Chinese Gov't to monks: No reincarnation w/out approval

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20227400/site/newsweek/

Aug. 20-27, 2007 issue - In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation." But beyond the irony lies China's true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region's Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country. By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.

See link above for full story.

BrianIs AtYou

[TheEllipticalDisillusion]

I want to see how they enforce this.

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

I want to see how they enforce this.

Forced abortions in Tibet?

Random arrests and executions of the elderly?

There are a lot of possibilities.

BrianIs AtYou

[Impenitent]

Absolutely bizarre! I agree, Brian, that it is aimed at preventing the perpetuation of the lamas, specifically the Dalai Lama.

It is tantamount to the state declaring itself to have authority over the spirit. Ridiculous.

[Inanna]

How sad.... what is wrong with this govt? Can't they let Tibetans be?

[Primula Baggins]

No, they can't.

[Frelga]

If the Romans thought of this 2,000 years ago, the history of Western civilization may have gone differently. This is beyond bizarre.

[Primula Baggins]

Well, there is the Biblical story of Herod ordering the killing of all children under 2. Analogous, I think: prevent the possibility of someone emerging who might challenge authority. It failed then, and it will probably fail now.

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

I guess this should not be surprising considering the Chinese government's treatment of religion in general, including its attempts to interfere with the appointment of Catholic bishops by the Pope, and its suppression of movements like Fulan Gong.

http://www.asianews.it/view.php?l=en&art=2962

http://www.religiousfreedom.com/nwslttr/gong.htm

Pope Benedict has attempted, as John Paul II did before him, to attempt to normalize relations and reach out. The Chinese were particularly antagonistic to John Paul II because he was credited by many with the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe.

http://www.asianews.it/view.php?l=en&art=2962

http://catholicism.about.com/b/a/000073.htm

BrianIs AtYou

[Impenitent]

Interfering with the internal politics of the Catholic church is one thing (unpleasant and out of line though it is); but trying to dictate the spirit? Tell the soul where it's allowed to go? That is beyond outrageous and reaches into the truly weird.

Now, of course the chinese government does not believe it can do such a thing (assuming it acknowledges the existence of the soul and any kind of afterlife in the first place. I understand it's all about the politics of the here and now. But the language is really silly! Stupid! Bizarre!

"...an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation..." They will not recognise the reincarnation of future lamas unless incarnated as a child completely compliant with Chinese interests.

[MithLuin]

Right - basically they are saying - if you choose your own religious leader, he's not legit. This is exactly what they do with the Catholic church there. If Rome appoints bishops, they are not recognized, and must therefore stay underground. If they Chinese gov't appoints the bishops, it's okay and they can be out in the open. The Dalai Lama is already an exile - this rule will not change that.

I agree that the language is stupid. Obviously, there is no practical way of enforcing this law. But...China is a very...interesting place. They've had totalitarian rule where the gov't completely uses the people...for a very long time. People have basically learned to live their lives without paying much attention to politics or getting involved in it...because the cost is pretty high. There doesn't seem to be much concept of the gov't existing to serve the people....

[The One Ring]

The Dalai Lama is already an exile - this rule will not change that.

Right. It's his next incarnation who will not be in exile, and that's what the point of this law is, I'm sure. The Tibetans will not be able to openly proclaim the next lama and use him as a rallying point.

Jn

[solicitr]

Of course, Buddha could direct the next incarnation to be born in India or Nepal.....In fact, I strongly suspect he will

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

In the interests of finding more about this, I did some digging about the history and found some articles that have a different take on the recent history of Tibet, and the ongoing place of Tibet as a part of China.

I certainly don't know enough about the subject to make a determination, but the point of view in these articles is one that I had not heard before.

And that is part of the point of these articles: that the view of the Dalai Lama as a pacifist, and gentle holy man is a constructed image. He was a powerful aristocrat with a retinue of slaves and serfs, who had as one of his main advisors a notorious Nazi, Heinrich Harrer.

