Torture is an everyday reality in Tibet.

Torture is used by China as a weapon against dissent, creating a climate of fear.

Torture must stop.

To shine a spotlight on the widespread use of torture in Tibet British actors lent their voices to Tibetan torture survivors who can not speak out for themselves. Watch Dominic West, Juliet Stevenson and David Threlfall and listen to Alan Rickman.

China bans evidence based on torture

Important step for the ‘Stop Torture in Tibet’ campaign.

China has introduced a new law banning evidence obtained through torture from courts in Tibet and China. This has been one of the key demands of Free Tibet’s ‘Stop Torture in Tibet’ campaign.

Though there are many problems with the new legislation, we believe it could be a good step towards stopping the torture in Tibet.

China announced new regulations on 31 May, which came into effect on 1 July, that ban the use of evidence extracted through torture in cases that can result in a death sentence. The regulations also offer all defendants the opportunity to challenge court evidence if they were tortured or coerced into confessing. The new regulations refer to :

-confessions obtained through torture;
-testimonies extracted using violence or threats;
-evidence whose origins are unclear.

One of the reasons for the widespread and routine use of torture in Tibet and China is the use of confessions as evidence of guilt.

While Free Tibet welcomes these new regulations it is not clear how they would be implemented as they are vague, lacking in details on key points and in many instances are impossible to implement. In their current form the new regulations are not likely to have a significant effect in the short term but they may prove to be a first step towards eradicating the routine and widespread use of torture in China and Tibet.

Problems with the new regulations to ban use of evidence obtained by torture

‘Oral evidence that has been determined to be illegal in accordance with the law shall be excluded and may not serve as the basis for conviction.’ Article 2

Therefore the new regulation does not ban the use of confessions extracted under torture outright, but rather leaves the decision largely to the courts to decide.

An investigation into allegations of torture can be requested by the defendant.

However, in a country where the overwhelming majority of defendants are not granted lawyers it is unclear how the defendant would know about and utilise this opportunity.

For an investigation into the alleged torture to take place the person who alleges torture must prove that torture took place, including by giving the name of the alleged torturer.

It is not explained how the defendant may prove that torture took place or what would be considered sufficient evidence. The few examples that are cited as acceptable evidence such as giving the name of the torturer are well nigh impossible for a victim of torture to meet, rendering any such investigation extremely unlikely.

The rules do not apply to cases of administrative detention such as re-education through labour.

Many Tibetans are sentenced to forced labour for political activities through this system of detention without trial.

The challenge now will be ensuring that China’s courts obey these new laws. Free Tibet will be working, with other human rights organisations like Tibet Watch, to make China accountable to its own laws to stop torture in Tibet.

Watch the videos of actors reading torture testimonies for the campaign to give greater insight into the terrible experience of being tortured in Tibet.

What we do

Free Tibet, established in 1987, is an independent membership organisation. All of our funding comes from individual supporters. The Executive Committee determines the general policy of the organisation and guides the work of the campaign.

It should be noted that Free Tibet is not a charity, though we are a non-profit, non-governmental organisation. Due to the current laws in the UK we are unable to apply for charity status, due to what is deemed to be the political nature of our work (the same applies for organisations like Amnesty International and Greenpeace).

The Free Tibet office is a vibrant hub of campaigning activity led by the Director who is assisted by a strong team of staff and volunteers.

Free Tibet has more than 20,000 supporters. For an annual subscription fee, supporters receive our magazine plus regular mailings with updates on the organisation’s activities. Supporters are able to become further involved by joining our Urgent Action Campaigns, participating in actions and events and getting involved with their local group.

Subscribers to the Urgent Action Campaigns receive immediate information on important cases needing their individual support. The majority of cases require letters, emails and/or faxes to be written to relevant authorities. On average there are 10-12 cases per year.

Approximately 50 Local Groups work on behalf of Free Tibet in local communities across the UK and overseas. Local groups are a vital link to grassroots support for Tibet; spreading awareness in their communities by participating in Free Tibet co-ordinated actions, by staging talks and fundraising events, and by promoting the work and membership of Free Tibet. Groups can vary from a single person co-ordinating activities in their area, to a committee of people with regular meetings. All local groups are legally and financially autonomous.

The Panchen Lama Controversy

Who Will Identify The Next Incarnation Of The Dalai Lama?

A Situation Report by Wilfried F. Voss

The Panchen Lama, meaning “Great Scholar,” is the highest-ranking Lama after the Dalai Lama in the Gelugpa sect of Tibetan Buddhism. The sect controlled western Tibet from the 16th century until the establishment of Chinese sovereignty in 1951.

The successive Panchen lamas form a reincarnation lineage, and they are believed to be the incarnations of Amitabha Buddha.

The Panchen Lama bears part of the responsibility of identifying the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama and vice versa, a fact that appears crucially important to the Chinese government when it comes to establishing their territorial claim on Tibet.

On May 14, 1995, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama identified a six-year-old boy by the name of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as the 11th incarnation of the Panchen Lama, but only three days later the boy and his parents were taken into Chinese custody.

In November of the same year the Chinese had officially enthroned six-year-old Gyaltsen Norbu, the son of two communist party members, as the 11th Panchen Lama.

To this day there are no records of the boy Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, his siblings, or his parents. [Read more...]

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Kailas is a sacred, snow-capped mountain of the Himalayas in a remote area of western Tibet. There have been no recorded attempts to climb it, in deference to Buddhist, Hindu, Ban, and Jainist beliefs. Award-winning British travel writer and novelist Thubron (Shadow of the Silk Road, 2007) traveled along the Karnali River (a tributary of the Ganges) by foot with only a guide, a cook, and a horse man on a long and often treacherous trek to visit this mystical peak, considered holy by one-fifth of humankind.

The journey is the reward, for both writer and reader, in this rich, beautiful account of the landscape, people, culture, and politics of Tibet. Much more than a travel guide or history lesson, this engrossing and gorgeously written book is also a stirring memoir tinged with the author’s own grief, reflecting on the joys and losses he’s experienced. Thubron is the steward of his father’s legacy and keeper of his mother’s memories, sharing familial recollections on a pilgrimage toward one of nature’s precious jewels, and his own parentless future. –Chris Keech, Booklist

Reader Review

Though still quite active, as evidenced by this book, Colin Thubron seems to belong to an earlier generation of British travel writers, the one that included Norman Lewis, H.V. Morton, Freya Stark, and Patrick Leigh Fermor (who also is still living, age 95). They wrote with grace and erudition, and with compassion, about exotic foreign places that were not served by any travel agencies. Take, for example, Thubron’s latest book, TO A MOUNTAIN IN TIBET.

The principal subject is a trek Thubron made to and around Mount Kailas, in western Tibet, in 2009. Accompanied by a guide and a cook, both Nepalese, he hiked from Simikat, Nepal to the Tibetan border, then took a Land Cruiser to Darchen in Tibet, from where he set out by foot on a kora, or circumnavigation, of Kailas. The trip was at altitude – from 8,000 feet to 18,600 feet – and much of it was along narrow trails perched hundreds of feet up the walls of sheer river gorges or up and over landslides of jagged scree. Thus, it met the criterion of old-fashioned travel books by being physically demanding. (And Thubron did it at age 70!)

Mount Kailas is “the most sacred of the world’s mountains”. It is holy to Buddhists and Hindus and a host of related and precursor faiths or ways of life. It stands by itself, in splendid isolation and over 22,000 feet high, next to Lake Manasarovar (equally holy and where Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes were scattered). It has never been climbed – due in part to technical difficulties but more to its remoteness and the reverence with which it is held by those who live in the area. But a circumnavigation of it is for many Hindus, Buddhists, and Tibetans what a pilgrimage to Mecca is for Moslems or to Jerusalem for Jews.

Along the way to Mount Kailas, Thubron encountered plenty of exotic sights and experiences, more than enough for a classic travel book. For example: Tibetan monks watching a soccer game on television and rooting for Manchester United and becoming enraged at the referee; caravans of goats, each carrying on its back a saddlepack filled with salt from Tibet, which will be exchanged for grain on the return trip from Nepal; a monastery in a stone hut, where pilgrims crowd in and leave behind money, which a novice collects in a box labelled “Budweiser”; and sky burials, where master corpse-dissectors render the body into pieces, which are tossed on to a platform for the vultures (after all, “A land of frozen earth, almost treeless, can barely absorb its dead.”).

But, like the best of travel books, TO A MOUNTAIN IN TIBET transcends its subject or “travel destination”. Interlaced throughout Thubron’s narrative of his trek are his reports and reflections on the region’s religions and ways of life and thought. Thubron is empathetic, but he does not engage in any phony or pandering attempts to become what he is not. In connection with a discussion of “tulkus” or reincarnations that he has with an abbot of a monastery exiled from Tibet, Thubron writes: “But I belong helplessly to another culture. He is focused on spiritual continuance, while I am overborne by individual death.”

For Thubron in this book, the mortality that weighs on him is accentuated by the recent death of his mother, leaving him the last survivor of his family. Again and again on the trip, he is haunted by memories of his father, his mother, and his sister (who, ironically, died in an avalanche in the Alps). Those memories do not overwhelm the book, but they do give it a poignant, personal dimension which, when added to the travel adventure, the history, and the religious ethnology make TO A MOUNTAIN IN TIBET a special book. – R. M. Peterson

Grief and Faith in Tibet

The New York Times Book Review – March 4, 2011 (Excerpt)

Trekking among the temples and monasteries of Nepal and southwestern Tibet, Colin Thubron hears variations of the same message whenever he consults a Buddhist priest: “The soul has no memory. The dead do not feel their past.” It’s not much consolation for an agnostic Englishman, aging and childless and now, after the death of his mother, the last surviving member of his family. But consolation — emotional if not intellectual or even spiritual — is what Thubron is after as he sets off on a grueling pilgrimage to the most sacred of the world’s mountains, an insurmountable eerie white cone that rises out of a barren plain in Tibet, shielded from easy access by the natural fortress of the Himalayas and the imported vigilance of the Chinese Army. Mount Kailas, the mystic Mount Meru of the Hindu scriptures, is venerated not only by Hindus but by Buddhists, Jains and practitioners of Bon, Tibet’s primeval faith. Together they constitute a fifth of mankind. Yet Thubron, approaching its inscrutable fastness, feels ever more solitary.

“You cannot walk out your grief,” he tells himself. “Or bring anyone back. You are left with the desire only that things not be as they are.” This is the reason he has resolved to go “walking to a place beyond your own history, to the sound of the river flowing the other way.” To embark on a journey is, he reminds himself, “my profession, after all.” And what a profession. Since the publication of his first book, “Mirror to Damascus,” in 1967, Thubron has been praised for the grace and erudition of his writing: in accounts of travels to the Near East, Russia and, in recent years, Central Asia and the ancient, now-vanishing route of the Silk Road, once the main link between China and the West. Also an accomplished novelist, he has come to be known for his ability to summon just the right phrases to fix a place or person in the mind’s eye. In “To a Mountain in Tibet,” however, what seems almost as striking is Thubron’s understanding of the power of silence. [Read the full article...]

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE

A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

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The 10th Panchen Lama

From The Sydney Morning Herald
November 12, 2005

She is half-Tibetan, half-Chinese, with an overlay of confident Los Angeles charm. Into the arcane world of Tibetan politics – mostly peopled by bossy Chinese communist officials, deferential maroon-robed Tibetan monks, and a mix of international activists like actor Richard Gere – has stepped a 22-year-old princess.

Yabshi Pan Rinzinwangmo is familiarly known to her friends as “Renji” but to many others she is known as the “Princess of Tibet”.

Her father was the 10th Panchen Lama, a Buddhist monk ranking close to the Dalai Lama in Tibet’s spiritual leadership, who died in 1989. Her mother, Li Jie, is a former doctor in China’s People’s Liberation Army and granddaughter of a famous general in China’s civil war.

After 10 years studying in the United States, at high school in Los Angeles and then political science at the American University in Washington, Renji has just returned to China for further studies at the elite Tsinghua University to prepare for what she sees as her future role as a “unifier”.

“I know my goal very clearly, as the daughter of the 10th Panchen Lama, my responsibility [is] to the Tibetan people,” Renji said this week in an interview with the Herald in an ornate villa built in the central Beijing compound given to her father. “They have hopes and dreams in me. Also I have to honour my father, give something back. People call me princess. They place hopes and dreams upon me. They count on me to do something.”

The invitation to return and commence doctoral studies in whatever field she wanted, at any Chinese university, came “from the highest authority in China, basically meaning Mr Hu,” the princess said.

The involvement of President Hu Jintao, China’s top communist, signals the high hopes that Beijing has placed in this young woman as a saga of hard politics and wafty mysticism moves slowly towards a finale.

The role of the Panchen Lama will be crucial in the identification and confirmation of the next reincarnation of the Dalai Lama after the death of the present one, who is 70.

Six years after the death of Renji’s father, the Dalai Lama and his senior monks identified a boy named Gedhun Choekyi Nyima in the Tibetan town of Naksu as his reincarnation.

Beijing moved swiftly. Six months later, its religious officials staged a ritual which selected another six-year-old, Gyaltsen Norbu, as the new Panchen Lama. The Dalai Lama’s choice, along with his family, disappeared from view and has never been seen by the outside world since. Beijing asserts the boy is well and the family secluded at their own request, but the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child recently asked for an independent mission to be allowed to visit them.

The Beijing-appointed Panchen Lama, now 16, has recently started appearing in carefully managed events, being quoted making “patriotic” remarks by the official media, and is currently holding a religious retreat at the headquarters of his order, the Tashilhunpo monastery in the Tibetan city of Shigatse.

Tibetans are yet to accept him however. His picture is rarely displayed in their homes or shops, which continue to show photos of Renji’s father (the Dalai Lama’s picture is banned).

Clearly, Beijing will be hoping that Renji will help reinforce their candidate’s claim as Panchen Lama, so that when the time comes to endorse a new Dalai Lama, one under Chinese control, his imprimatur will be widely accepted.

Renji is yet to oblige, however. She said she has encountered Gyaltsen Norbu twice, first briefly at a ceremony on the 10th anniversary of her father’s death at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, the last time at Tashilhunpo in 2002 when she went to brush up on her Tibetan language and study Buddhism next to the gilded stupa containing her father’s body.

Did she feel a buzz of recognition at the reincarnation of her father?

“Everyone asks me this question,” Renji said. “Because of that I went to that meeting wanting to feel something, trying to feel something.

“But I was deeply distracted. Before the meeting these people came to me and asked me to kowtow in front of him.

“I grew up with my father and I know what my father believed in and what he didn’t believe in. My father would never want anyone to have religious bows.”

The meeting passed quickly. “The whole time I was thinking about my father and feeling sad and loneliness for my father,” Renji said. “If I will see him again sometime soon, give me a call and I’ll tell you if I have new feelings.”

The princess said she had not met the other Panchen Lama candidate, and had no information about him. Nor had she met the Dalai Lama during her decade outside China, when he visited the US several times. But the Dalai Lama’s “people” had come to ask about her welfare several times and offered support, as recently as two months ago before her return to China. “So he cares a great deal about me,” she said. “Again I am feeling lucky.”

