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4. SOCIAL REALITY
IN ANCIENT TIBET
Just how
casual the Tibetans in exile are in dealing with scholarly works on their
history and social reality in ancient Tibet is shown by an example from the
Tibetan Review, the
English-language mouthpiece for the exile community. In April 1991, the
renowned American historian Melvyn C. Goldstein could publish an article in
which he presented for discussion a picture of Tibetan history that
contradicted the official line from Dharamsala. In the subsequent debate a
Tibetan scholar candidly admitted that Goldstein’s investigations were so
well documented „that he is probably correct in his analysis” — and then
the Tibetan continues, „But his presentation has succeeded in deeply
offending most Tibetans” (Tibetan
Review, January 1992, p. 18).
Thus, among the exile Tibetan
community, historical truths lead not to a self-critical stance towards
their own history, but rather one was insulted and thus believed oneself
justified in repudiating Goldstein’s works and denigrating them as Chinese
propaganda. (See above all Phintso Thondon’s article in the May 1991 issue
of Tibetan Review). Goldstein’s
reply to the attacks against him addresses what exactly is to be held of
the freedom of opinion among Tibetans in exile: „Mr. Thondon seems to
believe that anything which criticizing or contradicting Tibetan
nationalist rhetoric coming out of Dharamsala and Tibetan Support Groups
must be pro-Chinese. His 'rejoinder', therefore, clearly sets out to
discredit - a priori - my
findings and observations by creating the impression I have a pro-Chinese
bias. In using tactics resembling those of the McCarthy era in the US, Mr.
Thondon takes sentences out of context, distorts meanings, and worse yet,
imputes meanings, that were not there. His response represents the darkest
and most unpleasant side of the Tibetan exile movement” (Tibetan Review, September 1991, p.
18)
One can safely assume that official
statements from Dharamsala will defame as communist propaganda every historical analysis of Tibet
which strives for neutrality. To give a further example, we quote their
reaction to A. Tom Grunfeld‘s well-researched book, The Making of Modern Tibet. „This book”, a review in
the Tibetan Review says, „can
only be considered a sophisticated
presentation of Peking’s version of events. Although a lot of
material is included in the book which is often overlooked by pro-Tibetan,
and the author has evidently made an attempt to be impartial [!],his
Sinocentric and Marxist seen to be so extreme that he is quite unable to
master them” (Tibetan Review,
July 1989, p. 13).
The western image of Tibet
Western observers have in the meantime
become more and more blind to the shadowy sides of the Tibetan monastic
state. In countless recent books and publications the Tibet of old is
depicted as a peaceful state, a sanctuary of calm, the heart of compassion,
an ecological oasis, an island of wisdom, a refuge of knowledge, a home of
the blissful — in short as a lost earthly paradise, inhabited by
enlightened, peace-loving people and mysterious, shining gods. As early as
the 1940s, Marco Pallis praised the Tibetans as “one of the earth's most civilized
peoples” (quoted by Bishop, 1989, p. 231). “All the residents of Lhasa,
rich and poor, high and low, are peaceful”, we can read in a contemporary
report. “Even the beggars of Lhasa have only to ply their trade for some
time in the morning to get enough food for the day. In the evening they are
all nicely drunk. The people of Lhasa were physically relaxed, mentally
contended and happy. The food of the city is also nutritious. No one has to
strive to make a living. Life takes care of itself, as a matter of course.
Everything is splendid” (quoted by Craig, 1997, pp.86-87).
The Kundun
also knows to only report only the most positive aspects of the past of the
Land of Snows: “The continuing influence of Buddhism produced a society of
peace and harmony. We enjoyed freedom and contentment” (Panorama no. 553, November 20, 1997,
p. 2). Or at another point: “A poor Tibetan had little cause to envy or be
hostile towards the rich lord of his estate, then he knew that everybody
harvested what he had sown in his earlier lives. We were quite simply
happy” (Panorama no. 553,
November 20, 1997, p. 2). This image of a poor, deeply religious, pure, and
blissfully happy Tibet has meanwhile become fixed in the consciousness of
millions.
