© Victor
& Victoria Trimondi
The
Shadow of the Dalai Lama – Part II – 4. Social Reality in Ancient Tibet
4. SOCIAL REALITY
IN ANCIENT TIBET
Just how
casual the Tibetans in exile are in dealing with scholarly works on their
history and social reality in ancient Tibet is shown by an example from the
Tibetan Review, the
English-language mouthpiece for the exile community. In April 1991, the
renowned American historian Melvyn C. Goldstein could publish an article in
which he presented for discussion a picture of Tibetan history that
contradicted the official line from Dharamsala. In the
subsequent debate a Tibetan scholar candidly admitted that Goldstein’s
investigations were so well documented „that he is probably correct in his
analysis” — and then the Tibetan continues, „But his presentation has
succeeded in deeply offending most Tibetans” (Tibetan Review, January 1992, p. 18).
Thus, among the exile Tibetan community,
historical truths lead not to a self-critical stance towards their own
history, but rather one was insulted and thus believed oneself justified in
repudiating Goldstein’s works and denigrating them as Chinese propaganda.
(See above all Phintso Thondon’s
article in the May 1991 issue of Tibetan
Review). Goldstein’s reply to the attacks against him addresses what exactly
is to be held of the freedom of opinion among Tibetans in exile: „Mr. Thondon seems to believe that anything which
criticizing or contradicting Tibetan nationalist rhetoric coming out of Dharamsala and Tibetan Support Groups must be
pro-Chinese. His 'rejoinder', therefore, clearly sets out to discredit - a priori - my findings and
observations by creating the impression I have a pro-Chinese bias. In using
tactics resembling those of the McCarthy era in the US, Mr. Thondon takes sentences out of context, distorts meanings, and worse yet, imputes meanings, that were not
there. His response represents the darkest and most unpleasant side of the
Tibetan exile movement” (Tibetan
Review, September 1991, p. 18)
One can safely assume that official statements
from Dharamsala will defame as communist
propaganda every historical
analysis of Tibet which strives for neutrality. To give a further example,
we quote their reaction to A. Tom Grunfeld‘s
well-researched book, The Making of
Modern Tibet. „This book”, a review in the Tibetan Review says, „can only be considered a sophisticated
presentation of Peking’s version of events. Although a lot of
material is included in the book which is often overlooked by pro-Tibetan,
and the author has evidently made an attempt to be impartial [!],his Sinocentric and Marxist
seen to be so extreme that he is quite unable to master them” (Tibetan Review, July 1989, p. 13).
The western image of Tibet
Western observers have in the meantime become more
and more blind to the shadowy sides of the Tibetan
monastic state. In countless recent books and publications the Tibet of old
is depicted as a peaceful state, a sanctuary of calm, the heart of
compassion, an ecological oasis, an island of wisdom, a refuge of
knowledge, a home of the blissful — in short as a lost earthly paradise,
inhabited by enlightened, peace-loving people and mysterious, shining gods.
As early as the 1940s, Marco Pallis praised the
Tibetans as “one of the earth's most civilized
peoples” (quoted by Bishop, 1989, p. 231). “All the residents of Lhasa,
rich and poor, high and low, are peaceful”, we can read in a contemporary
report. “Even the beggars of Lhasa have only to ply their trade for some
time in the morning to get enough food for the day. In the evening they are
all nicely drunk. The people of Lhasa were physically relaxed, mentally
contended and happy. The food of the city is also nutritious. No one has to
strive to make a living. Life takes care of itself, as a matter of course.
Everything is splendid” (quoted by Craig, 1997, pp.86-87).
The Kundun also knows to only report only the most positive
aspects of the past of the Land of Snows: “The continuing influence of
Buddhism produced a society of peace and harmony. We enjoyed freedom and
contentment” (Panorama no. 553,
November 20, 1997, p. 2). Or at another point: “A poor Tibetan had little
cause to envy or be hostile towards the rich lord of his estate, then he
knew that everybody harvested what he had sown in his earlier lives. We
were quite simply happy” (Panorama no.