Her father had stayed in Tibet when the Dalai Lama fled to India after a failed Tibetan uprising in 1959. Initially, he was a useful figure for the Chinese, but was then targeted as a feudal remnant by radical leftists in the Cultural Revolution.

After vicious “struggle” sessions and public humiliation, the Panchen Lama was thrown into a Beijing jail. His palace in Shigatse, a mini-version of Lhasa’s famous Potala, was razed, along with much of Tashilhunpo. Released in late 1977 after 10 years in prison, aged 39, the Panchen embarked on a new life. He married Li Jie in 1979, and Renji was born in June 1983 (conferred the nickname “Tuan-tuan” or “Unifier” by the widow of Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong’s premier, in the first sign of the political hopes placed in her).

To get funds for reconstruction of Tashilhunpo, the Panchen set up commercial activities under a company called the Gyang-gyen Corporation.

All this brought much criticism and suspicion at first, but as the Panchen Lama spoke out steadily against the failings of Chinese rule, he earned wide respect and affection.

Renji said Tibetans were generally forgiving of her father’s lapse from his monk’s vow of celibacy, even though she is the first known child of any Panchen or Dalai lama in some six centuries of the priestly lineages. When she goes to Tibet, as many as 10,000 people a day attend her audiences.

“They try to get really close to me,” she said. “When they are touching me they feel they are touching my father.”

Having grown up with monks as part of the household in Beijing, she feels no awkwardness staying among hundreds of monks and novices at Tashilhunpo.

“There’s no gender issue between the monks and me,” she said.

Renji’s drift seems to be more to the temporal world than the cloisters. She has enrolled at Tsinghua for a PhD in finance, already runs a chain of 10 stores selling Tibetan traditional medicines and works with the Red Cross in Tibet and other charities.

She and her mother live off their family investments, which include an office building at the front of the compound rented out to a big dental clinic. Their house, built in their absence in the US, is a three-story example of the Rococo style favoured by China’s new rich.

Renji produces “Tree Bear”, the toy koala her father brought back from Australia in 1986.

“I don’t remember a single night the koala bear is not sitting on my bedside table,” she said. “He has a lot of mileage on him.”

In three years, her father’s 70th birth anniversary, she hopes to finish her degree and launch into her role as unifier.

“My biggest goal is to continue my father’s work,” Renji said. “Within this I would like to preserve the ancient heritage of Tibet [and] at the same time modernise the living conditions and facilities for Tibetan people, and deepen people’s skills and education.”

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/bridging-the-gap/2005/11/11/1131578237462.html

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The Bleeding Hills

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

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The Panchen Lama Controversy

Who will identify the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama?

Gyaltsen Norbu

The Buddhist Channel, August 18, 2005

In the cobbled paths and ancient courtyards of Tibet’s Tashilhunpo monastery, a little boy stares out of pictures wearing a yellow, cone-shaped hat that mark his sect of Buddhism.

Gyaltsen Norbu has been groomed since childhood to prepare for his role as the 11th Panchen Lama, the reincarnation of the 10th and the second-most important figure in Tibetan Buddhism.

But while he received politically vetted religious training under the close watch of China’s leaders, another boy is believed to have grown up under house arrest, dubbed the world’s youngest political prisoner.

The first boy was chosen by the Chinese government. The second, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, was anointed by the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader and Beijing’s nemesis since he fled to India in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule.

Ten years on, with the official Panchen Lama now a teenager and expected to take on a larger role, the Chinese government is being forced to come face-to-face with the question of acceptance for its choice in the towns and villages of Tibet, where many maintain a secret loyalty to the Dalai Lama.

“The 11th Panchen Lama is not a stooge,” declared Bian Ba Ci Ren, an official in Shigatse, Tibet’s second city tucked in the mountains four km (2.5 miles) above sea level.

“He is a genius, both in religious meaning and in his studies,” he said.

But with the “Soul Boy” spending most of his childhood in Beijing, his acceptance has yet to be tested where it counts — in the holy confines of the Panchen Lama’s traditional seat, Shigatse’s Tashilhunpo monastery.

Within the walls of Tashilhunpo, where security cameras keep watch and there are rumoured to be spies among the monks, Gyaltsen Norbu’s picture is displayed at every shrine, alongside photos of his predecessors.

All are of equal size, all carefully draped with white prayer scarves in a sign of respect.

But outside in the bustling streets of Shigatse, there are signs the 11th Panchen Lama is little more than tolerated while his Dalai Lama-chosen rival is revered.

“In the countryside, everyone believes the Dalai Lama’s choice is the right one. In the cities some think the government’s choice is right,” said an 18-year-old student.

Asked which boy he believes in, his answer is immediate. “Of course it’s the Dalai Lama’s choice,” he said before hustling off, helping his mother by the elbow through the pilgrimage circuit that winds into the mountains behind the monastery.

In the narrow streets where tourists jostle with Buddhist pilgrims, shop after shop bears the smiling photo of the 10th Panchen Lama, a hero among Tibetans for criticising Beijing in a 1962 petition against efforts to wipe out Buddhism in Tibet.

While he spent more than a decade in prison and under house arrest for his efforts, the 10th Panchen Lama was later rehabilitated, making him a politically acceptable figure to both Tibetans and the Chinese government.

But pictures of both boys picked as his reincarnation are conspicuously absent, a sign of passive resistance against the government’s choice.

“You don’t see his photo being displayed in a way that is used for figures that are held reverentially,” said one Western diplomat.

That’s a problem for a government keen to prove Gyaltsen Norbu’s acceptance among the monks of Tashilhunpo before he turns 18 and is expected to take on a full leadership role within Tibetan Buddhism.

Officially, the monks at Tashilhunpo not only accept Gyaltsen Norbu but also repudiate the other boy, now 16.

“The 11th Panchen Lama recognised by the Dalai Lama doesn’t exist,” said Pingla, a monk and director of the Democratic Management Committee at Tashilhunpo, the government group inside every monastery that keeps religious life in check.

“We do not accept him so we don’t display his photos at home or in the monastery.”

But loyalties at Tashilhunpo once lay elsewhere.

Its chief abbot, Chadrel Rinpoche, was sacked and jailed for treason after notifying the Dalai Lama that his search team had identified Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as its choice.

That leaves an open question of just what kind of reception Gyaltsen Norbu would receive should the government impose his presence within the monastery.

“The refusal of monks there to accept him is really a big problem for the Chinese. Symbolically, he should be in the monastery,” said Tsering Shakya, a Tibet scholar at Oxford University.

“He is wandering around all over China and he really has no seat of his own,” he said.

But with the battle over the Panchen Lama a fight for the hearts and minds of Tibetans, the Chinese leadership is making clear that its choice must win out, giving Gyaltsen Norbu an ever-higher profile as he gets older.

Earlier this year, religious leaders were ordered to urge the faithful to show more support for the boy, and he met President Hu Jintao on his birthday in February, underscoring his importance to the leadership.

“The 11th Panchen Lama has the respect of the people in Shigatse and the monks or our monastery,” Pingla said.

“He will come back to live here.”

Source: http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=8,1581,0,0,1,0

Panchen Lama elevated to challenge Dalai Lama

The Times of India, March 1, 2010

In 1954, the Dalai Lama attended a meeting of the National People’s Congress and Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong wrote a poem praising his accomplishments. The wheel has now turned a full circle with the party appointing the Panchen Lama as a member of the Chinese parliament.

In his new role, the 23-year old Panchen Lama may be expected to take on the Dalai Lama and help the government counter the adverse publicity on the Tibet issue. He has so far refrained from any direct attack on the elderly Dalai Lama. But this might happen now because most members of the parliament denounce the Dalai Lama on a routine basis.

It took 15 years for Bainqen Erdini Qoigyijabu, who was handpicked by Communist leaders to be made the Panchen Lama in 1995, to earn his spurs and rise to become a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the second body in Chinese parliament.

Technically speaking, a CPPCC member has a somewhat less influence as compared to a member of NPC, which is the most important decision making body. But the Panchen Lama will be given a high-profile political role aimed at building worldwide support for China’s case in the Tibet issue.

The decision to elevate him comes soon after US president Barack Obama brushed aside Chinese protests and kept his date with the Dalai Lama.

Beijing has also been saying that the Dalai Lama has lost his right to be called a Tibetan after his statement last year that he was born a Tibetan but was spiritually an Indian.

The Panchen Lama has so far helped the government build influence among Buddhists across the world by playing a key role in the State-sponsored conferences like the World Buddhist Congress and making statements praising the government. But he has not joined the government campaign to vilify the Dalai Lama.

Observers said he might now be expected to join the vilification campaign, participate in press conferences on Tibet related issues and even travel around the world to canvass support for the government’s point of view.

The CPPCC is a vast advisory body of 2,200 members and includes representatives of 56 ethnic minority groups in China, members of a few non-Communist parties, business leaders, religious figures, academics and celebrities. The next session of CPPCC begins Wednesday.

The Panchen Lama was among 13 new people named to the National Committee of the CPPCC.

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/Panchen-Lama-elevated-to-challenge-the-Dalai-Lama/articleshow/5630952.cms

China appoints Panchen Lama in tactical move to quell unrest

The Independent, March 2, 2010

The red stars and bunting are in place for China’s annual parliament, the National People’s Congress, which starts in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People tomorrow and had been shaping up to be a rubberstamp talking shop focused mainly on the economy.

However, the event has taken on a broader political significance since Beijing named the Panchen Lama, the young man controversially enthroned by Beijing as the second-highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, as a delegate to the country’s top legislative advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.

The publication of a report by a top government expert critical of Beijing’s handling of growing unrest has also added to the feeling that this year’s NPC might include a surprise or, at least, indications of growing tensions.

The 20-year-old Panchen Lama, whose name is Gyaltsen Norbu, has long been earmarked as Beijing’s choice to usurp the Dalai Lama as the public face of Tibetan Buddhism. He has taken an increasingly political role and was in the frame a couple of years ago to be a delegate to the CPPCC but was thought to be too young. The Panchen Lama was among 13 people named on Sunday to the CPPCC, made up of about 2,200 business leaders, religious figures, academics and celebrities. The young monk has appeared with Communist Party leaders, publicly praised Chinese rule in Tibet, and vowed to contribute to “the blueprint of the compatible development of Tibetan Buddhism and socialism”. [Read the full article...]

China’s Copy-Watch Panchen Lama

asia sentinel, June 9, 2010

The Chinese, having perfected the art of copying watches and DVDs, believe they have made a perfect copy of the Panchen Lama, Tibet’s second-most revered religious figure, and set him loose on the streets of a prefecture in Southern Tibet. The state-owned Xinhua news service reported Tuesday that thousands of Tibetan Buddhists had gathered in Lhoka prefecture on China’s border with India to see Gyaltsen Norbu, Beijing’s copy of the Panchen Lama, who was appointed by the Chinese as a six-year-old boy in 1995.

The method of picking the successor to Tibet’s high priests normally is a complicated one – unless you are a Chinese Communist, which makes it possible to ignore obscure religious practices that stretch back hundreds of years. Tibetan Buddhists believe the top lamas are reincarnations of an unbroken line of religious figures stretching back to the Buddha himself, whose soul never disappears. The Chinese Communists appear to believe it just takes a religious bureaucrat to run the place. [Read the full article...]

About the Book

On September 30, 2006 gunfire echoed through the thin air near Advance Base Camp on Cho Oyu Mountain. Frequented by thousands of climbers each year, Cho Oyu lies nineteen miles east of Mt. Everest on the border between Tibet and Nepal. To the elite mountaineering community, it offers a straightforward summit—a warm-up climb to her formidable sister. To Tibetans, Cho Oyu promises a gateway to freedom through a secret glacial path: the Nangpa La.

Murder in the High Himalaya is the unforgettable account of the brutal killing of Kelsang Namtso—a seventeen-year-old Tibetan nun fleeing to India—by Chinese border guards. Witnessed by dozens of Western climbers, Kelsang’s death sparked an international debate over China’s savage oppression of Tibet. Adventure reporter Jonathan Green has gained rare entrance into this shadow-land at the rooftop of the world. In his affecting portrait of modern Tibet, Green raises enduring questions about morality and the lengths we go to achieve freedom.

- Source: http://www.jonathangreenonline.com/

Reviews

In 2006, a video began circulating on YouTube showing Tibetan refugee’s escaping across the border into Nepal while being fired upon by Chinese army goons. In the distance a lone figure falls dead on the mountain. This became known as the Nangpa La shooting, which is the story behind investigative journalist Jonathan Green’s book `Murder in the High Himalaya`. It seems like a minor incident now, but Green draws in many facets and people to build a gripping and important contemporary story about Tibet, and a very personal profile of exactly what “human rights abuse” really means.

Green begins with a brief introduction to the history of Tibet and the Chinese occupation in 1950. He then threads a braided human interest narrative about two main characters: Kelsang Namtso, the 17-year old girl murdered on the mountain; and Luis Benitez, an American mountain climber who witnessed it and whose life would be changed forever. Each chapter switches back and forth between the two, moving forward in time until their paths finally cross that fateful day. It reads like a novel.

I don’t like to use the Nazi analogy, but its true, Tibet today is like occupied Europe under the Nazis. Not Western Europe, but Eastern Europe, where things were much tougher. It makes for thrilling if not chilling reading with late-night escapes, dogs, searchlights and check-points. Internment camps, sadistic guards, torture, bribes, safe houses, underground railroads, Collaborators and Resisters, etc.. it’s all real and happening today. Green’s book is one of the few reliable accounts since the wall of secrecy and Tibetan culture still keep most people silent.

`Murder` changed how I view Tibet, its clearly a very bad situation. As well it changed how I see wealthy mountain climbers who hoard the peaks every year in feats of egoistic bravo, while at their feet Tibetans are trying to escape to freedom and being shot. It makes climbing Everest seem somewhat banal and anti-climatic and strips it of its romanticism. The true story of Tibet is clearly not good business for China, or mountain climbing companies, all of whom collaborate to keep silent. The book is full of pseudonyms, people are afraid of being ostracized for speaking out, either from the tight-nit climbing community or by Chinese authorities. The book has been optioned to be made into a film for release in 2012, hopefully this powerful story will reach a wide audience. As the Dali Lama said, Kelsang Namtso did not die for no reason. - Stephen Balbach, Amazon Customer Review

Kirkus
“In clear, concise prose, the author deliberates over China’s stranglehold on Tibet, its systematic dismantling of the indigenous culture and the terror tactics employed on families… Green’s steely, factually dense analysis of this unlawful conspiracy sheds light on a perennial human-rights crisis.”

Bookseller
“A gripping take of routine murder that would have gone unreported but for the fact that a group of Western climbers were silent witnesses to the killing of a young Tibetan woman attempting to cross the border into India. Jonathan Green has travelled to the region to research the story, he’s interviewed witnesses, other refugees and even the Dalai Lama to tell this shocking and complicated story of how Chinese border guards, instructed to protect the border at any cost, will shoot to kill.”

