The Great Debaters

(at Asia Society)

A random piece I wrote a while ago reflecting on Geshe Thupten Jinpa’s and Daniel Purdue’s talk at Asia Society on the Tibetan Debate Tradition. It’s incomplete but as it’s just languishing on my laptop, I figured it’s better to just put it up as it is.

On April 29, 2011, Geshe Thupten Jinpa, official interpreter for His Holiness and the founder and president of Institute of Tibetan Classics in Montreal, and Daniel Purdue, the author of Debate in Tibetan Buddhism, gave a talk on the Tibetan debate tradition at Asia Society. It was fascinating and my friends and I just sat thrilled through the whole talk. I just didn’t know much about this tradition at all, except that it’s a Socratic system where you try to arrive at the truth through reasoning and that the person on the ground, answering to his opponent’s questions, only has a choice of four answers. And it seemed particularly poor not to know much about the debate tradition, because it is the primary mode of critical inquiry in the primary institutions of learning in Tibet – the monasteries.

So apparently the Tibetan debate tradition came from the Indian. In fact, it was really just constructed by one man, Charpa Choje, in the 12^th century at Sangpu Monastery, who took Dharmakirti’s Pramanavartika and extracted and adapted the form of debate, including the very specific debating language.

And I don’t know because the speakers didn’t directly speak about this, but it seemed to me like since then there really hasn’t been many upgrades to this form and it has sort of carried on, this very structured, arcane language, without many changes which is one big reason that I certainly can’t understand any debate that goes on in a debating courtyard. Another of course is that a lot of the debating is done by Kham and Amdo monks whose unfamiliar accent is coupled with the specific debate language, and they might as well be speaking Esperanto.

Actually seeing Thupten Jinpa with Daniel Purdue (after the talks and before the Q&A, they staged a display of debate in English!), that was the first that I have ever been able to see the process, and I was awed and amazed because it is really $%##&(*@ awesome! It was like the Socratic dialogues, which usually start with Socrates picking a poor guy, asking a simple harmless question, asking a follow-up question to his answer, probing deeper into his answer and gradually just taking this guy apart in the most reasonable, mild and brilliant display of intelligence - well that was what Thupten Jinpa’s debate with Daniel Purdue was like.

They decided for Thupten Jinpa to take the challenger’s position and so he asked Daniel Purdue if compassion and justice were the same. DP said, no, not necessarily and it went on from there. I wish I remembered the specific twists and turns and counter turns in the argument but my memory fails.

It was like chess, but with words instead of chess pieces, so that much more challenging. Imagine if Gary Kasparov had to announce his moves instead of actually making them, where they can be tracked, on the chess board. It’s the ultimate mental exercise.

It was just wonderful. And I was seeing this debate conducted in English, not in the home tongue of the Tibetan debate, Tibetan, in which the arguments would flow that much smoother, being assisted by built-in linguistic props and tools. A fierce debate in Tibetan must be that much more intimidating and awe-inspiring.

* An info sheet prepared by Daniel Purdue on Tibetan debate can be found here http://asiasociety.org/countries/traditions/tibetan-buddhist-debate?order=ASC

Tibetan Fish Curry: My Take on Groupon's Tibet Ad

I saw the Groupon Tibet ad online the night of the Superbowl, Sunday night a couple of weeks ago. The thirty second ad started with a shot of the Potala and went:

“Mountainous Tibet, one of the most beautiful places in the world.

This is Timothy Hutton. The people of Tibet are in trouble, their very culture is in jeopardy. But they still whip up an amazing fish curry. And since two hundred of us bought at groupon.com, we are getting thirty dollars worth of Tibetan food for just thirteen dollars at Himalayan restaurant in Chicago.”

What a weird, strange ad, I thought. Tibetans don’t eat fish curry, and that Himalayan restaurant looks Indian, and that supposedly Tibetan guy looks Nepalese or Sikkimese and also constipated.

So I was bemused and I was confused because I thought, “This cannot be the Superbowl ad.” The ad didn’t look like a $3 million dollar ad. The ad looked, frankly, a bit cheap. And I don’t cheap in the sense of “This belittles the Tibet issue” because I don’t think it did that but cheap in the sense of “This can’t have cost anything to make”. Why would you pay so much to sell something that doesn’t look very expensive? 

