YUTHOK LANE

The Great Debaters

2011-07-03T17:46:00.001-04:00

(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

2011-02-27T00:12:00.000-05:00

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

2011-02-21T18:12:00.005-05:00

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

2010-10-25T23:35:00.001-04:00

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.

2010-10-19T21:55:00.001-04:00

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

2010-08-19T00:32:00.000-04:00

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

2010-08-02T00:58:00.001-04:00

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:

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!

A Review: "THE GRASSLANDS" by Pema Tseden

2010-07-21T00:05:00.000-04:00

On Saturday I watched a short film: The Grasslands by Pema Tseden. It is Pema Tseden’s student film, and Latse Contemporary Tibetan Library* in the West Village has a copy in their video archives.

Pema Tseden, or Wanma Caidan as the pinyin transliteration has it so awkwardly, is a talented Tibetan film maker who studied at the Beijing Film Academy and has made two feature films in recent years. I have seen both, The Silent Holy Stones and The Search, and they are both amazing and excellent… and I am deeply in love with The Search. So I was curious to see his student film, curious to see how his directorial vision has evolved, curious to see whether his master talent so clearly displayed in every frame of The Search is manifest in this his first creation.

And yes, yes, it is. The Grasslands is short, only about twenty minutes or so. The film opens with a simple frame: an old couple trekking across the empty grassland under a blue sky. They are Aku Tsendruk, a stubborn old man who just can’t bear any wrongs done to him, and his wife Ama Tsomo, an even older woman who is curled into herself with age and resignation, a passive bystander who is swept in the drift of the current churned up by her aggressive husband.

They are headed to the next nomadic settlement over, to confront three young men who have stolen Ama Tsomo’s yak. As they go on, we learn that the yak is a “liberated” yak; which means that Ama Tsomo had released this yak from slaughter and the yak was a free animal until its theft. So the thieves had compounded their crime which had become a wrong not just against morality but against dharma.

When Aku Tsendruk and Ama Tsomo reach their old friend Dorlo’s tent, his grown son Juga, a pipe smoking thick-set type with streaming highlander hair, is dispatched to fetch the three men. An elaborate ceremony of oaths follow and the film wraps with a small twist that manages to convince and satisfy without being either surprising or predictable. The director is talented like that.

After I watched the film, I felt that the film was not about Aku Tsendruk and Ama Tsomo, nor about the other people in the film so much as it is about a way of life- a way of life where you can take a man’s word when he swears, a way of life where people still “liberate” their prized yaks, a way of life where a radio is as close as the outside world gets to you. And it’s about the land that not only sustains but rather reinforces this way of life-the immense rolling plains and mountains that are inseparable from the people who live there.

It’s worth seeing. It’s very worth seeing. Ok it’s worth the trek to Latse. Need I say more?

*www.Latse.org

Untitled Poem

2010-06-02T00:47:00.000-04:00

This is just a draft. I read it at the Renaissance Poetry Reading organized by SFT at Shangrila Tibet Kitchen in Jackson Heights, but it needs more work and time.

Here the river fails to flow

Here the barley stalks of Shigatse sleep

With their ears opened and eyes lightly shut

With dreaming

Here the kelsang methok

Hold off their blooming,

Hold their flowering

Hostage until the

Time comes once

Again for flourishing

Here we wait

For the sky and

Earth to settle

Here we wait

BUS RIDES IN TIBET

2010-05-28T22:13:00.000-04:00

This is a piece I wrote in October 2006. A friend of mine, Thupten, who was interning at Tibet Justice Center, asked me to submit a piece for their newsletter Trin-Gyi-Pho-Nya. He knew that I had just spent the summer in Tibet. I had a hard time thinking about what to write – I wasn’t sure that I would be able to write what they were probably hoping for. I ended up writing this. And of course they couldn’t use it. I have shared it with a couple of friends, and thought that I might share it here as well. Especially as I have not updated in a long while.

October 2006

I went on a lot of bus rides in Tibet. My first bus ride was along the Golok-Xiling route. It was an uncomfortable experience. The bus made a stop at 11 o’clock at a small Tibetan settlement along the road that looked exactly like the western town in High Noon. Dust, horses, leathery men, fat women, filthy restaurants, motorbikes. My friends said the bus would stop in the afternoon for lunch so I bought some plums and got back into my seat. Afternoon came and passed and the bus made no signs of stopping. I ate my plums and finally descended from the bus in late evening tired and hungry. Xiling, or as the Chinese call it, Xining, has no tourists. It is a small city bounded by mountains and looks like a small version of Beijing transplanted to Tibetan soil. But I didn’t mean to stay in Xiling; my destination was Labrang-a Tibetan town another long bus ride away.

We started out early the next morning. The 6 hour bus ride took 9 hours because the bus kept breaking down. The driver and the conductor were both Tibetan. They stopped the bus outside Xiling and picked up about 10 passengers without tickets, all of them Tibetans. I learned later that most of them were from the town of Labrang. They sat on the floor or on the raised engine platform. Every so often, we would stop and the extra passengers would get off and be bundled into passing cars. We would then drive cheerfully past a checkpoint. Once we were safely past, the bus would wait at the roadside for the other passengers to get on board. The driver and the conductor were smuggling Tibetans between Xiling and Labrang. It wasn’t a political statement. At first I thought it simple kindness and then I saw the conductor collecting money from them-he was just making some extra money on the side. Did he take less than the ticketed amount, since no tickets were involved? I wanted him to have done so. He was a young man and acted as repairman for the bus as well. Because the bus kept breaking down, the Chinese tourists kept asking him, “When will we get there?” He was snappish to them and gave monosyllabic answers. When a Tibetan asked him the same question, he answered quite patiently. Was that a political statement? Later when he found out I was Tibetan and a tourist, he began pointing out places to me. We passed through Rebkong, small villages with large fields, green rolling pastures and barren mountains, and my entire being thrilled. The Chinese tourists on the bus did not know, and would not have cared, that this was the birthplace of Gedun Choephel.

There is awe but no reverence. There is attention without respect. Monasteries have become museums. Chinese tour guides talk in loud voices and banish sacredness from these hallowed places of worship. Is there such a thing as sustainable tourism? Especially in such a place as Tibet where the factory line is staffed mostly with Chinese?

Later I went on another bus from the Chinese city of Chengdu to Lithang through Dhartsedo, that ancient trading town on the old border. Everyone on the bus was Chinese. Most of them seemed to be going to Bathang for work. I immediately stood out because I didn’t speak Chinese. At a stop I asked the Tibetan woman guarding the public bathroom how much farther it was to Lithang. When I climbed into the bus, many of the other passengers looked at me in surprise and puzzlement. The middle aged man across the aisle, who had taken off his shirt as we left Chengdu and sat in a comfortable sheen of sweaty nudity-to be covered only as we began climbing mountain after mountain, began speaking to me in unintelligible Sichuanese. Who were all these people going off into places about which they knew nothing?