MikeLDunham.com, May 24, 2010
“Once in a while, a book comes along that transcends its region-specific subject matter and addresses universal questions with calm moral clarity. Murder in the High Himalaya is such a book. It is a mesmerizing alpine adventure of horrifying consequences, a sober look at China’s crimes against humanity, and a reality check on the so-called heroics of Westerners who belong to the elite mountaineering community.”

Shelf Awareness, May 24, 2010
“A shattering tale that will appeal to readers of all things about Tibet, mountaineering, human rights and the preservation of cultural integrity.”

The Bookseller, April 16, 2010
“A gripping tale of routine murder that would have gone unreported but for the fact that a group of Western clumbers were silent witnesses to the killing of a young Tibetan woman attempting to cross the border into India. Jonathan Green has travelled to the region to research the story, he’s interviewed witnesses, other refugees and even the Dalai Lama to tell this shocking and complicated story of how Chinese border guards, instructed to protect the border at any cost, will shoot to kill.”

The Panchen Lama Controversy

Who will identify the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama?

The Last Dalai Lama?

On November 27, 2007, while attending an interfaith conference in the north Indian city of Amritsar, His Holiness the 14^th Dalai Lama suggested he might not be reborn, ending a 600-year-old tradition of reincarnation as a small boy after his death.

His Holiness was concerned that the Chinese government plans to seize control of his reincarnation and assign the 15^th Dalai Lama by breaking with the traditional selection process.

Such an interference with the Tibetan religious system is not unheard of, as the Chinese had officially enthroned a boy named Gyaltsen Norbu as the 11th Panchen Lama, the second-highest spiritual leader of Tibet, in November of 1995.

Earlier in the year, on May 14, His Holiness had identified a six-year-old boy by the name of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as the 11th incarnation of the Punchen Lama, but only three days later the boy and his parents were taken into Chinese custody.

As of today, there are no records of the boy or his parents.

Source:

http://buddhism.about.com/od/vajrayanabuddhism/a/dalailamarole_2.htm?r=et

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/dalai-lama-may-forgo-death-before-reincarnation/story-e6frg6t6-1111114986868

The Chinese are simply waiting for him to die

The announcement by Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, that he might consider changing the centuries-old method of succession is a sign both of the exiled god-king’s advancing years and his increasing desperation in the face of attempts by Beijing to aggressively pacify his homeland. In an interview with a Japanese newspaper, the 72-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate indicated that he and his aides were considering several methods that could replace the tradition of searching for a reincarnation of the Dalai Lama among Tibetan boys whose birth coincides with the previous incumbent’s death.

“If the Tibetan people want to keep the Dalai Lama system, one of the possibilities I have been considering with my aides is to select the next Dalai Lama while I’m alive,” he told the Sankei Shimbun in an interview published November 21st, 2007. That could mean either some kind of democratic election among senior Buddhist monks or a personal selection by the current Dalai Lama himself, who is the 14th of the line. For 13 successive incarnations, monks have fanned out across Tibet with relics of the deceased Dalai Lama to try and find his next incarnation — a boy who recognized the objects and thus signaled that the Dalai’s soul had passed into a new earthly envelope. It is a ritual that both affirms and reflects the basic foundations of Tibetan Buddhism, reincarnation and the rule of a revered group of repeatedly reborn monks. That the protector of Tibetan culture would consider scrapping a core tenet of Tibetan tradition and possibly undermining his own legitimacy are sure signs that China is solidifying its dominant position in the decades-long standoff.

But despite those high-profile appearances the Dalai Lama is well aware that time is on Beijing’s side. “The Chinese are simply waiting for him to die,” says Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher for the New York-based rights organization Human Rights Watch. When the Dalai Lama is gone, Bequelin says, supporters of Tibetan autonomy will have lost what is by far their most potent symbol of resistance to Chinese rule. Whoever takes over will have a much-diminished presence. History tends to back up that judgment. In 1995, the Dalai Lama chose a six-year-old Tibetan boy, Gendun Choekyi Nyima, to take the title of Panchen Lama, effectively the second-highest-ranking monk in the complex Tibetan hierarchy. The boy and his family disappeared almost immediately — spirited away, many suspect, by Chinese authorities — and haven’t been heard from since. Beijing later appointed its own candidate for the position — a boy, now 17 years old, who was prominently on display as a guest during last month’s 17th National Congress of the ruling Chinese Communist Party in Beijing.

To counter this, the Dalai Lama appears to have set on finding a suitable successor himself, one whose legitimacy is unsullied by unseemly squabbles over ritual with China and who has been handpicked to take up the advocacy work on behalf of his people once he dies. Making his succession an issue at this time may also be an attempt to tweak the Chinese — sensitive about their reputation in the walk-up to the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 — into taking a more accommodating position regarding the Tibet issue. Unlike more radical Tibetans, the Dalai Lama has always advocated autonomy, not independence, from China; and he has always said that he admired Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic. Beijing, however, has consistently lumped the Dalai Lama with the rest of what it calls the “splittists,” or those who would break up China.

But even if the Dalai Lama finds the perfect candidate, it may be too late. Beijing has become more sophisticated in dealing with Tibetan religion, allowing some interaction among less exalted lamas on both sides of the political divide. More importantly, the accelerating erosion of Tibetans’ traditional nomadic lifestyle, along with a burgeoning influx of ethnic Chinese workers, businessmen and tourists, makes it likely that Tibet will lose much of its unique cultural identity within a generation. Bequelin points to the example of China’s Muslim-majority province of Xinjiang, where Beijing has spent billions encouraging tourism — notably by building a train line through the region’s vast desert to the remote city of Kashgar, connecting it with the rest of China — and improving the infrastructure to extract its considerable oil reserves. Along with the strict repression of even the slightest signs of dissent, the policy has been highly successful in neutralizing opposition to Chinese rule.

In Tibet’s case, similar tactics are being used. A $5 billion train line connecting Beijing and Lhasa opened last July, doubling tourism arrivals in the region. A forced relocation program that will resettle tens of thousands of nomadic herders, along with increasing urban migration among young Tibetans, will ensure any remaining resistance dwindles with time. “It’s never a pretty sight when indigenous peoples run into the power of the state,” says Bequelin, “but China is unique in the Tibetans lack of ability to resist, so the process of assimilation is much faster.”

Source: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1686573,00.html

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The Bleeding Hills

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

guardian.co.uk – September 2, 2010

Scientists say the desertification of the mountain grasslands is accelerating climate change. Without its thatch the roof of the world is less able to absorb moisture and more likely to radiate heat.

Partly because of this the Tibetan mountains have warmed two to three times faster than the global average; the permafrost and glaciers of the “Third Pole” are melting.

To make matters worse, the towering Kunlun, Himalayan and Karakorum ranges that surround the plateau act as a chimney for water vapour – which has a stronger greenhouse gas effect than carbon dioxide – to be convected high into the stratosphere. Mixed with pollution, dust and black carbon (soot) from India and elsewhere, this spreads a brown cloud across swaths of the Eurasian landmass. When permafrost melts it can also release methane, another powerful greenhouse gas. Xiao Ziniu, the director general of the Beijing climate centre, says Tibet’s climate is the most sensitive in Asia and influences the globe.

Grassland degradation is evident along the twisting mountain road from Yushu to Xining, which passes through the Three Rivers national park, the source of the Yangtze, Yellow and Lancang rivers. Along some stretches the landscape is so barren it looks more like the Gobi desert than an alpine meadow.

Phuntsok Dorje (name has been changed) is among the last of the nomads scratching a living in one of the worst affected areas. “There used to be five families on this plain. Now we are the only one left and there is not enough grass even for us,” he says. “It’s getting drier and drier and there are more and more rats every year.”

Until about 10 years ago the nearest town, Maduo, used to be the richest in Qinghai province thanks to herding, fishing and mining, but residents say their economy has dried up along with the nearby wetlands.

“This all used to be a lake. There wasn’t a road here then. Even a Jeep couldn’t have made it through,” said a Tibetan guide, Dalang Jiri, as we drove through the area. By one estimate, 70% of the former rangeland is now desert.

“Maduo is now very poor. There is no way to make a living,” said a Tibetan teacher who gave only one name, Angang. “The mines have closed and grasslands are destroyed. People just depend on the money they get from the government. They just sit on the kang [a raised, heated, floor] and wait for the next payment.”

[Read the full article...]

Click to enlarge

The Qingzang railway, Qinghai–Xizang railway, or Qinghai–Tibet railway is a high-altitude railway that connects Xining, Qinghai Province, to Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region, in People’s Republic of China.

The total length of Qingzang railway is 1956 km (1215 mi). Construction of the 815 km (506 mi) section between Xining andGolmud was completed by 1984. The 1142 km (709 mi) section between Golmud and Lhasa was inaugurated on 1 July 2006 by president Hu Jintao; the first two passenger trains were “Qing 1″ (Q1) from Golmud to Lhasa, and “Zang 2″ (J2) from Lhasa. This railway is the first to connect the Tibet Autonomous Region to any other province, which, due to its altitude and terrain, is the last province-level entity in mainland China to have a conventional railway. Testing of the line and equipment started on 1 May 2006. Passenger trains run from Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing, Guangzhou,Shanghai, Xining and Lanzhou.

Lhasa Railway Station

The line includes the Tanggula Pass, which, at 5,072 m (16,640 feet) above sea level, is the world’s highest rail track. The 1,338 m Fenghuoshan tunnel is the highest rail tunnel in the world at 4,905 m above sea level. The 4,010-m Guanjiao tunnel is the longest tunnel from Xining to Golmod and the 3,345-m Yangbajing tunnel is the longest tunnel from Golmod to Lhasa. More than 960 km, or over 80% of the Golmud-Lhasa section, is at an altitude of more than 4,000 m. There are 675 bridges, totalling 159.88 km, and about 550 km of the railway is laid on permafrost.

A Passenger Health Registration Card is required to take the train between Golmud and Lhasa. The card can be obtained when purchasing the ticket. Passengers must read the health notice for high-altitude travel and sign the agreement on the card to take the train. On 28 August 2006 a 75-year-old Hong Kong man was reported to be the first passenger to die on the train, after he had suffered heart problems in Lhasa but insisted on travelling to Xining.

From October 2006 five pairs of passenger trains run between Golmud and Lhasa, and one more pair between Xining and Golmud. The line has a capacity of eight pairs of passenger trains, and the carriages are specially built and have an oxygen supply for each passenger.

The environmental impact of the new railway is an ongoing concern. The increase in passenger traffic will result in greater tourism and economic activity on the Tibetan Plateau. Trash is collected into two sealed containers in every car (not thrown on the tracks). They are taken out at the terminus.

Wood is the main fuel source for rural inhabitants in certain regions of Tibet. The damage to the ecosystem caused by cutting trees for fuel takes years to recover due to slow growth caused by Tibet’s harsh environmental conditions. The railway would make coal, which is not produced in Tibet, an affordable replacement. However, the increase in fuel combustion due to increased human activity in an already-thin atmosphere may affect the long term health of the local population.

China has been criticized for having built the railway to strengthen its political control over Tibet. In particular, groups such as Human Rights Watch and the International Campaign for Tibet have alleged that the railway will marginalize Tibetans in the Tibet Autonomous Region by encouraging further Han-immigration from the rest of China.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qingzang_railway

Pictures

• The Railway
• Inside the Train
• View of the Tibetan Plateau from Inside
• Oxygen Components in the Train

Beijing to Lhasa

By Train:

Beijing-Lhasa is 4,064 km, of which 1,110 km are over the newly-built Qinghai-Tibet railway. Train T27 will start from Beijing West Railway Station at 21:30 and arrive at Lhasa Railway Station at 20:58 on the third day after 47 hours and 28 minutes’ running. Train T28 will depart from Lhasa Railway Station at 8:00 am. and arrive in Beijing west at 8:00 am. on the third day with a 48-hour-trip.

By Air:

China has launched a direct flight from its capital Beijing to Lhasa, capital of occupied Tibet. The direct flight service of Air China started operation from July 10, 2006.

The Beijing-Lhasa direct air-route replaced the Beijing-Chengdu-Lhasa line, also operated by Air China. The introduction of the new line has reduced travel time by two hours. The total travel time between Beijing and Lhasa is 4 hours compared to 48 hours on the Qinghai-Tibet railway which began operation on July 1. There will be one flight every day using better A330 airplane, said the report dated July 14.

It will be the country’s only long distance air route to Lhasa. The one-way ticket will cost around 2,430 Yuan (price does not include TTB permit).

However, the flight from Lhasa to Beijing will still stop over at Chengdu, capital of southwest China’s Sichuan Province, to ensure occupancy. The return flight will take about five hours and 40 minutes.

Source: http://www.chinatibettrain.com/beijinglhasa.htm.

Everest at risk as new road conquers roof of the world

The Chinese are turning Tibet into Everestland, that way it’s easier to forget the past and make Tibet into a theme park. The push to open the area to tourism has attracted international controversy, with China planning to build a road – and possibly a hotel – right up against the slopes of Everest itself.

The vaudeville show at Lhasa’s station celebrates the Qing 1, the train that takes 48 hours to reach Lhasa from Beijing. For five years, more than 100,000 workers swarmed over this forbidding land, building a £2bn engineering miracle through 1,140 kilometres of mountains to link Tibet’s capital and China’s frontier city of Golmud.

With the link to the outside world comes a bitter price. Tibetans are now officially a minority in Lhasa. Encouraged by subsidised rail fares, migrant workers and tourists are pouring in. In the past year, more than 2 million Chinese have visited Lhasa alone.

Read the full article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jul/08/china.conservation.

1.5 million passengers take train to Tibet

July 2, 2007

The Qinghai-Tibet railway, the world’s highest line linking the Tibetan capital of Lhasa with the rest of China, transported 1.5 million passengers to the Himalayan region in its first year, state press said Monday. More than half of the 1.5 million passengers who rode the train to the Himalayan “roof of the world” since it went into operation on July 1, 2006 were tourists, Xinhua news agency said.

Chinese authorities see the 1,142-kilometre (710-mile) railway as an important tool in modernising and developing Tibet, which has been part of China since its troops occupied the region in 1950. However, critics say that the line is allowing the Han Chinese, the national majority, to flood into Tibet, leading to the devastation of the local culture as well accelerating environmental degradation of the pristine region.

The railway climbs over a pass at 5,072 metres (16,737 feet) above sea level, making it the highest railway in the world. According to the state-controlled press the railway helped push the Himalayan region’s economic growth to 13.2 percent in 2006, a 10-year high.

Source: http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?article=1.5+million+passengers+take+train+to+Tibet&id=17038.

Man dies on Tibet train trip

August 28, 2006

A 75-year-old Hong Kong man has become the first passenger to die on board the world’s highest railway line running from western China to Tibet, a radio report said on Monday.

The man had a fatal collapse while travelling from Lhasa in Tibet to Xining in China on the 1 142km railway line that opened on July 1, climbing to 5km above sea level on the Tibetan plateau.

