June 5, 2008
Why the Dalai Lama Matters: His Act of Truth as the Solution for China, Tibet, and the World
Robert Thurman is Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, Co-Founder of Tibet House US, and author of over a dozen books, including several key translations and analyses of Tibetan literature. Thurman is one of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s oldest Western 
friends. They first met in Sarnath, India, in 1964, five years after His Holiness fled the communist Chinese takeover of Tibet. In 1979, Thurman was responsible for securing the Dalai Lama’s first visa to the United States – just one of his many efforts over the years to assist the Tibetan Diaspora. It’s fair to say that he has spent most of his life dedicated to preserving and restoring Tibet's unique cultural and spiritual heritage, often without deserved recognition.
I remember a few years back, when I was acting as the national
spokesperson for Students for a Free Tibet, I was talking with a group
of activists, one of whom tossed off a fatuously dismissive remark
about Thurman’s major achievement being the siring of actress Uma
Thurman. Lhadon Tethong, Executive Director of Students for a Free
Tibet, who overheard the wisecrack, interrupted: “Listen. A few years
back when it was ultra chic to be pro-Tibetan and media coverage was
huge, we had plenty of big-name celebrities who came out to march with
us and speak on our behalf. When the novelty wore off, many of them
moved on. Not Bob. To this day, even if there’s only a handful of
demonstrators who gather in front of the UN to commemorate the March
10, 1959 uprising in Lhasa – if there’s only five of us and we’re
freezing our butts off and there’s no press covering it, Bob Thurman
will be right there freezing his ass off alongside the rest of us.”
For me, character references don’t get better than that.
I
first met Thurman about a decade ago at his summer home in Woodstock,
NY. At the time, I was artistic director of a massive Tibetan murals
project in a Nyingma Tibetan temple in the Catskills. At the same time,
Bob and his wife Nena were working on the layout of their new Manhattan
location for Tibet House on Fifteenth Street. They were looking for
someone to paint the walls for the Dalai Lama’s throne room that was
going to be incorporated into what was then just a raw open space.
Prior commitments prevented me from getting involved with their
project, although after spending the evening in their home I would have
dearly loved to work with them. I was smitten with the family’s
laid-back hospitality, lighthearted bantering, general enthusiasm and
incandescent wit. I was also mesmerized by several thangkas hanging on
their walls, painted by the late Dolpo master Pema Wangyal who, prior
to his death, had taught me how to paint in the Tibetan Buddhist
tradition.
Reading Thurman’s new book, Why the Dalai Lama Matters, just out this
week, published by Atria Books (a division of Simon & Schuster), is
not unlike being invited into his home and being swept up into playful
– but quite serious --repartee, which is the essence of a Thurman
conversation. Part memoir, part dharma teaching, part political
analysis, part Tibetan history, part environmental conservation, part
foreign policy advice for Paramount Leader of the People's Republic of
China Hu Jintao -- Thurman’s voracious appetite for the broad picture
plucks up the reader and hurls him or her across an ocean of topics
with the alacrity of a perfectly pitched stone sliver skipping across a
stilled lake. Long after one reads Why the Dalai Lama Matters, one will
still be gently rocking over the series of concentric waves left in the
stone’s wake.
Above all, this is a book of extreme optimism – utter conviction that
the Dalai Lama’s Middle Path philosophy will prevail over the draconian
efforts of the Chinese to smother the Tibetan spirit. Pessimists may
dismiss this book accordingly, but for the Buddhist practitioner, this
is a work that says yes we can, in spite of the most recent tragedies
that have occurred in the Tibetan Autonomous Regions and neighboring
districts.
From Why the Dalai Lama Matters:
At the time of the brutal crackdown by the Chinese authorities in March
2008, six rounds of such talks had been held, the last one ending
inconclusively, even negatively. During these talks, the People’s
Republic of China government denied there were substantial negotiations
going on and refused to recognize any such entity as the Tibetan
Government in Exile in Dharamsala. Nevertheless, the exile government
took many steps in connection with the worldwide Tibet support movement
to make goodwill gestures toward the Chinese government, such as
seeking to mute protests when People’s Republic of China leaders
traveled to foreign capitals. On their part, the People’s Republic of
China made no such goodwill gestures and instead took aggressive steps,
such as installing super hard-liners to administrate Tibet,
intensifying its anti-Dalai Lama campaign in Tibet, persecuting Tibetan
monks and nuns, demolishing centers of learning, pursuing the Dalai
Lama during his travels and teachings, and pressuring governments not
to grant him visas.
The most recent assaults have been in Nepal
and India, where the Nepalese government in the midst of its own
constitutional crisis has been forced to persecute Tibetan refugees
settled there, turning back new ones from escaping across the border –
a few thousand leave for exile every year in spite of the journey’s
tremendous hardships and dangers – and even blocking the American
government from its humanitarian plan to accept five thousand unsettled
Tibetan refugees. And the Indian government was bluntly told last year
by the People’s Republic of China’s foreign minister that, if India
wanted to be a friend of China, it would expel the Dalai Lama and all
Tibetan refugees, many of whom have been born in India and have lived
there for half a century.
…The frustrations of Tibetans living
in Tibet have built to a boiling point that occasionally erupts into
violence, as occurred in Lhasa and elsewhere in Tibet and China in
March 2008, in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics.
And that is why
I have written this book. It is important for people on all sides to
see the reasons why the Dalai Lama’s nonviolent dialogic approach can
succeed.
For book signing events and further information click here: Why the Dalai Lama Matters
………………………………………………………