553, November 20, 1997, p. 2). This image of a poor, deeply religious,
pure, and blissfully happy Tibet has meanwhile become fixed in the
consciousness of millions.
It has become a favored topic in, amongst other
things, the esoteric literature, but above all in the American film
industry. The actor Brad Pitt, who played the role of the German teacher of
the Dalai Lama, Heinrich Harrer, in a
melodramatic story (Seven years in
Tibet), came to the following conclusion once the film had been shot:
“Look at the Tibetans, how poor they are in material terms. And then look
at them, how happy and peaceful they are, and their attitude to life with
which they go their way. This is simply fantastic. It gets under your skin.
It is the hearts of the people which make Tibet into Shangri-La, into
paradise. In America this has become a real movement” (Panorama no. 553, November 20, 1997, p. 1).
Such glorifications have spread like wildfire in
recent years. “The result is a one-sidedly bright
image of spiritual purity”, writes Tibet researcher Peter Bishop. “Many
contemporary western studies go to the great length to avoid confronting
the shadow side of Tibetan spirituality. One can often encounter a
sociological naiveté that stands in stark contrast to claims of scientific
scrutiny” (Bishop, 1993, p. 73).
In contrast, among the majority of the earlier
travelers, the Tibet of old made a deeply negative impression, at least
with respect to its social situation, which are these days all too readily
dismissed as imperialist arrogance and European racism, although identical
criticisms of social conditions were also articulated by admirers of
Tibetan culture. Alexandra David-Neel, for example, was just as repelled by
the general misery of the country as by the corruption of the priestly
caste. Even such a fanatic devotee of the Kalachakra Tantra as
Nicholas Roerich complained about the general decadence in the Tibet of the
time.
Likewise, Heinrich Harrer
does not paint a rosy picture of Lhasa in the forties, but rather depicts
the land as an unjust albeit fascinating anachronism. In his world famous
travelogue, Seven Years in Tibet,
the German mentor of the young Dalai Lama writes: “The power of the monks
in Tibet is unique and can only be compared to a strict dictatorship. They
keep a mistrustful eye on every influence from outside which could threaten
their power. They themselves are clever enough to not believe in the
limitlessness of their strength, but would punish anyone who expressed
doubts about this” (Harrer, 1984, p. 71).
Dozens of such assessments like that of the “Dalai
Lama’s best friend” can be found in the early literature on Tibet. Many visitors
prior to the year 1959 report that dictatorial decisions, the arbitrary use
of power, brainwashing and paranoid belief in demons, spiritual control and
crawling servility, bitterest poverty and oriental wealth, slavery,
serfdom, hunger, diseases, a lack of any hygiene, alcoholism, cruel
punishments, torture, political and private murder, fear and violence,
theft, robbery, and mutual mistrust were everyday features of the kingdom
of the Dalai Lamas. The Chakravartin from Lhasa ruled over a vale of tears.
Of course, these negative conditions in no way
exclude the possibility that the Land of Snows also had oases of peace,
equanimity, erudition, joy, helpfulness, noble-mindedness, or whatever all
the Buddhist virtues may be. But what is peculiar about the current image
of Tibet is that it only stresses its bright sides and simply denies and
represses its shady side.
The social structure of former Tibet
For centuries, the education system, the
administration of finances, jurisdiction, and the police lay in the hands
of monastic officials. Bureaucracy and sacredness have long been compatible
in Asia. Hence we are familiar from the Chinese example with a boring
Confucian heaven of civil servants, inhabited by heavenly emperors and
their ministers, mandarins, scribes and administrators. Such images are
also known in Tibet. We may recall how bureaucratic the administrative
structure of the wonderland of Shambhala was
even imagined to be.
