibetan-style, yet modern, washable and practical working clothes. But the staff refused to wear the uniform. They claimed brown and grey are colours worn by elders. Just like Dolma, who grew up in a place tucked away deep on the plateau, they preferred young, sexy colours which were pink, yellow, red and turquoise – the brighter, the more beautiful; and the best is if it’s sequined.

I don’t know whether Rigzin’s simplicity in clothing style had something to do with her family background. Her parents were nomads in Tibet from the Damshung area north of Lhasa. They came to this country via India where Rigzin and her brothers were born and spent their childhood. The whole family was tall, slim and good-looking. Rigzin could have passed as a Prada model, but she wasn’t interested in fashion to that extent. She also didn’t mind if people said behind her back that she was an old spinster: “Why should I? In a way it’s true: I’ve never been married, don’t have a boyfriend, don’t date and still live with my parents!”

Rigzin was a forgiving and generous person.

Married to a Westerner, Dolma would have loved to dress up in shiny brocade and loads of jewellery but she wasn’t sure whether she would get to celebrate Losar at all since her husband would be away on business.

For Pema, the single-parent, true blue Khamo from Ganzi, and our fourth girl-friend at the dinner table, it was clear that she would wear a Lhasan Chupa for Losar. She insisted on adding the apron: The whole world should see that even though she was divorced, she was still a decent woman, which she feared would be contested by the scandalmongers if she didn’t wear the Pangden. For whatever reasons, she also wanted to go in a Central Tibetan Chupa even though she was from the East – as if a Chupa from her hometown would be too provincial or not festive enough. Heaven knows!

I was the only one who didn’t know what to wear for Losar.

Indignantly, Rigzin exclaimed: “Gosh, Phoenix! You own so many Chupas - more than all of us combined - and you still don’t know what to wear?”

Got caught red-handed.

I stammered something about the Wonju being so unpractical with the collar and the sleeves sliding out of place all the time. I didn’t want to be critical of their choice. If they feel alright wearing what they wear - good for them! What else could I have replied? That to me the Central Tibetan Chupa feels like a uniform? That I hate the multi-coloured, Tutti-Frutti apron? That I wasn’t keen on running around looking like the bhömè tsogpa?

Honestly, the way we Tibetans tailor our clothes or wear our accessories sometimes is so unflattering. Take the Kongpo Chupa for instance: Maybe that brown-bag outfit works in the jungles of Kongpo to scare off wild animals but over here those oversized, broad shoulders make the woman look like a wrestler. Add that funny looking hat with the horns and you know where the clownish-looking people in Eddie Murphy’s “The Golden Child” got their inspiration from.

Rigzin and Dolma immediately protested: “How can you say that? The Kongpo Chupa is the most beautiful Tibetan dress. “So and so” wore one at her wedding, she looked so pretty, you should have seen her!”

Okay, okay. I take that back: “Chances are it may look good on some, but not because the Kongpo Chupa is smart but because of the person wearing it. There are people who look graceful no matter what they wear, even if it’s a brown bag from Kongpo!”

Rigzin would have looked good in one, I was sure.

“Oh Phoenix, you are so hopeless! We are talking our own clothes. How can you be so critical about our own culture?”

“Well, do you prefer if an outsider criticises our culture? Better discuss internally in all openness, no?”

And so I started teasing my girl-friends.

Just because something is “our culture” doesn’t mean we have to like it. While it's great to to have clothes distinctively Tibetan, particularly because we have this political problem with China, it doesn’t make them automatically cool. Especially the guys’ Chupa: Most men in it look – sorry to say – clownish.

The exception are little boys who look adorably cute in Chupa, but it’s definitely a no-go for most grown men who want to be taken seriously by the world around them. It seems even our “top diplomats” have instinctively learned this lesson. Not that it has helped the outcome of their dealings in any noticeable way, but none of the Dalai Lama’s envoys ever wear Chupa when they are on mission, have you also noticed?

The female Chupa is a bit better although it can get pretty depressing there too. For instance, Western Tibetan women wear a Kyepdri or “hipwrap”. We know it can become very cold in the highlands but is the only way to keep warm to wrap that dull blanket around your waist and fastening it with a piece of sheet metal above your belly button? What are those grandmotherly kidney warmers doing on young women and little girls?

Not to mention the overloaded way, some Eastern Tibetan ladies dress up. All those fist-size faux corals, turquoises, ambers around the neck, and the Momo steamer lid-sized silver plates hanging from their belts… Maybe there is a weight-lifting competition going on somewhere and we just don’t know?

Amdo women from the northeast dose the accessories better but still: All that bulky, heavy cloak made from felt, trimmed with fur - real or faux – gives me the itch even thinking about them."

“Well, dear, people dress to keep warm, that’s their number one concern”, Pema replied, “You should know first-hand that the weather in Tibet can change abruptly so people need to be prepared. You even spent winters there and should know how cold it can get outside and that it’s not much warmer indoors.”

She was right.

How could I ever forget that keeping warm is the top priority? There were winter nights so cold I could see my own breath – indoors. And when I went to sleep, I would keep the down jacket, gloves and cap on before gliding into my sleeping bag.

One night an earthquake struck around 10pm. I had never experienced an earthquake before. Instinctively I ran out of the apartment because suddenly all the furniture around me started to dance. It was a frightening experience. I didn’t learn until a few days later that the epicentre was about 200 km to the south and came down with 7.4 on the Richter scale. Together with the other neighbours I walked around in the courtyard for two hours waiting for the aftershock which never came. After a while, when I was nearly frozen, I decided to go back inside into my sleeping bag and sleep. I decided that it was better to die in an earthquake while sleeping in a warm bed than dying from cold while trying to escape from an earthquake. That night the earth shook again several times. I woke up but was so drowsy with sleep and it was so cold outside of my sleeping bag that I didn’t care anymore if the roof would fall on me and I’d die right then and there.

Boy, can it get cold in the highlands!

My aunts wear their little fur hats all year round and even in summer when working in the fields under the hot highland sun with the sweat dripping down their foreheads. Once they went on a pilgrimage to Lhasa and when they visited the Potala, some locals ridiculed them for wearing fur hats in the summer. My mom got so upset about it, she hurled back at the Lhasans: “Don’t we have a saying? Lungba réré, kéyig réré; Lama réré, chölug réré? So where they come from one wears fur hats in the summer, what’s the big deal?” Where upon those cheeky Lhasans turned silent.

Many Tibetans also wear long johns under their pants year-in and out. And a lot of the women in Chupa wear pants underneath and long johns inside. Conveniently, those day-time long johns also function as night-time pajamas.

And it hasn’t stopped there.

“Right,” I threw back at Pema, “It gets so very cold in Tibet we also enrobe all images of the Buddha, saints and deities in our shrines with tons of brocade so they won’t freeze – and we’ve continued to do so even when our shrines stand in tropical India!”

Pema started to laugh out loud.

But all the teasing and the stories were just to cover up the absurd situation that I didn’t know what to wear for Losar even though I had closet stuffed almost to the ceiling with Chupas.

Normally I would muddle through by opting for a half-Chupa - which only looks half as folksy as a full Chupa, haha! I would also make sure the half-Chupa had such a pattern or colour that it would be hard to match a Pangden. My pre-emptive strike just in case somebody had the face to ask why I, as a married woman with children, don’t wear an apron: “This Chupa has such a crazy pattern, if I added a Pangden it would look so sangi-singi, marè la?”

But on New Year day, I can’t run around in a half-Chupa! It’s got to be the real thing, the festive thing. It had to be traditional garb.

How a life in affluence can be so hard sometimes.

To aggravate my Chupa problem, my mom just came home from another visit to Tibet and brought me back yet another Chupa, specifically tailored for me: Long-sleeved with brocade lining and a matching brocade blouse with a standing collar, golden edging and golden buttons. Here's a picture. Hallelujah!

My mom pointed out happily: “This is the latest style in Lhasa. Everybody wears this now, it’s so fashionable.”

Well, when I saw the blouse I didn’t think it was “le dernier cri” at all. I had to think of a pajama jacket instead. As if that was what I needed! How do I possibly refuse to wear this outfit on Losar day without hurting my mom’s feelings?

I’m afraid going back to my closet and doing a proper Chupa audit won’t bring any result either given that I’m full of prejudices:

I don’t like the shiny brocade: “Cheap Gyamo-style, looks like a Qipao which is the quintessence of bad taste, works only on little girls!”

I don’t like the slippery silk blouse: “It’s tailored like a box and makes you look like an Amala!”

And I’m only willing to wear that useless Pangden over my dead body: “The dowdiest homespun accessory ever!”

Although half-jokingly, if I had continued about Chupas in this way, my girl-friends may have walked out on me that evening. Imagine Mountain Phoenix, the clean and pure vegetarian, sitting there all by herself surrounded by nothing but heaps of chicken bones, deserted, and her Chupa problem still unresolved – woah!

It’s not that the girls’ Chupa doesn’t evolve at all, nor are the cuts and materials stuck in time. Especially in Tibet, the Chupa does undergo fashion trends, which I welcome. The problem is most of those creations look either awkward, are too fussy to put on, or are plain fantasy Chupas made for performance on stage and not meant for real life. Most of the time, the quality of the tailoring is also miserable.

But I still have hope.

The innovative Tibetan youth who tailors the ultimate Chupa for the modern Tibetan woman will appear on the scene one day. In addition to the traditional Chupas prevalent, there will be Chupas "prêt-à-porter" which don’t look like folksy costumes but are street-wear, practical, wearable, washable, wrinkle-free, non-iron, smart and fashionable clothes; and of course there will also be "haute-coûture" Chupas, especially designed for festive occasions such as the New Year. I would never again complain about Chupas ever!

Did somebody just say: “Sweetheart, if that’s what you’re waiting for, you can wait a long time?"

Well, when I think about it, maybe having to wait for a long time wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen: The longer I have to wait, the older I get and the likelier it becomes, I resemble a respectable “Amala”. So in the near future, that slick blouse and that homely Pangden I now find so unpractical, could suddenly become the perfect garment to match my image. Not exactly my preference but conceivable.

Happy New Year of the Rabbit!
Mountain Phoenix

Reckless Robots Vs Kind-Hearted Softies

2011-02-03T07:30:00.000-08:00

I thought I heard him shout something about “Tiger balm” from the other end of the apartment.

The imagined penetrating smell of this Chinese cure-all made me wrinkle my nose. Heaven knows what all they mix into this ointment! It’s never going to enter my four walls anyway. In my mind, Chinese medicine is by definition obscure with all kinds of weird animal ingredients – safest to stay away from it.

But actually he had said “Tiger mom”, referring to a book by American-Born-Chinese and Yale professor Amy Chua. It is stirring a huge controversy in the West because Chinese parenting is portrayed as more successful in producing disciplined, hardworking children who excel in school and succeed on the job whereas Western laissez-faire style parenting would produce lazy, spoilt kids.

I am definitely the wrong person to be asked about Chinese parenting or Chinese “anything” for that matter. I am a die-hard Tibetan. My default mode is suspicion and prejudice about all things Chinese. Over the years, I learned to put on a conciliatory, emotionally detached show for political correctness’, Buddhism’s and pragmatism’s sake, but on the inside much of me is still in aversion. So I shouted back from my end of the apartment: “I don’t want to read that crap! Chinese parenting is about turning your kid into a reckless robot! Remember xitonghua? That wraps it up in one word!”