There were other differences, perhaps minute to others but insurmountable to me. Tibetans, when they travel, slide their windows open so the warm sun and the cold air fall upon their faces. The Chinese tourists shy away from the wind and zip up their jackets to their chins. But they shy away from the sun also-the young women prop up umbrellas inside the bus to keep their skin fair and untanned. Tibet is a place of scorching sun and savage wind. I wondered why, if the Tibetan wind and the sun bothered them so much, they were there. But of course I knew really.

Ancient Art in a Modern City: An Exhibition of Contemporary Tibetan Art

2010-04-23T00:25:00.000-04:00

Ancient Art in a Modern City: An Exhibition of Contemporary Tibetan Art in Manhattan

So I have been meaning to write about the Kyigudo earthquake but I am going to have to do that another time. Because I don’t have the time or energy tonight to write coherently about something so awful and important and I don’t want to reduce it or diminish it, not that anything can of course, by putting up a crap post about it.

So instead this post is about a small exhibition that was launched in Manhattan on Tuesday, April 20. The exhibition, called Ancient Art in a Modern City: An Exhibition of Contemporary Tibetan Art, is exhibited at the International Center in New York on 23^rd Street near 5^th Avenue as part of New York Immigrant Week. The artists displayed are Rabkar Wangchuk, Tenzin Phakmo, Sodhon, Thupten N Chakrishar, Jamyang Dorjee Chakrishar, Selhatso, Lobsang Choephel, Chungpo Tsering and Tenzin Menzin.

The opening on Tuesday featured a discussion with some of the artists whose works were displayed. A friend was going and so I dragged my feet and went along because sometimes you feel guilty about passing up “culture” and also there might be food. The discussion had just begun when we entered the room and there were two empty seats up front which we took. This was a mistake, as it quickly became clear when Sodhon la, one of the featured artists, said he would like an interpreter and Thupten Nyima’s eyes scanned the audience and homed in on me. I didn’t mind, actually, as long as I didn’t have to translate iffy words like “illusion” or “beauty”. If this meant I now had to pay attention to what the speakers were saying, so much the better.

Sodhon la, Rabkar Wangchuk and Thupten Nyima spoke about their work. Tenzin Rigdol, a talented and successful artist who helped curate this show (although perhaps this show was not curated so much as …er… heaped together) later joined the conversation. It was actually very interesting and very cool, listening to these contemporary artists talk about their paintings, their background and the influences that shape their work.

It seems to me that, both for the artist and the audience, contemporary Tibetan art is defined not so much by what it is as by what it is not - it is not traditional thangka painting; it is not religious art. So paradoxically this means that thangka art has enormous influence over contemporary Tibetan artists. Whether they are informed and inspired by thangka painting or they are stifled and challenged by it, thangka art’s influence on contemporary Tibetan artists manifests clearly either on the artist’s canvas (such as Rabkar’s Passion or Sodhon’s Frivolity of Life) or in the artist’s conversation (such as Tenzin Rigdol’s remarks).

As far as the exhibits were concerned, Chungpo’s Untitled, the mani khorlo and the bell, is a serene and peaceful painting and Thupten Nyima’s digital art West Side Highway, with the deities cruising in the sky in an open convertible, is striking.

My favorites were Selhatso’s Behind the Shoeba Mask (pictured to the left) and Tenzin Phakmo’s My Land? #3.

Bhuchung La of ICT Writes About Space

2010-04-08T15:07:00.003-04:00

Bhuchung Tsering la of International Campaign for Tibet maintains a blog pretty diligently. More diligently for sure than other people I know, like me. Here are Bhuchung la's thoughts on whether Tibetan should be spaced or not, and on Tibetan language reform:

Bhuchung la on Tibetan language reform debate and er...me

BHUTAN: OUR NEIGHBOR TO THE SOUTH

2010-03-30T22:46:00.002-04:00

Very recently I went to Bhutan to visit a friend. I was already in India and from there it’s a hop (although an expensive hop) on Druk Air. Druk Air is the only airline flying in and out of Paro International Airport so what they charge you pay. So I paid and I sat in my window seat and there was this legend (below).

Sometimes it’s the small things that get you- like “Please fasten your seatbelt” written in your mother’s tongue or “Gyeltsen’s Carrier” written on the side of a cargo truck or “Sonam’s General Store” on the doorway of a convenience shop.

Wouldn’t it be a good and beautiful thing one day to fly Tibetan Airlines and to go to the airplane toilet and see “Flush” written in Tibetan?

A SMALL PLACE

2010-03-09T08:22:00.006-05:00

I have been reading Jamaica Kincaid's "A Small Place". Jamaica Kincaid, who was actually one of my instructors, now mostly gardens, I believe. If she keeps writing, I think she will win a Nobel. "A Small Place" is a thin book, anorexic almost. But my god, it's powerful. It's utterly gorgeous language, simple and all-encompassing in the way that a blue sky is simple and all-encompassing, and the savage ferocity with which Jamaica attacks her English colonizers is something to behold. Here is a nugget of gold:

"The Antigua that I knew, the Antigua in which I grew up, is not the Antigua you, a tourist, would see now. That Antigua no longer exists. That Antigua no longer exists partly for the usual reason, the passing of time, and partly because the bad-minded people who used to rule over it, the English, no longer do so. (But the English have become such a pitiful lot these days, with hardly any idea what to do with themselves now that they no longer have one quarter of the earth's human population bowing and scraping before them. They don't seem to know that this business was all wrong and they should, at least, be wearing sackcloth and ashes in token penance of the wrongs committed, the irrevocableness of their bad deeds, for no natural disaster imaginable could equal the harm they did. Actual death might have been better. And so all this fuss over empire-what went wrong here, what went wrong there-always makes me quite crazy, for I can say to them what went wrong: they should never have left their home, their precious England, a place they loved so much, a place they had to leave but could never forget. And so everywhere they went they turned it into England; and everybody they met they turned English. But no place could ever really be England, and nobody who did not look exactly like them would ever be English, so you can imagine the destruction of people and land that came from that." Pg 23-24

It's as if she takes this whole event of invasion and occupation and colonization of this small island nation of Antigua and she strips away the varnish and the paint and she shows you what it was actually like and it's so simple and so ugly. And that's what colonization is: it's so simple and so ugly and so 19th century that people think it just doesn't exist anymore. Or people do know that it exists and it's Kitty Genovese all over again - being stabbed to death in broad daylight while whole bunch of cowardly people look through their beautiful curtained windows.

So anyway I have had "A Small Place" on my mind these last few days, perhaps partly because I am in Dharamsala right now, which is a small place in its own special way.