The Hong Kong man was admitted to hospital in Lhasa with heart problems and was advised to wait two weeks before travelling, Hong Kong’s government-run radio station RTHK reported.

However, he insisted on catching the train to Xining and collapsed while travelling on the railway with his wife, RTHK said. The report did not give the date of the man’s death.

Oxygen for altitude sickness

The man is the first passenger to die on board the train, which has oxygenated air pumped around its carriages and oxygen tubes beneath seats for passengers who suffer altitude sickness.

Chinese President Hu Jintao opened the line from the frontier town of Golmud to Lhasa on July 1, linking Tibet with China’s extensive rail network for the first time.

Overseas activists have called for a boycott of the railway, saying it will speed up the migration of ethnic Chinese people into Tibet, a former Buddhist kingdom invaded by China in 1951.

Source: http://www.news24.com/World/News/Man-dies-on-Tibet-train-trip-20060828.

China-to-Tibet Train Derails, Delaying Thousands

August 31, 2006

One of China’s new trains to Tibet, the world’s highest railway, derailed, disrupting the line for five hours and delaying thousands of passengers, state news media said. No one was injured. Malfunctioning signal and switching equipment was said to be the cause. It was the first mishap on the rail system, which reaches altitudes of 16,400 feet above sea level, since it began operating July 1. The 16-car train, out of southwestern Chongqing, derailed near Co Nag Lake, 250 miles northeast of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, the reports said, adding that only the dining car came off the tracks. In a separate report, the New China News Agency said that a 77-year-old Hong Kong tourist died of altitude sickness aboard the railway earlier this month.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/world/asia/31briefs-005.html.

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The Bleeding Hills

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Potala Palace in Lhasa - Click to enlarge.

Lhasa is rightly one of the most featured and dreamt-about cities in the world. This is not only because of its remoteness, its high altitude at 3,650 meters (11,975 feet) means limited accessibility, but also because of its impressive heritage of over a thousand years of cultural and spiritual history that has helped to create the romantic and mysterious Tibetan religion.

Differing from the inland cities and other places in Tibet, Lhasa is unique with an allure all of its own. In the Tibetan language, Lhasa means the Holy Land or the Buddha Land. It is the center of Tibet’s politics, economy and culture. The city has also been appointed as one of the 24 historical and cultural cities of China. The splendor and grandeur of the Potala Palace in Lhasa remains a world-famous symbol of the enigmatic power of politics and religion in this region.

As the beautiful capital city of Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), Lhasa is situated in the South Central part of the region, on the North bank of the Kyichu River (Lhasa River) in a mountain-fringed valley. This ancient sprawling city, settled 1,300 years ago, covers 30,000 square kilometers (11,583 square miles), with a population of 400,000, of which 87 percent are Tibetans. The urban population is 180,000.

Generally the period from March to October is the best time to visit Tibet. Since Lhasa is located at such a high altitude it is wise to be prepared before starting your journey. Generally speaking, due to the large temperature differences during any given day in Tibet, warm clothes should be taken to keep away the cold. However, because it also receives a great deal of sunshine, sunglasses, suntan oil, and a sun hat are indispensable items if you’re traveling anywhere in Tibet.

Currently there are three options for travel to Tibet, by plane, by road and by train.

1. Taking the plane is a comfortable and timesaving option, but offers little time for you to acclimatise to the altitude; this may cause sickness.
2. Taking the bus along one of five highways that have been opened-up for tourists’ use. This will take longer but will enable you to see the amazing scenery en route. Furthermore, taking extra time allows for a more gradual acclimatization to the altitude.
3. Taking the train, is a fabulous new option, giving the opportunity to see hitherto unseen mountain scenery. With the operation of Tibet Railway from July 1st, 2006, more and more tourist have swarmed into Tibet via the great Tibet train.’

One word of warning: although there is a gradually increasing tourism industry in Lhasa, it is a city with many difficulties yet to be overcome due to its unique location and geography. Please bear in mind that traveling in Lhasa, as well as in Tibet on the whole, is more challenging than in any other part of China.

Despite this more and more people from every corner of the world are being attracted towards this vibrant city with its mysterious culture. Its unique scenery, long history, exotic culture, mystical religion and spectacular monuments will ensure your stay is unforgettable.

Source: http://www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/tibet/lhasa/

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The Bleeding Hills

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Lhamo La-tso

Oracle or Vision Lake

It is said that Palden Lhamo, as the female guardian spirit of the sacred lake, Lhamo La-tso, promised Gendun Drup, the 1st Dalai Lama in one of his visions “that she would protect the reincarnation lineage of the Dalai Lamas.” Ever since the time of Gendun Gyatso, the 2nd Dalai Lama, who formalised the system, the Regents and other monks have gone to the lake to seek guidance on choosing the next reincarnation through visions while meditating there.

The particular form of Palden Lhamo at Lhamo La-tso is Gyelmo Maksorma, “The Victorious One who Turns Back Enemies”. The lake is sometimes referred to as “Pelden Lhamo Kalideva”, which indicates that Palden Lhamo is an emanation of the goddess Kali, the shakti of the Hindu god Siva.

“Lhamo Latso . . . [is] a brilliant azure jewel set in a ring of grey mountains. The elevation and the surrounding peaks combine to give it a highly changeable climate, and the continuous passage of cloud and wind creates a constantly moving pattern on the surface of the waters. On that surface visions appear to those who seek them in the right frame of mind.” – Reference: The Search for the Panchen Lama by Isabel Hilton.

It was here that in 1935, the Regent, Reting Rinpoche, received a clear vision of three Tibetan letters and of a monastery with a jade-green and gold roof, and a house with turquoise roof tiles, which led to the discovery of Tenzin Gyatso, the present 14th Dalai Lama.

Monks from the Panchen Lama’s Tashilumpo monastery looked into the waters of Lhamo Latso lake and saw the upper half of a horse, the lower half of a goat and the Tibetan syllable ”grwa”. Those and other signs led them to a nomadic area called Lhari, and in it a young boy named Gedhun Choekyi Nyima. He bore birthmarks on his back similar to the symbols seen in the waters of the lake. He was born in the year of the horse. And he could instinctively point the way to Tashilumpo monastery. – Reference: In Search of the real Panchen Lama – The Sydney Morning Herald.

Geographical Setting

The lake is in Gyaca County, Lhokha to the southeast of Lhasa, Tibet, and a four-hour hike from the Gelugpa Chokorgyel Monastery at an altitude of about 5,300 m. (17,388 ft) and covers an area of only about 2 square kilometres (0.77 sq mi).

Chokorgyel Monastery itself is about 115 kilometres (71 mi) northeast of Tsetang and about 160 km (99 mi) southeast of Lhasa, at an altitude of 4,500 m (14,764 ft).

The old path from Chokorgyel Monastery used to be paved to make access easier for the senior monks wishing to visit the lake. Half way along is a diamond-shaped pond fed by glaciers known as Yoni Lake. On a ridge near the top of the pass overlooking the lake a ritual shökde or throne was built for the Dalai Lama, where he once sat to divine the future while gazing into the lake about 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) in front and 150 metres (490 ft) lower down. Nowadays it is buried under a mound of silk scarves (hadak).

Many pilgrims come each year to Lhamo La-tso believing that, with proper devoutness, and after fasting for three days and refraining from talk, they will be rewarded with a revelation of their future in the skull-shaped mirror of the lake.

Previously there was a temple to Maksorma (rGyal mo dMag zor ma) or Machik Pelha Shiwai Nyamchen (Ma gcig dPal lh Zhi ba’i nyams can), an unusually peaceful form of Palden Lhamo, at the eastern end of the lake which is now marked only by prayer flags and offerings left by pilgrims.

There is a kora or pilgrimage walk around the lake.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lhamo_La-tso

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The Bleeding Hills

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

The Panchen Lama Controversy

Who will identify the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama?

The Central Tibetan Adminstration

In 1949 the People’s Liberation Army of China marched into Tibet’s eastern provinces of Kham and Amdo, seizing control over the eastern Tibetan headquarters of Chamdo in the following year. Then in 1951, the so-called “17-Point Agreement on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet” was forced upon the Tibetan government and people. In the succeeding years, the Chinese army advanced further west and eventually crushed the Tibetan national uprising of Lhasa in 1959. This led to the flight of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and some 80,000 Tibetans who sought refuge in India, Nepal and Bhutan. The influx of refugees continues even today. Currently, the Tibetan exile population is over 140,000, of which about 100,000 are based in India.

On 29 April 1959, His Holiness the Dalai Lama established the Tibetan exile administration in the north Indian hill station of Mussoorie. Named the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, this is the continuation of the government of independent Tibet. In May 1960, the CTA was moved to Dharamsala.

The Tibetan people, both in and outside Tibet, look to the CTA as their sole and legitimate representative. This and the administration’s commitment to truth, non-violence and genuine democracy as its inviolable principles mean that it is now being recognised increasingly by parliaments and general public round the world as the legitimate and true representative of the Tibetan people.

Right from its inception, the CTA has set itself the twin task of rehabilitating Tibetan refugees and restoring freedom and happiness in Tibet. The rehabilitation agenda includes three important programmes: a) promoting education among the exile population; b) building a firm culture of democracy; and c) paving the way for self-reliance so that the Tibetan people are able to survive with the self-esteem and confidence that flows from not having to depend on external assistance.

The CTA’s experiment with modern democracy, in particular, is a preparation for the reconstruction of Tibet when freedom is restored there. As part of this exercise, a parliament, then named the Commission of Tibetan People’s Deputies, was instituted on 2 September 1960. The parliament gradually matured into a full-fledged legislative body, thus coming to be known as the Assembly of Tibetan People’s Deputies (ATPD). Then in 2006, its name was changed to the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile (TPiE).

In 1990 His Holiness the Dalai Lama announced further democratisation, by which the composition of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile was increased to 46 members. The parliament was empowered to elect the members of the Kashag or the Council of Ministers, which was made answerable to the people’s elected representatives. Similarly, the Tibetan judiciary, known as the Tibetan Supreme Justice Commission, was instituted in 1992 under the provisions of the Arbitration Act of the government of India.

The newly empowered Tibetan parliament issued the exile Tibetan constitution under the title of The Charter of the Tibetans in Exile.

In 2001 the Tibetan parliament, on the advice of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, amended the Charter to provide for direct election of the Kalon Tripa (the highest executive authority) by the exile populace. The Kalon Tripa, in turn, nominates the other Kalons (cabinet members), and seeks the parliament’s approval for their appointment. The first directly-elected Kalon Tripa — Professor Samdhong Rinpoche Lobsang Tenzin — took the oath of office on 5 September 2001. He was elected to the post of Kalon Tripa for the second time in August 2006.

Today, the CTA has all the departments and attributes of a free democratic administration. It must be noted, though, that the CTA is not designed to take power in Tibet. In his manifesto for future Tibet, entitled the Guidelines for Future Tibet’s Polity and Basic Features of its Constitution, His Holiness the Dalai Lama stated that the present exile administration would be dissolved as soon as freedom is restored in Tibet. The Tibetans currently residing in Tibet, he said, would head the government of free Tibet, not by the members of the exile administration. He said that there would be a transitional government in Tibet which would be headed by an Interim-President, elected or appointed by him. To this Interim-President His Holiness would transfer all his temporal power. The Interim-President, in his turn, would be required to hold a general election within two years and then hand over the power to the popularly-elected government.

Source: http://www.tibet.net/en/index.php?id=14

The Panchen Lama Controversy

Who will identify the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama?

Political Significance of the 11th Panchen Lama

Tibetans are betrayed by their hopefulness, the Chinese by their suspiciousness.
- Tibetan Saying

The political significance of the current 11th Panchen Lama – assigned by the Chinese government – has all to do with the Chinese territorial claim on the Tibet Autonomous Region. The Dalai Lama, living in exile in India, is outside of Chinese control, but his next incarnation may very well be assigned by the Chinese government, and consequently confirmed by the Panchen Lama.

In this context it is crucial to understand the claim of both, the Chinese government and the Central Tibetan Administration.

What is the historical basis of the Chinese claim to Tibet?

According to Beijing Review – Chinese Communist Magazine:

From ancient times, the Mongolians had been one of China’s nationalities. In the 13th century, their power expanded rapidly. Genghis Khan united the tribes under a centralized Khanate in 1206. The outcome was a unified country [China] and the formation of the Yuan Dynasty in 1271.

In the process, the Mongol Khanates peacefully incorporated Tibet in 1247 after defeating the Western Xia [1227] and the Jin [1234].

With a unified China, the Yuan Dynasty contributed greatly to the political, economic and cultural development of the nation’s various nationalities — in strict contrast to the feuding that had gone on since the late years of the Tang Dynasty (618-907). To argue that the Mongolians’ campaign to unify China was fundamentally the imposition of rule by a foreign power is wrong because it misses the basic point of Chinese history that China is a multi-national country. Whether it was the Mongolians, the Manchus (who founded the Qing Dynasty [1644-1912], or any other peoples, it has always been a case of one Chinese nationality replacing another.

It is completely out of the question to claim that the Mongolians or the Manchus were outsiders who conquered China.

The Dalai Lama’s view is as follows:

During the 5th Dalai Lama’s time [1617-1682], I think it was quite evident the we were a separate sovereign nation with no problems. The 6th Dalai Lama [1683-1706] was spiritually pre-eminent, but politically, he was weak and disinterested. He could not follow the 5th Dalai Lama’s path. This was a great failure. So, then the Chinese influence increased. During this time, the Tibetans showed quite a deal of respect to the Chinese. But even during these times, the Tibetans never regarded Tibet as a part of China. All the documents were very clear that China, Mongolia and Tibet were all separate countries.

Because the Chinese emperor was powerful and influential, the small nations accepted the Chinese power or influence. You cannot use the previous invasion as evidence that Tibet belongs to China. In the Tibetan mind, regardless of who was in power, whether it was the Manchus, the Mongols or the Chinese, the east of Tibet was simply referred to as China. In the Tibetan mind, India and China were
treated the same; two separate countries.

Source: http://stason.org/TULARC/travel/tibet/B5-What-is-the-historical-basis-of-the-Chinese-claim-to-Tib.html

The Importance of the 11th Panchen Lama

The importance of the Panchen Lama, as well as that of the current Dalai Lama, for the Chinese government seems to dwindle over time. First, the Dalai Lama is now 75 years old, and his health is less than perfect. Even the Dalai Lama himself is well aware that time is on Beijing’s side. “The Chinese are simply waiting for him to die,” says Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher for the New York-based rights organization Human Rights Watch. When the Dalai Lama is gone, Bequelin says, supporters of Tibetan autonomy will have lost what is by far their most potent symbol of resistance to Chinese rule. Whoever takes over will have a much-diminished presence.

