The (Tibetan) Art of Official Correspondence

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

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

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?!

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

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

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

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.