"Dr. Zarkov" <Ming@Mongo.com> wrote

Jez wrote:

Plan for Dalai Lama lecture angers neuroscientists

It would be more accurate to say "angers Chinese"

David Adam, science correspondent
Wednesday July 27, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1536580,00.html

The Dalai Lama is at the centre of an unholy row among scientists
over his plans to deliver a lecture at a prominent neuroscience
conference.

His talk stems from a growing interest in how Buddhist meditation may
affect the brain, but researchers who dismiss such studies as little
more than mumbo-jumbo say they will boycott the Society for
Neuroscience annual meeting in November if it goes ahead.

Jianguo Gu, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida who has
helped to organise a petition against the Dalai Lama's lecture, said:
"I don't think it's appropriate to have a prominent religious leader
at a scientific event.

"The Dalai Lama basically says the body and mind can be separated
and
passed to other people. There are no scientific grounds for that.
We'll be talking about cells and molecules and he's going to talk
about something that isn't there."

** Dr Gu and many of the scientists who initiated the protest are of
Chinese origin, but say their concern are not related to politics.
The Dalai Lama has lived in exile in India since he fled Chinese
troops in Tibet in 1959. **

The Chinese understandably don't like any reference to their seizure
of Tibet and brutal suppression of Tibetan culture.

Another fool who thinks Tibet was some kind of monastic paradise......

http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html

Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth
July 2004 (updated)

The histories of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam are heavily
laced with violence. Throughout the ages, religionists have claimed a
divine mandate to massacre infidels, heretics, and even other devotees
within their own ranks. Some people maintain that Buddhism is different,
that it stands in marked contrast to the chronic violence of other
religions. To be sure, for some practitioners in the West, Buddhism is
more a spiritual and psychological discipline than a theology in the
usual sense. It offers meditative techniques that are said to promote
enlightenment and harmony within oneself. But like any other belief
system, Buddhism must be judged not only by its teachings but by the
secular behavior of its proponents. Buddhist Exceptionalism?

A glance at history reveals that Buddhist organizations have not been
free of the violent pursuits so characteristic of religious groups. In
Tibet, from the early seventeenth century well into the eighteenth,
competing Buddhist sects engaged in armed hostilities and summary
executions.1 In the twentieth century, in Thailand, Burma, Korea, Japan,
and elsewhere, Buddhists clashed with each other and with nonBuddhists.
In Sri Lanka, armed battles in the name of Buddhism are part of
Sinhalese history.2

Just a few years ago in South Korea, thousands of monks of the Chogye
Buddhist order fought each other with fists, rocks, fire-bombs, and
clubs, in pitched battles that went on for weeks. They were vying for
control of the order, the largest in South Korea, with its annual budget
of $9.2 million, its additional millions of dollars in property, and the
privilege of appointing 1,700 monks to various duties. The brawls partly
destroyed the main Buddhist sanctuaries and left dozens of monks
injured, some seriously. The Korean public appeared to disdain both
factions, feeling that no matter what side took control, "it would use
worshippers' donations for luxurious houses and expensive cars."3

But what of the Dalai Lama and the Tibet he presided over before the
Chinese crackdown in 1959? It is widely held by many devout Buddhists
that Old Tibet was a spiritually oriented kingdom free from the
egotistical lifestyles, empty materialism, and corrupting vices that
beset modern industrialized society. Western news media, travel books,
novels, and Hollywood films have portrayed the Tibetan theocracy as a
veritable Shangri-La.

The Dalai Lama himself stated that "the pervasive influence of Buddhism"
in Tibet, "amid the wide open spaces of an unspoiled environment
resulted in a society dedicated to peace and harmony. We enjoyed freedom
and contentment."4 A reading of Tibet's history suggests a different
picture. In the thirteenth century, Emperor Kublai Khan created the
first Grand Lama, who was to preside over all the other lamas as might a
pope over his bishops. Several centuries later, the Emperor of China
sent an army into Tibet to support the Grand Lama, an ambitious
25-year-old man, who then gave himself the title of Dalai (Ocean) Lama,
ruler of all Tibet. Here is quite a historical irony: the first Dalai
Lama was installed by a Chinese army.