Beijing has become more sophisticated in dealing with Tibetan religion, allowing some interaction among less exalted lamas on both sides of the political divide. More importantly, the accelerating erosion of Tibetans’ traditional nomadic lifestyle, along with a burgeoning influx of ethnic Chinese workers, businessmen and tourists, makes it likely that Tibet will lose much of its unique cultural identity within a generation. Bequelin points to the example of China’s Muslim-majority province of Xinjiang, where Beijing has spent billions encouraging tourism — notably by building a train line through the region’s vast desert to the remote city of Kashgar, connecting it with the rest of China — and improving the infrastructure to extract its considerable oil reserves. Along with the strict repression of even the slightest signs of dissent, the policy has been highly successful in neutralizing opposition to Chinese rule.

In Tibet’s case, similar tactics are being used. A $5 billion train line connecting Beijing and Lhasa opened last July, doubling tourism arrivals in the region. A forced relocation program that will resettle tens of thousands of nomadic herders, along with increasing urban migration among young Tibetans, will ensure any remaining resistance dwindles with time. “It’s never a pretty sight when indigenous peoples run into the power of the state,” says Bequelin, “but China is unique in the Tibetans lack of ability to resist, so the process of assimilation is much faster.”

Source: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1686573,00.html

The Panchen Lama Controversy

Who will identify the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama?

During Tibet’s history, it has existed as a region of separate sovereign areas, a single independent entity and as a vassal under Chinese suzerainty or sovereignty. Tibet was first unified under King Songtsän Gampo in the 7th century. At various times from the 1640s until the 1950s, a government nominally headed by the Dalai Lamas, a line of spiritual political leaders, ruled a large portion of the Tibetan region. During some of this period, the Tibetan administration was subordinate to the Qing Dynasty.

In the chaos in China following the Xinhai Revolution in 1913, the 13th Dalai Lama expelled Qing’s representatives and troops from what is now the Tibet Autonomous Region and governed it autonomously. Neither the new Republic of China, nor any other foreign state or the United Nations recognized this as legal Tibetan independence. In 1950, the People’s Republic of China, emerging victoriously from the Chinese Civil War, quelled the 14th Dalai Lama’s army and successfully negotiated for an acknowledgment of Chinese sovereignty.

With the invasion of Tibet and the subsequent Seventeen Point Agreement, the PRC Central People’s Government asserted control over Tibet. In 1959, some ethnic Tibetans throughout much of the region attempted to revolt against CPG rule, but this attempt was promptly defeated by the PLA, and in the ensuing violence, the Dalai Lama and the rest of his government fled to Dharamsala.

In 1965, the area that had been under the control of the Dalai Lama’s government from the 1910s to 1959 (Ü-Tsang and western Kham) was renamed the Tibet Autonomous Region or TAR. Autonomy provided that the head of government would be an ethnic Tibetan; however, actual power in the TAR is held by the First Secretary of the Tibet Autonomous Regional Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, who has never been a Tibetan. The role of ethnic Tibetans in the higher levels of the TAR Communist Party remains very limited.

The destruction of most of Tibet’s more than 6,000 monasteries occurred between 1959 and 1961. During the mid-1960s, the monastic estates were broken up and secular education introduced. During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards inflicted a campaign of organized vandalism against cultural sites in the entire PRC, including Tibet’s Buddhist heritage. According to at least one Chinese source, only a handful of the religiously or culturally most important monasteries remained without major damage, and thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns were killed, tortured or imprisoned.

Widespread protests against Chinese rule flared up again in 2008. The Chinese government reacted strongly, imposing curfews and strictly limiting access to Tibetan areas. The international response was likewise immediate and robust, with a number of leaders condemning the crackdown and large protests (including some in support of China’s actions) in many major cities.

The PRC continues to portray its rule over Tibet as an unalloyed improvement, but foreign governments continue to make protests about aspects of PRC rule in Tibet as groups such as Human Rights Watch report alleged human rights violations. Most governments, however, recognize the PRC’s sovereignty over Tibet today, and none have recognized the Government of Tibet in Exile in India.

Since 1950 human rights have become a contentious issue. According to the website of the non-governmental organization “Save Tibet”, the Tibetan people are denied most rights guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including the rights to self-determination, freedom of speech, assembly, movement and expression. Elliot Sperling, an Associate Professor of Tibetan Studies at Indiana University, has said that human rights violations contributed to the migrations of Tibetans out of Tibet. Some have gone as far as accusing that Chinese rule has amounted to cultural genocide.

The Tibetan government-in-exile claims that China does not allow independent human rights organisations into Tibet, and foreign delegations invited to Tibet are denied independent access to meet with Tibetans. The Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy claims that more than 11,000 monks and nuns have been expelled from Tibet since 1996 for opposing “patriotic re-education” sessions conducted at monasteries and nunneries under the “Strike Hard” campaign.

Warren Smith, an independent scholar and a broadcaster with the Tibetan Service of Radio Free Asia, whose work began to focus on Tibetan history and politics after spending five months in Tibet in 1982, portrays the Chinese as “chauvinists” who believe they are superior to Tibetans, and claims that the Chinese Communist Party uses torture, coercion and starvation to control the Tibetan population.

According to the Communist Party, progress towards a prosperous and free society in Tibet (which is in turn part of human rights), the pillars being economic development, legal advancement, and emancipation of serfs, has been substantial.

Source:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tibet
• http://one-just-world.blogspot.com/2010/07/han-chinese-racism-in-tibet.html

Testament of the 13th Dalai Lama

When 13^th Dalai Lama died in 1933, he left a testament, eerily accurate in its predictions regarding the status of modern Tibet, pointing to the establishment of a Communist system in Mongolia.

‘Monastic properties and endowments were confiscated, the lamas and monks were forced into the army; the Buddhist religion destroyed, leaving no trace of identity.’

He predicted a similar fate for Tibet should it not defend itself.

‘In the future, this system will certainly be forced either from within or without on this land that cherishes the joint spiritual and temporal system. If in such event we fail to defend our land, the holy lamas, including their triumphant father and son (the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama), will be eliminated without a trace of their names remaining; the properties of the incarnate lamas and of the monasteries along with the endowments for religious services will all be seized. Moreover, our political system, originated by the three ancient kings, will be reduced to an empty name; my officials, deprived of their patrimony and property, will be subjugated like slaves by the enemy; and my people, subjected to fear and misery, will be unable to endure day or night.’ – Testament of the 13^th Dalai Lama

Source: Literature: The Search For The Panchen Lama by Isabel Hilton

Tibet: China’s little treasure

China has intensified its long-term quest to integrate the remote land and people of Tibet by building new infrastructure and drawing up plans to tap the Himalayan region’s virgin water sources and its rich reserves of copper, gold and hydrocarbons.

Chinese communist leaders insist their intentions are to make Tibet part of the country’s economic miracle by expanding trade and tourism, and creating wealth in the backward region that many Westerners see as the last refuge of spiritualism.

But detractors say Beijing sees Tibet as the new “El Dorado” for energy-starved and resources-limited China. Some 40% of China’s natural resources are located in Tibet, whose Chinese name, Xizang translates as “Western Depository”.

International activists and Tibetans-in-exile have warned that the new wave of Chinese investment in the region would be detrimental to Tibetan culture and autonomy. They say the new infrastructure would lead to further militarization of the Tibetan plateau as China, which occupied the region in 1951, would be able to move troops and supplies more rapidly and maintain a more effective garrison there.

[Read the full article...]

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The Bleeding Hills

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

The Panchen Lama Controversy

Who will identify the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama?

Gendhun Choekyi Nyima

The Panchen Lama is the highest ranking Lama after the Dalai Lama in the Gelugpa (Dge-lugs-pa) sect of Tibetan Buddhism (the sect which controlled western Tibet from the 16th century until the establishment of Chinese sovereignty in 1951). The successive Panchen lamas form a tulku reincarnation lineage which are said to be the incarnations of Amitabha Buddha. The name, meaning “great scholar”, is a Tibetan contraction of the Sanskrit paṇḍita (scholar) and the Tibetan chenpo (great).

The Panchen Lama bears part of the responsibility for finding the incarnation of the Dalai Lama and vice versa. Panchen Lama traditionally lived in Tashilhunpo Monasteryin Shigatse.

The Chinese takeover of Tibet eventually drove the Dalai Lama into exile in India in 1959. The 10th Panchen Lama, however, remained in Tibet to try to intercede with the Chinese government on behalf of his people. At first he was seen as a collaborator with the Chinese. In fact, at great risk to himself he criticized Chinese atrocities in Tibet. He spent more than a decade either in prison or under house arrest. His sudden death in 1989 at the age of 50 was never investigated or explained.

The present (11th) incarnation of the Panchen Lama is a matter of controversy. The People’s Republic of China asserts it is Gyaltsen Norbu, while the current Dalai Lama named Gedhun Choekyi Nyima on May 14, 1995. The latter vanished from public eye shortly after being named. Chinese authorities state that Gedhun Choekyi Nyima has been taken into protective custody, but there is no information regarding from what, or from whom, he must be protected, where he is being held, or under what conditions.

The head of the Panchen Lama search committee at the time, Chadrel Rinpoche, was able to secretly communicate with the Dalai Lama. After the Dalai Lama proclaimed Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as the 11th incarnation of the Panchen Lama, government authorities had Chadrel Rinpoche arrested, and he was replaced by Sengchen Lobsang Gyaltsen. Sengchen had been a political opponent of both the Dalai Lama and the 10th Panchen Lama.

The new search committee, having disregarded the Dalai Lama’s announcement, decided to choose the Panchen Lama from a list of finalists by drawing lots from a golden urn. This list did not include Gedhun Choekyi Nyima. The Chinese custom of using the golden urn, which is unrelated to the traditional religious or spiritual proceedings preferred by many Tibetan Buddhists, had been introduced in the year 1792 by the Qianlong Emperor to deal with a previous controversy.

Gyaltsen Norbu

Using the urn, six-year-old Gyaltsen Norbu, the son of two communist party members from Lhari was selected and proclaimed the Panchen Lama, with the religious name Qoigyijabu. According to Arjia Rinpoche, an important lama who attended the ceremony, Ye Xiaowen, the central government official in charge of the Panchen Lama issue, stated privately that the selection had been rigged in favor of Gyaltsen Norbu. Gyaltsen Norbu was enthroned at Tashilhunpo Monastery and has since assumed the full functions of the Panchen Lama.

He had been living in Beijing during his childhood to be educated in a Chinese way, and moved back to Tashilhunpo Monastery, the official seat of the Panchen Lamas. He developed altitude sickness when he first moved back, but overcame it quickly. As of 2006, according to the Associated Press, Qoigyijabu “is believed to live in Beijing amid intense secrecy and is almost never seen in public.”

The Chinese government claims that their involvement does not break with tradition in that the final decision about the recognition of both, the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, traditionally rested in the hands of the Chinese emperor. For instance, after 1792, the Golden Urn was used in selecting the 10th, 11th and 12th Dalai Lamas.

Sources:

• http://buddhism.about.com/b/2008/02/11/the-tragedy-of-the-panchen-lama.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyaincain_Norbu
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchen_Lama

The Panchen Lama Controversy

Who will identify the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama?

The “Poisoned Arrow”

In 1950, Chinese forces invaded Tibet. At first, the Communist government in Beijing (Peking) hoped to make use of the influence religious leaders had over their people by forcing them to accept seemingly important positions on various committees. It soon became obvious, however, that the Tibetan figureheads were nothing more than puppets, being used to feign legitimacy for the invaders and their alien policies of radical reform. The Tibetan uprising in 1959, and the brutal military response, dashed the Chinese hopes of using the Dalai Lama, when He and His government escaped into exile in India.

Chinese hopes then shifted to the 10th Panchen Lama. He seemed a likely candidate, because His predecessor had revolted against the government of the Great 13th Dalai Lama, and had hoped for assistance from China, before Mao’s Communists swept the Nationalists from power in that country. He was appointed to the position of acting Chairman of the ‘Preparatory Committee for the Tibet Autonomous Region’, and later as vice-chairman of the Chinese People’s Congress.

Three years older than the Dalai Lama, he was, in his own way, just as unconventional. In 1956, he opened a school in Shigatse, which he hoped would provide a modern education to its students, equipping them to face the challenge of Tibet’s new relationship with the outside world. He was a lonely man, little understood in his lifetime, and even considered a traitor by many Tibetans, because of his close association with China. The Chinese, on the other hand, were equally suspicious of him, suspecting him of using the school to train counter-revolutionaries in the 1959 uprising.

His inevitable fall from grace came in 1962, when he addressed a 70,000 character petition to Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, documenting the terrible living conditions faced by the people of Tibet, the deaths in forced labour camps, and the harm being done to his country in the name of socialist reform. This audacious criticism of the Chinese occupation touched on all aspects of life in Tibet, from the misguided agricultural reforms to religious persecution and systemic racism.

Predictably, Chairman Mao blew a gasket. He described the petition as “… a poisoned arrow shot at the Party by reactionary feudal overlords.”

The Panchen Lama was arrested, and spent 15 years in detention. While in prison, he was subjected to torture and forced to endure the ritual humiliation of thamzing, ‘struggle sessions’, in which victims are forced to dissect their own faults while being verbally abused or beaten by others (often friends or family members), who are in turn judged by their level of enthusiastic participation. He wrote the petition as a young man of 24, and returned to Tibet an old man in ill health at the age of 40.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A644320

The 70,000 Character Petition

Note: I found several online references pointing to www.TibetInfo.net as a source for the complete petition. The link, however, leads nowhere.

Originally titled “A Report on the sufferings of the masses in Tibet and other Tibetan regions and suggestions for future work to the central authorities through the respected Premier Zhou,” the 70,000-character petition included suggestions on how the implementation of Party policy in Tibet could have been improved.

The Panchen Lama displays an excellent knowledge of the Marxist ideology found in the Chinese state Constitution. He begins the report with praises of democratic reform and the greatness of socialism, providing examples of how Tibet has been ameliorated by mobilization of the working masses, improved labor production, and freedom of religion (for example, allowing those who did not wish to be monks to return to the life of a householder).

“The whole of Tibet had a flourishing, auspicious, bright and glorious new appearance, as if spring were coming to the earth.” The conciliatory tone of his introduction is maintained in his critique of the Chinese government. Speaking on the actual implementation of policy, “The democratic reform campaign, which was carried out in conjunction with suppression of the rebellion, was a large-scale, fast-moving, fierce, acute life-and-death class struggle, which overturned heaven and earth, and so it was possible for some unavoidable errors and mistakes to arise. However, some unnecessary and disadvantageous mistakes were also made during the campaign.”

The report on Tibet is divided into eight sections of “problems” which receive the Panchen Lama’s critique and suggestions:

1. Suppression of the Tibetan Rebellion
Chinese repression caused the deaths of up to 10,000 Tibetans during the Lhasa Uprising of March 10, 1959 alone. The Panchen Lama points specifically to the harsh treatment of those who surrendered and apologized, the “vengeful, discriminatory, casual and careless methods” of cadres, and the attempted destruction of the Tibetan religion which “caused the rebellion to be large-scale, to involve many people, to last a long time, to be stubborn in its stance and to rebel to the end.”

