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China Says Tibetans Need Permission To Reincarnate
michaelcole writes "China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. This article is both hilarious and sad, looking at the lengths to which a government will go to regulate thought through censorship. It also goes into some of the more subtle politics of the current 72-year-old Dalai Lama as he thinks about his political and spiritual successor. The Dalai Lama 'refuses to be reborn in Tibet so long as it's under Chinese control.'"
Ths isn't the Chinese equivalent of "The Onion" is it?
Actually they didn't. They banned people who are wearing clear religious signs, including (BUT NOT LIMITED TO) a headscarf. The law permits wide interpretations which in effect also prohibits funny little Jewish hats, big necklaces, big crucifixes, etc. The prohibition is for ANY religion.
It is therefore fair to consider the laws you refer to as being "neutral", because they simply prohibit strong religious signals IN GENERAL and not in opposition of a single religion.
They also don't tell you what you can or can't do in the privacy of your own home.
Your comparison to this new and very sad Chinese law is flawed.
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
Just like Falun Gong people are all given medical checkups and then entered into a database, the same will happen to anyone guilty of unlawful reincarnation. Infanticide would be a terrible waste. Waste Not, Want Not.
Our laughter means Chinese government's definition of reincarnation is different from ours. We think reincarnation is a "mystical belief that some essential part of a living being survives death to be reborn in a new body". Chinese government perhaps thinks that reincarnation is an act of stating such a belief about a certain individual. How does the Chinese government define reincarnation anyway?
http://id3as.livejournal.com/
It's not just an euphemism, it's what happens after you die, according to that religion. Just like christians prefer to believe in heaven and hell than that it ends for ever.
The prospect that it's the end of the line at some point, is freakin' scary for a lot of people. It's not just religion that gets built on that, but also stuff like trying to be remembered somehow afterwards, or trying to make enough kids that the line will go on that way. (It's why countries where survival is a crapshot people make 10 kids or more, while after they get sanitation, medicine, etc, it eventually dawns upon them that if 1-2 kids are just short of guaranteed to survive, you don't really need more.) Anything to maintain a belief that somehow it's not really game over.
So the government saying they can stop you from reincarnating? Oooer. That's a claim that they can really end that game. It's exactly like, if you're a christian, the government saying that you need their stamp of approval to go anywhere after death. Otherwise you're going nowhere. Not to heaven, not to hell, not to purgatory (if your flavour of Christianity has a purgatory), just nowhere. To a lot of people that'll be a scarier thought than even going to hell.
Anyway, they're not saying you need permission to die. You can still jolly well die whenever you wish. Just go demonstrate for democracy in front of some tanks, if you ran out of other suicide ideas, and they'll oblige. They're saying that they can make your death a lot more permanent and scarier.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Of course, the Turkish government is not an occupying power hell-bent on destroying the language and culture of the Turkish people. The Chinese government, on the other hand, is only interested in Tibetan culture to the extent that it can be used to encourage the tourist trade. This is just the latest in a long series of moves by the PRC to attempt to squash Tibetan religion and culture; previous steps have included destroying monasteries and religious schools, forcing monks to renounce their vows, forbidding pictures of the Dalai Lama, language restrictions, etc.
This is also essentially the next round in the ongoing battle of what will happen to the institutions of Tibetan Buddhism once the current Dalai Lama dies. China wants the next DL to be a hand-picked puppet of the state who will lend legitimacy to Chinese rule in Tibet. At the very least, they would like to create a long-standing controversy over who the 'real' Dalai Lama is, as they've done with the Panchen Lama, in order to cast a shadow on a very visible and popular rallying point for the Tibetan preservation and independence movement.
Could you at least show the Dalai Lama some respect by spelling his name correctly? The guy has won a Nobel Peace Prize and I suspect you haven't. I suppose it hasn't occured to you that there might be a way of life that doesn't revolve around power and greed? You are only seeing Tibetan culture bounded by your own limited worldview. Never mind, at least you're happy with your self image. I'm not sure he would be so conceited.
Their record for treatment of their own population isn't that great, butit gets glossed over by a west desperate to find a better path to their own enlightenment, whilst handily ignoring the impovorished state in which the peasants live, and have lived for a log time, long before the Chinese turned up.
Huh? Tibet has been occupied since the 1950's which if you compare it to the current world situation of the times, we Americans were still highly geared up for segregation and discrimination of African Americans in the South and only a handful of people were fighting to change it until the 1960's equal rights movement.
Hell... We are talking about a 3rd world nation's history from prior to that we might as well be talking about the Tsar and how bad he was that make the Soviet Crimes acceptable or how great the Zulus had it because the British brought them civilization at the point of a gun. Tibet had no road infrastructure, no factories, no electricity, no telecommunications, no real constitution, and pretty much was a society comparable to same one of medieval or ancient times.