It has become a favored topic in,
amongst other things, the esoteric literature, but above all in the
American film industry. The actor Brad Pitt, who played the role of the
German teacher of the Dalai Lama, Heinrich Harrer, in a melodramatic story
(Seven years in Tibet), came to
the following conclusion once the film had been shot: “Look at the
Tibetans, how poor they are in material terms. And then look at them, how
happy and peaceful they are, and their attitude to life with which they go
their way. This is simply fantastic. It gets under your skin. It is the
hearts of the people which make Tibet into Shangri-La, into paradise. In
America this has become a real movement” (Panorama no. 553, November 20, 1997, p. 1).
Such glorifications have spread like
wildfire in recent years. “The result is a one-sidedly bright image of
spiritual purity”, writes Tibet researcher Peter Bishop. “Many contemporary
western studies go to the great length to avoid confronting the shadow side
of Tibetan spirituality. One can often encounter a sociological naiveté
that stands in stark contrast to claims of scientific scrutiny” (Bishop,
1993, p. 73).
In contrast, among the majority of the
earlier travelers, the Tibet of old made a deeply negative impression, at
least with respect to its social situation, which are these days all too
readily dismissed as imperialist arrogance and European racism, although
identical criticisms of social conditions were also articulated by admirers
of Tibetan culture. Alexandra David-Neel, for example, was just as repelled
by the general misery of the country as by the corruption of the priestly
caste. Even such a fanatic devotee of the Kalachakra Tantra as Nicholas Roerich complained about the
general decadence in the Tibet of the time.
Likewise, Heinrich Harrer does not paint
a rosy picture of Lhasa in the forties, but rather depicts the land as an
unjust albeit fascinating anachronism. In his world famous travelogue, Seven Years in Tibet, the German
mentor of the young Dalai Lama writes: “The power of the monks in Tibet is
unique and can only be compared to a strict dictatorship. They keep a
mistrustful eye on every influence from outside which could threaten their
power. They themselves are clever enough to not believe in the
limitlessness of their strength, but would punish anyone who expressed
doubts about this” (Harrer, 1984, p. 71).
Dozens of such assessments like that of
the “Dalai Lama’s best friend” can be found in the early literature on
Tibet. Many visitors prior to the year 1959 report that dictatorial
decisions, the arbitrary use of power, brainwashing and paranoid belief in
demons, spiritual control and crawling servility, bitterest poverty and
oriental wealth, slavery, serfdom, hunger, diseases, a lack of any hygiene,
alcoholism, cruel punishments, torture, political and private murder, fear
and violence, theft, robbery, and mutual mistrust were everyday features of
the kingdom of the Dalai Lamas. The Chakravartin
from Lhasa ruled over a vale of tears.
Of course, these negative conditions in
no way exclude the possibility that the Land of Snows also had oases of
peace, equanimity, erudition, joy, helpfulness, noble-mindedness, or
whatever all the Buddhist virtues may be. But what is peculiar about the
current image of Tibet is that it only stresses its bright sides and simply
denies and represses its shady side.
The social structure of former Tibet
For centuries, the education system,
the administration of finances, jurisdiction, and the police lay in the
hands of monastic officials. Bureaucracy and sacredness have long been
compatible in Asia. Hence we are familiar from the Chinese example with a
boring Confucian heaven of civil servants, inhabited by heavenly emperors
and their ministers, mandarins, scribes and administrators. Such images are
also known in Tibet. We may recall how bureaucratic the administrative
structure of the wonderland of Shambhala
was even imagined to be.