But then my partner is a very reasonable and sometimes downright wise person. So after my initial refusal, I read the article on the BBC about the book, stopping short of his offer to buy me the book. Good grief! I don’t want to see the “tiger strategy” broken down step by step into practical implementation stages and milestones. Spare me the details. I don’t want to know how Amy Chua forced one of her daughters to play a piece on the piano for hours in a row without allowing the kid to even go to the loo. The author herself points out her approach has its limits, so why delve into nasty details?

Instead I began to wonder what distinguished “Tibetan parenting”.

If Westerners overemphasize individuality in their kids to the detriment of discipline, and if Chinese overvalue drill to the detriment of creativity, what’s the distinctive feature of Tibetan-style parenting?

Here’s my shot: Tibetan culture tends to overrate “a kind heart” (sem zangpo) to the detriment of performance and assertiveness, which then tends to produce adults who may be kind-hearted but are mediocre, indulgent, unambitious and inconspicuous in practical matters.

We’re talking stereotypes and generalizations of course.

Let me explain.

Chinese parents believe that they know what’s best for their kid and if the kid doesn’t agree, that it is their duty to force the kid, who will eventually realize that the parents were right and be grateful. Chinese parents believe that they weren’t doing their job if the kid didn’t achieve results no matter how. Chinese kids walk a straight line: They have to work hard to achieve good grades to make it into a good school, a good university and then on to a good job. That wraps up the life prospect of a Chinese kid.

Tibetan parents of any generation also think they know what’s best for their kids and we expect them to move in that direction, that’s also a traditional Asian thing. But my generation would never exhibit that kind of tenacity in forcing a kid. We try our best by talking reason, sometimes raising our voice but never resort to the carrot-and-stick approach. We don’t threaten and – Buddha forbid – we do not use force.

In contrast to the Chinese, we Tibetans don’t command our children because we believe we don’t “own” them. A child chooses us as parents by being born to us in this life. But the kid comes with a complete set of independent imprints on its mind from previous lives. Being the parents is a transitory thing. We have the responsibility to shape the child’s character and personality, help it get onto a good track so the kid can stand on its own two feet, but that’s about it. The rest is up to the kid and its personal karmic backpack. This is Buddhist parents thinking.

And Tibetan kids have their own unique features as well. Let me give you an example. A colleague has a really talented 12-year old daughter who is not only a top student but also a graceful ballet dancer. The mother thought maybe the girl should move to a more competitive ballet school with regular tests before a professional jury so she could make the most of her talent. After the trial lesson the mother asked her child whether she would like to transfer to this school. Now, a tiger mom would not ask for the child’s opinion to begin with. She would just transfer the kid. But we’re talking a progressive modern Tibetan mom here.

The daughter asked back: “If you were in my place, what would you do, Amala?” The mother kept insisting: “No, you first. Tell me what your thoughts are.” But the girl held back until her mother expressed her opinion. The girl then agreed with her whole-heartedly.

I call this a typical reaction for a Tibetan kid. They look to their parents for guidance. They are willing to accept our decision if it’s accompanied by reasonable explanation.

Another point that illustrates the special feature in Tibetan parenting is the way Tibetans pray. They pray for the welfare of all sentient beings. Even the poorest Tibetan in some remote corner of the highlands who owns nothing but a smelly black tent and some animals will pray this way. It reflects a mindset that stretches beyond oneself.

Chinese Tiger people have no time for such sentimentalism or for others. Their domain is the here and now with themselves at the centre of a hostile competitive environment where it’s “eat or be eaten”.

We are so very different from them. Actually we are extreme opposites.

While our religion teaches us to cherish others more than self, the Chinese belief is to prevail over others. While we literally don’t harm a fly, they virtually eat everything that creeps and crawls. What an irony that we are made to live together! It’s our national misfortune that they constitute the dominant culture.

How to survive the clash of cultures? If we don’t sharpen up more and fast, they’ll eat us alive.

We should particularly realise that our habit of leaving everything the way it is and trusting upon the law of cause and effect to take its just course, is not only a wrong understanding of karma but downright irresponsible and short-sighted: Without taking specific action, our kids risk ending up as over-emotional softies unable to achieve much in practice.

We should also watch out not to fall into the “victim mode” which leads us to externalise the blame for all our problems, big or small, on the Chinese presence in Tibet. The victim mode is poison for our motivation to make it. Or the "poor refugee" mode for those of us who live abroad. We must stop identifying ourselves as poor refugees without a country. We do have a country and our country needs us now more than ever. We must make the most of ourselves so we are able to stand by Tibet's side during these rough times.

Another weird interpretation of Buddhism à la tibétaine is that we have come to overvalue emotional development. We call it “healthy mind” or “the kind heart”. As one mother once told me, “I tell my child the most important thing in life is to be a good person. This is more important than academic performance or a high salary.”

This is a fatal misjudgment! Being sem zangpo AND striving to be a high performer are both equally important! Who wants to put up with kind-hearted people who have little knowledge? Look at how some Tibetan organizations operate: They are full of people with good intentions but precious little skills. We all know it doesn’t get us anywhere.

Tibetan parenting must definitely become more result-oriented!

In our culture, Buddhism has always played a powerful role. We are not always on top of it as far as the practical part goes. Sometimes we go astray but it doesn’t mean that we don’t recognize our mistakes or that Buddhism is useless.

It is ingrained in our genes: gomspa medna byangchub mi’grub – “without practice, no enlightenment” or to say it as unsurpassably as the Westerners do: No pain, no gain; no cross, no crown; no sweet without sweat; nothing comes out of nothing. Tibetan children are perhaps better prepared than any other children to deal with hardship because of their active Buddhist upbringing. We should make use of this quality and get us all into the active habit of studying hard and aiming high. We can't change the Chinese with whom we are forced to live, but we can change ourselves.

There shouldn't be a single person out there thinking being kind-hearted is being good enough. Mind you: Compassion never comes alone. Compassion fulfills its purpose only in combination with wisdom or “skillful means” as they call it. Applying compassion without wisdom is idiotic and turns us into a nation of Lama Kunchos.

Hardly groundbreaking analysis from Mountain Phoenix here. But if we don’t act and emphasise result-orientation and discipline in our kids as equally important as developing a kind heart, they will not only be eaten alive, they almost deserve to be eaten alive - along with their silly parents.

So here’s to compassionate AND confident Tibetan kids!
Mountain Phoenix

A Private Conversation About The Recent Language Protests In Tibet

2010-12-18T09:25:00.000-08:00

Students in Chabcha, Qinghai, 2010

My partner came home from his latest trip to Tibet a few days ago. He was aware of the Tsongön language protests although he is stationed in another region. He said the governor of his area summoned all educators and warned them not to get involved and spread information about the recent protest especially via SMS. He called for extreme caution because the language protest had become political and he didn’t want people in his area to become associated with it and get (him?) into trouble.

When I listened to my partner, that governor came across as so negative: Instead of displaying solidarity with the demand to keep Tibetan as medium of instruction in classrooms, which is in the interest of all Tibetan-speaking people all over the highlands, this guy specifically instructs people to restrain themselves and keep quiet. What an irresponsible leader! What a miserable coward! No wonder his area figures among the poorest in terms of Tibetan language proficiency. It’s probably not exaggerated if I say the proficiency level among Tibetan officials there doesn’t rise above the vocab of a 5-year old.

I had to think back.

I worked in a middle school there in the mid-1990s. Tibetan wasn’t considered important enough to figure on the curriculum. On my first day in the classroom I was taken aback by the Chinese name cards in front of the students: The children all looked “rugged-faced” but had these names that wouldn’t suit their faces.

“I didn’t come all the way here to teach Chinese kids”, was my first thought, “they tricked me”, was my second thought.

Later when I became friendly with some of the other teachers they assured me my students were all kosher Tibetan kids. They were just not from the surrounding countryside but town kids. By then I had become suspicious myself. During breaks I would occasionally hear snatches of Tibetan when the children were at play.

Gradually I realised that many of those Chinese-sounding names were not properly Chinese after all. For example, there was a boy sitting in the front row with funny glasses. He was a good student. The name on his card said “QI LU RONG”. I figured out “Qi” was his Xing or Chinese family name. It was customary for townspeople in this part of Tibet to have a Chinese family name parallel to their Tibetan family name, that much I knew. Depending on which culture they were operating in, they would use either their Chinese or Tibetan name. Since school is a public affair, the kid naturally used his Xing.

So far so good - but then what was “Lu Rong” supposed to represent? It turned out that was a clumsy Chinese rendering of the local Tibetan, a malapropism of the Tibetan “Lobsang” which in this region is pronounced something like “Luzon”; and since we are dealing with people who are all illiterate in their mother tongue - and since we can hardly expect the Chinese to know the correct rendering of Tibetan names into Hanzi - the bona fide Tibetan name “Lobsang” became the dreadfully sinicised “Lu Rong” - out of sheer ignorance and incompetence.

During that time, I occasionally visited Anye Rinchen, an old Tibetan who had returned from an Indian settlement in the late 1980-ies. When he was a bit drunk he used to tease the local officials: “When you folks go to a conference up in Lhasa, you have to keep your mouths shut because you don’t know Ükè, only the local Tibetan dialect; and when you go to a conference down in Beijing, you folks also have to keep your mouths shut because you don’t know Putonghua, only your local Chinese dialect.” There wasn’t anything the officials could say because it was true. Even Anye Rinchen, himself illiterate in any language, clearly saw their limits.

These are stories over ten years old, Anye Rinchen passed away in the meantime and things have gradually been changing.

My partner said: “The same governor who called for restraint with regard to the Amdo language protests has been taking private Tibetan lessons himself to make up for his deficit.“

“His learning curve must be steep,” I exclaimed, “because a year ago I heard him deliver a formal speech at a new-year event in surprisingly decent Tibetan!”

“Some other intellectually more sophisticated officials must have also recognised their lack in substance”, my partner continued, “Many are taking private Tibetan lessons these days. There is a small presence of Tibetan language teachers from outside the region who cater to those needs.”

Yes, and I also remembered at least one official had a child studying at the Tibetan Children’s Village in Dharamsala although the official version was that the kid was studying in Lhasa.

So when the governor summoned everyone to tell them not to get involved in the Tsongön language protests, was this perhaps intentionally phrased ambiguously so his Chinese superiors would not become suspicious? Was this perhaps not to be interpreted as cowardly after all but as skillful?

Mirig dranyam - keyig rangwang - "All nationalities are equal - freedom of language"

I asked: “Since the official allegation is that the language protests are politically motivated, what other method than taking to the streets could the students possibly have used? Do you think there would have been a more skillful way for the students to make themselves heard without getting into trouble?”

He said: “It is not clear to me how the government delivered the message and what it exactly entailed. Did they say they want to stop using Tibetan as the medium of instruction? Did they say they want to stop all Tibetan in classrooms? If the message was too harsh, then students and teachers naturally felt threatened.”

He continued: “I am also not sure about the penetration of spoken Tibetan in Amdo. I can only infer it must be a bilingual set-up in the classrooms because the Amdowas speak great Chinese too. I can’t imagine there are exclusively Tibetan-medium schools since education is government job. Still the Tsongön area is way ahead with regard to penetration of the Tibetan language. They teach all the subjects - including the sciences - in Tibetan. Isn’t that wonderful? They continuously develop and enrich our language adding new vocabulary so anything and everything going on in our world and our minds can be expressed in our mother tongue. The work they have done is so encouraging and so important. They have made significant contributions to the continued relevance of Tibetan culture today.”

And then he said something striking:

“When you see how skillful the Tsongön people have been in getting this far within the system – not only preserving but enriching and expanding Tibetan – and when you think of the experience they must possess in dealing with authoritarian government, it’s a bit baffling that they chose to take to the streets rather than looking for a more subtle method. Because they are aware the official reaction to the protests can cause an enormous setback to the advancement of the Tibetan language for a long time to come.”