To elevate his authority beyond worldly challenge, the first Dalai Lama
seized monasteries that did not belong to his sect, and is believed to
have destroyed Buddhist writings that conflicted with his claim to
divinity. The Dalai Lama who succeeded him pursued a sybaritic life,
enjoying many mistresses, partying with friends, and acting in other
ways deemed unfitting for an incarnate deity. For this he was done in by
his priests. Within 170 years, despite their recognized status as gods,
five Dalai Lamas were murdered by their high priests or other
courtiers.5 Shangri-La (for Lords and Lamas)

Religions have had a close relationship not only with violence but with
economic exploitation. Indeed, it is often the economic exploitation
that necessitates the violence. Such was the case with the Tibetan
theocracy. Until 1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet,
most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked
by serfs. Even a writer sympathetic to the old order allows that "a
great deal of real estate belonged to the monasteries, and most of them
amassed great riches. . . . In addition, individual monks and lamas were
able to accumulate great wealth through active participation in trade,
commerce, and money lending."6 Drepung monastery was one of the biggest
landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great
pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries went mostly
to the higher-ranking lamas, many of them scions of aristocratic
families.

Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the
commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, who owned 4,000 square
kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. He also was a member of the Dalai
Lama's lay Cabinet.7 Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some of its
Western admirers as "a nation that required no police force because its
people voluntarily observed the laws of karma."8 In fact. it had a
professional army, albeit a small one, that served as a gendarmerie for
the landlords to keep order and hunt down runaway serfs.

Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their families and brought
into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they became
bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for
peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He
himself was a victim of repeated rape, beginning at age nine.9 The
monastic estates also conscripted impoverished peasant children for
lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.

In Old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind
of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed
the "middle-class" families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small
traders. Thousands of others were beggars. A small minority were slaves,
usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born
into slavery.10 The greater part of the rural population---some 700,000
of an estimated total of 1,250,000---were serfs. Serfs and other
peasants generally were little better than slaves. They went without
schooling or medical care. They spent most of their time laboring for
high-ranking lamas or for the secular landed aristocracy. Their masters
told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not
get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might
easily be separated from their families should their owners send them to
work in a distant location.11

One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: "Pretty serf
girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he
wished." They "were just slaves without rights."12 Serfs needed
permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture
those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese
intervention as a "liberation." He claimed that under serfdom he was
subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed
escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord's men until blood poured
from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on
his wounds to increase the pain.13

The serfs were under a lifetime bond to work the lord's land---or the
monastery's land---without pay, to repair the lord's houses, transport
his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide
carrying animals and transportation on demand.14 They were taxed upon
getting married, taxed for the birth of each child, and for every death
in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for
keeping animals. There were taxes for religious festivals, for singing,
dancing, drumming, and bell ringing. People were taxed for being sent to
prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed
for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search
of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the
monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts
were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not
meet their obligations risked being placed into slavery sometimes for
the rest of their lives.15

The theocracy's religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor
and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon
themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they
had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic
atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve upon being
reborn. The rich and powerful of course treated their good fortune as a
reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives.
Torture and Mutilation
In the Dalai Lama's Tibet, torture and mutilation---including eye
gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation--were
favored punishments inflicted upon runaway serfs and thieves. Journeying
through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former
serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a
monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand
mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: "When
a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in
religion."16 Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life,
some offenders were severely lashed and then "left to God" in the
freezing night to die. "The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe
are striking," concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet.17

In 1959, Anna Louise Strong visited an exhibition of torture equipment
that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all
sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting
off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, and breaking off hands. There were
instruments for slicing off kneecaps and heels, or hamstringing legs.
There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for
disemboweling.18

The exhibition presented photographs and testimonies of victims who had
been blinded or crippled or suffered amputations for thievery. There was
the shepherd whose master owed him a reimbursement in yuan and wheat but
refused to pay. So he took one of the master's cows; for this he had his
hands severed. Another herdsman, who opposed having his wife taken from
him by his lord, had his hands broken off. There were pictures of
Communist activists with noses and upper lips cut off, and a woman who
was raped and then had her nose sliced away.19