The clerical administration functioned
well for as long as it concerned the immediate affairs of a monastery. But
it could hardly cope with all the state and social political divisions of
the highlands. Western researchers who visited Tibet in the 19th and 20th
centuries thus encountered a completely inflexible administration:
decision-making processes stretched out over weeks, ignorance and timidity
dominated the incapable civil service and nowhere could be anything be
attained without bribery. [1]
The social structure of the Tibet of
old in no way corresponded to an ideal-typical model of happy individuals
it is so often depicted as being. Alongside the omnipresent clergy, the
country was ruled by circa 150 to
300 “secular” families. Different groups were distinguished among
the aristocracy. The highest stratum traced their ancestry to the old Tibetan
kings, then followed the members of the Dalai Lamas‘ families. These were
ennobled simultaneously with the enthronement of the new god-king. Every
family in the country was proud to have a monk as a son. For aristocrats,
however, it sufficed that the novice spend just one night in the monastery
in order to — for an appropriate fee — be considered ordained. Equipped
with the considerable privileges of a lama he could then return home.
The absolute majority of the sedentary population
were the “serfs” of a wealthy ruling elite, and saddled with high taxes.
The lives of these Tibetans was hard and frugal, they were badly nourished
and the medical services now praised in the West were largely unsuccessful.
Forms of slavery were known up until the twentieth century — something
which is denied these days by the Tibetans in exile. As in India there was
a caste of untouchables. Among these were to be counted beggars,
prostitutes, blacksmiths (!), fishermen, musicians and actors. In many
parts of the country members of these stigmatized groups were not even
permitted to become monks.
In contrast, the nomads preserved a
relative autonomy, in relation to both the clergy and Chinese or Mongolian
invaders. This was even true of their customs and traditions. For example,
the killing of animals — strictly forbidden in Buddhism — was normal
practice among them. The monks in Lhasa — none of them vegetarians — had
the animals slaughtered by Muslim butchers who thus brought the bad karma
from the killings down upon themselves, then the consumption of meat is not
a “sin” for the Tibetans, but the slaughter of animals decidedly is. The
Fourteenth Dalai Lama, himself a meat-eater for “reasons of health”,
nevertheless campaigns constantly (in the West) for a vegetarian lifestyle.
On the basis of the doctrine of karma,
the privileged strata of the Tibet of old saw their advantages as a reward
for previous good deeds in past lives. Anyone born into the lower castes
had a badly led past life to blame for this and was marked from the outset
as a former villain. Such degrading judgments are still prevalent among the
Tibetans in exile. Rebecca Redwood French reports on a case, for example,
where a child who made strange noises and threw a picture of the Dalai
Lamas to the ground was recognized as the reincarnation of a dog (Redwood
French, 1995). One can imagine how easily such classifications could
lead to a general social arrogance
and the abuse of power.
Tibetan criminal law
On the basis of a western orientation
towards democracy and human rights, we would have to describe the Tibet of
old as a totalitarian state. The legal system was for three hundred years
unchangingly based upon the Ganden
Podrang Codex which was commissioned by the “Great Fifth”. Yet criminal
law was already codified in the thirteenth century by the Sakyapa sect. It
displayed a strong Mongolian influence, was derived from the Yasa (statute-book) of Genghis Khan,
and, like the penal system of the European Middle Ages, was extremely cruel.
Bizarre mutilations like blindings, the cutting off of limbs or tearing out
of tongues, deliberately allowing people to freeze to death, the pillory,
shackling, yoking, lifelong imprisonment in damp pits all count as common
punishments up until the 20th century, even after the Thirteenth Dalai Lama
had introduced a number of moderation’s. In 1940, a British envoy
still saw „all over Tibet […] men who had been deprived of an arm or a leg
for theft” (Grunfeld, 1996, p.24).
 Since Buddhism fundamentally forbade
the killing of a living creature, criminals were often tortured to the
point of death and then left to fend for themselves. If they now died of
the consequences this was purely a matter of their own karma. These days
the power elite in Dharamsala maintains an embarrassed silence about such
inhuman acts and brushes them aside as Chinese propaganda; western
observers of the Tibet of old and their reports are considered to be
prejudiced and examples of European arrogance. It is truly astonishing how this
obscuration of their own dreadful past by the lamas in the West has
succeeded. And there is a lot of authentic photographic evidence; a public
whipping, which took place in the middle of Lhasa in 1950 was reproduced in
the American magazine, Life, for
example (Life, November 13, 1950,
pp. 130–136).