It’s true. They are risking a lot. We are already hearing of principals, deputies, being fired or transferred and even students being interrogated. And we are learning about more protests. But then should they just have restrained themselves just like this governor suggested?

I said: “It must have been an emotional short circuit. There is no other rational explanation. After all, this piece of news comes just as one more arbitrary policy aimed at pressing the irritatingly non-conform Tibetan identity into the Chinese mainstream. Maybe it was the last straw that broke the camel’s back. Maybe people were just fed up and couldn’t help but to air their anger without thinking about the long-term consequences.”

My partner asked: “Do you really think they have a plan to wipe out Tibetan because it makes us so different?”

I reflected for a moment: “I think it’s not about us and what makes us special. It’s about them and what makes life easier for them. The motivation to press us into the Chinese mainstream is so administering becomes easier for them. It’s all about what is easier and practical for them. They want to lump everyone together so it’s easier for them to manage “the masses”.

My partner reminded me: “But don’t forget, officially they embrace bilingualism. Maybe in practice, it risks to foster separate identities that they want to prevent. So their position on bilingualism in practice becomes ambiguous.”

I said: “Practicing bilingualism correctly also means having to acknowledge people’s diversity, which is contrary to their ill-conceived idea of man. All their policies are rooted in their linear, flat and mistaken idea of man that material well-being is all that people need to be happy. That’s very communist but at the same time it is also very feudal. It’s not like they have problem only with Tibetan, but it goes on to Cantonese and Uighur as we know. “

“I also believe they don’t do a grand analysis of how the Tibetan language – secular or religious – fosters a separate identity,” my partner said slowly, “it’s shallow mind most of the time, I think you’re right. You know they have this word xitonghua, which means to systematize, norm or standardize everything like a commodity. That’s the expression they also use in raising sports figures, athletes. I met one at the airport who said in the West, they focus on the individual’s strength and develop these, whereas in China, they have one single approach for all athletes – “xitonghua”. Since there are so many athletes, chances are out of a hundred, one makes it to the top with this type of grooming.”

“Right, and who cares about the other ninety-nine who failed and whom they’ve messed up in the process? They have more than enough candidates, so who cares about the fall-off?” I replied.

The implications are very clear: There is little space for individuality as far as the government’s dealing with the average Chinese citizen is concerned because that means complicating their work as administrators and organisors. And on this basis we can deduct that there is no space for groups of people either who stick out like the Tibetans or Uighurs or Cantonese speakers because that also means complicating their grand scheme. It’s as linear as that. People face a government in whose mindset they are just a number to be “xitonghua-ed”.

The conversation was helpful because I began to recognize a pattern.

“But now that we’ve figured them out, isn’t it up to us to find ways to work around that pattern,” I asked, “because the way things are at the moment, we do not have power to break it or even challenge it?”

My partner was firm: “We have to challenge them when we believe things go wrong but we have to make sure our actions remain not only peaceful and within the constitution, but at the same time very careful and well thought out. Since their default disposition vis-à-vis the Tibetans is nervousness they are prone to overreact and we have to bear the consequences.”

Then he asked me the crunch question: “Do you think it’s worth making the effort to teach our kids? Do you think they will ever speak Tibetan and use it when they’re grown up?”

We all wonder all along whether it’s worth keeping up the Tibetan identity.

I spontaneously replied: “We have to keep on teaching them and making every effort. It’s the right thing to do. We don’t need to speculate too much about its eventual outcome. We have to do what’s right without getting obsessed.”

I added: “What our children do with their heritage is no longer in our hands and we shouldn’t be too concerned about that either. Also, as people who have faith in the Dharma, we must try to look at this as a practical exercise in the law of cause and condition that says if you create the conditions, you will get matching results. We may not live to see what comes out of this exercise but we can be confident we exhausted all methods that are in our power.”

I don’t know what made me say all that. Life would be a lot easier if we just stopped the Tibetan overtones and became thorough Westerners or Chinese, I’m sure you agree. But when my partner looked at me with what I thought was a warm and loving expression on his face, I knew I had instinctively said the right thing.

It boils down to our demand to respect our individuality versus their habit of lumping everybody together like a commodity and pushing through uniform policies that are easiest for them. It’s a matter of perseverance and individual choice for all Tibetans, whether we live in Tibet or outside. Tibetan spoken at home in the family is where it starts. Even in Tibet with official pressure in the schools, this is completely in our hands and is the absolute minimum we all can do.

Maybe my partner and I are too simple-minded. Maybe we are under-analysing the situation but that’s what we believe. We also believe the accuracy of our analysis doesn’t matter so much as long as we carry on.

Kelsang Tenzin Kamè 30

I came across a really cool alphabet rap from Tibet the other day. The name of the song is “kamè 30” by a performer called Kelsang Tenzin left in the picture.

Never heard about the guy before, but the song is powerful because it contains an ardent appeal to more self-responsibility in holding high our beautiful Tibetan language.

The chorus says:

Children of the Land of Snows

We Tibetans have a saying:

“No matter how many languages you know

If you forget your father’s tongue, then shame on you!

There's a link to the video at the bottom. It’s easy to get distracted by the video because it’s so hip. Just pay attention to the message. It tells us what we need to hear: We can be multi-lingual, widely-travelled, professionally successful, socially respected, politically influential, rich, famous - we can possess all outward signs of success, but if we neglect our mother tongue in the pursuit or fail to pass it on to our children, our achievements are incomplete - because we lost touch with our roots.

There is absolutely nothing to add to that.

Mountain Phoenix

Kelsang Tenzin's "Alphabet Rap"

When the snowlion descends from the mountain

2010-10-08T11:31:00.000-07:00

A while ago, we received an invitation to a smoke-offering ceremony (Sangsol) to commemorate the freedom fighters of the Tibetan resistance and all compatriots killed in the course of the Chinese takeover.

Andrug Gonpo Tashi’s memoirs, Nyarong Aten’s life-story written by Jamyang Norbu; or John Avedon’s “In Exile from the Land of Snow”; those were books that coined us as youths. Who wasn’t impressed by the stories of the brave men of the “Four Rivers and Six Ranges” or Chushi Gangdrug, who fought the invaders and orchestrated the Dalai Lama’s flight?

http://www.friendsoftibet.org/main/hhdl.html

Decades later, somebody gave us a copy of Lithang Athar Norbu’s oral memoirs recorded on DVD. He recounts, in great detail, those days of glory and subsequent tragedy from the perspective of a directly involved witness to history. Irritations between his organization and the Tibetan government, which later arose when on Indian/Nepali soil, were also freely addressed. He spoke from memory about historic events as if everything had just happened yesterday. I was glued to the TV for hours. I would not have been able to tell. He appeared very together and lucid, but somebody pointed out he was already very ill. Parts of the DVD are also available as video on Youtube

Even though the resistance failed, our “war heroes” deserve to be honored because they didn’t give up without putting up a good fight. So the least someone like me could do, I figured, is go and pay my respects.

The memorial service began straight away with a two-hour prayer session. We recited a hotchpotch of I-don’t-know-what, jumping back and forth between the pages of a 2-inch thick prayer book. The only fractions I was able to discern was a Mandala offering and a couple of stanzas from Lama Choepa. A solemn introduction by the leading monk was missing. It would have been helpful to know what it was we were reciting and how that related back to the people we were remembering.

Before we then proceeded to the actual smoke-offering ritual, there were formal speeches by people who hold office in the organization understood to be the heir to the resistance movement, also going by the same name. Further function owners were a people’s representative and a representative of the women’s organization. The government was not represented.

The main point reiterated by the speakers was: a) remember the sacrifice of Chushi Gangdrug, b) remain united (dogtsa jigdril), and c) follow the orders of His Holiness well.

I was so disappointed. Had they nothing more relevant to say for this significant ceremony?

Nobody has forgotten the sacrifice not just of Chushi Gangdrug but of all Tibetans all over the country. And aren’t we as united as ever? This "dogtsa jigdril" point reiterated at every gathering is such an artificial point with no real-life reference. It’s also misused to obtain 100 % obedience on any topic. Whoever has a deviating opinion on anything is quickly running the risk of not being dogtsa jigdril and not following the wishes of His Holiness. The speeches were nothing more than the repetitive routine call for everyone to stay put in their place, try even harder to be even nicer, and obey even more - as if that would get us anywhere.

I don’t know what went through the others’ heads. My desperate thought was: “More of the same is not enough, not enough, not enough.”

Suddenly I remembered a new Tibetan music album from an India-Tibetan: I was so put off by the name regug - “waiting with hope” – I didn’t even bother listen to the CD. “Waiting with hope” summarizes our current mindset so well. We all wait and hope: for the Dalai Lama to sort things out for us, for the liberal forces in China to bring about political change for us, for third countries to pressure China for us. And as it was, even some people in the fine arts were waiting and hoping for better times.

Then my thoughts went back to the old men we were commemorating. What would they do? Slowly I noticed an essential oversight: The little success the Tibetan resistance had back in Tibet, was precisely because they were NOT waiting with hope but acting with resolve.

When the Chinese came to take control of our country, the official Tibetan position was to appease them – “waiting with hope” basically. In contrast, the people in the resistance trusted their own judgment and went for active defense – without endorsement from the top.

Is that why the government didn’t send a representative to attend the memorial service? Because you don’t honor disobedient, violent subjects? Because the government doesn’t want to jeopardize the chances of a negotiation break-through with China by associating with “counterrevolutionaries”? Because Chushi Gangdrug is a “Khampa thing” and the Tibetan government stands above petty little phayuls? Or could the government representative not attend, simply because he was ill or occupied with something else?

It's a co-incidence that Jamyang Norbu just published “High Mountain Elegy” as I am writing down my thoughts. We learn that even at that memorial service, there weren’t any Tibetan government representatives present. Instead, we learn that former CIA people, who trained the resistance fighters, organized the whole event and held the speeches of honor. It speaks in their favor because they don’t owe us anything, and it only adds to our government’s shame. The reactions to Jamyang Norbu’s article show clearly that people are upset about the government’s no show.

The "flaming sword" is the sword of wisdom Buddha Manjusri which severs the roots of ignorance. Picture: http://www.chushigangdruk.ca/index.html

It doesn’t look like the government has a position on the Four River Six Ranges at all. If they calculated that China will give them credit for ignoring Chushi Gangdrug, it’s miscalculated just as Ngapo’s obituary was a miscalculation. They made zero points on the foreign policy side through these actions, at the cost of alienating a lot of their own people all across the board.

If the government believes Chushi Gangdrug is a thing of our past, non-compatible with our current political style of peaceful resistance, and too regional for our pan-Tibetan outlook, they are ignoring that the freedom fighters are remembered even in Tibet today and by people who were born after the Cultural Revolution. The whole landscape tells the story of resistance, bravery and sacrifice:

Once after a long walk, we clueless greenhorns raised in faraway lands chose a scenic spot by a small alpine lake for a rest. “Although this is a beautiful spot, our people avoid this place,” our friends remarked, “there was a bloody battle here. Many good men were killed. Some tried to escape over the frozen lake, but the ice broke and they drowned with their horses.”

Suddenly at that lake-side, the fighting and bravery were no longer stories handed down by others, they appeared so real. I was standing on the very place they stood. I was breathing the very air they did. My blood froze. Our friends’ remembered. Their parents and grandparents had remembered even though times were much rougher when they were young.

Or take Pema from the Tibetan for kids story. The only time she mentioned her ex was when she saw a picture of Chushi Gangdrug soldiers in a book. She said “the children’s father’s uncle” was a famous freedom fighter hailing from Ganzi (shame on me, I can’t remember his name). The thing is: Pema grew up under the “new China”. There was no way she could have had access to the type of books we read. And still she was informed because in her family, too, they remembered, admired, and passed on.