And you come to us and say that the Dali Llama and upper society was to blame for all this? Its kind of like expecting a medieval king of Europe in the 1300s to come out and say "Let's have an revolution for the people! Equal rights for all! Lets do away with Catholicism and all you believe in while we are at it."
Things like that need things like printing presses, universities, trade, burghers, factories, and everything else needed for a revolution and a change in culture. Even if the Dali Lama came out and said we need to get rid of the old system, the peasants of Tibet would have said "Reject hundred of years of tradition? The Dali Lama has gone mad! Time for a new Dali Lama!"
Yeah... China brought civilization and industrialization to Tibet, but they did it at a point of a gun just like Europe brought civilization to Africa. It is wrong and look how it turned out for a lot of places.
The same apartheid in South Africa is going on in Tibet. Native Tibetans are 3rd class citizens even if they reject Buddhism.
Of course the Tibetan lower class had it bad... Just like any other lower class in any third world nation. Its not something the leadership could correct even if they wanted to.
Secondly it has nothing to do with religion and backwardness. China as a sense of their own Manifest destiny.
Originally, Mao had claimed that Mongolia, Vietnam, and Korea have and always been a part of China just like Tibet. Stalin and the Red Army basically told him to can that idea.
Of course the Dali Lama got caught up in the web of the CIA and things went bad.
So don't tell us things sucked worse under the Lamas because it would have sucked anywhere, and it even sucks even worse with the current regimes policy towards non-ethnic Chinese.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
As for the monks having been relatively well off historically - yes, just as the monasteries were in old Europe. However, just like it had been in Europe, most every family could and would send one of its sons into the monkhood. So it does not map into Marxist analysis of hereditary class differences, as much as the Maoists would like to force it into that mold. It solved a problem in both Europe and Tibet - a farming family needed to have enough sons, and the best way to be sure of that was to have extra sons. But with too many sons the farm would become split up too small by inheritance to each of them. So sending the extras off to attend to religion rather than farming was good for both farms and the religious institutions.
Now, I'm an athiest (actually, many practicing Buddhists are too - although the Tibetans more tend to polytheism), so I don't on the whole favor massive social investment in religious institutions (however beautiful some of the buildings and art end up). But there's something in Tibetan Buddhist culture that clearly produces superior sanity in its common people. Perhaps that's related to the degree that Buddhism has since its founding specifically involved itself in psychological as well as religious questions.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
So has Yasser Arafat. What's your point?
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
We also wouldn't be doing anything but growing food.
actually they did. During the "Cultural Revolution" Mao declared birds responsible for crop damage and village cadres were soon fighting over who had exterminated the most birds. The following year and for a quite a few years after that, the crop damage from insects was fairly substantial. They gave that up and took on the challenge of small scale steel production - see previous sentence and replace "exterminated" for "produced" and "birds" for "useless slag". This resulted in no trees, which were used to fuel the smelting operations and virtually no iron pots, tools, utensils or bits off the nearest site of important cultural and scientific interest (easier to melt).
... well everything really.
Other enlightened activities from the People's Paradise included the public humilation and beating of teachers and academics (those well known threats to the very fabric of society) in the streets.
It should come as no surprise to anyone who reads slashdot that a) the Chinese concept of government is a rather loose term and b) that regular news scraped from msnbc about Bhuddism, the Chinese and er.. religion is somewhat short of the mark as far as news for nerds goes. It should be common knowledge amongst this readership and if not shouldn't you be listening to the Skeptics podcast? http://www.theskepticsguide.org/ or even reading other material?
Oh, and I am surprised at the absence of a surfeit of comments mentioning how all of the vitriol here is counter to almost everything the present Dalai Lama has said on
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1. Well, the funny thing is, the Tibetan theocracy is based on the idea that essentially they didn't have several Dalai Lamas. They had exactly one, which was reincarnated again and again and again in different bodies, but still was the same guy.
h em. It was the same gang at the top all along, uninterrupted.
I can see how that had a stabilizing effect, though. It's hard to argue the legitimacy of a succession when, so we're told, there was no succession, silly. There never was one. It's the same guy on the combined secular and spiritual throne, for the last several centuries straight.
Now if you're more secular minded, like I am, you probably won't give a damn about such claims. Pfft, of course there were several Dalai Lamas, and each must be judged by his own merits and shortcomings.
But let's pretend that we believed that reincarnation claim. There was always the same guy on the throne. The same applies to most of the other Lamas, btw. So essentially the not only they had the same ruler all along, but they had the same guys as his councillors/cardinals/whatever-you-want-to-call-t
Then, pray tell, why _shouldn't_ we hold him responsible for what he's done at various points in the last few hundred years?
Since you mention the Tsar, I'd do the same if there was one and the same Tsar on their throne ever since Ivan the Terrible assumed that title. If anyone's claim to authority was that he, essentially, _is_ Ivan the Terrible, plus all other Tsars ever since... then I'd also hold him responsible for all the atrocities those did at various points.