The clerical administration functioned well for as
long as it concerned the immediate affairs of a monastery. But it could
hardly cope with all the state and social political divisions of the
highlands. Western researchers who visited Tibet in the 19th and 20th
centuries thus encountered a completely inflexible administration:
decision-making processes stretched out over weeks, ignorance and timidity
dominated the incapable civil service and nowhere could be anything be attained without bribery. [1]
The social structure of the Tibet of old in no way
corresponded to an ideal-typical model of happy individuals it is so often
depicted as being. Alongside the omnipresent clergy, the country was ruled
by circa 150 to
300 “secular” families. Different groups were distinguished
among the aristocracy. The highest stratum traced their ancestry to the old
Tibetan kings, then followed the members of the Dalai Lamas‘
families. These were ennobled simultaneously with the enthronement
of the new god-king. Every family in the country was proud to have a monk
as a son. For aristocrats, however, it sufficed that the novice spend just
one night in the monastery in order to — for an appropriate fee — be
considered ordained. Equipped with the considerable privileges of a lama he
could then return home.
The absolute majority of the
sedentary population were the “serfs” of a wealthy ruling elite, and
saddled with high taxes. The lives of these Tibetans was
hard and frugal, they were badly nourished and the medical services now
praised in the West were largely unsuccessful. Forms of slavery were known
up until the twentieth century — something which is denied these days by
the Tibetans in exile. As in India there was a caste of untouchables. Among
these were to be counted beggars, prostitutes, blacksmiths (!), fishermen,
musicians and actors. In many parts of the country members of these
stigmatized groups were not even permitted to become monks.
In contrast, the nomads preserved a relative
autonomy, in relation to both the clergy and Chinese or Mongolian invaders.
This was even true of their customs and traditions. For example, the
killing of animals — strictly forbidden in Buddhism — was normal practice
among them. The monks in Lhasa — none of them vegetarians — had the animals
slaughtered by Muslim butchers who thus brought the bad karma from the killings
down upon themselves, then the consumption of meat is not a “sin” for the
Tibetans, but the slaughter of animals decidedly is. The Fourteenth Dalai
Lama, himself a meat-eater for “reasons of health”, nevertheless campaigns
constantly (in the West) for a vegetarian lifestyle.
On the basis of the doctrine of karma, the
privileged strata of the Tibet of old saw their advantages as a reward for
previous good deeds in past lives. Anyone born into the lower castes had a
badly led past life to blame for this and was marked from the outset as a
former villain. Such degrading judgments are still prevalent among the
Tibetans in exile. Rebecca Redwood French reports on a case, for example,
where a child who made strange noises and threw a picture of the Dalai Lamas
to the ground was recognized as the reincarnation of a dog (Redwood French,
1995). One can imagine how easily such classifications could lead to a general
social arrogance and the abuse of power.
Tibetan criminal law
On the basis of a western orientation towards
democracy and human rights, we would have to describe the Tibet of old as a
totalitarian state. The legal system was for three hundred years
unchangingly based upon the Ganden Podrang Codex which was commissioned by the “Great
Fifth”. Yet criminal law was already codified in the thirteenth century by
the Sakyapa sect. It displayed a strong Mongolian
influence, was derived from the Yasa (statute-book) of Genghis Khan, and, like the penal
system of the European Middle Ages, was extremely
cruel. Bizarre mutilations like blindings, the
cutting off of limbs or tearing out of tongues, deliberately allowing
people to freeze to death, the pillory, shackling, yoking, lifelong
imprisonment in damp pits all count as common punishments up until the 20th
century, even after the Thirteenth Dalai Lama had introduced a number of
moderation’s. In 1940, a British envoy still saw „all over Tibet […] men who had
been deprived of an arm or a leg for theft” (Grunfeld,
1996, p.24).
Since
Buddhism fundamentally forbade the killing of a living creature, criminals
were often tortured to the point of death and then left to fend for
themselves. If they now died of the consequences this was purely a matter
of their own karma. These days the power elite in Dharamsala
maintains an embarrassed silence about such
inhuman acts and brushes them aside as Chinese propaganda; western
observers of the Tibet of old and their reports are considered to be
prejudiced and examples of European arrogance. It is truly astonishing how
this obscuration of their own dreadful past by the
lamas in the West has succeeded. And there is a lot of authentic
photographic evidence; a public whipping, which took place in the middle of
Lhasa in 1950 was reproduced in the American
magazine, Life, for example (Life, November 13, 1950, pp.