Rangzen Shonu

2010-02-08T01:14:00.002-05:00

A friend of mine, Tenzin Tsetan, is launching a fan site for Rangzen Shonu, basically the best music band in the history of Tibet. www.RangzenShonu.webs.com I was lucky enough to get to write the following introduction:

Rangzen Shonu is a Tibetan rock band that burst on to the exile music scene in the late 1980s, firmly establishing the genre of Tibetan rock and forever changing the landscape of Tibetan music. As one of the first Tibetan rock bands, Rangzen Shonu’s signature sound of soulful song and meaningful lyrics accompanied only by the acoustic and electric guitar captured the hearts and minds of Tibetans in Tibet and in exile. The release in 1987 of their self-produced album titled Rangzen Shonu albums marked a historic moment in the nascent Tibetan music industry.

Rangzen Shonu’s three members were Tenzin Choesang, Norbu Choephel and Paljor. Their songwriter was Professor Ngawang Jinpa. The songs are folk-like in simplicity and sound, evocative of the old songs of the highlands, and yet nuanced and complex in meaning and melody, full of poetry and passion. These absolutely beautiful songs are infused with the spirit of freedom and resistance and resonate powerfully with Tibetans of all generations even today. Their song “We Tibetan Nomads”, one of the most popular Tibetan songs of all time, can be said to function as an unofficial Tibetan national anthem.

Although Rangzen Shonu has now been disbanded for many years, Tibetan music lovers honor and remember their immeasurable contribution to Tibetan music.

BREATHING SPACE: How Word Separation Can Save the Tibetan Language (3)

2010-01-27T00:58:00.009-05:00

Tendor, an activist and a musician, who first started advocating word separation in written Tibetan a year ago, has been writing with word separation at his bilingual blog www.yarlungraging.com. Although “aerated” Tibetan script may look startling at first, this minor change has the capacity to turn the chore of reading into a pleasure.

I believe that a study by the Tibetan Department of Education or a similar institution should formally assess the merits of word separation. A top-down implementation of an aerated writing system in the Tibetan schools, starting with the elementary classes and moving up to the higher grades, can bring about the immediate revival and long-term survival of the Tibetan language. Imagine if ten years from now, Tibetan students can read Tibetan with the same ease with which they can speak it, and children crave and nag for Tibetan language comic books! Such a future is certainly possible if we adopt word separation today, making the same leap that almost all other literate cultures have already made.

If this top-down implementation sounds too radical at this time, it might be more realistic to urge a bottom-up initiative that can gradually spread among the Tibetan public. To this end, I ask bloggers and writers in and outside Tibet to experiment with aerated script, to add space between words.

Written Tibetan can remain hallowed and privileged, or it can be accessible and popular. Since the time of Emperor Songtsen Gampo, it has been written Tibetan, bod-yig, that has bound the three provinces together, bod-yig that has preserved the intrinsic unity of the Tibetan people through imperial fragmentation and governmental dissolution. Bod-yig, Sambhota’s legacy to all Tibetans, has saved us time and again. Now it’s time for us to save this legacy. Future generations will thank us for allowing our words to breathe and to live.

How Word Separation Can Save the Tibetan Language (2)

2010-01-27T00:51:00.004-05:00

When Thonmi Sambhota, the outstanding innovator of the Tibetan script, single-handedly devised the Tibetan writing system in the 7^th century (and among other innovations introduced the dot between syllables), there were considerations which no longer hold true now: at that time, parchment or paper was scarce and expensive. Printing was done laboriously from woodblocks and dense continuous script fit more words onto the woodblock and more content on the page. These considerations are irrelevant today thanks to advanced printing technology.

Let’s not forget that in the early days the script was not meant for mass consumption but rather seen as an elite privilege that one needed years of laborious training to master. After all, most writing systems in the world were developed not for mass consumption, but for the administration of empire and for governance. In fact for the greater part of the written word’s six thousand-year history, the different writing systems have required the presence of scribes who trained for long years to be proficient in reading and writing them. In Tibet, of course, the spread and diffusion of Buddhism has meant that the Tibetan writing system became the ultimate tool to preserve and transmit the teachings through the culture of the great monasteries. Within the monastic curriculum itself, years could be devoted to instill reading and writing proficiency in the young student.

Today, with the public school system – with the medium of study often Chinese or English – taking precedence over the monastic model, we no longer have the luxury of a long training period. And the Tibetan writing system is already complicated enough without the handicap of a script that may look beautiful but might well suffocate itself. The variations in spelling are mostly unpronounced, and words are often said differently from the way they are written. If space between words can be as an inhaler to the asthmatic, and revive Tibetan literacy for future generations, what might be the costs of whitespace?

A legitimate concern is that the unparalleled canon of Tibetan literature will be inaccessible to future readers accustomed to reading separated words. However, a few hours’ practice should allow scholars who will be fluent readers to access old manuscripts. Word separation will be crucial not only to beginning readers parsing lines, it will be an aid for scholars engaged in reference reading by facilitating swift silent reading and an expanded field of vision. As an interesting aside, it will also simplify the creation of a computer spell-check program and translation program for Tibetan.

I know this proposition will upset and outrage many Tibetans, because we have always been resistant to change – and we have been writing this way for centuries. But remember that traditionally scripture was written in stanzas so that readers always knew where to pause even without space. Most writers writing in Tibetan today do so in prose. The young reader slogs through, stumbling ever so often. Even the learned scholar trips every once in a while.

All things being equal, where words are spaced and comprehension is easier, more people will pick up a book. My brother Tendor and I have been informally testing the merits of word separation on a number of Tibetans, making them read two copies of the exact same text, one containing continuous script and the other containing separated script. Without exception, every one of the surveyed Tibetans found it easier to read and comprehend the separated script. We hope to continue the survey online and make it available to all interested participants.

BREATHING SPACE: How Word Separation Can Save the Tibetan Language (1)

2010-01-27T00:47:00.002-05:00

The Tibetan language, like an asthma patient in a dust storm, is gasping for breath. Although Tibetan children born and raised in locations as geographically disparate as Lhasa, Dharamsala or New York may grow up speaking Tibetan as a first language, they’ll almost certainly write it as a second. As long as Tibet remains a colony of China, this will not change. For Tibetan students inside Tibet, the language of professional success is now Chinese. For Tibetan students outside, it’s English. Disadvantaged by the system, Tibetan is inevitably neglected.

For the fate of Tibetan as a spoken language, the result of this neglect is so far minimal: as the language of home and hearth, it surrounds us in infancy and we grow up speaking Tibetan as our mother tongue. For Tibetan as a writing system, however, the result of this neglect is devastating: Tibetans of our generation do almost all of our reading and writing in a foreign language and almost none in Tibetan.

When young Tibetans trained outside the monastic system – who constitute the majority – cannot write a decent letter in Tibetan or read a sentence without tripping over at least three words, we have a crisis at hand. What’s to be done?

The root of the problem is quite simple: we cannot write Tibetan well because we almost never read Tibetan, and we almost never read Tibetan because it is so difficult to read it. And there’s one very simple way to immediately ease the difficulty of reading Tibetan: word separation. Adding a space between words so that we can see each word as an immediate discrete unit having visual meaning will simplify the daunting task of reading Tibetan script overnight.