Early visitors to Tibet comment about the theocratic despotism. In 1895,
an Englishman, Dr. A. L. Waddell, wrote that the populace was under the
"intolerable tyranny of monks" and the devil superstitions they had
fashioned to terrorize the people. In 1904 Perceval Landon described the
Dalai Lama's rule as "an engine of oppression." At about that time,
another English traveler, Captain W.F.T. O'Connor, observed that "the
great landowners and the priests . . . exercise each in their own
dominion a despotic power from which there is no appeal," while the
people are "oppressed by the most monstrous growth of monasticism and
priest-craft." Tibetan rulers "invented degrading legends and stimulated
a spirit of superstition" among the common people. In 1937, another
visitor, Spencer Chapman, wrote, "The Lamaist monk does not spend his
time in ministering to the people or educating them. . . . The beggar
beside the road is nothing to the monk. Knowledge is the jealously
guarded prerogative of the monasteries and is used to increase their
influence and wealth."20 Occupation and Revolt

The Chinese Communists occupied Tibet in 1951, claiming suzerainty over
that country. The 1951 treaty provided for ostensible self-government
under the Dalai Lama's rule but gave China military control and
exclusive right to conduct foreign relations. The Chinese were also
granted a direct role in internal administration "to promote social
reforms." At first, they moved slowly, relying mostly on persuasion in
an attempt to effect change. Among the earliest reforms they wrought was
to reduce usurious interest rates, and build a few hospitals and roads.
"Contrary to popular belief in the West," writes one observer, the
Chinese "took care to show respect for Tibetan culture and religion." No
aristocratic or monastic property was confiscated, and feudal lords
continued to reign over their hereditarily bound peasants.21

The Tibetan lords and lamas had seen Chinese come and go over the
centuries and had enjoyed good relations with Generalissimo Chiang
Kaishek and his reactionary Kuomintang rule in China.22 The approval of
the Kuomintang government was needed to validate the choice of the Dalai
Lama and Panchen Lama. When the young Dalai Lama was installed in Lhasa,
it was with an armed escort of Chinese troops and an attending Chinese
minister, in accordance with centuries-old tradition. What upset the
Tibetan lords and lamas was that these latest Chinese were Communists.
It would be only a matter of time, they feared, before the Communists
started imposing their collectivist egalitarian solutions upon Tibet.

In 1956-57, armed Tibetan bands ambushed convoys of the Chinese Peoples
Liberation Army (PLA). The uprising received extensive assistance from
the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), including military training,
support camps in Nepal, and numerous airlifts.23 Meanwhile in the United
States, the American Society for a Free Asia, a CIA front, energetically
publicized the cause of Tibetan resistance, with the Dalai Lama's eldest
brother, Thubtan Norbu, playing an active role in that group. The Dalai
Lama's second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup, established an intelligence
operation with the CIA in 1951. He later upgraded it into a CIA-trained
guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet.24

Many Tibetan commandos and agents whom the CIA dropped into the country
were chiefs of aristocratic clans or the sons of chiefs. Ninety percent
of them were never heard from again, according to a report from the CIA
itself, meaning they were most likely captured and killed.25 "Many lamas
and lay members of the elite and much of the Tibetan army joined the
uprising, but in the main the populace did not, assuring its failure,"
writes Hugh Deane.26 In their book on Tibet, Ginsburg and Mathos reach a
similar conclusion: "As far as can be ascertained, the great bulk of the
common people of Lhasa and of the adjoining countryside failed to join
in the fighting against the Chinese both when it first began and as it
progressed."27 Eventually the resistance crumbled. Enter the Communists

Whatever wrongs and new oppressions introduced by the Chinese in Tibet,
after 1959 they did abolish slavery and the serfdom system of unpaid
labor, and put an end to floggings, mutilations, and amputations as a
form of criminal punishment. They eliminated the many crushing taxes,
started work projects, and greatly reduced unemployment and beggary.
They established secular education, thereby breaking the educational
monopoly of the monasteries. And they constructed running water and
electrical systems in Lhasa.28

Heinrich Harrer (later revealed to have been a sergeant in Hitler's SS)
wrote a bestseller about his experiences in Tibet that was made into a
popular Hollywood movie. He reported that the Tibetans who resisted the
Chinese "were predominantly nobles, semi-nobles and lamas; they were
punished by being made to perform the lowliest tasks, such as laboring
on roads and bridges. They were further humiliated by being made to
clean up the city before the tourists arrived." They also had to live in
a camp originally reserved for beggars and vagrants.29

