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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.'"
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...
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.
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.
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.
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