130–136).
The punishment of criminal delinquents was by no
means confined to this world, rather the monks condemned people to millions
(!) of years in the most dreadful hells, more grotesque and sadistic even
than their counterparts in the Christian Middle Ages. Voltaire’s cry of
“Remember your cruelties”, by which he primarily meant the politics of the
Christian clergy and with which he launched his struggle for human rights,
ought to be heard in Dharamsala as well!
Equality before the law varied in Tibet according
to social status and wealth. For a murder, one had to pay a so-called “life
tax” (mistong)
to the surviving dependents and could thus avoid criminal prosecution.
According to a statement from one of the current Dalai Lama’s brothers,
this practice was still being followed in the mid-twentieth century. The
price was naturally related to the status of the victim. Hence, in the
fifties the life of a high monastic official was worth between US $8,000
and $10,000. (Grunfeld, 1996, p. 24). For the
murder of a woman from the lower castes, 10 Liang (about 11 ounces) of
silver was to be paid.
Clerical commerce
The Buddhist clergy was also commercially active
and the most important monasteries were regarded as significant trading
centers. The lamas even dealt in credit. Production was mostly devotional
objects which the monks usually manufactured themselves: holy images,
statuettes of gods, amulets, and similar things. As services, soothsaying, astrology,
and the performance of all manner of rituals were offered for sale. A
further source of income was mendicancy. Bands of monks were dispatched
through the country to collect donations. They often returned with great
cargoes. The rent for a domestic cell within a monastery had to be paid by
the monk’s relatives. If this was not possible, then the novice had to earn
his keep. Franz Michael thus referred to the Tibetan monastery as a „private,
profit-making, ‘capitalist’ enterprise. It was capitalist in the sense that
the manager’s [the administrator of the monastery] aim was clearly and
admittedly to make the greatest possible profit for its owner, the
incarnation [of the abbot]“ (Michael, 1982, p.
49).
The Lamaist dispensaries
bloomed splendidly. The excreta (stools and urine) of higher tulkus were manufactured into pills and sold as
valuable medicines. The supreme palliative was of course the excrement of
the “living Buddha” (Kundun).
When the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was staying in China, his chamberlain
collected his excrement daily in a golden pot so as to then send it to
Lhasa to be manufactured into a medication (Grunfeld,
1996, p. 22).
Traditional Tibetan medicine, now on offer
worldwide, and which the western admirers claim can cure cancer, had to be
content with less success in its home country. The majority of the
population suffered from sexual diseases. Smallpox was widespread
and even the Thirteenth Dalai Lama fell victim to it.
Political intrigue
There is no question that the lamas constantly
employed their charismatic religious aura to amass worldly power and to
generate personal grandeur. “The original Buddha teaching”, Matthias Hermanns writes, “of the 'flight from worldly life‘ was transformed into the Machiavellian principle
of unrestrained, moral-free power politics” (Hermanns,
1956, p. 372). Only the monks would never have called it this. It was a
part of their ruling ideology to present every expression, no matter how
secular and decadent, as the decision of a deity.
An important instrument of Tibetan power politics
was the political intrigue. This is admittedly a universal phenomenon, but
in Tibet it developed such a high status because the worldly resources
available to the lamas were barely adequate to the task of controlling central
Asia. Above all there was only a rudimentary army. Hence, time and again it
was necessary to seek armed allies, or to play armed opponents off against
one another. The great abbots, regents and Dalai Lamas have made extensive
use of these strategies over the course of history. They were masters of
the game of political intrigue and were for this reason as much feared by
the Chinese emperors as the Mongolian Khans.