By 1961, the Chinese expropriated the landed estates owned by lords and
lamas, and reorganized the peasants into hundreds of communes. They
distributed hundreds of thousands of acres to tenant farmers and
landless peasants. Herds once owned by nobility were turned over to
collectives of poor shepherds. Improvements were made in the breeding of
livestock, and new varieties of vegetables and new strains of wheat and
barley were introduced, along with irrigation improvements, all of which
reportedly led to an increase in agrarian production.30

Many peasants remained as religious as ever, giving alms to the clergy.
But the many monks who had been conscripted into the religious orders as
children were now free to renounce the monastic life, and thousands did,
especially the younger ones. The remaining clergy lived on modest
government stipends, and extra income earned by officiating at prayer
services, weddings, and funerals.31

Both the Dalai Lama and his advisor and youngest brother, Tendzin
Choegyal, claimed that "more than 1.2 million Tibetans are dead as a
result of the Chinese occupation."32 But the official 1953 census---six
years before the Chinese crackdown---recorded the entire population
residing in Tibet at 1,274,000.33 Other census counts put the ethnic
Tibetan population within the country at about two million. If the
Chinese killed 1.2 million in the early 1960s then whole cities and huge
portions of the countryside, indeed almost all of Tibet, would have been
depopulated, transformed into a killing field dotted with death camps
and mass graves---of which we have not seen evidence. The thinly
distributed Chinese military force in Tibet was not big enough to round
up, hunt down, and exterminate that many people even if it had spent all
its time doing nothing else.

Chinese authorities do admit to "mistakes," particularly during the
1966-76 Cultural Revolution when religious persecution reached a high
tide in both China and Tibet. After the uprising in the late 1950s,
thousands of Tibetans were incarcerated. During the Great Leap Forward,
forced collectivization and grain farming was imposed on the peasantry,
sometimes with disastrous effect. In the late 1970s, China began
relaxing controls over Tibet "and tried to undo some of the damage
wrought during the previous two decades."34

In 1980, the Chinese government initiated reforms reportedly designed to
grant Tibet a greater degree of self-rule and self-administration.
Tibetans would now be allowed to cultivate private plots, sell their
harvest surpluses, decide for themselves what crops to grow, and keep
yaks and sheep. Communication with the outside world was again
permitted, and frontier controls were eased to permit Tibetans to visit
exiled relatives in India and Nepal.35

In the 1990s, the Han, the ethnic group comprising over 95 percent of
China's immense population, began moving in substantial numbers into
Tibet and various western provinces. On the streets of Lhasa and
Shigatse, signs of Han preeminence are readily visible. Chinese run the
factories and many of the shops and vending stalls. Tall office
buildings and large shopping centers have been built with funds that
might have been better spent on water treatment plants and housing.
Chinese cadres in Tibet too often view their Tibetan neighbors as
backward and lazy, in need of economic development and "patriotic
education." During the 1990s Tibetan government employees suspected of
harboring nationalist sympathies were purged from office, and campaigns
were launched to discredit the Dalai Lama. Individual Tibetans
reportedly were subjected to arrest, imprisonment, and forced labor for
carrying out separatist activities and engaging in political
"subversion." Some arrestees were held in administrative detention
without adequate food, water, and blankets, subjected to threats,
beatings, and other mistreatment.36

Chinese family planning regulations allow a three-child limit for
Tibetan families. (For years there was a one-child limit for Han
families.) If a couple goes over the limit, the excess children can be
denied subsidized daycare, health care, housing, and education. These
penalties have been enforced irregularly and vary by district.
Meanwhile, Tibetan history, culture, and religion are slighted in
schools. Teaching materials, though translated into Tibetan, focus on
Chinese history and culture.37 Elites, Émigrés, and the CIA

For the rich lamas and lords, the Communist intervention was a calamity.
Most of them fled abroad, as did the Dalai Lama himself, who was
assisted in his flight by the CIA. Some discovered to their horror that
they would have to work for a living. However, throughout the 1960s, the
Tibetan exile community was secretly pocketing $1.7 million a year from
the CIA, according to documents released by the State Department in
1998. Once this fact was publicized, the Dalai Lama's organization
itself issued a statement admitting that it had received millions of
dollars from the CIA during the 1960s to send armed squads of exiles
into Tibet to undermine the Maoist revolution. The Dalai Lama's annual
payment from the CIA was $186,000. Indian intelligence also financed
both him and other Tibetan exiles. He has refused to say whether he or
his brothers worked for the CIA. The agency has also declined to
comment.38