So if our government’s intention behind cutting Chushi Gangdrug dead is to prevent regionalism, it’s not working. On the contrary, alienating people by not giving credit where credit is due seriously risks to increase regionalism.

At first, I regretted wasting time at this clumsy function. But then it turned out to be a real eye opener. It helped me realize a number of things.

Finally, it dawned on me why some contemporary Eastern Tibetans don’t fatigue in basking themselves in the glory of the freedom fighters. To them, it is a source of endless pride that the resistance movement arose in Dokham and was led by people from that area. Yes, it’s pathetic to try and associate yourself with something you haven’t even contributed to. But now I can understand that psychologically, it makes sense because resistance was the last honorable act from the Tibetan side within living memory. What followed has been nothing but a long row of humiliation: total defeat, escape, despair, and political self-mutilation all the way down to “waiting with hope”.

I also realized that while there wasn’t much the government could do to control the Tibetan resistance when they were still on native soil, later in India, the now Tibetan government-in exile became increasingly irritated by political dissent. They started to perceive Chushi Gangdrug as a threat to their power monopoly and began to exert pressure. In the name of unity, in the name of the Dalai Lama, in the name of non-violence: from this moment on, there was a break. The heroic freedom movement of old became an annoying, anachronistic relict of the past that could not be put to any good use for the future.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Snow_Lion.svg

Don’t we have saying? When the snowlion descends from the mountain, he’s nothing more than an ordinary dog? It looks like that’s what happened to the Four Rivers Six Ranges. After they left Tibet, only ugly stories were circulating about them such as bullying villages, raping women, plotting to murder the Dalai Lama (!), and conspiring with Taiwan. All the glamour was gone.

Next, I realized that Chushi Gangdrug doesn’t just stand for a romanticized picture of courage vis-à-vis the external invader, it stands for genuine courage to stand up for one’s beliefs vis-à-vis anybody really, and if necessary even your own government. So those old men had a political maturity about them that made them very modern. They were truly free men at any point in time.

Didn’t His Holiness, who has always opposed violence, respect these upright men for their courage and integrity? He says so in “My land and my people”.

To be brutally honest, it’s the Dalai Lama who should have reacted. He should have sent a representative or a message. After all, Chushi Gangdrug was out to save him. They sacrificed for him. These are Andrugtshang’s entry lines in the book “Four Rivers, Six Ranges – a true account of Khampa resistance to the Chinese in Tibet”:

Dedication

My beloved leader,
His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso,
The Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet;
My unselfish compatriots who gave their lives,
and
the coming generation of freedom fighters.

And read the lines at the end of the book:

May Lord Buddha bless my country and raise a new Tibet. And may his noblest representative on earth, the Dalai Lama, lead our people once again to freedom, peace and happiness.

Those lines say everything. For these guys, the Dalai Lama was the embodiment of everything that was dear to them: their country, their way of life, their faith, everything. The government was merely saved along with him.

So for us to pile up all the blame and shame in front of the government’s door is incorrect. We all know our government is weak and incompetent. Sadly, there is really nothing to expect from them. So picking on them without ever mentioning Kundun’s behavior in this matter is the same game as “Deconstructing Ngabo”. It’s bashing weaklings and useless. It’s the doggish approach.

If we are serious, we need the guts and the skill to take it up with those who are really in charge; we must take the matter to the Dalai Lama himself – in form of letters, e-mails, audience and conversation, whatever possibilities we have - and address it honestly and objectively. That would be the snowlion approach.

Finally came the smoke-offering to conclude the memorial service. Amidst a lot of smoke, we again recited something undiscerning and again my thoughts wandered off.

What’s the essential difference between a snowlion-person and a dog-person after all? Take a look at the Chushi Gangdrug emblem. The old men have put it down for us in the form of the two swords. It's the wisdom to recognize a problem correctly and the courage to act upon it with resolve. This is the legacy. We can continue to delve in the past and complain or we can strive to live as they have lived.

Arro-tso, I’d say the vibes are still going :--)

In memory of some great old men!
Mountain Phoenix

A Comment to “Two songs about Tibetan unity” on High Peaks Pure Earth

2010-09-17T07:15:00.000-07:00

I appreciate High Peaks Pure Earth because it brings significant developments in Tibet and China to our attention. Recently, it discussed songs about Tibetan unity: “Mentally return” and “Song of unity” to which I would like to add some comment.

When I heard the song “Mentally return” for the first time about two years ago, the few fragments I believed I understood were enough to knock me off my feet. What an immortal declaration of love to our homeland, the gracious land of snows! A hunt for the music and the lyrics began which only ended in the Barkhor last summer, when I finally managed to buy a VCD of the 2007 Rebkong open-air concert which featured “Mentally return”.

In case the VCD is still on sale, people should make sure they buy plenty of copies. The disk quality is so poor that after watching it a second time, it would just stop every other second and not move for the longest time.

Did you also marvel at the large audience? I do hope people showed up out of free will and attendance wasn’t orchestrated. I rejoiced inside over so many “rugged-faced” folks of all ages participating peacefully in what was not only a visibly big entertainment event, but also a gigantic exercise in reaffirming collective identity. Moreover, the whole concert was moderated exclusively in Tibetan. That was encouraging when we recall that even cultural events often have bilingual moderation at best.

After the 2008 unrests, I wonder how long it will take before such large gatherings will be allowed again. We hear the organizers of the pompous, bi- or tri-annual Kangba Yishu Jie (“Khampa Arts Festival”) were looking all over the place for a “safe” location to stage this year’s event, but low profile. As a last resort, they settled for the rebaptised “Shangri-la” Tibetan Prefecture of Dechen in Yunnan. I have always wondered whether the Tibetans really find it entertaining to look at people in plump jewellery and machos in stone-age felt outfits parading through the streets with archaic daggers hanging from their belts. Or is this a top-down ordered marketing event aimed primarily at tourists? Let’s see how it goes. The festival is still going on as I am writing.

But to come back to “Mentally return”, I see it standing in the tradition of inward-looking, identity-strengthening songs that are also lyrically discerning like Tso Ngonpo by Dadon or more recent songs by Kunga. If we think about it, even songs from the old Tibetan era are the symbolic, poetic type. For instance the 6th Dalai Lama’s TrungTrung Karmo or Makyé Amé. They are equally about something which is important to the composer's heart, but which can’t be openly expressed because it would cause trouble.

These days, some artists pick old songs and modify them, but still stick to the symbolic, indirect style: There is a popular Amdo remix of the Dalai Lama’s Trungtrung Karmo. It’s sung in the form of a dialogue between a person and a migratory bird. Obviously, the only reason for the dialogue is the underlying circumstance that the person is separated from its kin by a third party and can’t interact freely. Still the remake is not a sad song at all, but a cheerful one. In this language of symbolism and vagueness this could – or could not – mean: Even though you suppress us, we will not allow you to spoil our mood. Check it out:

I heard Sherten’s “Song of unity” for the first time on High Peaks Pure Earth. It’s a soft and pretty song. The words on the other hand, are unmistakably direct. Certainly it is brave to be so direct, but is it also wise, I wonder. That road is confrontation and could lead directly to trouble and prison. Is our cause served by that? I am not sure.

The words are bold, yet the meaning is not clear. What is meant when the Tibetans of three historical provinces are asked to “unite”? Work to become one administrative unit but still under China? Work to become separate from China? “Unite” meaning do what?

Moreover, the phrase “unite” (dogtsa jigdril) is an over-used panacea applied to all our political problems. Often it is also interpreted to mean “Don’t talk back, just do as you're told”. I felt uneasy when I heard Sherten call “unite, unite” throughout the song.

I know it’s a traditional music style. But I find excessive goat-like singing with “baa baa” over every vowel at the end of a line un-cool. Just makes the sound very folksy and “Country-music”. That’s just my individual taste though, ignore it. Sherten is undisputedly a rising star and currently dominates the charts also in our corner of the highlands, with every place playing his music. Everybody here, boy and girl alike, loves his music without ifs and buts.

Still I fully agree with High Peak Pure Earth’s assessment that “Mentally return” is the more powerful of the two songs. The only thing is the English rendering of the title. It sounds odd. I would have translated it more freely as “Many happy returns” or something to that effect.

Do you have good sites to recommend? I sometimes go to "Tibet Music Net" and “China Tibetans Music & Entertainment Portal” which friends recommended. You'll find the latest songs from the music scene in Tibet there. Not that I understand much, I just randomly click around for a taste.

It looks like music has become a flexible channel to emphasise collective identity. That’s good news. What I find even more impressive is that many composers and performers don't compromise and pay equal attention to artistically good songs.

In 2007, another album with subtle “Tibetan power” songs was published in Lhasa. The title is Lhämè kyi tsesog – “the stainless life” and features 16 songs performed by less-well and better known artists including Zimi 9pa, Kunga, Yadong, Jamyang Kyi, and also Sherten.

Check out track no. 5 Sem ü kyi dunpa which I would freely translate as "Prayer from the bottom of my heart". It's performed by singer Norsang in the picture below. Lyrics are by Tenzin Chodak and the tune by Lhakpa. The singing style is reminiscent of Sherten but the accent is closer to high Tibetan, so a translation may not be necessary:

I'm still struggling to get the audio on the blog. Once it's there, listen close: You'll love the ending line where he says rang rig rang-gi kyongla sho. In these rough times, may we find the strength to save ourselves.

Ema!
Mountain Phoenix

Hocus, Pocus, Abracadabra!

2010-08-19T05:25:00.000-07:00

People have all kinds of ailments that make them stick out. One of my former bosses was known for her restless legs. They would suddenly start to dance under the table during meetings without her being able to make it stop. Or this colleague who has a cheese allergy: He was very hungry, lugging down two helpings of Risotto without noticing the graded cheese in it. They had to call an ambulance after his airways began to swell in the cafeteria.

Mountain Phoenix has nothing that dramatic. She is merely blessed with an extraordinary pair of lungs. Catching the slightest cold can make her get stuck with the most tenacious cough in the world – a dry, empty bark that keeps coming and coming until her lobes ache and the diaphragm is sore. Air-conditioned rooms, trains and airplanes are pure torture chambers.

During the latest episode, I emptied two bags of cough drops and one-and-a-half bottles of disgusting cough syrup in seven days – with zero impression on the cough. It’s a blessing in disguise that the swine flu hype is over. Otherwise they would have made me stay away from work - that is if people on the commute wouldn’t have thrown me out of the train in the first place.

Over the years, I tried all kinds of over-the-counter cough medicines, but once I have this cough, boy, nothing helps, it just sticks. Neither the general physician nor the lung specialist has found anything. All they discovered was that my lungs looked a bit “asthmatic” although I was assured it wasn’t asthma - very helpful diagnosis indeed!

Maybe I was waiting for too long and now this thing has become chronic? There was a great granduncle in my family who coughed happily and healthily up to the age of 94. Maybe it runs in the family?

My friend Pema from the Tibetan for kids story witnessed one of my cough attacks the other day. She happens to hail from a family of traditional Tibetan medical doctors still practicing in Tibet today. Through her stories I realized how wide-spread and well accepted traditional Tibetan medicine was not only in its country of origin but also among very respectable people in China.

Pema said in an uneasy voice: “Your cough doesn’t sound good at all. You’d better go and see a Menba.” I told her about my disappointing odyssey from one medicine and doctor to the next. Pema added: “No, I mean you should see a bod men menba.”