The punishment of criminal delinquents
was by no means confined to this world, rather the monks condemned people
to millions (!) of years in the most dreadful hells, more grotesque and
sadistic even than their counterparts in the Christian Middle Ages.
Voltaire’s cry of “Remember your cruelties”, by which he primarily meant
the politics of the Christian clergy and with which he launched his
struggle for human rights, ought to be heard in Dharamsala as well!
Equality before the law varied in Tibet
according to social status and wealth. For a murder, one had to pay a
so-called “life tax” (mistong) to
the surviving dependents and could thus avoid criminal prosecution.
According to a statement from one of the current Dalai Lama’s brothers,
this practice was still being followed in the mid-twentieth century. The
price was naturally related to the status of the victim. Hence, in the
fifties the life of a high monastic official was worth between US $8,000
and $10,000. (Grunfeld, 1996, p. 24). For the murder of a woman from the
lower castes, 10 Liang (about 11 ounces) of silver was to be paid.
Clerical commerce
The Buddhist clergy was also
commercially active and the most important monasteries were regarded as
significant trading centers. The lamas even dealt in credit. Production was
mostly devotional objects which the monks usually manufactured themselves:
holy images, statuettes of gods, amulets, and similar things. As services,
soothsaying, astrology, and the performance of all manner of rituals were
offered for sale. A further source of income was mendicancy. Bands of monks
were dispatched through the country to collect donations. They often
returned with great cargoes. The rent for a domestic cell within a monastery
had to be paid by the monk’s relatives. If this was not possible, then the
novice had to earn his keep. Franz Michael thus referred to the Tibetan
monastery as a „private, profit-making, ‘capitalist’ enterprise. It was
capitalist in the sense that the manager’s [the administrator of the
monastery] aim was clearly and admittedly to make the greatest possible
profit for its owner, the incarnation [of the abbot]“ (Michael, 1982, p.
49).
The Lamaist dispensaries bloomed
splendidly. The excreta (stools and urine) of higher tulkus were
manufactured into pills and sold as valuable medicines. The supreme
palliative was of course the excrement of the “living Buddha” (Kundun). When the Fourteenth Dalai
Lama was staying in China, his chamberlain collected his excrement daily in
a golden pot so as to then send it to Lhasa to be manufactured into a
medication (Grunfeld, 1996, p. 22).
Traditional Tibetan medicine, now on
offer worldwide, and which the western admirers claim can cure cancer, had
to be content with less success in its home country. The majority of the
population suffered from sexual
diseases. Smallpox was widespread and even the Thirteenth Dalai Lama
fell victim to it.
Political intrigue
There is no question that the lamas
constantly employed their charismatic religious aura to amass worldly power
and to generate personal grandeur. “The original Buddha teaching”, Matthias
Hermanns writes, “of the 'flight from worldly life‘ was transformed into
the Machiavellian principle of unrestrained, moral-free power politics”
(Hermanns, 1956, p. 372). Only the monks would never have called it this.
It was a part of their ruling ideology to present every expression, no
matter how secular and decadent, as the decision of a deity.
An important instrument of Tibetan power
politics was the political intrigue. This is admittedly a universal
phenomenon, but in Tibet it developed such a high status because the
worldly resources available to the lamas were barely adequate to the task
of controlling central Asia. Above all there was only a rudimentary army.
Hence, time and again it was necessary to seek armed allies, or to play
armed opponents off against one another. The great abbots, regents and
Dalai Lamas have made extensive use of these strategies over the course of
history. They were masters of the game of political intrigue and were for
this reason as much feared by the Chinese emperors as the Mongolian Khans.
Poison and assassinations dominated
even the internal Lamaist scene. Not all “living Buddhas” reached the age
at which they could govern. As we have already described above, the four
divine children (the Ninth to Twelfth Dalai Lamas) fell victim to powerful
cliques within the clerical establishment. The great abbots were especially
feared because of their magical abilities which they employed against their
enemies. Alongside the authority of state, magic was the other significant
control mechanism of which constant use was made. It played a more
important role at an elevated political level than the bureaucratic administration
and international diplomacy.
