The Tragedy in Tibet: Will Freedom-Loving Countries Stand Up to China?

By Lobsang Chodron, AlterNet. Posted April 1, 2008.

From my room above the Tibetan-exiled community of McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala, India, all throughout the day, I can hear the protests of Tibetan marchers. Their voices strain into the night, an urgent plea for someone to listen, to pay attention, to respond. I have been based here, on and off, over the last three and a half years, but for some reason, now, more than ever, I am listening.

I am an American nun in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

Before my involvement in Buddhism, I was heavily involved in political work in Washington, DC and San Francisco, California. I thought this was a way to bring about positive change in a conflicted world. I was free to organize political meetings and marches. I was encouraged to speak out in the face of social injustice. I was hired to write about whatever seemed to move political conscience.

However, most individuals born in the United States take these basic liberties for granted. I often did until I engaged in extensive travel outside of the United States. Now, here in Dharamsala, I feel censored. I fear that by writing that I may never be granted another Chinese visa allowing me to travel to Tibet. As a Buddhist, it is too difficult to imagine never again seeing the sacred places and images in Tibet that have so inspired my spiritual practice. In fact, I was due to lead a pilgrimage this May to Tibet. At this moment, however, the tour organizer is researching alternative destinations and designing a new itinerary, one that will take us to a place that is not only holy, but free, not only spiritually beneficial, but safe.

This leads me to question what is free and safe and how best can I respond when those very values are threatened.

Here in Dharamsala, I go down to the town every other day to lend support to the Tibetans. I feel helpless, but join in the protests taking place throughout the town. I clap for, smile at, say thank you (in Tibetan) to, and put my palms together as a symbolic gesture of prayer for the variety of marchers who pass through the narrow streets. At times the Tibetans organize themselves into specific groups with each group marching at different intervals to keep the urgency of their cause heightened. Therefore, at one point I watch a group of Tibetan nuns chanting slogans and waving Tibetan flags through the street. At another time a group of school boys from the Tibetan Children's Village (TCV) swarm through, their fists raised in protest, the blue sweaters and grey slacks of their uniforms betray nothing of their quest for a free homeland.

It is tragic to me how many of these Tibetans have never been able to step foot in their homeland while I have enjoyed two visits to Tibet over the years. Imagine what it is like never to have your own home. To always be a visitor, a refugee without the seeming stability and familiarity of your own land and culture. While I have been on the road for more than three years now, often living out of suitcases, moving rooms, crossing borders, I have a passport that allows me entrance without visa to a country in which I am entitled to stay for as long as I like. I can always go home. Home we often take for granted. For Tibetans, a home such as that is a distant dream.

And I have been warned. I am visitor, a "tourist" in India and it is illegal for me to incite demonstrations and create violence. Some foreigners have already been arrested, their passports stamped giving them 48 hours to leave the country and inability to return to India with this passport or perhaps forever. Creating violence is actually against my very code of ethics as Buddhist nun and therefore, harming others is something in which I am not at all interested. However, what I am most interested in, in this case, is freedom. Most Tibetans are also not citizens of India and their protests have prompted some arrests by the Indian government. Most of them are and always will be refugees here.

The days I do not venture into town, I focus more on my own spiritual practice. Since coming into contact with Tibetan Buddhism, my politics have evolved into a combination of internal and external work. The activism on both fronts feels the best balance now in order to create what His Holiness the Dalai Lama calls "inner disarmament," when the delusions of confusion, anger, desire, pride, jealousy, etc. are subdued and transformed into more positive behavior. This I have found to be some of the most effective political work I have done.

But still these past few days I have felt like a coward. Afraid to act, to write, to sign petitions, to send messages to those in power. I walk past the hunger strikers outside His Holiness the Dalai Lama's temple and see in their eyes that some of them would starve to death for freedom. They won't, though, since His Holiness strongly discourages harming others. And this includes themselves. I wonder what I would starve to death for.

In Tibet, it is far worse than starving. The accounts we read daily have come out of Tibet via mobile phones and at tremendous risk to the caller. I think of the bravery of those who have stood up in Tibet to raise awareness to the Tibetan plight. Risking execution, beatings, imprisonment and torture, these individuals blaze more brightly for me than any Olympic torch. Of what truly do I have to be afraid?

I follow the news from around the world. I am stunned to read what Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Christensen said in response to whether the U.S. would boycott the Olympics, that the "Olympics are an opportunity for China to show progress on human rights..." I wonder what the International Olympics Committee president Jacques Rogge and his committee were thinking in 2001 when they selected China for the 2008 site. The very Olympic charter states that it holds "a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity." Where is the peace and "human dignity" for Gendun Choekyi Nyima, the young Panchen Lama, and his family disappeared several years ago in China? I want to ask the committee how they would define the words "human rights."

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