I didn’t want to be disrespectful as she comes from that traditional Tibetan medicine background. But Pema urged me to go and see this doctor, who she claimed was “one of the few remaining masters still trained at the legendary Medical School at Chakpori in Lhasa”.

I was hesitant at first. What could an Amchi possibly do? But something made me change my mind. After all, cough-wise I was in such a bad shape, what have I got to lose, only my cough, right?

The Amchi was a girlish-looking little old man, who also wore the robes of the Buddha. And boy, must he have loved incense. When I entered his office, I almost fainted amidst all the smoke from the incense that was burning on his shrine. Poor Medicine Buddha sitting on that altar. Now I understand why you’re always depicted in blue: You’re smoked all day! The smoke immediately made me cough and I had to think of the Chinese doctors back in the hospitals in Tibet, who chain-smoke while examining their patients, not taking the cigarette out of their mouths even when speaking.

I sat down and explained my situation whereupon the Amchi started to do the famous Tibetan medical pulse diagnosis. I only had that done once before, many years ago in Lhasa, as a routine check-up so to speak. At that time, the Holiday Inn had an in-house Menba whom all the Western tourists went to see. I thought if science-driven, rational Westerners trust Tibetan doctors, it would be safe for me to do the same and so I also went. That consultation didn’t last longer than 15 minutes; cost 100 USD with no diagnostic finding. Maybe because I had nothing, maybe because I had something but he couldn’t find it, or I had something and he wouldn’t tell me. In any event, my first encounter with a Tibetan doctor was not convincing.

The Chakpori doctor took longer. Only to mumble after what seemed like half an eternity: "Hmm..., there's definitely something wrong with your lungs..." I almost had a little fit inside. Didn’t I just say that there was something wrong with my lungs?

“Tell me something I don’t know, Pola!” I thought.

“If you leave this untreated, you will have serious shortness of breath as you get older”, the doctor continued.

That was like a bomb.

“This is the moment your negative Karma catches up with you,” I thought, “you are being punished with a breathing problem for your sarcasm. Forget about your old-age plan to retire to high-altitude Tibet. This is the kind of bill people like you have to pay for disrespectful, blasphemous thoughts on Tibetan medicine and innocent Tibetan doctors…”

My fear was intensified by the story of two elders I suddenly remembered: One asthmatic, the other with high-blood pressure. Both wanted to return to Tibet for good. One of them suffered a heart attack before even reaching the highlands, the other almost died shortly after getting there. Both came back utterly traumatized by their experience of Chinese hospitals and never tried to return to Tibet thereafter.

I got panicky. My plan, my hope, my dream… Not enough merit growing old on Tibetan soil… I would be stuck here like those two old folks. But what’s the point in having healthy lungs if you have to trade them for a broken heart?

“Oh no!” I exclaimed in fear. “Please, no breathing problems! Does that mean, when I’m old, I can’t go to Tibet because of altitude and shortness of breath? Please, Amchi-la, help me!”

“Oh, you absolutely have to go to Tibet”, the doctor replied gently, “where on earth to go if not to Tibet?” In beautiful and impeccable Lhasan he continued: “Don’t worry, there is a medicine to help your lungs heal. But you must start taking the medicine now without delay, while you’re still young.”

How kind and trustworthy an Amchi could look all of a sudden! And what a lucky buggar I was. Was I not just given a second chance? Plus a compliment? “Young”!

So this is the story of how I became a hardcore Ribu eater. Now, if that isn’t proof for the existence of the law of cause and effect, then I don’t know what is: Here goes the sacrilegious Mountain Phoenix sentenced to swallow a total of eight soaked wonder pills a day for an undetermined length of time, as a last resort to cure her nervous lungs. How ironic!

To tell you the truth: I still can’t take these Ribu Tibetan medicine pills completely seriously. I found out they are made in Ladakh, so I trust the medicinal herbs come from the Himalayas and are really the ones in the original prescription. But Ribus are still the most unpractical and ugly-tasting medicine in the whole world. They have to be soaked for hours! And who can tell whether they really do the job? You normally take them over such an extended period, in the end, one is never sure whether the sickness disappeared just by itself or whether it was due to the effect of the holy Ribus.

Another hilarious aspect of our Ribus are all the things you have to follow when taking them: Things like no “sour” and fried foods, sweet foods only on full-moon, but not simultaneously with spicy foods; garlic and onions are always absolute no-go’s; take pills before sunset, never after; but do take after sunset on full-moon, with one eye half-closed, standing on one leg, and in the dark - so no one can see how fantastic all this is?

But as awkward as it sounds to me, my heathen lungs have responded well to the wonder pills. That’s all that counts because it means I am less likely to suffer from respiratory problems when I’m older, which then means my chances to survive into retirement in Tibet are still intact.

In my mind, I now bow with hands folded to the wise medicine man from the Medical School on Iron Hill in Lhasa. I utterly repent my ignorance. Thanks to Tibetan medicine, I can still dream to be that old woman with long white hair, sitting in a woolen Chupa on the verandah of her small home, under a sunny, clear-blue Tibetan sky, breathing the clean mountain air, while reading her Peja and sipping hot water - maybe with some dissolved Ribus inside, yes!

Provided of course, nothing trailblazing happens like I get run over by a car, die in a plane crash or an Asteroid hits the planet and we all go, that sort.

When my colleagues at work ask what it is that I’m sipping in that exotic-looking Chinese thermos-mug, I tell them just that: Magic potion.

Hocus, Pocus, Abracadabra!
Mountain Phoenix

Bashè forever!

2010-07-02T05:50:00.000-07:00

We were invited to a Tibetan wedding the other day. The bride was flown in from the Ba area of Kham, and wore a wedding dress typical of her home region. She looked stunning with all those ornaments around her waist, neck and head.

The Western-born groom and his family wore traditional garb too, just like most of the guests, including my own little family. We all must have looked like we stepped out of a pictorial “Costumes of Ancient Tibet”.

It was a typical Tibetan wedding with hundreds of guests - none of which were required to sign up or off by the way - plenty of food and drink, in a merry atmosphere of a folk festival. But what made this wedding particularly memorable was the music and the fun time we had dancing.

To the honour of the bride, a group of dancers performed songs from the homeland. The best thing was that all guests were invited up on stage to join in. My kids didn’t have to be asked twice. They were among the first ones to join the round dance. Obviously those visits to Tibet and a never-ending supply of music VCDs their dad would bring home from his trips had made an impact...

A young woman dancing next to me was all smiles and suddenly said: “I’ve never seen this kind of dance at Tibetan gatherings, it’s such a pity. This is so beautiful, I don’t know how to dance this - so difficult!”

“Honey! Never heard of Bashè? What planet are you from?”

Of course, I didn’t say that.

Instead I politely replied: “Oh, this genre of song and dance is known as “Bashè”, but it’s popular all over Eastern Tibet. The performances you see at large Tibetan gatherings abroad, tend to be mostly from the Western and central areas. You know, Toeshè, Gyangshè, Nangma, sometimes pieces from Lhamo opera, that sort…”

“Alè”, she went, looking at me as if I were the one coming from another planet.

But the great thing was, she and a lot of other people without Bapa connections, felt the groove. They were all on that stage with the dancers, laughing away, having a good time: Western friends on the groom’s side, Toepa moms, Lhasan couples, Tsangpa elders, a few Amdowas, and Mountain Phoenix with her kids, trying to look “normal” up there. We were all led by the beautiful young bride, who was an exceptionally graceful Bashè dancer.

The Western-born groom didn’t dance. No matter how staunch a patriot he may have been, but like most folks born outside of Tibetan culture, the singing and dancing part just didn’t click. It would have looked out of place also, because meanwhile he had changed into Western attire completely.

My partner? - Never sings nor dances in public. But he’s excused, as far as I’m concerned, because he is among the few, who manage to look masculine even in the funny male Chupa.

So what’s the big deal with Bashè? The penetrative four-four time? The sound of an antiquated string instrument called "Piwang"? The lyrics? The tunes? The choreography? A combination of them all? Take a look at this interpretation so you know what I mean:

The thing that sticks out with Bashe is it can be very modern with really cool, outgoing moves, often involving all parts of your body, including rowing with the arms. There is more freedom for physical expression. Not that you can create your own moves, but within a move, you have space for individual interpretations. At the same time, the music can be spiced up with contemporary beats while the basic step combinations remain technically the same. This makes Bashè a true folk dance, a down-right communal undertaking with three generations dancing to the same music. That’s amazing!

Another thing about Bashè is it’s always sung with fervor. The melodies are usually simpler than from the central areas, but that’s being compensated for by a lot of passion in the voice. The lyrics are easy: Most of he time it’s longing for or praising your phayul, the snow-capped mountains, the beautiful grasslands, your parents, or your lama - with lots of repetition in between.

The thing is: To really feel the groove, you have to dance along with all the others, while also singing at the same time: that's at the heart of the Bashè magic. People who only dance along but can’t sing, look somehow out of place. And people who sing without understanding the meaning are also unmasked pretty fast because their dance lacks character.

I have a crush on Bashè if you haven’t noticed by now. Here’s another, more traditional piece that’s also quite charming to sing and dance along:

But there is something else to Bashè, beyond the fun factor, something really wholesome.

Remember a well-known contemporary son of Ba, the infamous Bapa Phuntsog Wangyal? After he fell from grace, the one thing that he says helped him survive those years in solitary confinement, was singing and dancing the songs of his hometown. - Good for the old man the repertoire of Bashè folksongs is virtually infinite! Lasted for 18 years! Bashè as life-saver!

A friend, who works in a home for asylum seekers here, told me, there are new arrivals from Tibet who play this music day in and out. It helps them endure the foreign environment and relieve them from their homesickness. Life in four-four time…Bashè as emotional healing!

Maybe an innovative musician could transform Bashè for a broader audience. Like Bangra which also has local origins, but is spreading beyond the Punjab and even beyond the borders of India… or Reggae coming out of Jamaica but now being played all over the place… Bashè as Tibetan musical export to the world!

Once in a blue moon, even Mountain Phoenix, the part-time Tibetan, gets depressed with homesickness. The only thing that really helps in those moments is to buy a ticket and fly to Tibet. But as that’s hardly ever possible, the next best thing, which kind of works too, is plug in a Bashè VCD and imagine she is hanging out with those singers and dancers in the grasslands on a beautiful, sunny day, surrounded by magnificent snow-capped peaks… Bashè as antidepressant!

I vowed to learn those glorious songs and sing them to my children. By now, they know about half a dozen, picking up in no time. And just casually along the way, we all also work on our Tibetan. On the lookout for fun ways to teach your kids Tibetan? Use Bashè as a language-teaching tool!

Bashè forever – Yallaso! Tashi-sho!

Mountain Phoenix

Out of sync

2010-06-04T11:50:00.000-07:00

My seven-year old participated in a Tibetan function the other day. It opened with the usual pomp: Drums, flutes, traditional costumes, huge flags, and a portrait of the Dalai Lama ceremonially placed on a throne; then all function owners gather on stage and sing the Gyelu, our beautiful national anthem.

I don’t know how many of these functions I’ve sat through since my own childhood – innumerable ones. Still, I can’t recall a single occasion where the Gyelu has failed to move me. Have you ever heard a more beautiful national anthem then the one of Tibet, our beloved homeland? Here is particularly graceful rendering of our Gyelu:

So when I saw my child standing on that stage, I realised it’s time to teach my kid the national anthem. For if there is one thing a patriot MUST know, then it’s how to sing the Gyelu with dignity and grace.