In fact, this is what people throughout the world have been doing with other writing systems. Ancient Greek and Latin were written in scriptura continua, which is continuous script without spaces between words. Paul Saenger, the distinguished scholar of medieval writing practices, asserts that it was only at the end of the seventh century that Irish monks began to introduce spaces between words into medieval manuscripts, and it took several centuries for this practice to be adopted as standard. (Paul Saenger argues that it was this “aerated” script that led to the development of silent reading as we know it.) This space between words, also called whitespace, is now ubiquitous across many writing systems. Even Hindi, previously written in continuous Devanagari script (the base from which Thonmi Sambhota devised the Tibetan alphabet and writing system) is now spaced. Korea’s Hangul, previously continuous, is now generally spaced. Ethiopic, which like Tibetan uses the interpunct, the dot – although they double it, like so (:)- is increasingly written with a space between words.

Actually, writing Tibetan as we currently do, with the single dot to differentiate between syllables and no space between words, is a faithful representation of speech: after all in speech, we pause not between words but only at the end of a sentence. However, for the reader, that space – the visual equivalent of a pause – makes a world of difference: the whitespace allows words to be discrete, to have meaning that can be accessed visually as well as aurally. The eye can see quicker than the ear can hear and reading comprehension is consequently faster and simpler. Because Tibetan does not use word dividers, textual meaning is harder to access and the writing encourages the reader to read aloud rather than silently. In Space Between Words, Paul Saenger contends, “In general, graphic systems that eliminate or reduce the need for a cognitive process prior to lexical access facilitate the early adaptation of young readers to silent reading, while written languages that are more ambiguous necessitate the oral manipulation of phonetic components to construct words.” Tibetan of course falls into the latter category. He continues, “These latter writing systems require a longer training period, one that features oral reading and rote memorization and that continues, in some instances, even into adulthood.”

Continued-

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa: Poetry Reading at the Rubin Museum of Art

2010-01-16T01:23:00.001-05:00

There was a poetry reading at the Rubin Museum of Art today. Tsering Wangmo Dhompa read from Rules of the House, In the Absent Everyday and from her new book which is not out yet. I had the books and had read the poems, so hearing her read was like hearing a sweet old song that I haven’t heard in a while.

I feel like her poetry is more diasporic than exilic – which is perhaps another way of saying that it is more cultural than political- but it is so moving. It feels familiar and yet remarkable: she touches on familiar themes, ideas, and images but by remarking on them with her clear far-seeing eyes and gorgeous voices, she makes them remarkable. This is from Bardo, a poem to a dead uncle or as she calls him, “Uncle who is no more.” “You are dead, go into life, we pray.” How beautiful, how non-sentimental and fitting.

It is hard to pick a favorite but I particularly love this one.

Hill Station passages

Transparent, the town smeared itself around nightfall. House lights

attempted star life.

There were no rooms on Main Street. No roads bifurcating

from it.

A stranger’s town can make you shy. Dogs barked at our heels.

Avuncular and in their own way, marking every entry.

Here is someone else’s place of origin.

Dust in the morning – eager-eyed grit. Amber grass.

People spilled on to the streets like red ants driven out of hiding.

Light removed all images of the night. What was visible was

not recognizable.

The language is startling. The images are old images made completely new. The verbs she chooses, the way she sees and expresses ideas, makes all the difference in the first lines. “The town smeared itself around nightfall.” How surprising, and yet how true. This is what a town in a fog looks like at night, a smear against, around the dark. A lesser poet might have said “House lights looked like stars” or “House lights imitated stars”- Dhompa says, “House lights attempted star life.” When she says, “Here is someone else’s place of origin,” there is so much story there- both the speaker’s and that actual someone else’s. The only line I don’t like is the next one; I find the image of people spilling out like red ants jarring, incongruous, but the rest of the poem with its detached wisdom and small surprises (like “eager-eyed grit”) is perfect.

How We Were Haunted

2009-12-03T01:04:00.004-05:00

How We Were Haunted (Part 1)

Bardo is the interworld: Every Tibetan child knows this. It’s the forty nine days between the death of one body and the birth of the next, when the soul is untethered -housed in the womb of the universe- ready to birth at any opportune moment as any sentient thing – a man, a fly, a horse. So essentially, you can see bardo as life’s backyard, or lobby, as this time-space continuum wherein a soul hangs out, has a few sangrias before putting its cigarette out and rejoining the party. And every so often, an unhappy soul dissatisfied with bardo, will wreak destruction. Being unhampered by a body, a soul is free from the laws of nature, from constraints on its movement, restraints on its power.

All of which is to say, I spent much of my childhood being terrified out of my mind. This is an exaggeration on some level, because my childhood was a relatively happy one. However, it is true that, every night when darkness fell, if I was alone, I grew afraid. We were all afraid. Not only of mundane things like sadu babas, child-snatchers and bridge-builders. We were afraid of old witch-women, churels with hollow backs, people with faces without features, we were afraid of shadows in the window and footsteps in the dark.

We were conditioned to this fear of course. By our elders who were themselves afraid of the dark and all it hid, by older kids who told us not to go to the toilets at night, and by stories endlessly passed around about pyre fires that would not go out, dead people who have returned to claim an object they left behind, men and women who have walked when they have no business to.

This childhood fear; it was unspecific, and it was as large and amorphous as the dark itself. Sometimes I wonder what the psychic cost of this bucket load of childhood fear is. Fear is friction, isn’t it? It wears the mind. And of course, it freezes the brain, shrinks it, reduces the contours of consciousness until all you are aware of is the weight of fear itself, an unbearable weight heavy and dull like a dead pond frog rested on the brain.

The (Tibetan) Art of Official Correspondence

2009-11-23T01:19:00.000-05:00

Latse Library on Perry Street is currently hosting an exhibition titled “Postmarked Lhasa: An Exhibit of Tibetan Stamps and Correspondence.” I went to the launch of this exhibition on the Saturday before last, on November 7. The program that day included two speakers Geoffrey Flack, who spoke on the postal history of Tibet, and Shewo Lobsang Dhargyel, who spoke on official correspondence, who were both simply excellent.

On Geoffrey Flack, a stamps dealer and Vice President of the Nepal and Tibet Philatelic Study Guide, and an expert on Tibetan stamps and postal history, and his important presentation, more another time.

Shewo Lobsang Dhargyel, whose lecture was entitled “The Art of Official Correspondence”, gave a rare example of a talk by a shungshab that started off on point, stayed on point and ended on point. He started off in the traditional manner, thanking his host and insisting that he wasn’t an expert and he didn’t really know much about official correspondence at all but since Pema Bhum asked him to come and speak, he has come. Normally when a speaker starts off this way, I itch with impatience but that day, perhaps because Lobsang Dhargyel was such an impressive speaker, I appreciated that this very customary opening is one way of respecting the audience. (Of course, another way of respecting the audience, and one seemingly unfamiliar to most Tibetan officials, is to begin on time and end on time and stay on topic.)