(Note that the following sources have their own biases. The first labels itself a "pro-worker" site, which is often a euphemism for pro-communism, and this article, as well as some of their other articles support that interpretation. The second appears to be a site like snopes, but I do not know how credible it is; it contains a number of links to a variety of sites that flesh out the issues.)

Hollywood hides Tibet's true history

"The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking," writes Grunfeld in "The Making of Modern Tibet."

In the 1940s, Tibet was a feudal theocracy with a dual papacy—the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. By all accounts, the Dalai Lama was considered supreme in political matters.

Below the Dalai Lama were the aristocratic lords—owners of the estates, most descended from the ancient kings of Tibet before the Mongol invasion. "Despite claims to the contrary, heredity and ennoblement were the only avenues for joining the nobility," Grunfeld writes.

"As in all agricultural societies, the source of power and wealth was not titles but land. Land was divided among three ruling groups: the monasteries, the lay nobility and the Lhasa government," Grunfeld says.

The Dalai Lama himself was never from a ruling family, for that would have given an individual family domination. Rarely did the Dalai Lama ever reach adulthood, with fierce disputes often leading to murder of the young ruler.

The aides to the Dalai Lama really ruled the local government. The 13th Dalai Lama was one of the few to have survived into adulthood.

The vast majority of the people of Tibet were serfs. A small part of the population, about 5 percent, was slaves to the nobility.

Women were considered inferior to men. Polyandry—where one woman was the wife of several brothers—and polygamy were common.

The Chinese are interpreted here as liberators, who free the vast majority of the populace from serfdom or slavery.

But Tibet was changed forever.

Schools were built. Newspapers were introduced. Telephones and a postal service were begun.

Hospitals and movie theaters were built. And for the first time, highways to the outside world were built.

When the Tibetan oligarchy says the Chinese government did not respect Tibetan customs in the 1950s, this is what they are referring to.

The Chinese did violate local customs. Wages were paid to Tibetans who worked building the roads. This disrupted the custom of servitude. Paying Tibetan children to attend school also gave the serfs economic leverage against the age-old work practices as well as providing avenues for rising out of serfdom.

Heinrich Harrer:

During the rule of the 14th Dalai Lama in the 1940s, Tibet was again a center of intrigue. The German Nazis hoped to expand into Asia, particularly into India, Nepal and Tibet, leaving the penetration of China to their ally, imperialist Japan.

This is how Heinrich Harrer ended up in Tibet. His book on Tibet is really a fictionalized account of his adventures.

Who Harrer is and what his role was is of interest not just because of the movie. Harrer by all accounts was a teacher of the Dalai Lama and has remained a close adviser ever since.

"It came as a bombshell five months ago when the German magazine Stern reported that, as early as 1933, Harrer had been a Nazi, a member of the ruthless SA [storm troopers] and, later, the SS [elite protective guard]," according to a report in the October 1997 issue of the magazine Men’s Journal.

Harrer had always denied he had been a Nazi. When he could no longer deny it, it was said that he had been a Nazi but he had only joined in order to further his career as a mountain climber. This claim did not hold up, since his 1933 entry would not have helped his career in Austria, where he lived. The Nazi Party was illegal in Austria and had to operate underground.

The Men’s Journal story is written by someone who had seen Harrer as a hero and reluctantly came to the conclusion, after extensive research, that Harrer was a "150-percent Nazi" and had to have been involved in some of the most brutal crimes in Austria in the 1930s. Harrer had first been recruited by Heinrich Himmler, the second most powerful person in the Third Reich.

Harrer was part of the Dalai Lama’s inner circle at the time of the Chinese Revolution in 1949. At that time the Dalai Lama was a teenager who, by his own account, knew nothing of the outside world. He was completely dependent on his advisers.

http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id393/pg1/

Chattel slavery existed in Tibet well into the 1950s, and the vast majority of the population was serfs who had to pay tithes to . . . you guessed it, the lamas. Most Tibetans were not mystic sorcerers capable of levitating or stopping their own heartbeats for fun and enlightenment (and profit). They were broken-backed peasants tied to the monastery establishment.