Well, the great thing coming out of this first: My child can sing the anthem now, every curve of the tune, with a crystal-clear pronunciation, without a single trace of a treacherous foreign accent to be detected, nor even intonation. My kid can even play the anthem on the flute and the piano. Bravo, chapeau!

At the same time, the child hasn’t asked me too much about the meaning, for which I’m really grateful. Here’s why:

While preparing to teach my kid, I realised that all these years, I had been singing the Gyelu like a parrot, not only ignorant of its meaning, but also without feeling the urge to learn what the words actually mean. Mea maxima culpa!

When I quickly wanted to fix this embarrassing gap in education, before my child could expose my inadequacy, I searched for a translation so I could convey the meaning. Only to discover in horror that the text of our sacred anthem turns out to be - excuse my language – crap! Check out this extract from Wikipedia:

Huh?

That doesn’t sound like the anthem of a country, that’s the hymn of an ideology! Our hymn glorifies Buddhism instead of Tibet. As far as I get it, the “Gye” in Gyelu stands for “country” (gyalkhab), correct? But the content makes it a “Nang-lu” - anthem of Dharma. It’s crazy. We got it all mixed up!

Reportedly some overzealous folks are propagating to have the anthem rewritten since it was texted by the late Kyabje Trijang Dorje Chang, junior tutor to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, whose reputation has become tainted due to his personal protector deity having been the these days disgraced Dorje Shugden. Well, the anthem definitely needs to be rewritten, I can’t agree more, but for another reason: It needs to be rewritten because it puts religious ideology in the place that appertains to our country. It basically claims our country is Buddhism.

The line which personally makes me the most uncomfortable is the one glorifying the antiquated system of religion-cum-politics-combined:

May a new golden age of happiness and bliss spread
throughout the three provinces of Tibet
and the glory expand of religious-secular rule.

We sing these lines on every important occasion and with all our heart. But how can we continue to praise a system that has proven to be unfit to handle the requirements of the modern world? This form of government has not served us well in the past for it was unable to interpret the signs of the times, unable to make the right decisions, unable to prevent the Chinese takeover. And it is not serving us well in the present either for the governing Lamas make our secular politicians look like little kids who constantly need to be told what to do next.

Look at the mindset our anthem reflects and then say we’re democratic. Who are we kidding? How can we even think to have democracy without secularisation?

Just for the record: I’m not criticising the Dharma, nor the composer. I just think he was the wrong person to go to for the anthem. What can you expect? Dharma is a Lama’s worldview. No wonder did we end up with the anthem we have, an anthem that mixes apples and oranges, that praises religious rule and relegates our country to the second line. But it’s not the composer’s fault, it’s ours.

We say we are a democracy. We say religion and politics should be separated. Everyone is full of praise for the “Amdo madman” Gedun Choephel, who said about our political system: “If you mix salt and sugar, how can that possibly result in palatable food?”

But our anthem unmistakably shows us once more: We Tibetans are completely out of sync. There is a huge disconnect between what we say and how we actually tick.

Since we’re oh so engrossed with Buddhism, maybe it helps to recall the famous line from the Heart Sutra: Zug tongpa ‘o, tongpanyid zug so. We are trapped to systematically cherish the first part, “form is emptiness”, and slight the second, “emptiness is form”. We value Buddhism so much that we constantly dismiss the equal importance of the “conventional” realm.

We lost our country over this fatal prejudice, but shockingly, we still haven’t become any smarter. We still go on the old way, we still praise religion and slight the secular. We still can’t find the strength to reform our worldview and our political system. We even stole the national anthem from our country and gave it to our religion.

Buddhism is important for our identity and it rightly holds a special place in our hearts. But Tibet is just as important. We haven’t done our country justice. A first step to get back in sync is to give our country a Gyelu that is worth the name.

Tongpanyid zug zo!
Mountain Phoenix

Happy Sakadawa!

2010-05-20T23:46:00.000-07:00

It’s the beginning of Sakadawa, the most important Buddhist holiday. People commemorate the birth, enlightenment and passing of Shakyamuni Buddha.

Many lay folks intensify their spiritual practice during the Tibetan Vesak by following special rules to complement their regular Dharma routine.

The most visible Sakadawa practice for the lay is to refrain from eating meat in order to minimise the accumulation of negative Karma by harming other beings. It’s commonly believed that spiritual merit accumulated during this special month multiplies manifold. If it’s meant as an incentive to step up the practice, it seems to work.

What I like best about Sakadawa is that it gives you choices. So if you think it’s overkill to observe it for the whole month, you can simply do it for a single day - ideally on Tsepa 15, the day of the full moon which falls on 27 May this year. And if you can’t live off a single meal for that one day, then at least make sure you avoid meat. - You can almost custom-build your Sakadawa, ain’t that beautiful?

But I didn’t always look at Sakadawa this way.

In fact, I didn’t pay attention at all, ever. When I accidentally learned that we were in the middle of Sakadawa, the only thoughts that would go through my head would be: If you eat animals year-in and out, what good is it to put on a saintly show for just a month or a lousy day? You seriously believe that would make a difference? Only old illiterate folks fall for that!

I just couldn’t get my head around it until many, many years later.

During Q&A following a teaching on “Atisha’s Lamp on the Path”, one person remarked that it was so incredibly difficult to generate compassion towards all beings by reminding yourself that they have been your loving mother in countless previous lives.

The Lama’s response was: “Go step by step. Do today what you think you are able to do today, and pray that one day, you will be able to do what you are unable to do now.”

I don’t know what that person made of the comment, but it struck a chord with me. Maybe because the authority to decide was left with the individual and there was zero pressure. Lamas are so cool sometimes.

I asked myself what I could do without much effort. Then suddenly I had the idea: I could go vegetarian. The least I could do right then and there, was stop harming “mother sentient beings” by eating them. If you love meat, everyone will understand why you can’t be a vegetarian. But if you’re not particularly fond of it, like myself, and still aren’t a vegetarian, now that’s unforgivable: It’s eating animals out of indifference, out of plain thoughtlessness. So what may have looked like a great act, was actually nothing, and should have suggested itself long ago.

I owe the Lama and the person who made that mother-sentient-being comment. And want to know the funny part? It’s how one thing is leading to the next. Remember the Lama said "go step by step"?¨

After having gone vegetarian for well over a year, I now I find myself thinking that I could equally easily do away with other stuff around me that’s made from killing animals, such as shoes, handbags, jackets, belts, pants. I still use whatever leather stuff I have, but I haven’t bought any new items. Now, that is a little sensation considering that I’m the stereotype female when it comes to shoes and handbags.

So never say never: I eat “Saitan” and “Quorn” now, why not wear “vegan” shoes? Right now, the only thing that's holding me back is their hair-raisingly ugly design - which means I need to work on my vanity, a true effort.

What also takes a conscious effort is to avoid becoming an over-correct, newly-born Buddhist, a “convert”, a really fussy person, who makes life for everyone around her difficult, just so hers can lived the way she thinks is correct. I don’t want to accidentally wipe out all the potential merit I’d have accumulated on the one side, by giving people a hard time on the other side.

Still, as a late bloomer, I feel compelled to catch up. So for once, I’ve been anticipating Sakadawa as an opportunity to generate some revenue for my merit account. Now is supposedly the best time to accumulate it, and it doesn’t even cost me a real effort. Don’t I love Buddhism?

Happy Sakadawa!
Mountain Phoenix

Thoughts on Jamyang Norbu’s “Deconstructing Ngabo”

2010-02-08T09:46:00.000-08:00

In 1980 when this article was first published, I was a clueless kid. But republished in 2010, with Mountain Phoenix grown into a big girl, she heeded the author’s recommendation and took a close look at this picture that makes Jamyang Norbu’s stomach churn.

Strange how people can tick differently about one and the same thing: Because what I feel is not revulsion at all, it’s nostalgia! - Isn’t that strange?

I can assure you it’s not because of Ngabo. I had to look really close to even detect him in the group. Instead, my attention went straight to the late Panchen Lama because he was our bridge to the other side. Since his passing, no leader has been able to fill the void. Those were also the times when – unlike now - both sides were at least talking, leaving political allegiances aside. That’s what made me nostalgic.

Who cares about Ngabo?

He didn’t do anything positive worth remembering. His first and foremost concern was his own survival, without having to do much for it. Already back in the old days, it had been the prerogative of people with his class background to hold high office without doing much. All the guy did was making sure that didn’t change after he switched sides, so what’s the big deal?

That spineless submissiveness that incenses Jamyang Norbu in the article, is symptomatic of our political culture even to this day. He says it himself. So over what exactly should our stomachs churn?

Sure, we can always argue that Ngabo overdid it. But hey, the way I see it, the guy only sticks out because of historical circumstances and the role that fell to him: Bad luck that, he of all people, got the job in Kham where the Chinese happened to show up first.

Now Dharamsala’s eulogy is absurd, no issues with that. It makes Ngabo bigger than he ever was in real life. But Jamyang Norbu then goes on to make him even bigger, by digging out an article that was thrown at us thirty years ago – with the rest of us padding him on the shoulder over how well he’s taught Dharamsala a lesson.

Folks, we know so well that in our political culture, holding a high post still doesn’t mean anything of substance, such as having a vision or an agenda. So how come we expect a Ngabo to exhibit backbone? Give the guy a break. He’s dead! - Deconstructing Ngabo is a real no-brainer.

Instead of wasting time deconstructing someone so weak and vulnerable, we’d better be constructive checking out those leaders from whom we can expect to learn something, so we can move forward in the political discussion.

In this context, Bapa Phuntsog Wangyal deserves a second look because commoners never ran the show in the old days. That used to be the stage reserved for religious leaders and aristocrats.

Phuntsog Wangyal came from a farmer's background in some faraway corner at the end of Tibet, nothing exceptional. What distinguishes him from the crowd though, is that he followed what went on in the world around him, and became convinced that Tibet, too, needed to change. He saw back then that our political system was unfit to tackle the problems of the modern world. Most notably, the man was not just ideas. He let actions follow.

He went to Lhasa to test the water for a Tibetan communist movement, because for him Communism was the answer for a modern, egalitarian Tibet. He tried to convince people in the government that our political system was outdated, and we needed to do something about it.

When he fell on deaf ears in Lhasa, he could have walked away from it all. But the guy persisted and started to look outside, first trying the Soviets to help set up a Tibetan communist movement, and only when that failed, did he turn to the Chinese.

Let’s forget about the act of treason for one second. Just reflect on this guy from out of nowhere deciding to go to the capital believing he could change the Tibetan political system. - Tibet was a class society with a government enamored in its own world. For a regular guy to do that, it took not only farsightedness and courage, it took tons of self-confidence.

That’s the remarkable feature about Phuntsog Wangyal, an average Tibetan like you and me: He didn’t just sit there waiting for our Lamas or the Tibetan government to sort things out. He took matters into his own hands. He didn’t just call out for political change, he actively made change happen.

Yes, he ended up in the wrong camp; and yes, his venture failed completely. He is the big time loser out of the three collaborators. In the end, even the Chinese didn’t trust him because to them, he was more a Tibetan nationalist than a loyal communist. They threw him into prison for 18 years. After he reemerged, they still wouldn’t give him a post of any significance.

In retrospect, his biggest failing was his naïveté in believing the Chinese communists would help develop Tibet and then withdraw. But even there: Nobody could foresee how Chinese communism would unfold in practice. The movement was young in China to say the least.

So my bottom line is: Even though he stands on the other side with different ideas, we folks today can take a leaf from his book as far as audacity is concerned. Especially at this time, with the talks going nowhere and an awkward Kalon Tripa search, we desperately need leaders who can inspire and are bold enough to follow through.