More recent developments
in the historical image
The marked differences of opinion in
the assessment of the Land of Snows and its culture are not just a product
of the western imagination, but must likewise be explained in terms of a
gaping disparity between Lamaism’s own ideal-typical claims and an
“underdeveloped” social reality. A devout Tibetan Buddhist tends to have
his eyes fixed upon the ideals of his doctrine (Dharma) and to be blind to
the social realities of his country. This is almost always true when the
Tibet of old is concerned. As Tantric, the “law of inversion” also grants
him the possibility of seeing all that is bad and imperfect in his
surroundings as the formative material for the work of spiritual
transformation, then according to logic of inversion Vajrayana makes the base social reality into an element of the
becoming whole, into the prima
materia of the tantric experiment.
It goes without saying that the lamas
thankfully adopted the western ideal-world vision of a peaceful and
spiritual Tibet. They combined this with images of paradise from their own,
Buddhist mythology and added historical events from the times of the
Tibetan kings to the mix. The result was the picture of a society in which all
people had lived happily since time immemorial, with a smile on their face
night and day. All the needs of a meaningful human existence could be
filled in the Tibet of old; nothing was lacking. Everyone respected all
others. Humans, animals, and nature lived together peacefully with respect.
The ecological balance was assured. The Tibetan kings ruled like goodly
fathers and the ecclesiastical princes followed in their stead. Then came
the Chinese military with guns and artillery, enslaved the people, tortured
the priests, destroyed the culture and planned to totally exterminate the
Tibetan race.
With such or similar images, the
Fourteenth Dalai Lama has up until most recently largely succeeded in
implanting the image of a pure, noble, humane, ecological, spiritually
highly developed Tibet, this stronghold against materialism and inhumanity,
in the awareness of the world’s public. Even the German news magazine, Der Spiegel, normally extremely critical of such matters, becomes
rapturous: “Tibet as a symbol of the good, as the last stronghold of
spirituality, where wisdom and harmony are preserved, while the world lies
in darkness and chaos: Has the 'Roof of the World' become a projection of
all our longings? What is the secret behind the western fascination with
this distant land, its religion and its god-king?” (Spiegel, 16/1998, p. 110).
But under the pressure of the vehement
critique of the history of the country which has been building since 1996,
and which can table indisputable evidence, in Dharamsala one is also
becoming more careful of unrestrainedly glorifying the Tibet of old. For
this reason the Dalai Lama ever more often now employs the handy formula
that Tibet, like all nations, has its good sides and its bad sides; the
future will, however, only stress the good. That is more or less all.
Hence, the shadows which cast their pall over the history of the Land of
Snows are only referred to in very general terms — roughly in the sense
that where there is much light there is also much darkness.
It is not our task here to offer an
assessment of the improvements much praised by the Chinese which they claim
to have brought to the medieval country. We personally believe that in
social terms the Tibetan people today live better than they did under the
rule of Lamaism. But we in no sense mean by this that the current social
situation in the Land of Snows is ideal. We hold many of the accusations
and criticisms leveled at Beijing’s “minority politics” by the Tibetans in
exile to be thoroughly relevant. It can also not be denied that resistance
to China is today growing among the Tibetans and that it primarily makes
use of religious arguments. Like everywhere in the world, there has also
been a religious renaissance on “roof of the world” since the mid-eighties.
We see a problem in this Lamaist revival, not in the Tibetan democracy
movement. What is peculiar and confusing about the political situation is,
however, that the clerical revival itself very successfully pretends to be
the democracy movement, and manipulates the awareness of both the Tibetans
and the West with this deception.
Footnotes:
Back to Contents
Next
Chapter:
5. BUDDHOCRACY AND ANARCHY: CONTRADICTORY OR
COMPLEMENTARY?
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