But I was not offended and I was not outraged. If anything, I was just a little bit excited that a Groupon ad featured Tibet. And a little bit awed that Groupon didn’t sugarcoat the opening lines to suit the Chinese palate: “The people of Tibet are in trouble; their very culture is in jeopardy.”

In Tibet circles, this is a big deal. It’s huge. A company had the conscience and courage to say something where even governments sit silent for fear of offending China.

But the next morning and the following days, I saw the media (social, political, commercial) tearing the ad to shreds. These were some of the headlines that came out:

Groupon-Tibet: Clever Ad or Crass Commercialism? from CNN

Groupon’s Gaffe from Chicago Tribune

When Edgy Goes Overboard from Politics Daily

Groupon Offends With Tibet-Themed Superbowl Ad from Forbes

The avalanche of criticism to the Groupon Tibet ad can be boiled down to this: that Groupon was turning the suffering of the Tibetan people into a way of making a buck, that they were “insensitive” to the “real crisis” in Tibet.

The show of support, the moral outrage on behalf of the Tibetan people and the Tibetan issue, was overwhelming, humbling and inspiring. I have no doubt that for so many people, it was an issue of principle. They must have felt like they were standing up for Tibetans.

But was the outrage really necessary? After all, Groupon’s heart was in the right place and they were not only acknowledging that Tibetans have a problem, but also offering people a way to help by donating to an NGO that helps Tibetans.

I wondered if the fact that Groupon was a more manageable and less vengeful target than the Chinese Communist Party had anything to do with the enthusiasm of the outrage; if Tibet supporters were unconsciously heartened and relieved to have a more human target than the totalitarian Cyborg machine that is the CCP.

I noticed that my fellow Tibetans’ reaction was quite different from the reaction of non-Tibetans. Far from being upset or insulted, they were just happy that a Superbowl ad mentioned Tibet. They were a bit confused about the slightly schizophrenic nature of the ad, and thought it could have been done better, but overall they were happy with the ad.

And they were all surprised at the reaction of the news media. They all wondered what the big deal was. Look at China’s reaction, they said. The Chinese government and Chinese people were terribly upset that Groupon had said Tibetans were in trouble. If something upsets China this much, doesn’t it mean that Groupon has done something right for Tibetans?

But should we be happy about a thing just because China is unhappy about it? And no matter how ironic the Groupon ad was, for a second there didn’t it look as if the suffering of the Tibetan people was made the springboard for selling coupons for fish curry? Is our outrage threshold too low? Should we take a page from the Chinese book and cry bloody murder every time we spy a paper cut as a way to stave off future injury?

These were all valid questions I was asking myself. But ultimately, I think my fellow Tibetans were right. For us, it’s an issue of survival above all else. We don’t really have the luxury of getting offended at any supporters, not least an organization that has taken our message to a hundred million people. 

From Slapstick to Standup

The Inside Story of How Humor Became a Respectable Enterprise in Tibetan Society

When my brother and I were small, one winter vacation our mother dedicated to the purpose of scolding him for trying to be funny on stage. For two months, she tried to set him straight.

He had gotten on stage several times that school year, after debates and elocution contests when they open the stage to the floor, and cracked some lame jokes. During one Suggestions Session, when the entire student body meets to make suggestions that are passed on to the school principal, he said that that the school tingmos, the flour buns for breakfast, should be bigger and puffier.

In those days, at Patlikuhl, sobriety from humor was considered as important as sobriety from alcohol; the idea that your kid might be seen as a “joker” was a terrifying prospect for most parents. It meant that no one would take them seriously.

Hence the long winter ordeal. I mean he should have expected it. When my mother came to school, teachers took her aside and in the deathly serious tones of something saying, “He takes drugs,” my mother was told, “He tries to be funny. He tells jokes in front of the other students.”

I think what everybody was so alarmed about was that humor is always irreverent. Humor deconstructs, subverts, turns something –an idea, a concept, a belief- on its head. Where humor flourishes, reverence diminishes.

That’s why authority figures like our school teachers could not abide students being funny.

In those days our entire community looked down on humor. People talk about how Tibetans are so good natured, ready to find the humor in anything but in fact our humor was too broad and shallow, too easily satisfied with watching people fall on their faces. Where there is nothing to be seen of wit and irony, satire and black humor, only slapstick survives.