In 1995, the News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina, carried a
frontpage color photograph of the Dalai Lama being embraced by the
reactionary Republican senator Jesse Helms, under the headline "Buddhist
Captivates Hero of Religious Right."39 In April 1999, along with
Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and the first George Bush, the
Dalai Lama called upon the British government to release Augusto
Pinochet, the former fascist dictator of Chile and a longtime CIA client
who had been apprehended while visiting England. The Dalai Lama urged
that Pinochet not be forced to go to Spain where he was wanted to stand
trial for crimes against humanity.

Today, mostly through the National Endowment for Democracy and other
conduits that are more respectable-sounding than the CIA, the US
Congress continues to allocate an annual $2 million to Tibetans in
India, with additional millions for "democracy activities" within the
Tibetan exile community. The Dalai Lama also gets money from financier
George Soros, who now runs the CIA-created Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty and other institutes.40 The Question of Culture

We are told that when the Dalai Lama ruled Tibet, the people lived in
contented and tranquil symbiosis with their monastic and secular lords,
in a social order sustained by a deeply spiritual, nonviolent culture,
inspired by humane and pacific religious teachings. The Tibetan
religious culture was the social glue and comforting balm that kept rich
lama and poor peasant spiritually bonded together, to maintain those
proselytes who embrace Old Tibet as a cultural purity, a Shangri-La.

One is reminded of the idealized imagery of feudal Europe presented by
latter-day conservative Catholics such as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire
Belloc. For them, medieval Christendom was a world of contented peasants
living in a deep spiritual bond with their Church, under the protection
of their lords.41 Again we are invited to accept a particular culture on
its own terms, which means accepting it as presented by its favored
class, by those at the top who profited most from it. The Shangri-La
image of Tibet bears no more resemblance to historic reality than does
the romanticized image of medieval Europe.

When seen in all its grim realities, Old Tibet confirms the view
expressed earlier in this book that culture is anything but neutral.
Culture can operate as a legitimating cover for a host of grave
injustices, benefiting some portion of a society's population at great
cost to other segments. In theocratic Tibet, ruling interests
manipulated the traditional culture to fortify their wealth and power.
The theocracy equated rebellious thought and action with satanic
influence. It propagated the general presumption of landlord superiority
and peasant unworthiness. The rich were represented as deserving their
good life, and the poor as deserving their mean lowly existence, all
codified in teachings about the karmic residues of virtues and vices
accumulated from past lives, all presented as part of God's will.

It might be said that we denizens of the modern secular world cannot
grasp the equations of happiness and pain, contentment and custom, that
characterize more traditionally spiritual societies. This is probably
true, and it may explain why some of us idealize such societies. But
still, a gouged eye is a gouged eye; a flogging is a flogging; and the
grinding exploitation of serfs and slaves is a brutal class injustice
whatever its cultural wrapping. There is a difference between a
spiritual bond and human bondage, even when both exist side by side

Many ordinary Tibetans want the Dalai Lama back in their country, but it
appears that relatively few want a return to the social order he
represented. A 1999 story in the Washington Post notes that he continues
to be revered in Tibet, but

. . . few Tibetans would welcome a return of the corrupt
aristocratic clans that fled with him in 1959 and that comprise the
bulk of his advisers. Many Tibetan farmers, for example, have no
interest in surrendering the land they gained during China's land
reform to the clans. Tibet's former slaves say they, too, don't want
their former masters to return to power. "I've already lived that
life once before," said Wangchuk, a 67-year-old former slave who was
wearing his best clothes for his yearly pilgrimage to Shigatse, one
of the holiest sites of Tibetan Buddhism. He said he worshipped the
Dalai Lama, but added, "I may not be free under Chinese communism,
but I am better off than when I was a slave."42