After that brief intro, Shewo Lobsang Dhargyel then launched into the body of his lecture and it was fascinating. He talked about the protocol and etiquette of official letter writing of the Tibetan government (specifically the Ganden Phodrang government which had ruled Tibet from the time of the Fifth Dalai Lama in the sixteenth century till 1959 when the invading Chinese dissolved it). The protocol governing letter writing is mind-boggling. There were exacting standards dictating details from the kind of script to the color of ink to the type of paper used, to the given amount of header and footer space on each page, to the way the letter is folded and string is tied around it.

According to Lobsang Dhargyel la, Tibetan official correspondence was divided into two main categories which were further divided into four subgroups each. The two man categories were Edicts and Reports, i.e. correspondence that was sent by the Government and correspondence that was sent to the Government. Edicts can include orders and proclamations while Reports can include appeals and proposals made to the various elements of government.

The subdivision of Edicts looked like this: 1. Edicts from His Holiness 2. Edicts from the Regent 3. Edicts from the Prime Minister 4. Edicts from the Cabinet. Consequently, the subdivision of Reports follows the same categorization: Reports to His Holiness 2. Reports to the Regent 3. Reports to the Prime Minister 4. Reports to the Cabinet.

Basically everything that could be thought of was thought of and then standardized. And this standardization was extreme and precise, and of the sort that could only be carried out by a fully functioning government that reached into all sectors of literate society. Bear in mind that in sixteenth century England, spelling and punctuation were not yet standardized. So the Tibetan standardization of the form of official correspondence, built on the standardization of spelling, punctuation and syntax carried out in the 7^th/8^th century, was an admirable achievement.

The system of official correspondence is important as a piece of history and as corresponding detail supplementing other evidence of the existence of a fully functioning Tibetan government based in Lhasa distinct from the Chinese government in Peking. After all, detail honors reality by making reality more real.

In “How Fiction Works,” (a brilliant book of revelations) critic James Wood says, “…in life as in literature, we navigate via the stars of detail… We snag on it.” He explains this detail as detail “that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability”, and “centers our attention with its concretion”. The protocol and etiquette governing Tibetan government correspondence carries out that same task – it “centers our attention with its concretion” and convinces us of the integrity, and historicity, and existence, of such a government.

Lamp Map of Tibet from SFT's Art Auction

2009-10-20T20:05:00.000-04:00

At SFT's Art Auction held sometime ago, in Chinatown of all places, there were several pieces of art that pulled at my heart. One that was very very cool and creative was Tenzin Mochoe's piece: a sculpture of a map of Tibet made up of little wax candles. Mochoe described the piece as a melding together of the political and the religious- the map of Tibet with the candles symbolizing butter lamps that we light in temples; and he stressed that with the lighting of the lamps, the act of creation, of making the map come alive with fire, simultaneously becomes an act of destruction- as the candles light, the wax melts and the map blurs.

I thought this was brilliant. A map of Tibet is always highly political, especially a map of Tibet as we conceive it, with borders around the three historical provinces of Tibet and the plateau itself as one political entity (just as it is one geological unit). Here, this map, the highly political and usually secular entity, becomes spiritual and sacred. And how does it become sacred? Not by sitting there as a piece of art, but because people -the audience- light the candles as an offering, which act, when you think about it, is really the performance of a wish fulfulling ritual. You make the wish, and you light the lamp to mark its making. With the lighting of the lamps made of candles, you are complicit in the creation and the destruction and the sanctification of this map of Tibet made of lamps.

Thanking His Holiness

2009-10-08T23:29:00.000-04:00

I had a chance at Garrison Institute in upstate New York to thank His Holiness. This was in front of a hundred Tibetan professionals who had gathered there for the three-day Tibetan Professionals' Conference. The Conference itself was crazy and inspiring and very very hectic for Tsewang la and me. But more on the conference later. For me, of course, the moment that stands out is when I got to thank His Holiness. I was to thank him for being there. But of course I had to thank His Holiness for so much more than that. Obviously we owe His Holiness everything- the strength of our identity, the unity of our people, our image, our platform, our place in the world. Displaced as we are, we are not invisible and that is because of His Holiness. Anyway this is my thank you note, or address, or whatever that I read in front of His Holiness and the audience of Tibetan professionals at Garrison Institute, Monday, October 5.

Tashi Delek, Your Holiness, and good afternoon to all. On behalf of the Office of Tibet, I would like to once again thank all the participants and speakers for being here and Garrison Institute for providing us with this wonderful space.

On behalf of all the Tibetans, and all the youth and professionals gathered here, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Your Holiness for meeting with us in spite of your most hectic schedule.

In the past fifty years, we were forced to cross the highest mountains to go into exile, and from that exile we crossed oceans to go into an even further exile. We live on other nations’ charity, on other people’s good will and conscience, but we have dignity and we have strength because when we lift our gaze up, we see you.

Many of us here in this room are more fortunate and privileged than most of our countrymen. We believe that there is no further exile. From here on, every step must be a step home. Our parents’ generation suffered and sacrificed for the cause of our nation. I assure Your Holiness that we will continue to do the same, with courage and resilience, to realize the vision of a Tibet where Tibetans can live in peace and prosperity and freedom. Thank you.

The Chinese Empire...State Building?!

2009-10-02T00:14:00.001-04:00

60 years ago yesterday, Chairman Mao chased Chiang Kaishek off the Middle Kingdom, surveyed his fiefdom of Long March survivors, youthful yet-to-be-disillusioned Communists and a war-weary people, and proclaimed the People's Republic of China. After that, Mao and his Army proceeded to invade and occupy Tibet, East Turkestan, Inner Mongolia. That wasn't all. He also launched a drastic social and agricultural experiment called the Great Leap Forward which caused large-scale famine across China (and of course across Tibet and the other occupied territories) and killed tens of millions of people. Then of course he jump started the Cultural Revolution - not for ideological reasons as some people may like to think but because of petty power struggles with his comrades Liu Shaoqi and others in the Politburo. Now Mao is dead but his totalitarian regime lives marching on.

Yesterday, in an astoundingly stupid move, the owners and managers of the Empire State Building in New York -W and H Properties- lit the building red and yellow in celebration of the 60 Year Anniversary of the founding of the PRC. What were they thinking? Not only is it immoral and shameful to honor a government and a state that jails, tortures and kills people for expressing dissent, but it's unbelievably bad public relations.

Of course we came out to protest. And of course, in today's papers, every mention of the Empire State Building's cloaking itself in red bloody light emphasized the protests and the Tibetan reaction.

So really- for us? Win-win. The Empire State Building selling its soul gave the Tibetans a platform to protest the anniversary of the Politburo's Republik of China.