However, and I am not sure how it happened, being funny slowly became an asset. As I moved schools from provincial Patlikuhl (the back of the woods) to Dharamsala, the cosmopolitan exile capital at the top of the hill, I noticed that the ban on humor was here lifted.

The funny students were known and lauded, and it was fine for them, good even, to be funny.

Don’t get me wrong. Humor still wasn’t so valued that women were going around saying of their prospective husbands, “I am marrying him because he makes me laugh.” No one was going that far.

But it was hip to be funny. And over the years it has grown progressively cooler to be funny.

Perhaps we were all so anal in the beginning because we were poor refugees working as coolies or settling farmland and there was no time to make or listen to jokes?

But now there was. A number of years ago, we debuted our first stand-up comic. Pasang Tsering. Ex-monk. His jokes were pretty funny, but a large part of his routine was song, or the singing of Indian songs with funny Tibetan lyrics.

And from Tibet there was Migmar la and Thupten la, but I heard them in Boston and thought they were pretty awful: theatrical and stagey, stiff and scripted, and just not funny. It was slapstick rather than standup: two grown men on stage feeding each other terrible, unoriginal lines and expecting you to laugh.

Which, to be fair, the audience was doing but only because Menla Kyab, who went before them, had hammered them with his Amdo accent to the nth power, and they were relieved to hear central Tibetan again.

Now we have Sonam Wangdue, ex TCV and a good friend of ours. He has a gift for physical comedy, a taste for impressions, and can be genuinely funny off the cuff. The other day we were hanging out with an Inji friend who speaks some Tibetan, and SW said, “Ok, please speak Tibetan in Tibetan only.”

He did a standup routine in Boston at Thanksgiving, and the audience was splitting with laughter. He topped it off with a dance routine, of the different dancing styles that our people have, which was totally hilarious. He does also have some jokes which fall flat, which he has to cut, but he is not ruthless at cutting.

He has a talk show that will debut on Vajra TV but I don’t know how funny that will be. Fingers crossed. He is also a professional MC and that’s a new thing. He keeps (and I mean this very loosely) a blog at www.TibetanComedian.blogspot.com.

We still have a long way to go. Our political cartoons have no teeth. I don’t think the cartoonist at Bod-kyi-dus-bab even tries anymore. It’s like he’s just doing drawings.

But I live in hope. We have tottered this far. Surely a Seinfeld or a Stewart cannot be all that far in the future now. 

The Question of Linguistic Autonomy for Tibetans

Some summers ago when I was in Lhasa, I noticed that the sun rose surprisingly late and daylight diffused quite a long while into the evening. This was because Beijing dictates that every one of its subjects from the outer reaches of East Turkestan and Inner Mongolia to the whole of the Tibetan plateau run on Beijing time. Even though Lhasa is as far away from Beijing as San Francisco is from Washington DC, the Tibetans in Lhasa must rise and sleep in harmonious lockstep with the Party chiefs at Zhongnanhai.

Not content with temporal conformity, Chinese leaders in Qinghai Province have now targeted linguistic autonomy. The Qinghai Provincial Government has issued orders that, by 2015, all lessons and textbooks in Tibetan schools should be in Chinese language instead of Tibetan. This will mean that Tibetan children growing up in the region (the historical Amdo region of Tibet famed for producing scholars and intellectuals) will be taught in Chinese instead of Tibetan. Tibetan students will have to learn history, science, social studies etc. in a second language instead of their native language. In fact, in most other parts of the Tibetan plateau, Chinese language instruction has already replaced Tibetan. This latest attempt to promote Chinese language at the expense of Tibetan has sparked the largest and most significant Tibetan protests since the seismic protests of 2008.

On Tuesday, October 19, over a thousand students from six different schools in Rebkong (called Tongren in Chinese) marched in non-violent demonstration against the planned language change carrying a banner that read: “Equality of Peoples, Freedom of Language.” Over the following days, the protests spread to Chabcha and other areas of Qinghai, as well as to Minzu Daxue, the Minorities University in Beijing where four hundred students participated. Their banner read,  “Preserve Nationality Language and Expand National Education.”

These wide-ranging student protests come at the heels of a highly significant letter signed by at least 133 teachers from different schools and submitted to the Qinghai Provincial Government on October 15^th. The letter was obtained and published by the popular Tibetan blog Khabdha. In the letter, submitted in both Tibetan and Chinese, the teachers wrote, “The plan of leaving one’s language aside and prioritizing another’s language, teaching all classes except Tibetan language class in the Chinese language, is a dangerous one that violates the current Constitution of the People’s Republic of China; violates the Law of the PRC on Regional National Autonomy; violates the principle of pedagogy; and violates science-based development.”