Poison and assassinations dominated even the
internal Lamaist scene. Not all “living Buddhas” reached the age at which they could govern. As
we have already described above, the four divine children (the Ninth to
Twelfth Dalai Lamas) fell victim to powerful cliques within the clerical
establishment. The great abbots were especially feared because of their
magical abilities which they employed against their enemies. Alongside the
authority of state, magic was the other significant control mechanism of
which constant use was made. It played a more important role at an elevated
political level than the bureaucratic administration and international
diplomacy.
More recent developments
in the historical image
The marked differences of opinion in the
assessment of the Land of Snows and its culture are not just a product of
the western imagination, but must likewise be explained in terms of a
gaping disparity between Lamaism’s own ideal-typical claims and an
“underdeveloped” social reality. A devout Tibetan Buddhist tends to have
his eyes fixed upon the ideals of his doctrine (Dharma) and to be blind to
the social realities of his country. This is almost always true when the
Tibet of old is concerned. As Tantric, the “law of inversion” also grants
him the possibility of seeing all that is bad and imperfect in his
surroundings as the formative material for the work of spiritual
transformation, then according to logic of inversion Vajrayana makes the base
social reality into an element of the becoming whole, into the prima materia
of the tantric experiment.
It goes without saying that the lamas thankfully adopted
the western ideal-world vision of a peaceful and spiritual Tibet. They
combined this with images of paradise from their own, Buddhist mythology
and added historical events from the times of the Tibetan kings to the mix.
The result was the picture of a society in which all people had lived
happily since time immemorial, with a smile on their face night and day.
All the needs of a meaningful human existence could be filled in the Tibet
of old; nothing was lacking. Everyone respected all others. Humans,
animals, and nature lived together peacefully with respect. The ecological
balance was assured. The Tibetan kings ruled like goodly fathers and the
ecclesiastical princes followed in their stead. Then came the Chinese
military with guns and artillery, enslaved the people, tortured the
priests, destroyed the culture and planned to totally exterminate the
Tibetan race.
With such or similar images, the Fourteenth Dalai
Lama has up until most recently largely succeeded in implanting the image
of a pure, noble, humane, ecological, spiritually highly developed Tibet,
this stronghold against materialism and inhumanity, in the awareness of the
world’s public. Even the German news magazine, Der Spiegel, normally extremely critical of such matters, becomes
rapturous: “Tibet as a symbol of the good, as the last stronghold of
spirituality, where wisdom and harmony are preserved, while the world lies
in darkness and chaos: Has the 'Roof of the World' become a projection of
all our longings? What is the secret behind the western fascination with
this distant land, its religion and its god-king?” (Spiegel, 16/1998, p. 110).
But under the pressure of the vehement critique of
the history of the country which has been building since 1996, and which can
table indisputable evidence, in Dharamsala one is
also becoming more careful of unrestrainedly glorifying the Tibet of old.
For this reason the Dalai Lama ever more often now employs the handy
formula that Tibet, like all nations, has its good sides and its bad sides;
the future will, however, only stress the good. That is more or less all.
Hence, the shadows which cast their pall over the history of the Land of
Snows are only referred to in very general terms — roughly in the sense
that where there is much light there is also much darkness.
It is not our task here to offer an assessment of
the improvements much praised by the Chinese which they claim to have
brought to the medieval country. We personally believe that in social terms
the Tibetan people today live better than they did under the rule of
Lamaism. But we in no sense mean by this that the current social situation
in the Land of Snows is ideal. We hold many of the accusations and
criticisms leveled at Beijing’s “minority politics” by the Tibetans in
exile to be thoroughly relevant. It can also not be denied that resistance
to China is today growing among the Tibetans and that it primarily makes
use of religious arguments. Like everywhere in the world, there has also
been a religious renaissance on “roof of the world” since the mid-eighties.
We see a problem in this Lamaist revival, not in
the Tibetan democracy movement. What is peculiar and confusing about the
political situation is, however, that the clerical revival itself very
successfully pretends to be the democracy movement, and manipulates the
awareness of both the Tibetans and the West with this deception.
Footnotes:
Next
Chapter:
5. BUDDHOCRACY AND ANARCHY: CONTRADICTORY OR
COMPLEMENTARY?
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