The Art of Activism

2009-09-22T23:57:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday, September 19, I went to listen to “The Art of Activism”- talks by Lhadon and Tsundue and Q&A, in Astoria, NY. It was Tibetan time central. The talk was to start at 2pm. We got to Diki Daycare on Steinway St. about 15 minutes before 2. Thupten Nyima and Losel were setting up the tech- oh yes, there was to be livestreaming. Since, you know, SFT’s very technically advanced and all that, esp. for an activist organization headquartered above a Chinese Laundromat. At 2pm there were five people there. Maybe. This was worrying. What if people didn’t show? It was Saturday afternoon, after all. A significant population of the younger Tibetan crowd would be nursing hangovers picked up from the Irish Bar. But actually, people started filing in, and although only half the seats were filled when the talk started, eventually all seats were taken.

The actual talk and Q&A went from 2:30-4:30PM. It went off really really well. Tsundue and Lhadon are of course two of our most eloquent speakers. The audience was really engaged too. There was an online audience too, as Tendor kept reminding us. He was clearly delighted about the livestreaming, and the fact that there was an online audience.

Lhadon talked about how we need to know ‘how to organize, how to be strategic, how to understand history’. She said, “So much of the art of resistance is studying, looking at other movements.” She also said that this is not new, what we are going through and we need to remember it: so many other people and nations in history have gone through colonialism, gone through oppression and torture and death, and finally gained freedom. “It’s acute pain, but it’s not new.”

Lhadon mentioned Estonia- their freedom struggle, how all sorts of different people came together, performed their own role etc- the freedom fighters, the ordinary brave people, the collaborators who weren’t really etc etc. I realize that I don’t know much about the whole of Eastern Europe. An entire swath of earth which recently came out from under Soviet occupation. Probably worth it to learn a bit about those countries and their struggles. Yep.

Tsundue talked about the “indignity of exile”, the indignity of being out of one’s country. The struggle gives him dignity, he said. I understand this- I mean, the indignity of exile. All Tibetans understand this- we face it in so many small ways as we live in and out of our communities, but nothing brings this home -like a slap in the face- than travel. Of course, being invested in anything worthwhile gives one dignity, but resistance and the struggle to return as counter to the indignity of exile is neatly appropriate, poetic even.

Intersections at Wasabi Point

2009-09-12T16:13:00.000-04:00

I have been meaning to write about an unusual gathering of young Tibetans in NYC about two months ago. The gathering was called by the Global Tibetan Professional Network* at Wasabi Point, a nice little restaurant in Woodside, Queens. GTPN (which suffers from an unfortunate acronym –for a long time, I thought it was possibly a dharma center or perhaps an STD) is a new and growing network of Tibetan professionals in the US started by Drs. Tsering Amdo and Tenzin Jamyang.

There were about 30-40 young Tibetans there, professionals and budding professionals in all walks of life – geology, aerospace engineering, dentistry, advertising, nursing, doctoring, lawyering, film-making, activisting (activating?), you name it. We got together, and we speed-dated basically. Each of us was paired up with someone we hadn’t met previously –since the point of the whole gathering was to network, meet new people, form new connections- and told to make conversation. We talked about ourselves, our interests, why we were there and what we hoped to get out of this new network.

There was a nice poetic touch to the choice of restaurants. Just as we, the attendees, were a fusion of Tibetan and foreign environments, in greater and lesser proportions, so the restaurant too was a fusion of Tibetan and foreign cuisine. The whole thing was actually very well organized.

There was even an admirable (but doomed) short-lived attempt at simulcasting audio through the flat screen TV on the wall. However, as Shakespeare would say, knowing how to fiddle with a few touch screen buttons on your iphone does not a tech expert make. We have still a good ten years to go before we produce any real life tech geeks. Still, I did come away from Wasabi Point with the pre-dawning hope that we are farther along the path to developing the human resources necessary for a functional civil society than I had mournfully assumed.

*www.gtpnus.com

A Special Meeting, for some very special people

2009-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00

I watched the DVD of the Special Meeting held in Dharamsala in November 2008. The DVD was of the sixth day, the last day of the meeting (I suppose the seventh was fittingly the day of rest).

Several things struck me:
A. The Resolutions of the Meeting are really very weird. One was that China must admit policy mistakes and another was that China is to be blamed for lack of progress on dialogue. Umm yes. A hundred and ten people got together for this?

B. Samdhong Rinpoche's speech was basically a state of the union address, which got me thinking, do we even have a state of the union address? His Holiness's March 10 speech is obviously the important speech of the year; is there even a Kalon Tripa equivalent? Sure the Kashag always issues a March 10 statement too but that always seemed like an underwhelming speech to me; I can't remember ever listening to a Kashag March 10 statement. Samdhong Rinpoche's speech was actually very good. He addressed a lot of the suggestions made throughout the Special Meeting in his usual way, that is, sarcastic and skewering if you are at the wrong end. (I mean he addressed some suggestions and criticism by saying, you are wrong, and also, don't know enough!) And he talked about what the government had been up to- no debt, yay! So, I am actually a huge fan. Samdhong Rinpoche is obviously one of the brightest intellects in the Tibetan world, and I really like the no-nonsense, no-frills straightforwardness, and also even his slightly-awkward smile. So overall I am awed and admiring of him, and of course also slightly scared to death.

Samdhong Rinpoche made a distinction between the Middle Way policy and the Dialogue process; he said the dialogue process had produced no results but this did not mean that the Middle Way policy had produced no result. It is an important distinction to make, but I wished that he had elaborated on whatever result had been produced by the policy.

C. I think His Holiness was disappointed with the Special Meeting. His Holiness said, at the very beginning of His speech, that He had nothing to say about the meeting. Later during the Q&A, when a reporter asked how policy was going to change because of the meeting, His Holiness answered, "The meeting...I have nothing to say." I did think this might be a strong statement, because the people didn't have much to say at the Meeting, after all.

2009-04-22T23:38:00.000-04:00

High Peaks Pure Earth reported a Beijing student's account of racism and discrimination against Tibetans in the Chinese capital. Qiaga Tashi Tsering and his girlfriend went to seven or eight different hotels only to be turned away from all of them because "Tibetans can't stay here."

They were turned away because they were Tibetan, because of their race. Are these isolated cases that happen because of personal prejudice (never mind that Tashi Tsering went to at least seven different hotels)? Or is this something more insidious and political and therefore much more hideous? The ugly truth is that the entire Chinese policy seems rooted in a belief that Tibetans are second-class citizens; that Tibetans are to be suspected and distrusted so long as they practice their religion, read and write their language, and hold on to their culture and identity.

Han chauvinism is plain racism. I am reminded of an earlier era in American and Indian history when a black man could not sit in the front of a bus and an Indian could not travel first class on a train alongside Englishmen.

Because people in the west take it for granted that social and political liberalization must follow social liberalization -because we see only the skycrapers of Shanghai and the skyline of Beijing and not the prisons and detention centers of Lhasa and Shigatse- we often fail to realize that in China's occupied territories, the political and social situation is in fact worse and more oppressive now than before.