The letter goes on to say, “If both the spoken and written language of a people die, then it is as if the entire population of that people has died and the people have been decimated.” The teachers referred to the 4^th Article in the PRC Constitution: “All ethnic groups have the freedom to use and develop their own spoken and written languages and to preserve or reform their own folkways and customs.” They were careful to note that their appeal is in lawful alignment with the Chinese Constitution as well as the PRC’s Law on Regional National Autonomy.

Policy makers from the Qinghai Provincial Government, as well as Beijing, should take a note from Newton and notice: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. They should also carefully note the deep-seated concern about language and culture apparent in these courageous appeals by the teachers and students. And then they should consider, at length, the fact dictated by common sense, and upheld by education experts: Children learn better in their mother tongue.

The medium of academic scholarship is language, as the medium of music is sound. Forcing students who grow up speaking Tibetan to study the concepts of science, social science and mathematics in a second language is to disadvantage them from the start: a handicap that will place certain stumbling blocks in their educational development.

Unlike the 2008 protests, which were attributed to social and economic causes as well as political ones, these protests and appeals are clearly in reaction to the education policies of the local Qinghai Government. If Chinese leaders want to give any impression to the Tibetans, and to their own growing number of politically-conscious middle class citizenry, that they care about the wishes of the Tibetan people, they should for once listen to the voice of the Tibetan people, and yes the voice of conscience, and at least allow the Tibetans this small zone of linguistic autonomy. 

Published on Huffington Post October 25, 2010

N.S.

She is a quiet woman who uses her words sparingly;

For a long time words were all the possession she had.

When she was returned to her family,

She found she had lost all the old ways of loving.

Cradled into captivity, she is younger than her age;

Serrated by suffering, she is older than her youth.

Her teacher said, when you are on the path you endure.

Her teacher said, now is another thing to be endured.

10/19/2010

Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama: Redux

 So I was quite quite wrong. I had misread the first two lines and mistranslated the last. (To be fair to me, these poems, our Shakespeare’s sonnets, do lend themselves to rich and varied interpretation. But ok, perhaps not this one. I was basically just wrong.) This is the corrected effort. I feel that the “thousand” must echo the thousand arms and eyes of Avalokiteshvara so I prefer “thousand-armed” to “thousand-petaled.” Maybe this is not right. Also I don’t know if a ha.lo’i me.tok is a hollyhock flower. Where is a horticulturalist when you need one? I also ended up changing “chapel” to temple. I still have misgivings; the word lha.khang does not translate perfectly. Both “chapel” and “temple” have too many overtones seeping in from different cultures and ages. But needs must.

If the thousand-armed hollyhock flower

Leaves as material for offering,

Please take me, the young turquoise bee,

Into the temple as well.

Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama

I have been making stabs at reading this tiny book that I “borrowed” from my father’s bookcase: Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama. It was first printed by the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in 1981. K Dhondup translated. His short biography of the Sixth Dalai Lama is very good. There are 59 poems or songs- and of course I haven’t read all of them, but of the ones I have read, my favorite so far is this:

14

Stong.ldan. ha.lo’i. me.tog.

Mchod.b’i. rjas.la. pheb.na.

gyu.sbrang. gzhon.nu. nga.yang.

lha.khang. nang.la. khrid.dang.*

K Dhondup translates this as:

If the blossoming hollyhock flower is leaving

As an offering to the altar,

Leave not the young turquoise bee behind:

“Take me with you,

To the altar.”

Ok first, the poem is lovely. Second, I think I am really just utterly charmed that the speaker is a bee. It’s unexpected. The speaker begins quite loftily with stong.ldan. ha.lo’i. me.tog. and reaffirms this with the honorific pheb.na. but the last line is almost petulant and definitely pleading. I am just… very taken with this.

Actually I tried my hand at translation because I didn’t think K Dhondup’s translation was entirely faithful and this is my effort, based of course on K Dhondup’s:

If the blossoming hollyhock flower

Follows the offerings to the altar,

Take me also, the young turquoise bee,

Into the chapel.

*This may be a feeble attempt at transliteration. Anyone is welcome to correct me!