2. Democratic reform in Tibet
The Panchen Lama suggests that certain aspects of the democratic reform could have been better implemented. He cites the example of innocent Tibetans accused of rebel activity or crimes which are actually fabricated by cadres, saying, “If even I and other well-known, patriotic and progressive people could unexpectedly and groundlessly be labeled as reactionaries, how much less need we speak of anyone else.” He indicates the flawed ramifications of this overzealous implemention of policy, including the systematic confiscation of land and the careless manner in which middle-class Tibetans were classified as “agents of feudal lords” and subjected to recrimination. This further alienates the masses and leads “to the ideological problem becoming much more complicated.”

3. Decline of agricultural production in Tibet
During the transition between the “feudal” system and “voluntary mutual benefit,” agricultural production in Tibet declined to such an extreme that many people were starving to death. The Panchen Lama states pointedly in his critique, “In the past, although Tibet was a society ruled by dark and savage feudalism, there had never been such a shortage of grain… In Tibet during the two years of 1959 and 1960, free exchange of agricultural and animal herding products [i.e., donation to beggars] more or less ceased.”

4. The United Front
The Panchen Lama’s petition is a direct result of the United Front, the fourth problem. The United Front theoretically encouraged non-Chinese nationalities and non-Party members to criticize policy, but this actually led to indiscriminate attacks on the “feudal lords”. Through its refusal to accept apologies or criticism, the United Front’s policy of class-struggle left little recourse to the people besides demoralization and despair. As the Pachen Lama points out, “They no longer retained any hopes about the world, and their situation appeared miserable. Therefore,it was difficult to win over and reform these people.”

5. Democratic centralism
Democratic centralism is upheld as a core facet of Party ideology which claims to directly address the hopes and concerns of the people themselves. The Panchen Lama criticizes its “incomplete, non-universal and imperfect implementation” in terms of the basic two tenets of democracy and centralism. Such ideological pretense to democracy is tantamount to a sick man ingesting medicine which gives rise to new ailments instead of curing him; the problem of centralism, on the other hand, is concerned with the complexity of restructuring government administration.

6. Dictatorship in Tibet
Dictatorship can be legitimately used as a tool against the most reactionary counter-revolutionaries. The Panchen Lama deplores the abuse which has resulted in “many good and innocent people (being) unscrupulously charged with offences, maligned, and categorized with criminals.” People can be arbitrarily assigned to vocational training; furthermore, large numbers of people are actually imprisoned and put through forced “labor reform”.

7. Religion in Tibet
The problem of religion is naturally of crucial importance to the Panchen Lama. Personally upholding the freedom of Tibetans to adhere to Buddhism, he would rather let personal choice determine the number of Tibetan monastics rather than some dogmatic leftist force. Furthermore, he promotes the religious reform of monasteries in order to “eliminate all feudal privileges and the systems of oppression and exploitation which are inconsistent with the profound doctrines of Buddhism, not appropriate to the revolutionary spirit and a hindrance to social development.” His argument for the freedom of belief is briefly detailed in Article 88 of the State Constitution: “The policy of the Party and the Constitution of the State can only be the sun for the whole body of citizens, and cannot be a sun which shines on one side. Therefore, so-called freedom of religious belief can only be legal protection for those who do not believe, and it should give similar protection to believers; if those who do not believe in religion use the law on freedom of religious belief as a pretext to obstruct or harm religious belief, this is a serious violation of the law.”

8. Tibetan nationality
The Panchen Lama views the incorporation of Tibet into the “Motherland” as the positive unity of nationalities, notwithstanding dangers of racism, “modernity”, and the assimilation of national characteristics such as language, costumes, and customs. Through his emphasis on the preservation of these characteristics, by reading between the lines, one can almost perceive the challenge of restructuring an autonomous Tibet, able to interface with a distant capital in Beijing through a distinctly Tibetan form of socialism.

Source: http://www.dorjeshugden.com/forum/index.php?topic=181.15;wap2

More Information on the Petition

• On Facebook: The 70,000 Character Petition of HH 10th Panchen Lama
  http://pa-in.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=68643736400&topic=7169
• A Poisoned Arrow: The Secret Report of the 10th Panchen Lama (TIN background briefing papers) [Paperback]
  Amazon.com (US$172.30): http://www.amazon.com/Poisoned-Arrow-Panchen-background-briefing/dp/0953201112
  Amazon.co.uk (£50.00): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Poisoned-Arrow-Secret-Report-Panchen/dp/0953201112

The Panchen Lama Controversy

Who will identify the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama?

The Reign of the 14th Dalai Lama

Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, usually shortened to Tenzin Gyatso was born as Lhamo Thondup on July 6,  1935. He is the 14th Dalai Lama, a spiritual leader revered among the people of Tibet. He is the head of the government-in-exile based in Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh, India.

Tibetans traditionally believe him to be the reincarnation of his predecessors.

The Dalai Lama was the fifth of seven surviving children to a farming family in the village of Taktser.

Lhamo Thondup was recognized formally as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama at the age of two and renamed Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso (Holy Lord, Gentle Glory, Compassionate, Defender of the Faith, Ocean of Wisdom).

In 1950 the army of the People’s Republic of China invaded the region. One month later, on November 17, 1950, he was enthroned formally as Dalai Lama, and at the age of fifteen he became the region’s most important spiritual leader and political ruler.

The Dalai Lama’s formal rule was brief. In 1951, when he was only 16 years old, the Chinese military pressured the Dalai Lama to ratify a Seventeen Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet which permitted the People’s Republic of China to take control of Tibet. He tried to work with the Chinese government, and in September 1954, together with the 10th Panchen Lama, he went to the Chinese capital to meet Mao Zedong and attend the first session of the National People’s Congress as a delegate, primarily discussing China’s constitution. On September 27, 1954 the Dalai Lama was selected as a deputy chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress.

The Dalai Lama, then still a teenager, initiated many reforms in the short time he had as head of state. He established a reform committee which was charged with overseeing wide ranging reforms from the Judiciary, Public Education, Communications, Transport and other aspects of Tibetan society which the Dalai Lama intended to modernize and reform. He quashed the practice of Debt Inheritance, breaking the chain of debt from one generation to the next and consequently exonerating the thus affected peasantry of any debt burden which may have encumbered them. He also declared an amnesty on all debt owed to the government, absolving all debtors of such obligations.

In addition, he established an Independent Judiciary among other reforms. On the agenda was a major land reform which would have seen the larger estates of the land owning families becoming wholly government owned and controlled again, and the land then allocated to the people who worked and cultivated it at the time, however the Chinese occupation terminated such efforts.

In 1959, during a failed uprising in Tibet ending with the effective collapse of the Tibetan resistance movement, the Dalai Lama’s entourage suspected that the Chinese government may have been planning to kill him. On March 17, he fled through the mountains to Tawang, India, finally crossing the border on March 31. In April, the 23-year-old Dalai Lama told of his people’s attempt to throw off the Chinese yoke, “The Chinese have taken by force and ruined tens of thousands of homes belonging to my people. Over a thousand monasteries have been destroyed by the Chinese, and more are being reduced to ruin even today.“

It was later established that forces from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s Special Activities Division had assisted the Dalai Lama’s escape and supported initial resistance to the Chinese.

In India he established a government-in-exile.

The most influential member of the Gelugpa or Yellow Hat sect, he has considerable influence over the other sects of Tibetan Buddhism. The Chinese government regards him as the symbol of an outmoded theocratic system. Along with roughly 80,000 exiles that followed him, the Dalai Lama strives to preserve traditional Tibetan education and culture.

Conditions in Tibet have in more recent years caused an international protest movement, including the attempted disruption of the 2008 Olympic Games. In March 2008 the Dalai Lama asked for an international inquiry into China’s treatment of Tibet, which he said amounted to cultural genocide.

A noted public speaker worldwide, the Dalai Lama is often described as charismatic. He is the first Dalai Lama to travel to the West, where he seeks to spread Buddhist teachings and to promote ethics and interfaith harmony. In 1989 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In October of 2007 he was awarded the United States Congressional Gold Medal. He has received more than 100 honorary conferments and major awards.

On 25 October 2008, the Dalai Lama announced he had given up negotiating for increased autonomy for Tibet within the People’s Republic of China. He stated that from now on Tibetans themselves should decide how to continue a dialogue with the Chinese government.

On December 17, 2008, after months of speculation, the Dalai Lama announced his semi-retirement. He said that the future course of the movement he had directed for nearly five decades would now be decided by the elected parliament-in-exile with the prime minister Samdhong Rinpoche. The then 73-year-old Nobel laureate, who had recently undergone surgery, told reporters in Dharamsala, “I have grown old…. It is better if I retire completely and get out of the way of the Tibetan movement.”

Source:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenzin_Gyatso
• http://one-just-world.blogspot.com/2010/07/han-chinese-racism-in-tibet.html

Tibet’s Last Stand? The Tibetan Uprising of 2008 and China’s Response

by Warren W. Smith Jr.

This deeply knowledgeable book offers the first sustained analysis of the 2008 uprising in Tibet, which revealed much about Tibetan nationalism and even more about Chinese nationalism. Retracing the complex history between China and Tibet, noted expert Warren Smith describes the uprising itself and explores its broader significance for Chinese-Tibetan relations. He sharply critiques China’s use of heavy-handed propaganda to recast the uprising and obscure its origins and significance. The book convincingly shows that far from becoming more lenient in response to Tibetan discontent, China has determined to eradicate Tibetan opposition internally and coerce the international community to conform to China’s version of Tibetan history and reality.

Reviews

Tibet’s Last Stand? is the first book-length discussion of the 150 or so protests that took place in Tibet in 2008. Using clear, accessible language, Warren Smith offers a detailed summary of the protests that took place and especially of the responses of the security forces and politicians to unrest, together with extensive ethical and political commentaries by the author. –Robert J. Barnett, Columbia University

A lucid, comprehensive, and insightful account of the 2008 uprising in Tibet. Smith’s impressive analysis of the causes of the uprising is surpassed only by his detailed examination of the consequences of that eruption: the resurgence of Tibetan nationalism, the brutal Chinese crackdown and the collapse of the Dalai Lama’s negotiation attempts with Beijing. It is a must read for those concerned about the fate of Tibet. The book takes on special significance in the wake of the similar conflict in Xinjiang in 2009, providing useful insight into the future of China’s colonial empire. –Jamyang Norbu, author of The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes

Warren W. Smith Jr. has emerged as the preeminent writer on Tibetan history and Sino-Tibetan relations. His newest work solidifies that position by offering the most comprehensive account available of Tibet’s resistance during the buildup to the Beijing Olympics–an uprising that challenged China’s claim that it has a legitimate right to colonize and suppress the Tibetan people. Smith relates Beijing’s paranoid reaction to the uprising in fascinating detail. Anyone who is interested in the Tibetan issue or the nature of modern Chinese nationalism must read Tibet’s Last Stand?, a seminal and mesmerizing book. –Mikel Dunham, author of Buddha’s Warriors

“The most informative and fair account available of China’s occupation of Tibet and its consequences. . . . Open-minded readers of whatever opinion about China and Tibet will find much to learn from Tibet’s Last Stand, and may even change their minds. . . . This is a revealing and honest book. . . . Tibetans are unlikely ever to achieve their independence, Dr. Smith concludes, `but they retain the right to write their own history.’ This he says–and he is a great champion–must be the role of Tibetans in exile and their friends. . . . I believe that will be the judgment of many attentive readers of this invaluable book.” –Hong Kong Economic Journal

“A useful, detailed account of the 2008 demonstrations, the official response, and surrounding events. . . . Readers will gain a clear idea of the Chinese position on Tibet and of Beijing’s strategy in the region: a combination of Han immigration, economic development, assimilation, repression, and waiting for the Dalai Lama to die.” –Foreign Affairs

Buy the book through Amazon.com…

The Panchen Lama Controversy

Who will identify the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama?

by Warren W. Smith Jr.

Anyone who is a Tibet activist, a serious student of Tibetan Buddhism, or a history buff will find Smith’s book indispensable. What is truly fresh and original in China’s Tibet?–and reveals Smith at his most penetrating and disturbing– is his analysis of China’s greatest propaganda successes. The tug of war between recorded fact and historical revisionism, autonomy and assimilation, Tibetan Buddhist culture and Chinese real estate, will continue while the rest of the world looks on from the sidelines. In the meantime, we should be very grateful that Warren Smith has kept a superb scorecard for us.

Reviews

Smith has extensive living experience in the region and does his research with great care….Recommended. –Choice, November 2008

This is a landmark study of China’s efforts to fully subsume Tibet and to rewrite Tibetan history to conform to this official reality. Smith’s dispassionate, critical, and detailed account makes clear China’s goal of complete assimilation and the futility of the Dalai Lama’s policy to seek some kind of ‘meaningful autonomy’ for his country. –Jamyang Norbu, author of The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes

“In seven fluid chapters, the book covers recent Tibetan history, with an emphasis on Chinese propaganda and how Chinese leaders have viewed Tibet. . . . China’s Tibet?is essential for understanding how the Sino-Tibetan relationship became what it is today. . . . His clear-eyed analysis makes a very convincing case.” –Far Eastern Economic Review

Buy the book through Amazon.com…

The Panchen Lama Controversy

Who will identify the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama?

The Panchen Lama Controversy

Who will identify the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama?

The 14th Dalai Lama

Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, usually shortened to Tenzin Gyatso (born Lhamo Dhondup, July 6, 1935) is the 14th Dalai Lama, a spiritual leader revered among the people of Tibet. He is the head of the government-in-exile based in Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh, India. Tibetans traditionally believe him to be the reincarnation of his predecessors. As well as being Tibet’s spiritual leader, Dalai Lamas have traditionally been the country’s absolute ruler.

The current Dalai Lama is sometimes called “His Holiness” (HH) by Westerners (by analogy with the Pope), although this does not translate to a Tibetan title. ”Dalai” means “Ocean” in Mongolian, and is a translation of the Tibetan name “Gyatso,” while “Lama” is the Tibetan equivalent of the Sanskrit word “guru.” Putting the terms together, the full title is “Ocean Teacher” meaning a teacher who is spiritually as great as the ocean.

The 14th Dalai Lama remarks: “The very name of each Dalai Lama from the Second Dalai Lama onwards had the word Gyatso [in it], which means “ocean” in Tibetan. Even now I am Tenzin Gyatso, so the first name is changing but the second part [the word "ocean"] became like part of each Dalai Lama’s name. All of the Dalai Lamas, since the Second, have this name.”

Searching for the Reincarnation

By the Himalayan tradition, phowa (Tibetan) is the discipline that transfers the mindstream to the intended body. Upon the death of the Dalai Lama and consultation with the Nechung Oracle, a search for the Lama’s reincarnation, or yangsi (yang srid), is conducted. Traditionally it has been the responsibility of the High Lamas of the Gelugpa Tradition and the Tibetan government to find his reincarnation. The process can take around two or three years to identify the Dalai Lama, and for the 14th, Tenzin Gyatso it was four years before he was found. The search for the Dalai Lama has usually been limited historically to Tibet, although the third tulku was born in Mongolia. Tenzin Gyatso, though, has stated that there is a chance that he will not be reborn although if he is reborn it will not be in a country possessed by the People’s Republic of China. In his autobiography, Freedom In Exile, he states that after he dies it is possible that his people will no longer want a Dalai Lama, in which case there would be no search for the Lama’s reincarnation. “So, I might take rebirth as an insect, or an animal – whatever would be of most value to the largest number of sentient beings“.