Jamyang Norbu’s bottom-line is: “Yeah, whatever you apologetics say, but there is a limit and who ever passes it, is a traitor. Full stop.”

I would wish an opinion leader like Jamyang Norbu would move the discussion forward and go beyond bashing weaklings or questioning people’s patriotism.

It’s desperate enough as it is. Our Mission Impossible envoys have just returned with empty hands from another humiliating round, and it’s plain to see that we’re back to square one. More “deconstruction” will only make sure we’ll stay there, so let's avoid it like the plague!

Long live Tibet!
Mountain Phoenix

Reading Tibetan? All Greek To Me!

2010-01-22T01:21:00.000-08:00

I’ve been feeling like my own grandmother lately, attempting to read, recite and memorise prayers and Sutras. When I think of it, that’s how I’ve been spending most of my free time in the last six months. Holy Trinity, looks like Mountain Phoenix discovered Buddhism as her new hobby!

Actually, it’s crazy because I can’t even read properly. Honestly, it’s more a deciphering than reading. And once painstakingly deciphered, without a translation next to the Tibetan root text, the content wouldn’t even begin to make sense. That’s the way I “read”.

So when the functionally illiterate Mountain Phoenix had finally taught herself to recite the Heart Sutra, she so utterly mixed up the pauses between the words, it got the Lama roaring with laughter - because the text had taken on a completely different meaning.

Every kid knows the story in this context: Somebody receives a letter that was supposed to read: Nga natsha me, yak ngakar shisong ("I’m fine, the white-tailed Yak died”). But the recipient got the pauses wrong and read: Nga na, tsha me, yak nga kar shisong ("I’m ill, there’s no salt, and all five Yaks are dead”).

But how is it possible in the first place, to misread one and the same text to such a drastic extent, I ask myself? And I answer myself right away: Punctuation and spacing. Two simple things.

Thomi Sambotha and his crew did a great job when they created the Tibetan script in the 7th century and introduced lots of sophisticated new vocab translated from Indian texts. But how come they omitted punctuation and spacing? Maybe those are recent linguistic phenomena and weren't there in the Indian originals? I don’t know. But then I’d say it’s high time our modern Lotsawas do something about it.

Ifyouhadtoreadmybloglookinglikethishowwouldyoulikethathuh? Wouldn’tyouagreenglishisreally adifficultlanguage?Andwouldn’tyouagreethewrittenandspokenenglishlanguagedon’thavemuchincommonjustliketibetan?
Other countries tackled the simplification of the written language hundreds of years ago and their literacy rates today speak for themselves. Mind you, their job involved a lot more than just punctuation and spacing. The Chinese had to come up with a completely new set of simplified characters (thousands of them!) so people would have an easier time to learn them. And Luther virtually invented a new language when he wrote the bible in vernacular German, so ordinary people would be able to understand, not just a lucky few.

Well, if Luther could issue the holy bible in a whole new people’s version, then our Lotsawas certainly shouldn’t have a problem with mere punctuation and spacing added to the Buddhist texts, should they? After all, we’re not touching the message; we only make it better understandable by more people. What could possibly speak against that?

Of course, those who love to read textwiththewordsallstucktogetherinahugehodgepodge may continue to do so. I’m not proposing to replace these. All I’m saying is we should have a user-friendly, modern version with spacing and punctuation. Simplifying Tibetan is a sine qua non if we want literacy rates in the Tibetan rural areas and among young expats to go up.

Or do we really prefer to tell ourselves for our own amusement and for even more generations to come, the story of the guy who fell ill with no salt and all yaks dying on him, without ever drawing the right conclusions from this story?

Sooner or later we will have to address the demystification of the written Tibetan altogether. If we want to keep our culture alive and evolving, we must update and expand our view of Tibetan as an exclusive and holy vessel that transports the Buddhist doctrine. We must add a new layer. Modern Tibetan should serve to communicate content, with no religious nostalgia tied to it, full-stop!

The question really boils down to this: Do we want reading and writing skills to be a self-understood mass ability? Or do we want to keep it a decorative privilege of an elite? That’s been the state of Tibetan literacy since the alphabet was invented over a thousand years ago.

It goes without saying: The goal is to have every single citizen, young or old, lay or clergy, male or female, rural or urban, in Tibet or abroad, able to read and write with ease, as if they have never done anything else. To achieve this goal, we must support language reform which includes things like punctuation, spacing, but also simplified spelling.

We shouldn’t treat Tibetan like a holy cow. If Tibetan were a dead language like Latin or Sanskrit, OK, then it would have a special status, and we can’t go around proposing to change stuff. But we’re still here, speaking it, using it every day and we want it to help us express things that are relevant to our lives today. Therefore as a living language, Tibetan must evolve and adapt to the people’s needs.

If we don’t do it, people will revert to other more flexible languages and gradually do away with Tibetan. Or its only purpose will become liturgy. Look, all this is already happening, we are witnessing it. If we don’t react, Tibetan will definitely join the holy ranks of Latin and Sanskrit one day, with a big reputation - but dead.

Those who believe Tibetan is perfect as it is, and doesn’t need to change, are part of a backward-oriented, reactionary group that ends up preserving reading as the privilege of a few. The fact that we haven’t had a language reform worth the name in half a century since coming to the modern world, shows that there must be a lot of folks out there, who think this way. That’s scary, don’t you think so?

So we see, even in linguistics we touch upon our old problem: mixing the secular and the religious. And as usual, the religious overpowers the secular.

Actually, when I think of it, what keeps me from adding punctuation and spacing to Tibetan texts? I’m free to do as I please. It’s a small first step, but it’s a step. If language reform doesn’t come top-down, people can always give impulses bottom-up.

As the Americans say: “It’s not over till the fat lady sings”.

Bhod Gyallo! Victory to Tibet!
Mountain Phoenix

Who will be our next Prime Minister?

2009-10-02T10:43:00.000-07:00

We clearly missed the opportunity for political reform in the November meeting in Dharamsala last year. Now we are getting ready to elect a new Prime Minister in 2011 under the same outdated system Tibet has had for centuries, which does not distinguish between the secular and the religious.

Leaving aside the essential question of how effective a Prime or any Minister can be in such a system, people are all getting worked up about the profile of the new Prime Minister: The new person should be “young”, should be “a woman”, should be “educated” and what not.

I’m struck though that the primary criteria people seemed to look for in a candidate, was knowledge of how to deal with the West in order to promote the Tibetan cause.

I couldn’t disagree more here.

The main concentration of our political work in the last 50 years was exactly on lobbying the Western countries to pressure China for concessions on Tibet. This strategy has not worked the way we would have liked to see. We should learn from this and adapt. We should go about solving our problems more directly, without relying too much on third party involvement.

It doesn’t mean we should stop lobbying the West, but it’s a strategic mistake to continue to put all our eggs in one basket.

Our problem is with China. So first and foremost we need a PM who can deal with China. We need someone who is intimately familiar with China and has the focus on China with everything else flowing from there. It should be someone who is at ease in the Chinese presence, confident enough to deal with them eye-to-eye. China-fit should be our killer criterion.

Technically, the PM should be someone who, while firmly rooted in Tibetan culture and with the ability to directly communicate with the people both in- and outside of Tibet, at the same time, has an affinity for Chinese culture, speaks that language with ease and is familiar with that system. In other words, it has to be a person that is perceived by both the Tibetans and the Chinese government as “one of us”.

Just in case this sounds extreme, it really shouldn’t.

Because that’s what the middle path boils down to, if we implement it. The middle path says, internally we’re autonomous, externally we’re under China. Fact is more than 75 % of the exile voting populace backed the middle path. So we’d better start to walk the talk and get used to think of ourselves as PRC citizens – Tibetan by ethnicity, but PRC citizens nevertheless.

In addition to being “China-fit”, our candidate should also be superior in stature to those no names from the United Front which His Holiness’ envoys have been fobbed off with for the longest time. For there to be real progress, we need to elect someone the Chinese government can take seriously.

The people whose names are in discussion as candidates in the phayul forum or on kalontripa.org will do their best and have the sincerest intentions, no shadow of a doubt. But to tell you the truth: No amount of dedication and commitment will replace what has got to be our killer criterion: “China-fit”.

You can be the best driver in the whole world. You still won’t win the Monaco Grand Prix if what you’re riding is a truck.

So “China-fit” must be our killer criterion.

This requirement already disqualifies a lot of the potential candidates whose names are now circulating.

For one, it can’t be a member of the Sangha. Looking at it from Chinese side, Lamas are their number one concept of the enemy. Looking at it from the Tibetan side, politics is not a Lama-job either. There is no good reason on either side to appoint a Lama.

Next, any of the old boys and girls from the exile establishment: Lodi Gyari, Kelsang Gyaltsen, Dolma Gyari, Bhuchung K. Tsering. Kasur-this-and-that, former Reps etc, are not the right fit either. They live up to the expectations of a large part of the exile-Tibetan constituency (“experienced”, “cultured”, “loyal”, “woman”), but in the Chinese context, they are too much “the Dalai Lama’s messengers”. They don’t have an independent profile or the stature it takes to shape policy and handle China. And, most of all, they all lack the killer criterion as they were brought up too far away from Chinese culture.

Even the Harvard lawyer, Dr Lobsang Sangay, won’t do. His work is important and we need good lawyers. But our problem is not legal, it’s political. It cannot be resolved in a court of law. It can only be resolved in the political arena with China and within Chinese law. In the world of Realpolitik, the international legal case is little more than a side-argument. But more important, would this person fulfil the killer criterion? From what I’ve seen and heard, he’s not our man either.

Then we have an interesting group of new, younger leaders such as Lhadon Tethong of SFT. I would love to see someone like her as the Tibetan ambassador to North America. She would project a modern, young, gender-neutral, progressive, secular, and open image of our exile administration. If I were Dharamsala I would offer her the job as the Head of the Office of Tibet in that region, and give her the formal authority to boost her excellent PR work. But she’s not the right fit for the PM job. Remember the killer criterion.

So who’s left? Don’t we have any China-fit PM candidates who are reminiscent of Sino-Tibetan cultural hybrids like Bapa Phuntsog Wangyal or Gyalo Thondup, but who are not in the wrong camp, not related to the Dalai Lama, and not on the verge of senile decay?

At the very least, the new PM should have a higher profile than the incumbent Samdong Tulku. It’s still been the Dalai Lama doing all the touring, meeting all the government leaders and politicians. I bet you nobody even remembers our Prime Minister’s name, let alone is aware we have one.

Maybe it’s because the Dalai Lama’s Private Office wants to control everything as Jamyang Norbu suggests in an article. Or it’s because Samdong Rinpoche is a traditional guy who wants the Dalai Lama to control everything. Who knows? Whatever the reason, the political result is a disaster.

The question is: Do we want the distribution of power and the working relationship between Dalai Lama and Silön to resemble that of the British Queen and her Prime Minister, or that of Putin and Medvedev? You agree we’re not only way closer to the Russians on this one, but we surpass them by far.

I don’t know, have all the Silöns in Tibetan history been limited to managing the Kalons and warming up messages from the Dalai Lama? Have you also wondered what is expected from a contemporary Tibetan Prime Minister? Has anyone seen a job description for the position somewhere? Does the post have any foreign policy relevance at all?

When I heard “panel discussion” about the new PM, I thought there would be several people discussing rather than two automats delivering incoherent one-way messages. In the “panel discussion” on phayul.com from 20 June 2009, half of the time is wasted with lecturing the people about the difficult situation in Tibet - as if we didn’t know!

The other half is used to explain what the Prime Minister’s job is. But what they failed to do is connect the two parts: No explanation how doing the PM job would improve the difficult situation in Tibet. All the while, Samdong Tulku is wiping his face with a huge orange cloth, looking like he either just got out of or is preparing to go to bed. Sorry, did I just intrude here?