We suffer from, to use Samantha Power's words, a failure of imagination. We live in a society where a parent can go to jail for slapping a child, where a policeman reads you your Miranda rights before handcuffing you and hauling you off to jail. How to realistically imagine then a society -with skyscrapers and cellphones- where a student can be expelled from school and their future ruined for simply writing "Free Tibet" on a piece of paper and a person can spend years in jail for joining a peaceful demonstration and shouting slogans?

I am reminded very much of Verbal's quote in The Usual Suspects: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." The Chinese government with its billion-strong market and reserves of American dollars, is well on its way to convincing the world that it is not a colonial power that is forcefully occupying Tibet, East Turkestan and Inner Mongolia.

In Memoriam

2009-03-28T21:50:00.001-04:00

Return to Snow

Snowflakes pull their punches landing
On my face much as cats do, with
Stockinged feet and kind concern.

I keep close watch on my dreams
Allowing only two to grow in free-flow.
When circumstances threaten I

Self-abort the first dream-
Safely keeping just the second-
The second dream of return.

Must I accept my sentence,
This slow sentience, this
Awful partial awakening?

Must I always say grace
Before drinking from
The cup of sorrow?

The Death of Tashi Sangpo

2009-03-28T21:46:00.000-04:00

Last weekend I heard and then learned about the death of Tashi Sangpo, a monk from Ragya Monastery in Amdo who drowned himself in the Machu river after escaping from his police captors who were interrogating him about his role in hoisting up the Tibetan national flag on the rooftop of Ragya Monastery. I differentiate between hearing and learning because when I first heard about it, it was the standard tragic story that you hear coming out of Tibet every so often. Someone's given 14 years in jail or beaten and tortured to death and you think akha and azi and then you get over it and think about something else. I thought akha and azi and then I got over it and thought about something else.

But of course his story didn't go away. Later Tendor showed me his photo. He's a 28 year old monk and he looks like a nice young man, the kind of shy, easily-embarrassed monk you have seen everywhere. What happened was this: The Tibetan national flag had been hoisted atop the monastery and the police (the PSB of course) was there to piss and shit on all the Tibetans. Tashi Sangpo claimed that he put up the flag all by himself, no one else was involved, and then he ran from the police and jumped into the Machu. We call it suicide, but is that right? He was driven to this final desperate act -by his own courage and heroism in taking all the blame and by fear and terror of the Chinese government and its scumbag agents. Tashi Sangpo drowned himself, but his death is yet another Tibetan murder committed by the Chinese Communist Colonial Government.

Earth Ox: Another Year of the Iron Fist

2009-03-07T22:33:00.000-05:00

Another Year of the Iron Fist. That's the title of a Leader on Tibet in the Economist.
The Subtitle: If this is success, maybe China should look for an alternative.

"As Tibetans around the world this week marked the advent of the new year of the Earth Ox, many did so in a spirit of mourning rather than jubilation. The festival fell just before a bloodstained anniversary season: 50 years since the Chinese suppression of an uprising that saw the Dalai Lama, their spiritual leader, flee into exile in India with some 100,000 followers; 20 years since protests that led to the imposition of martial law in the capital, Lhasa; one year since ugly and murderous anti-Chinese riots in Lhasa that brought a sharp and lasting security backlash. The fact that so many troops are still needed, merely to prevent commemorative protests, suggests that China's Tibet policy is in need of an overhaul."*

I am thankful to the Economist for covering this, and I basically have a media crush on the Economist anyway. But I have a question. This paragraph begins so well, so strongly and knowledgeably and sympathetically, but, but, but, why is the last line of this para so ridiculously wimpy?

"China's Tibet policy is in need of an overhaul"?
Isn't that a little bit like saying the American economy needs a teeny tiny injection of cash?

*Economist, Feb28-March6, 09 (page15).

Where I finally read Paradise Lost

2009-02-24T10:56:00.000-05:00

I have had the book forever and it's pretty famous and I was an English Lit major and so, I thought I should probably read it.

So I have read Book One so far and it's actually pretty cool. Ok so Book One is basically just a catalogue of demons, ok? And everyone in the world has already pointed out that perhaps when Milton went out to humanize Satan and to make him the adversary worthy of God, perhaps, just perhaps he went overfar and as a result Satan is now way Cooler Than God.

Part of it is that God hasn't entered the picture yet. Now Milton is probably working the scenes a little bit, laying the groundwork and making us anticipate and salivate, so when God draws up in his limo, his entrance will be all the more brilliant, but meanwhile Satan is working the room like no other and giving us his version of the events so that God comes off a bit Machiavellian and you actually start to feel a bit sorry for Satan.

You see, Satan charges God with instigating the rebellion:
"But He who reigns Monarch in Heav'n...His Regal State Put forth at full but still His strength concealed, Which tempted our attempt and wrought our fall." Book One, Ln 637-642.

Sort of begs the question:
Did God create Hell as a sort of boundary maintenance mechanism?
After all, what is Heaven without Hell?

Book One is thus Satan as underdog, as victimised victim, all proud and offended dignity in defeat, and at this point I am all for him and "his dark designs." Also he has some great lines: "The mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven!"

Milton's proposed reason for writing the epic is to "justify the ways of God to men." So the question is, did Satan run away from under his hands? But possibly I should read more before answering this.

After Book One, I now think of Satan and his rebels, the denizens of hell, as a sort of diaspora community. Hell is nothing more than exile from Heaven, an exile from which they cannot return. So how do you not feel bad for Satan? At least, for us from Dharamsala, return is still possible.

Little Golden Statues

2009-02-23T10:12:00.000-05:00

The Oscars yesterday were...not very funny. In fact, flat almost.

When I found Hugh Jackman of the blisteringly hot Wolverine was the host, I did feel considerable trepidation. Hugh Jackman is seriously goodlooking and not British - how could he be funny? Perhaps Oscar was thinking of Grant or Laurie?

Here are my morning-after thoughts. Basically, Oscar, if you want to be a musical and still entertain, you have to be Made In Bollywood. And if you want to be goodlooking and funny, you can't just be a Hugh, you also have to be funny.

At least Slumdog and Kate Winslet won. Small mercies.

Pet Salad and Rice Beer

2009-02-22T19:48:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we bought two pots of wheatgrass (called "Lobue" in Tibetan and also known as "Pet Salad" because cats like to eat them, and not at all related to marijuana) from Bread and Circus and today my parents fermented some rice for Chang.

Because Losar, New Year, falls on February 25th.

Of course, we aren't really celebrating this year's New Year. In solidarity with the Tibetans in Tibet who have said that they aren't celebrating in protest against the Chinese crackdown.

But, you know what, in many ways, it feels like I have already lost Losar anyway. Part of it is just this: Try being a Red Sox fan in Kathmandu, try being a Sachin Tendulkar fan in Vermont. But part of it is something else.