The High Lamas used several ways in which they can increase the chances of finding the reincarnation. High Lamas often visit the holy lake, called Lhamo La-tso, in central Tibet and watch for a sign from the lake itself. This may be either a vision or some indication of the direction in which to search and this was how Tenzin Gyatso was found. It is said that Palden Lhamo, the female guardian spirit of the sacred lake, Lhamo La-tso, promised Gendun Drup, the 1st Dalai Lama in one of his visions “that she would protect the reincarnation lineage of the Dalai Lamas.” Ever since the time of Gendun Gyatso, the 2nd Dalai Lama, who formalized the system, the Regents and other monks have gone to the lake to seek guidance on choosing the next reincarnation through visions while meditating there.

Lhamo Latso is a brilliant azure jewel set in a ring of grey mountains. The elevation and the surrounding peaks combine to give it a highly changeable climate, and the continuous passage of cloud and wind creates a constantly moving pattern on the surface of the waters. On that surface visions appear to those who seek them in the right frame of mind.

It was here that during 1935, the Regent, Reting Rinpoche, received a clear vision of three Tibetan letters and of a monastery with a jade-green and gold roof, and a house with turquoise roof tiles, which led to the discovery of Tenzin Gyatso, the present 14th Dalai Lama.

High Lamas may also have a vision by a dream or if the Dalai Lama was cremated, they will often monitor the direction of the smoke as an indication of the direction of the rebirth.

Once the High Lamas have found the home and the boy they believe to be the reincarnation, the boy undergoes a series of tests to affirm the rebirth. They present a number of artefacts, only some of which belonged to the previous Dalai Lama, and if the boy chooses the items which belonged to the previous Dalai Lama, this is seen as a sign, in conjunction with all of the other indications, that the boy is the reincarnation.

If there is only one boy found, the High Lamas will invite Living Buddhas of the three great monasteries together with secular clergy and monk officials, to confirm their findings and will then report to the Central Government through the Minister of Tibet. Later a group consisting of the three major servants of Dalai Lama, eminent officials and troops will collect the boy and his family and travel to Lhasa, where the boy would be taken, usually to Drepung Monastery to study the Buddhist sutra in preparation for assuming the role of spiritual leader of Tibet.

However, if there are several possibilities of the reincarnation, in the past regents and eminent officials and monks at the Jokhang in Lhasa, and the Minister to Tibet would decide on the individual by putting the boys’ names inside an urn and drawing one lot in public if it was too difficult to judge the reincarnation initially.

The Incarnation of the 14th Dalai Lama

Lhamo Dhondup was a somber child, and he liked to stay indoors alone. When away from home, he would only drink from his mother’s cup. He would not let others touch his blanket and always kept it near his mother. He was preoccupied with packing his clothes and things.  While he could hardly talk, when questioned, he replied he was “packing to go to Lhasa and would take all of us with him.”

When he met a quarrelsome person, he would pick up a stick and try to beat him. If someone smoked, “he would flare into a rage.” Friends reported they were afraid of him. One day, he told the family “he had come from heaven.”

When he was just two years old, party of officials from Lhasa charged with identifying the 14th Dalai Lama visited the family home three times. Over a three-year period of search, they identified sixteen possible candidates, reduced them to three finalists, and finally settled on Lhamo Dhondup in 1935.

On the first visit, Khetsang Rinpoche of the party had two staffs and Dhondup “went to the staffs, laid one aside, and picked up the other. He struck Rinpoche lightly on the back with it, said the staff was his and why had Rinpoche taken it.” (His mother said the members of the party exchanged “meaningful looks.”)

On a later visit of the party, he stuck his hand underneath Rinpoche’s robe and withdrew a rosary and insisted it was his. (His mother later learned that the 13th Dalai Lama had given that rosary to Rinpoche.)

On the third visit, the party placed a bowl of candy before Dhondup along with two rosaries and two ritual drums. He took one piece of candy and gave it to his mother. He then selected the rosary and the drum that had belonged to the 13th Dalai Lama. Later they told his mother that, during a 3-hour private session, they had spoken to him in the Lhasa dialect (that he had never heard before) and that he had replied without difficulty. When they departed, he cried to go with them.

When all sixteen candidates were later taken to Lhasa to meet Ma Pu-fang the governor, he alone did not cry or cling to his parents. Dhondup went to the only vacant seat and sat down. While the other children gobbled down the candy placed before them, he took one piece for his great-uncle. He correctly identified Pu-fang although he had never met him before.

At his point Pu-fang chose him as the 14th Dalai Lama, saying he was dignified beyond his years, different with his big eyes, and intelligent in his conversation and actions. The other children and their families were sent back home.

Dhondup’s mother reported in her memoirs that a month before his birth one of her dreams was of two green snow lions flying around a brilliant blue dragon. All three beings smiled at her and greeted her in traditional Tibetan style. She thought her son might become a high Lama. Later, she was told the dragon was Dhondup and the others were showing him the way to his rebirth.

In 1939, at the age of four, the present Dalai Lama was taken in a procession of lamas to Lhasa.

Residence

Starting with the 5th Dalai Lama and until the 14th Dalai Lama’s flight into exile during 1959, the Dalai Lamas spent the winter at the Potala Palace and the summer at the Norbulingka palace and park. Both are in Lhasa and approximately 3 km (roughly 2 miles) apart.

During 1959, after the start of the Chinese occupation of Tibet, the 14th Dalai Lama sought refuge in India. The then Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was instrumental in granting safe refuge to the Dalai Lama and his fellow Tibetans. The Dalai Lama has since lived in exile in Dharamsala, in the state of Himachal Pradesh in northern India, where the Central Tibetan Administration (the Tibetan government-in-exile) is also established. Tibetan refugees have constructed and opened many schools and Buddhist temples in Dharamsala.

References

• Wikipedia – The 14th Dalai Lama
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenzin_Gyatso
• Wikipedia – Dalai Lama
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalai_Lama
• The Reincarnation Experiment
  http://www.reincarnationexperiment.org/home/dalailamareincarnation.html

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The Panchen Lama Controversy

Who will identify the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama?

Gendhun Choekyi Nyima

Upon the death of the Tenth Panchen Lama, both the Tibetan Government-in-Exile and the atheistic Chinese Communist Party initiated searches for his reincarnation. The search ordered by the 14^th Dalai Lama, proceeded according to the traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. On May 14, 1995, after a six-year seach, the Dalai Lama recognized Gendhun Choekyi Nyima as the 11^thPanchen Lama of Tibet. Gedun Choekyi Nyima, son of Kunchok Phuntsok and Dechen Choedon, was born on April 25, 1989. On May 17, 1995, Gendhun Choekyi Nyima, his family, and Chadrel Rinpoche and his Secretary, who both led the search party for this incarnate, were taken to Beijing.

In December 1995, The Chinese announced they had discovered the incarnation of the Panchen Lama in the son of one of their security officers. They enthroned the boy, Gyaltsen Norbu, in a carefully protected ceremony. Part of the reason for the great attention paid to selecting the 11^th Panchen Lama is that he will play a major role in identifying the next Dalai Lama.

At the time Gendhun Choekyi Nyima was considered the youngest political prisoner in the world. Since his disappearance, the Chinese government has changed its position on the whereabouts of Gendhun Choekyi Nyima many times. At first, it was claimed that Gendhun was with his family in their home village. In March 1996, it was reported that he was in protective custody. In the summer of 1996, the Chinese claimed that Gendhun Choekyi Nyima was back in the Tibetan community. In September 1998, it was claimed that the Panchen Lama was in their care to protect him from Tibetans. In September 1998, Mary Robinson (UN High Commissioner of Human Rights) was denied access to Gendhun Choekyi Nyima during her fact-finding trip to Tibet.

In October 2001, Chinese officials reported that the boy is safe, that he was leading “a normal life,” and that his parents did not want anyone to disrupt his studies. The officials also said the boy’s “parents want their privacy respected, that they don’t particularly want people to have access to the child and they want him to live a normal life and they don’t want to be bothered by people.” Beijing has at different times given differing accounts of the boy’s whereabouts; some accounts place him on Beijing’s outskirts, others in Tibet or in provinces near the Himalayan region.

References

• The Panchen Lama
  http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/wittke/Tibet/Panchen.html
• The official website of Tashi Lhunpo Monastery
  http://tashilhunpo.org/his-holiness-the-11th-panchen-lama

The Panchen Lama Controversy

Who will identify the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama?

The 10th Panchen Lama

The title of ‘Panchen Lama’ or ‘Panchen Rinpoche,’ meaning ‘Great Scholarly Lama,’ has been given to successive abbots of the Tashilhunpo Monastery in Shigatse. Regarded as the embodiment of the Buddha Amitabha (Opame), he is ranked second in the order of Tibetan religious leaders, after the Dalai Lama. Although he is a high-ranking religious leader, the Panchen Lama originally carried no political authority; however, successive Panchen Lamas were used by both Britain and China in their efforts to subjugate the Dalai Lama’s government in Lhasa.

The first Panchen Lama was given the title by the Great Fifth, who wished to honor his tutor. Subsequent Panchen Lamas did not have such amiable relationships with the Dalai Lamas and the occupying Chinese have attempted to use this rivalry to their advantage. The Ninth Panchen Lama (1883-1937) fled to Mongolia after a dispute with the Thirteenth Dalai Lama over taxes.

The Tenth Panchen Lama (1938-89) was enthroned in 1951. In 1959, after the escape of the Dalia Lama to India, he was appointed acting chairman of the ‘Prepartory Committee for the Tibet Autonomous Region,’ which would be established in 1965. This post had previously been held by the Dalai Lama. The Chinese appointed him vice-chairman of the Chinese Political Consultative Conference in 1960, hoping that he would be a willing spokesman for their policies in Tibet.

In May 1962, the Panchen Lama presented his 70,000 Character Petition to the Chinese government in which he presented compelling reasons for a change in the Tibetan policy of Chairman Mao. Mao is said to have called the Petition “a poisoned arrow shot at the party” and its author a “reactionary feudal overlord.” Believed to be the most extensive internal criticism of Chinese Communist policies ever submitted to the leadership, it documented the mass arrests, excessive punishment and executions of Tibetans that followed the 1959 uprising in Tibet against Chinese rule, and the starvation in Eastern Tibet that resulted from policies implemented as part of Mao’s Great Leap Forward at the end of the 1950s. The 70,000 Character Petition remained secret, seen only by those in inner Party circles in China.

The Panchen Lama was arrested after a 1964 speech supporting the exiled Dalai Lama and subjected to a 7-week-long struggle session in Lhasa. Condemned without trial as an enemy of the people, he spent most of the next 14 years in prison or under house arrest in Beijing. He was released in 1978, two years after Mao’s death. In the following years, he was an outspoken advocate of liberalization laws and policies to ensure the survival of Tibetan culture and religion. He was finally allowed to return to his homeland in 1982.

In 1983 the 10th Panchen Lama married a Chinese woman and a girl was born to them. Though this was a violation of the ethical codes governing the life of a monk, this has never affected Tibetans’ belief in him. It is probably the case that most Tibetans feel that he was in Beijing to support the Tibetan cause.

Upon his return, the 10th Panchen Lama devoted all of his energies to the revival of Tibetan religion and culture, which had almost been totally annihilated during the Cultural Revolution. He pushed for a law making Tibetan the official language of the Tibetan Autonomous Region; it was passed in 1987.

In January 1989, he returned to Shigatse after his long absence and was welcomed home by 30,000 Tibetans jubilant at his return. He made a statement to the crowd that could be interpreted as a criticism of the Chinese government, saying: ‘Tibet has paid a price that could never be met by the development achieved over the last 30 years.’

The 10^th Panchen Lama died five days later on January 20, 1989 under mysterious circumstances, three days after consecrating a stupa containing the remains of many of his predecessors, which had been desecrated by the Red Guards. The official version was that he suffered a massive heart attack. He was only 50 years old. The Tenth Panchen Lama was also interred in the tomb, which was completed in 1992.

References

• The 10th Panchen Lama by Yukiyasu Osada
  http://www.kotan.org/tibet/10th_panchen_lama.html
• The Panchen Lama
  http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/wittke/Tibet/Panchen.html

The Panchen Lama Controversy

Who will identify the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama?

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Tibet

Tibet is a plateau region in Asia and a disputed territory, north of the Himalayas. It is home to the indigenous Tibetan people, and to some other ethnic groups such as Monpas and Lhobas, and is inhabited by considerable numbers of Han and Hui people. Tibet is the highest region on earth, with an average elevation of 4,900 metres (16,000 ft). It is sometimes referred to as the roof of the world.

During Tibet’s history, it has existed as a region of separate sovereign areas, a single independent entity and as a vassal under Chinese suzerainty or sovereignty. Tibet was first unified under King Songtsän Gampo in the 7th century. At various times from the 1640s until the 1950s, a government nominally headed by the Dalai Lamas, a line of spiritual political leaders, ruled a large portion of the Tibetan region. During some of this period, the Tibetan administration was subordinate to the Qing Dynasty.

In 1913 the 13th Dalai Lama expelled Qing’s representatives and troops from what is now the Tibet Autonomous Region. While the expulsion was seen as an assertion of Tibetan autonomy, Tibet’s proclaimed independence was not accepted by the government of China, nor did Tibet receive foreign diplomatic recognition and in 1945 China’s sovereignty over Tibet was not questioned by the United Nations.

Following a decisive invasion and battle at Chamdo in 1950, the Communist Party of China gained control of the region of Kham to the West of the Upper Yangtze River. The next year the 14th Dalai Lama and his government signed the Seventeen Point Agreement. In 1959, after a failed uprising in the region, he together with a group of Tibetan leaders and followers fled to India and set up the Government of Tibet in Exile in Dharamshala. Beijing and the Government-in-exile disagree over when Tibet became a part of China, and whether the incorporation into China of Tibet is legitimate according to international law. Since what constitutes Tibet is a matter of much debate, neither its size nor population are simple matters of fact, due to various entities claiming differing areas as part of “Tibet”.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet

Tibetan Agrarian and Social System

Tibet as a country was very poor but content, with very little difference between rich and poor. The workers were not bonded to the aristocrats and could move on to work for other landowners if they felt they could improve their lives by doing so.

In “Tibet through dissident Chinese eyes”, Yiu Yung-chin and others express the sentiment that by contrast, China was a much more iniquitous society, where there were huge disparities of wealth, and widespread cruelty between the landowners and the peasants, with torture, beatings to death and rape of peasant tenants commonplace.