Kim Lewis, who studied healing methods with a Buddhist monk in Berkeley,
California, had occasion to talk at length with more than a dozen
Tibetan women who lived in the monk's building. When she asked how they
felt about returning to their homeland, the sentiment was unanimously
negative. At first, Lewis thought their reluctance had to do with the
Chinese occupation, but they quickly informed her otherwise. They said
they were extremely grateful "not to have to marry 4 or 5 men, be
pregnant almost all the time," or deal with sexually transmitted
diseases contacted from a straying husband. The younger women "were
delighted to be getting an education, wanted absolutely nothing to do
with any religion, and wondered why Americans were so naive." They
recounted stories of their grandmothers' ordeals with monks who used
them as "wisdom consorts," telling them "how much merit they were
gaining by providing the 'means to enlightenment'-- after all, the
Buddha had to be with a woman to reach enlightenment."

The women interviewed by Lewis spoke bitterly about the monastery's
confiscation of their young boys in Tibet. When a boy cried for his
mother, he would be told "Why do you cry for her, she gave you up -
she's just a woman." Among the other issues was "the rampant
homosexuality in the Gelugpa sect. All was not well in Shangri-la,"
Lewis opines."43

The monks who were granted political asylum in California applied for
Social Security. Lewis, herself a devotee for a time, assisted with the
paperwork. She observes that they continue to receive Social Security
checks amounting to $550 to $700 per month along with Medicare and
MediCal. In addition, the monks reside rent free in nicely furnished
apartments. "They pay no utilities, have free access to the Internet on
computers provided for them, along with fax machines, free cell and home
phones and cable TV." In addition, they receive a monthly payment from
their order. And the dharma center takes up a special collection from
its members (all Americans), separate from membership dues. Some members
eagerly carry out chores for the monks, including grocery shopping and
cleaning their apartments and toilets. These same holy men "have no
problem criticizing Americans for their 'obsession with material
things."44

To support the Chinese overthrow of the old feudal theocracy is not to
applaud everything about Chinese rule in Tibet. This point is seldom
understood by today's Shangri-La adherents in the West.

The converse is also true. To denounce the Chinese occupation does not
mean we have to romanticize the former feudal régime. One common
complaint among Buddhist followers in the West is that Tibet's religious
culture is being undermined by the occupation. Indeed this seems to be
the case. Many of the monasteries are closed, and the theocracy has
passed into history. What I am questioning here is the supposedly
admirable and pristinely spiritual nature of that pre-invasion culture.
In short, we can advocate religious freedom and independence for Tibet
without having to embrace the mythology of a Paradise Lost.

Finally, it should be noted that the criticism posed herein is not
intended as a personal attack on the Dalai Lama. Whatever his past
associations with the CIA and various reactionaries, he speaks often of
peace, love, and nonviolence. And he himself really cannot be blamed for
the abuses of the ancien régime, having been but 15 years old when he
fled into exile. In 1994, in an interview with Melvyn Goldstein, he went
on record as favoring since his youth the building of schools,
"machines," and roads in his country. He claims that he thought the
corvée (forced unpaid serf labor for the lord's benefit) and certain
taxes imposed on the peasants were "extremely bad." And he disliked the
way people were saddled with old debts sometimes passed down from
generation to generation.45 Furthermore, he now proposes democracy for
Tibet, featuring a written constitution, a representative assembly, and
other democratic essentials.46

In 1996, the Dalai Lama issued a statement that must have had an
unsettling effect on the exile community. It reads in part as follows:

Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism
is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only
with gain and profitability. Marxism is concerned with the
distribution of wealth on an equal basis and the equitable
utilization of the means of production. It is also concerned with
the fate of the working classes-that is the majority---as well as
with the fate of those who are underprivileged and in need, and
Marxism cares about the victims of minority-imposed exploitation.
For those reasons the system appeals to me, and it seems fair. . . I
think of myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist.47

And more recently in 2001, while visiting California, he remarked that
"Tibet, materially, is very, very backward. Spiritually it is quite
rich. But spirituality can't fill our stomachs."48 Here is a message
that should be heeded by the well-fed Buddhist proselytes in the West
who wax nostalgic for Old Tibet.

What I have tried to challenge is the Tibet myth, the Paradise Lost
image of a social order that actually was a retrograde theocracy of
serfdom and poverty, where a favored few lived high and mighty off the
blood, sweat, and tears of the many. It was a long way from Shangri-La.

See URL for references......