While the world moralises over China's occupation, feudalism and abuse in Tibetan culture has been conveniently forgotten
When I was youger, I would regularly go to my local Buddhist centre to practice Buddhism. But its nihilism, along with being dispassionate, losing desire, and snuffing out the flame of life, wasn't for me at the time. But nowadays I have discovered that the Western translations of the ancient Buddhists texts often got it wrong, and that Buddhism is nowhere near as stark as it seems. Quite the opposite, in fact, so I'm now back into it, but in a gentle way without fundamentalism, and within the Quaker movement.
Anyway, one day I came across an article about Tibetan Buddhism and I was stunned. The Tibetan Buddhists were brutal warlords who run an oppressive cast system and had turned most Tibetans into serfs. The Tibetan monks were the aristocracy who engaged in the brutal suppresion of the population, including using torture. The article said how most Tibetans were pleased that the Chinese had came in to end their oppression.
This article from the Guardian says very much the same thing, but it does mention some Chinese brutality as well.
Tibet seems like as a celestial paradise held in chains, but the west's tendency to romanticise the country's Buddhist culture has distorted our view. Popular belief is that under the Dalai Lama, Tibetans lived contentedly in a spiritual non-violent culture, uncorrupted by lust or greed: but in reality society was far more brutal than that vision.
Last December, Ye Xiaowen, head of China's administration for religious affairs, published a piece in the state-run China Daily newspaper that, although propaganda, rings true. "History clearly reveals that the old Tibet was not the Shangri-La that many imagine", he wrote "but a society under a system of feudal serfdom."
Until 1959, when China cracked down on Tibetan rebels and the Dalai Lama fled to northern India, around 98% of the population was enslaved in serfdom. Drepung monastery, on the outskirts of Lhasa, was one of the world's largest landowners with 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. High-ranking lamas and secular landowners imposed crippling taxes, forced boys into monastic slavery and pilfered most of the country's wealth – torturing disobedient serfs by gouging out their eyes or severing their hamstrings.
The Guardian
Sorrel Neuxx - What we don't hear about Tibet.
I read a book about Tibet as it was in the 1940s, "Seven Years in Tibet", a long time ago, and don't remember anything about Buddhist monks being brutal, but I might be wrong.
ReplyDeleteThe Guardian does of course have a motive for portraying traditional Tibetan culture as brutal, which stems from the fact that the Guardian backs the Africanisation and Islamification of Europe and immigration in general. That gives rise to a slight problem, as follows. The political left is often mocked for romanticising Tibetans' desire to preserve their culture and way of life, while attacking those in the West who want to preserve theirs in the face of migrants from other cultures arriving in large numbers.
That anomaly or apparent self contradiction is removed if traditional Tibetan culture can be shown to be dreadful, and benefiting enormously from immigration.