Not everyone in Tibet huddled around fires of burning yak dung in their little hovels though: the Dalai Lama himself lived in the 1000 room, 14 story Potala Palace with a personal retinue of slaves, and spent the summers in the slightly smaller Norbulingkha Palace.

The thrust of the articles is that the picture of the Dalai Lama as a pacifist is primarily a constructed image that was created after his slaves were taken from him and he lost his wealth and went into exile. The image, claims the articles, is a clever construction with the sole aim of getting Western support.

The contention is that restoring the Dalai Lama to power could mean returning Tibet to a state of feudal oppression where most of the population would revert to serfs or slaves under the thumb of the lamas who had formerly oppressed them.

-----------------

Again, all of this must be taken with a grain of salt.

It is very difficult to judge the truth in such matters where I have little personal experience, and where the sources of information may not be objective, and may in fact have agendas of their own.

BrianIs AtYou

[The One Ring]

Of course, Buddha could direct the next incarnation to be born in India or Nepal.....In fact, I strongly suspect he will

I suppose it doesn't matter to the Chinese whether the next Dalai Lama is born in exile, since they've been content to leave the current one living in exile. If there is a new lama born in India or Nepal, the nature of the problem for them does not change. They've achieved stability in other words.

The current lama is 72 years old, and in good health as far as I know. The message this should be giving to us in the West is the time horizon over which the Chinese government is strategizing. And also the imaginativeness with which they secure their own interests.

Jn

edit: Brian, we cross-posted. Very interesting info. Some of it is verifiable, of course. I was doing a bit of reading about this when you posted. Let me return to that and post something in response in a few more minutes.

[The One Ring]

This is from Wikipedia: the 14 Dalai Lamas

Date born ... Date Died ... Age at Death
1391.............1474..............83
1475.............1541..............66
1543.............1588..............45
1589.............1616..............27
1617.............1682..............65
1683.............1706..............23
1708.............1757..............49
1758.............1804..............46
1806.............1815..............9
1816.............1837..............21
1838.............1856..............18
1857.............1875..............18
1876.............1933..............57
1935 still living

The manner of their deaths is not given, but most of them did survive childhood.

As far as the feudalism of Tibet, I must assume that this is true because that was also the culture of China before the revolution. The communists modernized the east by force, as the party did in Russia. The fury with which this was done has to be judged, I think, against the backdrop of the culture they were modernizing. All these regimes went forward with a great deal of brutality, but the KMT that escaped to Taiwan also established itself by means of brutality and it's only been in the past ten years that the Taiwanese 'natives' have been able to reclaim political territory.

As for the Dalai Lama himself, he was only 24 years old when he went into exile, and his childhood and young adulthood were apparently spent in a very rarified environment. It would be more surprising if his views had not changed over the past 48 years in exile.

And I am wondering what he would have made of Nazism. What context could he have had for understanding it in the 1930s? Perhaps it was enough for him, as it has been enough for our friendly government officials here in the US since WWII, to know that the fascists were the enemies of his enemy? Hard to imagine what he would have made of anti-Semitism, since he'd most certainly never met a Jew in all his life.

From what I have heard, the current lama does have a 'presence' that is described as holy. Is there a reason why I should disbelieve his pacism? Or his good will? I've never heard a word spoken again his person ... though I wouldn't take Richard Gere's word for anything.

It would be better if Tibet were independent, I think, to make its own way toward modernization. That's my rule of thumb for all countries, in fact. I don't believe in the long-term efficacy of occupation or hegemony. But China has something like 19 autonomous regions, several which are as ill-suited to Chinese rule as Tibet is, and they simply don't make the news here.

One other thing regarding the article Brian posted at the top, this also from Wikipedia:

The current Dalai Lama has repeatedly stated that he will never be reborn inside territory controlled by the People's Republic of China[4], and has occasionally suggested that he might choose to be the last Dalai Lama by not being reborn at all.

The PRC has apparently appointed the Panchen Lama who is not recognized by the Tibetan followers of the Dalai Lama. And they intend to continue appointing the lamas that will rule Tibet, so the 'approval' required for reincarnation makes more sense in that context, I guess.

Jn