2. The point that things sucked everywhere if you go far enough in the past, is true and insightful, but it still doesn't remove another question: then how enlightened were they after all?
A lot of disillusioned westerners have this idea that even shit smells great if it's packed as some ancient asian mysticism. Surely every single religion, cult, superstition, heresy or divine right excuse is pure enlightenment, if it comes from the far east. And their monks and gurus? Whoa, if they're from the far east, they surely were all enlightened, selfless, generous, open-minded, and so learned that they were a walking Wikipedia. Why surely if you gave a bunch of them secular power, that'd rock, right?
So then you look at one state that was ruled like that, and the best that you can say is, well, as you were saying, that it wasn't much worse than any other medieval totalitarian state.
Basically to answer to your example about the European medieval kings of 1300: no, of course, I wouldn't condemn them for being medieval back then. But I wouldn't hold them as an enlightenment model for the present generation either.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So, having decided that you do not like religious people, the question still stands; how much have you studied religion? Do you know anything about the eightfold path? What the difference between Mecca and Medina is? What a pharasee is, versus a zealot? Who really got the Protestant revolution rolling?
Because however you feel about the people who choose to practice religion today, and devote more of their life to it than to other pursuits, religion as a cultural force is incredibly powerful and far reaching in our history. More to the point it fueled a great deal of our modern philosophy - including most secular and scientific philosophy that is considered to be the greatest enlightened thinking of our day. Few people question the cultural role of the Dalai Lamas in the past because the philosophical ideas that Buddhism has spread are so powerful; and ultimately, the culture is changing in the face of the twenty first century. Similarly, no one cares that the House of David probably was not exactly the beneficent dictator we'd like to think. Life is incredibly hard in poor countries. Harder still in poor countries without technology. Even harder in poor countries without democracy.
If you don't believe in the righteousness of the Dalai Lama's cause, then don't stand for it. That is fair. But doing so on the basis of his forerunner's cultural environment is sort of like saying the Constitution isn't worth fighting for because it was written by slave owners. There has to be a recognition that society is a living thing, changes, and despite the fact that we all came from feces-flinging monkeys, we've still got a case.
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As a good, conscientious Marxist myself, I can confidently say that Parenti is not too bright. He is not even consistent for that matter. He is opposed to the Iraq war (as am I), and argues that it was the invasion of one sovereign country by another. Yet somehow he supports the Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet, because, well, somehow they deserved it because Parenti didn't like the particular form of oppression there. Oh, and plus the Chinese claim to be Marxists, so I guess that that makes it OK. He is against the Israeli settlements and says the UN specifically bans population transfers to occupied territories; yet he has no problem when the Chinese do this on a far, far greater scale in Tibet.
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Its pathetic, really. Either you are (like Lenin) for the self-determination of nations regardless of their stage of economic and social development; or you support some variant of nationalism. Either you are against colonization, or you are for it. If Parenti were at all consistent or intellectually honest, he would say: "I support the Chinese invasion and colonization of Tibet because China is more progressive. I also support the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan because, as much as it pains me to say it, the US is the more progressive side in those conflicts. Israeli settlements in the West Bank are wrong, and so is the Chinese population transfer to Tibet." But he doesn't. And he doesn't because he either isn't that bright or isn't that honest. Take your pick.
And let's not be naive -- the Chinese invasion and continued colonization of Tibet has nothing to do with "liberation," socialism, or anything noble. This is about aggressive nationalism plain and simple, and now it is also about capitalism. It seems that the Chinese just can't imagine having a neighbor without Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonalds, Budweiser, and a good Chinese-owned mining company digging up whatever it can dig up.
Of course Tibet was no paradise before the invasion. The only times that I have ever heard this claim is when pro-Chinese-invasion people say things like "supporters of the Dalai Lama claim that Tibet was a paradise before the Chinese came, but it really was a nasty place." Other than that, I have only heard supporters talk about this as an issue of national self-determination. Why is that something so hard to understand?
One other thing to consider about the Dalai Lama. Like his predecessors, he is way out ahead of the dominant class of Tibet in political terms. He demanded a constitution that would limit his political authority, and then called all Tibetans to vote on it. He wants to retire as anything but ceremonial head of state, or at least have his successor do this. The programs that he has called for in a truly autonomous Tibet make Dennis Kucinich look like Dick Cheney. And, of course, he also considers himself a Marxist.
http://hhdl.dharmakara.net/hhdlquotes1.html#marxi
Given that the Dalai Lama is more politically progressive than the current Chinese government; given that the Chinese occupation of Tibet is illegal; given that the Chinese colonization of Tibet is a violation of United Nations regulations on occupation; and given that the majority of Tibetans recognize him, not the Chinese government, as the legitimate ruler of the country -- given all that, why on Earth would anyone support the Chinese position on this?
There is one reason: Chinese nationalism. It really is that simple.