Actually the incumbent PM shouldn’t have to say anything about his successor in the first place, but what all these discussions among the expats about the new PM show is not only the alarming shortage of capable leaders in our midst. It’s also showing the fundamental problem in our political system and that is – we all know it inside out - the mix of religion and politics.

So in this context, it’s unfair to expect the Prime Minister to fix our problems, when a) there’s someone overpowering at the top who has very clear ideas of where Tibet should go, and b) we have the ingrained habit of looking for implicit approval and endorsement from the top. That’s the way we function.

Our biggest problem, even bigger than getting back Tibetan independence, is that we are incapable of emancipating ourselves from divine rule. We just can’t let go of the Dalai Lama, we love him too much. We probably think a terrible karmic revenge would befall us if we politely asked him to withdraw from politics.

But as long as we are unable to separate the religious sphere from the secular, it won’t make a difference who we choose as our next Prime Minister, they will all be the same: Ineffective automats with no relevance to the outside world.

Look at China: This month they are celebrating 60 years since the foundation of the new China. Whatever faults there are with their system, and the world knows there a lot, but at least they were strong enough to leave the old ways behind and walk new paths as a people. The world including the Tibetans can accuse China of many wrong-doings, but not for inactivity.

When was the last time that we, the Tibetan people, took destiny into our own hands?

I’m afraid we have to go back over a thousand years to find something of similar magnitude in our history: During Langdarma’s reign when Buddhism was almost annihilated in the central areas, it was only due to enormous efforts of the Guge kings Yeshi and Jangchub Ö that a Buddhist renaissance could take place. Where would Tibetan Buddhism be today if the two had not sacrificed so much to get the Indian Atisha Dipamkara to come to Tibet and fix things? We owe these guys big time.

Something of this magnitude must now happen on the political level and in our times. Nothing less will do to save us from decline. Whether we get what we want or end up getting what we deserve, will depend on whether we can replicate the boldness, fearlessness, and farsightedness of our forefathers.

Long live Tibet!
Mountain Phoenix

Plain Vanilla: Our summer in Tibet

2009-09-11T06:16:00.000-07:00

It was a bit rushed, but we still managed to catch up with most friends and relatives. Some were up higher in the summer pastures, but they came down one by one as word spread that we had returned. How did the word pass so fast you may wonder?

Plain and simple: cell phones.

Everyone seems to own a cell phone there. During a courtesy visit to the resident Lama of our monastery, mine started to ring. I was so embarrassed, mumbled an apology and stepped out to turn it off. When I went back in to rejoin the conversation, the thing went off again. Didn’t I just…? - Huh! It was someone else’s going off: Even our venerable Lama had a cell phone tucked away in his Amba!

Gosh, I’m getting old here because I’m about to exclaim: “How times have changed!”

When I first came to Tibet in 1993, our relatives only knew by accident that we were coming. Someone found the letter my dad had sent them. It was lying around in the grasslands. The postman must have lost it on one of his delivery tours.

That year, while we desperately tried to figure out how to transfer from the point of entry in China on to the Tibetan highlands, our relatives waited in the Dzong (county seat) for days and days not knowing whether we would be coming at all.

But that’s long ago and seems like a dream now.

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After last year’s downturn, visitors were now gradually coming back. The hordes of Chinese tourists “polluting” the air with their smelly incense at the splendidly restored monastery were back, just as the Christian missionary families camouflaged as English teachers and gastronomes. Had to think of the Griebenows in Labrang of pre-Communist times, when I saw some of those families accompanied by what seemed to be half a dozen kids.

The laidback atmosphere in the Old Town reminded me a bit of McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala with its cafes, shops and visitors from all over the globe. It looked like the global recession had not hit the local economy so strong. Tourism was picking up. The wild mushrooms’ season was also at its peak, although prices were reportedly not as good as in previous years.

We also saw no more trace of the huge army camp that the newspapers reported was set up right in front of the entrance to the Old Town during last year’s political unrest. We found the usual car park there. There were no soldiers patrolling through the city, not even near the monastery. It seemed like normality had returned - plain vanilla.

One of the many memorable experiences during this trip was our first day when we hung out with all the kids in the grassland.

Then we took them for Pizza made by the local girl-friend of an Italian expat, who owns a restaurant in town; followed by a treat to delicious ice-cream at a Taiwanese fast-food chain. To wrap a great day up, we took the children to a small amusement park where they hopped around on bounce castle, drove little cars, and painted pictures. It was great to see how the children, all from differing backgrounds, got along with each other. It was borig phunda shatrak jig gyi mi if you know what I mean.

I am grateful to have experienced a piece of normality in Tibet. I am keen to see more of that normality return. There has to be some normality for folks to function in that kind of politically repressive environment.

We returned safely, happy, with a bag full of photographs and beautiful memories.

But as I’m blogging, the sad news has reached us that army trucks and soldiers were sent to our hometown again. We don’t know whether there has been an incident or whether they were sent as a precaution for the 50-year PRC anniversary celebration.

I only hope there won’t be any clashes. Direct confrontation is suicide.

And oh, I haven’t even mentioned my other big problem: How to relate to my kids what is happening? It’s one thing to tell children about Tibet from afar without ever going there. It’s quite another if your kids know Tibet through direct experience. You have to be much more careful and balanced. So that’s my big problem, not exactly plain vanilla.

If anyone out there has an idea, let me know.

Mountain Phoenix

Enter the dragon

2009-06-05T06:05:00.000-07:00

Yes! After weeks of uncertainty, the China visa is finally stuck in my passport! Now there’s nothing that could possibly keep me from boarding that plane taking me and my two little ones towards Tibet this summer. Unless one of us unexpectedly dies, I will drag each and everyone of us onto that plane, come what may, serious!

They don’t say for nothing that you can take a person out of his phayul but you can’t take the phayul out of the person. I tell you I’ve been so homesick.

My eyes hurt from longing to gaze at those snow-capped mountains around my parents’ hometown; my nose is so eager to smell the aroma from the local farmers’ market in the middle of town; my ears want to hear the antique Tibetan dialect spoken; my lungs want to breathe the clear mountain air. I’ve been starving with all my senses and now it’s going to happen.

I’m so happy.

I’m so happy I completely forget the humiliating trips to the Chinese embassy it usually takes in the forefront.

Although I’m a bona fide citizen of this country, I can’t line up with the regular folks at the visa counter of the Chinese embassy. I need to call in advance and make an appointment with that specific guy who is in charge of handling visa requests from Tibetan expats.

Visa applications by regular folks get handled at the counter by clerks from the Foreign Affairs Office. It normally takes four days to issue a regular tourist visa. If you pay an express fee, you get it the same day.

Visa applications by Tibetan expats get handled by a bureaucrat from the Tongzhanbu, somewhere in the back office of the embassy. In my case, the United Front bureaucrat is not even an ethnic Chinese; he’s one of us, probably the saddest part in this whole thing.

So I called the guy up and fixed the appointment. Then I went to the embassy on the agreed day, to apply to be allowed to apply for a permit.

I handed in my application forms plus the sheet providing exact details where I would go, where I would stay, who I would visit, how I was related to them and the telephone numbers to contact.

I asked him when I could expect his call that I could come for the visa application.

“Well, that is not possible to say in advance”, the bureaucrat tells me without looking up from his paperwork.

My head is going: “Don’t mess with me, wannabe.”

But my mouth says: “Oh, just tell me roughly based on your long experience, Gen-la.”

“20 days”, he says again without looking up from the paperwork.

I know he has to refer my application back to the Tongzhanbu headquarter, and the headquarter would refer it to the Tongzhanbu regional office, and the regional office would refer it to the local office, and all the way down the ladder, until it lands on the Tongzhanbu desk of my parents’ hometown. That’s the procedure. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s the way it is.

Let me tell you what is wrong.

The guy is a pervert. He loves to be intransparent, enjoys keeping people in uncertainty and, worst of all, is corrupt.

Two years ago, when I went through the same procedure he said I could only get a visa if I bought the air ticket from him. That would be the new procedure.

I innocently asked why it was considered necessary to introduce a new procedure.

Don’t fall off your chairs.

He said a lot of Tibetans would either not return or not arrive properly, that’s why they introduced this new rule with everyone having to fly with a Chinese airline.

I bet you the Chinese ambassador had no clue what our little zangbao was doing right under his nose. Abuse of authority in its purest form.

Luckily I could talk myself out of the situation by telling him I needed to travel a certain route which would not be covered by “his” ticket. He grudgingly said, ok for this time, but next time, don’t do it like that.

Well, when I went back this time, there was no mentioning of the air ticket. I trust he realised it’s wiser not to engage in irregular activities.

Once when I was living in Tibet, I was summoned by the police.

They came into my classroom in the middle of a lesson. No idea what the students thought when the teacher was taken away by Public Security people.

There were three of them Gong An’s behind a huge desk in that office and I was by myself seated on the opposite side of the desk. I got a severe scolding in Chinese from the fat boss and his two side-kicks for working on a tourist visa. How come I did that? His fist came smashing down on the table. For sure I must know that’s against the law?

Actually the school had told me they would sort the visa thing out when they hired me. But obviously they had not done it at that point. That’s all I could try to say to the police and ask them to speak to the school principal.

Thinking back it could have been a stereotype scene straight from a Bollywood movie, making the police look really shabby: Three of them ganging up on a somewhat naïve young woman who couldn’t even speak well enough to explain herself. The story only got sorted out because a knight-in-shining-armour came to my rescue and managed to explain the whole “case”.

And believe it or not, the villain in my story, the fat police guy, got stabbed in the stomach a few weeks later during a fight in a night club. Bollywood again!

Meanwhile, a few months later, the knight and I got married. Bollywood all over:--)

But at the time though it wasn’t funny. It was scary. The surreal thing remains the utter loss of countenance of these people in that police office and the uneasy feeling that no one seemed to be able control these guys.

Years later, I ran into one of them by accident. He greeted me as if we were old pals, so cordially: “Oh hello, hi, it’s you! When did you come back? We’ve met, remember?”

That stinking rat.

Yet I forced myself to smile back: “Oh yes! I remember! You are so and so. How have you been?”

I hated myself for doing that. It sounded as if I was selling my soul.

But in effect, I was calculating in cold blood: You may need his help sometime down the road. He may know someone whose help you may need to get something done. Even if he doesn’t have any useful connections, he could still harm your projects or people connected to you, so you’d better not give him any reason. It would be unwise to jeopardise chances in the heat of the moment.

I would have loved to just beat him up, but one thing you learn when you enter the dragon is to never allow yourself to get irritated by its raw demeanor. That can completely backfire, so don’t be like Bruce Lee, be a tough cookie.

Be like Sunzi in The Art of War.

Beat them with their own weapons. Use people like the police guys or the embassy guy a thousand times in return. The worse they act, the more focused you become.

There are a lot of them, all members of the much discussed new aristocracy who are complicating the political situation with their vested interest and their feudal mindsets. They thrive in this situation of intransparency and unaccountability.

What they don’t know is that they can’t win. Tibet will always be bigger than all of them combined.

As our Lamas say:

"The sword of hatred is ornamented with the handle of invasion,
A red star has imprisoned the sun and moon,
The high snow-peaked mountains are cloaked in the darkness of a poisonous wind;
The peaceful valleys have been shattered by the sound of artillery.
But the dignity of the Tibetan people competes with the glory of the sky."
Chogyam Trungpa

I only hope I can vaguely remember these lines when I enter the dragon this summer.

Mountain Phoenix