Vigiling on Wednesdays

2009-02-19T10:55:00.000-05:00

I went to the Vigil yesterday with my mother.
We meet in Harvard Square, in the Pit, for two hours, and hold up Tibetan flags and signs saying "Free Tibet", "Tibet Belongs to Tibetans", "Honk for Freedom", "Long Live His Holiness" etc. Then we pray, for all the Tibetans who were taken, tortured, executed because of the March protests. Yesterday there were about 25 people, older and younger Tibetans. It's generally the same crowd.

There was heavy snowfall yesterday. I mean, snow was falling like confetti, like all the angels in heaven were clearing out their sidewalks and we just happened to be underneath their shovels. Truth be told, we probably wouldn't have gone if the weather hadn't been fine when we started out. Because, you know, it's very easy to think 'what good will it do anybody for a bunch of us to gather in the pit and hold a couple of signs?' It's warm at home, and there's TV. I have missed these vigils any number of times, out of habit, laziness and cognitive dissonance.

Even when I do go, sometimes that seems to be habit too. And sometimes because other people whose dedication I admire go. Sometimes to get out of the house. Sometimes out of guilt, and only very occasionally, from a small inspired burst of activism.

There's no sort of "Eureka" reason for why we hold these vigils. I guess, mostly, we hold the vigils because we can.

I think I'll write something about what it means to be Tibetan, what it means to be from this country we have never seen and yet always to think of going to Tibet in terms of going back to Tibet, to have terms like "occupation" and "colonialism" mean now and not history. Perhaps I can call it "What We Talk About When We Talk About Tibet".

If you are a Schizo

2009-02-18T14:37:00.000-05:00

Ok it already sucks because you have a mental disorder. But you know what else, turns out you can't go to China either because they won't let you in the door!

Here's the additional information on Chinese visas, from the website of the Chinese embassy, in the section entitled Additional Information:

"Any person suffering from a mental disorder, leprosy, AIDS, venereal diseases, contagious tuberculosis or other such infectious diseases shall not be permitted to enter China."*

Yeah, how very medieval totalitarian state (as opposed to modern totalitarian state)! Come on, China, be yourself.

Also I am wondering, and just wondering for wonder's sake, you understand: is the term "person suffering from a mental disorder" strictly defined to mean only the full blown psychotic or loosely defined to include the occasional mild melancholic?

*http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/hzqz/zgqz/t84246.htm

The Tibetan Woman as a Nun

2009-02-15T23:29:00.000-05:00

I resolve to update more regularly. So it isn't Losar yet, won't be until February 25, but it'll be good practice.

Today finished editing "Status of Tibetan Nuns in Exile" for the Tibetan Women's Association. Tenky asked me to do this since, she said, "u enjoy working with nuns and reading about nuns" - which makes me sound like I have a weird nun fetish. This because I told her that while I was at my cousin's wedding reception at Soaltee Hotel (in Kathmandu!) I spent some time chatting with the novice nuns from the local nunnery. A very young nun, 14 perhaps, newly out of Tibet, went red, covered her face with her hands and would not talk to me because I have short hair and she was convinced I was a boy. Later, another nun asked me which nunnery I was from. Perhaps I need to rethink this boy's haircut and learn the lesson that Samson taught.

So anyway, nuns. I am interested in nuns and have always gotten along well with most because Dolmaling Nunnery/School of Dialectics was my home for three years and a half years, and so see past the red robes and the monastic mystique. Basically I edited TWA's report on nuns because I wanted to read it.

Although the report and the data compiled presents no new finding or bright idea, it was very interesting reading and I think it's going to be a good and helpful thing, a great thing, to have these actual statistics. So there are 1651 nuns in exile, and about 342 nuns form the survey's raw pool. So a pretty good percentage. There's a positive correlation between the number of nuns who are political prisoners in Drapchi and the number of escapee nuns in exile the following year, while it may be predictable it's still exciting to see the graph. Another exciting -and really, entirely dramatic- point is that 80% of the nuns said they would study for the Geshe Degree if they could. Yeah, 80%. Yeah, the Geshe Degree, the PhD. of Tibetan Buddhism. Well, perhaps the nuns ticked that box because they knew that right now, they can't even if they wanted to, since they are not allowed.

You see, only people who are fully ordained can sit for the Geshe Exam. And the reason that brilliant nuns can't sit for this exam is because -wait for it, it's good: nuns aren't fully ordained, they can't become Bikshunis because the Bikshuni lineage died out a long time ago. Seriously people, is that your excuse? Surely there are loopholes. True, I conceive of bizarre scenarios in which a nun would get a sex change, become a monk and then become a Geshe. But no, seriously, there must be other ways the Bikshuni lineage can be revived.

After all these women already get shafted as Tibetans nationals (by the Chinese government) and as Tibetan women (by Tibetan men). They do not need to be shafted -by the monks- as Tibetan nuns!

We have established that a mother's son with the necessary wisdom may win the Ganden Throne, but what about a mother's daughter?

Public Policy in Tibet

2008-10-31T09:10:00.000-04:00

Public Policy in Tibet, circa. pre "liberation"

We all wonder. Before China sent the People's Liberation Army to occupy, excuse me, sometimes I forget my newspeak, I mean liberate Tibet, how did the Tibetan Government spend its time? There are only so many picnics a Kudak* can attend in a season. Well I found this nice bit of information in Charles Bell's "The People of Tibet." One thing government officials did to occupy their time was issue a development policy. Yes, a written proclamation known as Tsa-Tsik (Root Word) was circulated to all the Mayors of all the towns.

This proclamation proclaimed:
During that portion of the summer in which there is scarcity of rain (i.e. May and June) no one is allowed to construct any building.**

Because, you know, builders make offerings and pray for dry skies. Obviously if these prayers were answered, farmers who pray for rainfall get screwed.

*A civil servant who through service to the government received land grants and titles and became an aristocrat. This process was a little bit like the bureaucratizing of Japanese samurai, except there was no wimpy sheathing of cool samurai swords.
**Bell, C., The People of Tibet, Delhi, Book Faith India, 1998

My tentative attempt at technology and timepass

2008-10-27T15:16:00.000-04:00

Yuthok Lane

This is how it will be.
We will take a walk on concrete, not blue tiles.
You will pretend to be disappointed.
This will have the quality of a ritual.

In the morning the sun will fall from the sky,
We will protect ourselves against its fire.
It is not so unbearable but
We have learnt to be wary of arrivals from the east.

We are unbeautiful here.
Our stay in the plains has made us so.
But whispers now carry endearments.
And we would not have it any other way.

Outside the chapel we will collect ourselves,
Then enter the bowels of its benign shell.
Nothing in here threatens us.

We will pull out our offerings, crisp and new.
This time they will go where they are intended.
The pilgrims are less urgent now
And slowly, the shadow of the deity gains its substance.

In the temple's deep
I will speak my name for you.