Gompo Tashi Andrugtsang, one of the main leaders of the Tibetan rebellion, commented on this in his memoirs by stating:
“Critics of the Tibetan agrarian and social system are apt to overlook some very relevant factors which countered its apparent faults. In spite of differences of status or material possessions, there was no great gulf between the rich and the poor. The landowner was more a patriarchal head of household than an exacting or oppressive master. The universal belief in the principles and teachings of Buddhism encouraged, on the one hand, generosity and desire to improve the lot of the less fortunate and, on the other, the absence of envy or resentment on the part of the poor.”

Source: http://one-just-world.blogspot.com/2010/07/han-chinese-racism-in-tibet.html

The Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama is a Buddhist leader of religious officials of the Gelug sect of Tibetan Buddhism. The name is a combination of the Mongolian word “Dalai” meaning “Ocean” and the Tibetan word “Blama” (with a silent b) meaning “chief” or “high priest.” ”Lama” is a general term referring to Tibetan Buddhist teachers. In religious terms, the Dalai Lama is believed by his devotees to be the rebirth of a long line of tulkus who descend from the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara. Traditionally, he is thought of as the latest reincarnation of a series of spiritual leaders who have chosen to be reborn in order to enlighten others. The Dalai Lama is often thought to be the director of the Gelug School, but this position belongs officially to the Ganden Tripa, which is a temporary position appointed by the Dalai Lama who, in practice, exerts much influence.

Between the 17th century and 1959, the Dalai Lamas were the directors of the Tibetan Government, administering a large portion of the area from the capital Lhasa, although the extent of that lineage’s historical authority, legitimacy and claim to territory has been recently contested for political reasons. Since 1959, the Dalai Lama has been president of the Tibetan government-in-exile, or Central Tibetan Administration (CTA).

Upon the death of the Dalai Lama and consultation with the Nechung Oracle, a search for the Lama’s reincarnation, or yangsi (yang srid), is conducted. Traditionally it has been the responsibility of the High Lamas of the Gelugpa Tradition and the Tibetan government to find his reincarnation.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalai_Lama

The Panchen Lama

The Panchen Lama is the highest ranking Lama after the Dalai Lama in the Gelugpa (Dge-lugs-pa) sect of Tibetan Buddhism (the sect which controlled western Tibet from the 16th century until the establishment of Chinese sovereignty in 1951). The successive Panchen lamas form a tulku reincarnation lineage which are said to be the incarnations of Amitabha Buddha. The name, meaning “great scholar”, is a Tibetan contraction of the Sanskrit paṇḍita (scholar) and the Tibetan chenpo (great).

Panchen Lama traditionally lived in the Tashilhunpo Monastery in Shigatse.

The Panchen Lama bears part of the responsibility or the monk-regent for finding the incarnation of the Dalai Lama and vice versa. Furthermore, the search for the late Panchen Lama’s reincarnation, or any reincarnation, is a philosophic matter. In the case of the Panchen Lama, the procedures traditionally involve a final selection process by the Dalai Lama.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchen_Lama

The Four Schools of Tibetan Buddhism

Back to The Panchen Lama Controversy

My research on the Panchen Lama controversy is, to a good part, based on Online resources, i.e. websites I find through search engines. The mere intention to write about the subject is pointing to a specific aspect of the troubled Tibetan-Chinese relationship, admittedly a crucial aspect for the future of both countries. Writing a book about this particular aspect must include a presentation of the historical background, but it is important to emphasize that my intention was not to write a history book. My account on the rich Tibetan history can only be incomplete, but, nevertheless, sufficient to understand the controversy. In the same sense, I do not claim to have new and unique insights on the Tibetan problem. My research on the topic is, in all consequence, a data collection focussed on a single issue and put into one work.

While my sympathies are primarily with the Tibetan people and not with the Chinese government, I have tried to present the facts as objective as possible. However, I do take the liberty of referring to the 14th Dalai Lama as “His Holiness.” The Dalai Lama’s path during this lifetime and his next incarnation are inextricably linked to that of the Panchen Lama.

Chapter 1 – The Tibetan Religious System

• Tibet
  Wikipedia
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet
• Panchen Lama
  Wikipedia
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchen_Lama
• Dalai Lama
  Wikipedia
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalai_Lama
• The Four Tibetan Schools of Buddhism
  http://www.rootinstitute.com/buddhism/buddhism-tibetan-schools.html
  
• The 4 schools of Tibetan Buddhism
  http://www.essortment.com/all/tibetanbuddhist_refw.htm
• Four Schools of Tibetan Buddhism
  http://buddhism.about.com/od/vajrayanabuddhism/tp/Schools-of-Tibetan-Buddhism.htm
  

Chapter 2 – The 10th Panchen Lama

• The Tragedy of the Panchen Lama
  by Barbara O’Brien, About.com Guide
  http://buddhism.about.com/b/2008/02/11/the-tragedy-of-the-panchen-lama.htm
• The 10th Panchen Lama by Yukiyasu Osada
  http://www.kotan.org/tibet/10th_panchen_lama.html
• The Panchen Lama
  http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/wittke/Tibet/Panchen.html

Chapter 3 – The 14th Dalai Lama

• Tenzin Gyatso
  Wikipedia
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenzin_Gyatso
• Dalai Lama
  Wikipedia
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalai_Lama
• Evidence for reincarnation of 13th Dalai Lama as the 14th
  Reincarnation Experiment
  http://www.reincarnationexperiment.org/home/dalailamareincarnation.html

Chapter 4 – The Reign of the 14th Dalai Lama

Chapter 5 – The Reign of the 10th Panchen Lama

Chapter 6 – The Incarnation of the 11th Panchen Lama

• In search of the real Panchen Lama
  Phayul.com
  http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=27669

Chapter 7 – Chinese Rule of Tibet

Chapter 8 – Political Significance of the 11th Panchen Lama

• China’s Panchen Lama enters political arena
  Asia Times Online
  http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/LC17Ad01.html
• Tibet’s Panchen Lama, Beijing’s propaganda tool
  Google News
  http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5g4z56PSsE15aH9AaSUAtI4-M_AaQ

Chapter 9 – The Central Tibetan Adminstration

• The Central Tibetan Adminstration
  http://www.tibet.net/en/index.php

Chapter 10 – The Last Dalai Lama?

• Dalai Lama may forgo death before reincarnation
  by Jeremy Page, Amritsar, India
  http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/dalai-lama-may-forgo-death-before-reincarnation/story-e6frg6t6-1111114986868
• The Last Dalai Lama?
  by Barbara O’Brien, About.com Guide
  http://buddhism.about.com/od/vajrayanabuddhism/a/dalailamarole_2.htm?r=et

Chapter 11 – Gedhun Choeky Nyima

• The Panchen Lama
  http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/wittke/Tibet/Panchen.html
• China Says Missing Panchen Lama Gendun Choekyi Nyima is Living in Tibet
  China Digital Times
  http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/03/china-says-missing-panchen-lama-gendun-choekyi-nyima-is-living-in-tibet/
• Tibet: Panchen Lama still sequestered by China
  SperoNews
  http://www.speroforum.com/a/19055/site/privacy.asp
• The official website of Tashi Lhunpo Monastery
  http://tashilhunpo.org/his-holiness-the-11th-panchen-lama

Chapter 12 – Gyaltsen Norbu

• Gyaincain Norbu
  Wikipedia
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyaincain_Norbu
• Panchen Lama
  China Digital Times
  http://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/panchen-lama/
• Choosing the next Dalai Lama
  James Reynolds, BBC News
  http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/jamesreynolds/2009/03/gyaltsen_norbu.html
• Tibet’s Panchen Lama, Beijing’s propaganda tool
  Google News
  http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5g4z56PSsE15aH9AaSUAtI4-M_AaQ

Misc. Resources

• His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama
  http://www.dalailama.com/

Back to The Last Dalai Lama

The present (11th) incarnation of the Panchen Lama, who will select the next Dalai Lama, is a matter of controversy. The People’s Republic of China asserts it is Gyaltsen Norbu, while the current Dalai Lama named Gedhun Choekyi Nyimaon May 14, 1995.

The latter vanished from public eye shortly after being named. Chinese authorities state that Gedhun Choekyi Nyima has been taken into protective custody, but there is no information regarding from what, or from whom, he must be protected, where he is being held, or under what conditions.

The Search For The Panchen Lama

by Isabel Hilton

While working on a documentary film, British journalist Hilton was permitted to accompany the Dalai Lama as he sought to identify the 11th incarnation of the Panchen Lama, the second-highest spiritual authority of Tibet’s ruling Buddhist sect. This excellent and artfully written book (part of which has appeared in the New Yorker) tells the complicated recent history of the Panchen Lama. The 10th incarnation died under mysterious circumstances in 1989 and is considered by many Tibetans to have been a traitor. The 11th–still a child–is missing; the six-year-old boy was detained along with his family in the mid-’90s by Tibet’s Chinese rulers and has not been heard from since. Meanwhile, the Chinese authorities have offered another child as the spiritual leader incarnate. Although she reveals the end of the story in the early pages of the book, Hilton relates this history with great drama and subtle wryness (for Westerners, she says, Tibet is “a kind of religious Disneyland”). Her wonderfully detailed writing illustrates the spiritual and political contours of these events. She describes, for example, a group of Tibetan lamas’ two-day journey to Lhamo Latso Lake, where they went to gain insight that helped them find the reincarnated Panchen Lama; their trek, which involved 20 yaks, a video camera and a set of binoculars, was also monitored closely by Chinese spies. Hilton reports the story of the quest with great skill, weaving the history of Tibet with visits to monasteries in Tibet, China and India and conveying the power of a religion to survive the destruction of its institutions, the imposition of martial law, jailings and death in labor camps and prisons.

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In search of the real Panchen Lama

Phayul.com – July 3, 2010

The Communist Party resolved to do whatever it took to ensure that it would appoint, train and control the lamas who they saw as the key to political control of Tibetans. It proclaimed that the Dalai Lama-endorsed Panchen Lama was “illegal” and Xinhua news agency denounced the six-year-old boy for having “once drowned a dog”.

For most Chinese citizens, the Communist Party offers broad religious freedom, a process of law and at least an effort to win their hearts and minds. But it is different inside the frontier regions of western China.

Read the full article…

China says missing Panchen Lama Gendun Choekyi Nyima is living in Tibet

The Times – March 8, 2010

China shed a glimmer of light yesterday on the life of a young Tibetan man who vanished 15 years ago after the Dalai Lama declared him to be the reincarnation of the second-highest monk in Tibetan Buddhism.

The son of a Tibetan herder, Gendun Choekyi Nyima was only 5 when he was selected by the exiled Dalai Lama as the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama. Police swooped on the boy’s village in a county to the north of Lhasa and, pro-Tibet exiles say, removed the child and his parents.

He has not been seen or heard from since. But Tibet’s new governor, Padma Choling, revealed yesterday that the young man, now 20, is still living in Tibet, where “his brothers and sisters are at university or are doing regular work”.

Read the full article…

Tibet’s Panchen Lama, Beijing’s propaganda tool

(AFP) – March 26, 2009

Read the full article…

China’s Panchen Lama enters political arena

Asia Times – March 17, 2010

China’s handpicked 11th Panchen Lama, born Gyaltsen Norbu in northern Tibet, made his political debut this month at the annual session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) in Beijing, appearing as a national committee member of the top political advisory body.

Observers expect the 20-year-old Panchen Lama will be named a vice chairman of the CPPCC within the next couple of years, though he was not, as expected, given the post this year. While the title is largely honorary, it is an important national leadership post similar to one his predecessor, the 10th Panchen Lama, held when he died in 1989.

Read the full article…

Back to The Last Dalai Lama

His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama celebrated his 75th birthday today with hundreds of cheering followers in Dharmsala, northern India, which has been his home since he fled Tibet after a failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule.

Looking at posters depicting his life as a child, a young man and a spiritual leader, the man who has come to symbolise Tibet’s struggle against China said: “I remember my past and I feel that I haven’t wasted these years.”

In neighboring Nepal, police detained at least 22 Tibetan exiles on their way to a celebration for the Dalai Lama, according to an Associated Press reporter who was at the police station in Katmandu.

Dalai Lama celebrates 75th birthday

hindustan times – July 6, 2010

Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, on Tuesday celebrated his 75th birthday, breaking from tradition to accept greetings in person from hundreds of cheering supporters from across the globe.

“When I see these pictures and remember my past, I know my life has not been wasted,” the Dalai Lama told the people who braved heavy rain to greet the leader at a temple near his official residence in McLeod Ganj, 15 kms from here.

The Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule, walked through the crowd smiling and waving as he received gifts and traditional white scarves from his followers and appeared to be in fine health.

“Even at this age, I find time for my Buddhist studies that give me strength, peace, happiness and good health,” he said, and urged the crowd to show compassion to others.

Read the full article…

Thousands gather to celebrate Dalai Lama’s 75th birthday

Telegraph.co.uk – July 6, 2010

The Nobel laureate will address a crowd of 5,000 fans and followers at his temple in McLeod Ganj, a hill station in the Indian Himalayas where he has lived since fleeing Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule.

In apparently fine health and showing no signs of slowing down despite his advanced years, the Buddhist spiritual leader will break with recent birthday tradition and greet well-wishers in person.

“Everything is ready,” said the man tasked with organising the festivities, Tashi Norbu, an official in the Tibetan government-in-exile based in nearby Dharamshala.

“This time, as it’s his 75th birthday, he also wanted to join the function,” he said.

Elsewhere, Tibetan communities in North America, Europe and Australia are gearing up for music and cultural events to celebrate the day, while numerous Internet campaigns are collecting birthday messages.

Read the full article…

Supporters cheer Dalai Lama on 75th birthday

The Independent – July 6, 2010

The Dalai Lama celebrated his 75th birthday today with hundreds of cheering followers in Dharmsala, northern India, which has been his home since he fled Tibet after a failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule.

Looking at posters depicting his life as a child, a young man and a spiritual leader, the man who has come to symbolise Tibet’s struggle against China said: “I remember my past and I feel that I haven’t wasted these years.”

In neighbouring Nepal, police detained at least 22 Tibetan exiles on their way to a celebration for the Dalai Lama, according to an Associated Press reporter who was at the police station in Katmandu.

Katmandu Police Chief Ramesh Kharel said the Tibetans were taken for questioning and would be released.

Read the full article…

Celebrations and sadness as Dalai Lama turns 75

Yahoo News – July 6, 2010

The Dalai Lama turned 75 on Tuesday, a milestone marked by celebrations in his hometown-in-exile but tinged by sadness that his compatriots in Tibet were unable to honour the occasion.

Under relentless rain, the Tibetan spiritual leader addressed a packed crowd of 5,000 followers at his temple in McLeod Ganj, a hill station in the Indian Himalayas where he has lived since fleeing Tibet in 1959.

In a reminder of the situation in his homeland, where China views him as a dangerous separatist, he expressed regret that his followers there would be unable to pay tribute for fear of reprisal.

“The Tibetans in Tibet have a great desire to celebrate my birthday but they are not allowed to,” he said in Tibetan.

Staring out at a banner depicting him at various stages over the last three-quarters of a century, he reflected on his work of preaching peace and religious tolerance while keeping the issue of Tibet in the spotlight.

Read the full article…