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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.'"
...if we figure out you're defying this order, we'll slaughter you in your crib.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
...I create a new law in my glorious purple sky kingdom that every Chinese government official must get special written permission from King Me prior to squatting down and excreting the same kind of fecal matter that they are spewing from their mouths.
The Dalai Lama has already announced - long before this weeks-ago Chinese ruling - he's not only going to reincarnate outside Tibet, but as a girl, just to bugger the monks.
But the law is only partly directed at the Dalai Lama. A whole score of other "Living Buddhas" are believed by Tibetans to be reincarnating, which has important consequences for claims to social influence in that rocky corner of the world. China has long sought to control this, for example with the high-profile abduction of the then 6 years old Panchen Lama whose whereabouts remain unknown.
The News may seem offbeat, but it is actually rather serious for Vajrayana (Tibetan Buddhism) believers. Lamas are regarded to simply live many centuries, with death/reincarnation just a particular step in the way. The Chinese announcement will seem to the believers like the deliberate attempt to end the lives of all remaining leaders of the religion.
blow your mind already
Ths isn't the Chinese equivalent of "The Onion" is it?
C'mon that's just hilarious (at least if it wouldn't be that sad). It's a wonderful example how totalitarian states need to control every corner of life even the dark corner of superstition.
But please don't forget that Tibet was a theocracy (actually a bodhisattva-cracy) before the Chinese Army invaded and the Dalai Lamas only became meek as a lamb after they/he lost power.
That China is evil doesn't mean Tibet was good.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
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.
Let's take this to its logical conclusion.
Therefore, it is forbidden to be naked, and it is forbidden to be clothed. So nakedness is both forbidden and mandatory.
Clever, that.
--
I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
Every time I hear "Dali Lama", I think of melting llamas draped over tables and held up by poles and crutches!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
If you knew the history of Tibet, this news is neither hilarious nor sad. In fact, this rule was not "invented" by today's Chinese government. Back to the end of 18th century, after a rebellion in Tibet was ended by central government of Qing dynasty, a Manchurian dynasty, the emperor set up rules for reincarnation, and the reincarnations of Dalai Lama, Panchen Lama and others were under the control government. After this, Dalai Lama was awarded political power by central government and noble families of Tibet had less influence on the reincarnations. Before that rebellion, Tibet was ruled by Mongolians.
Chinese govt. did this to prevent a successor to Dalai Lama. Which was to be chosen by monks who would find a boy who is a reincarnation of Dalai Lama. Basically this is reincarnation at its finest, and chinese govt. officially acknowledged reincarnation.
Read radical news here
- quite beside the point, I think.
Here's some background: Whether you like the Chinese government or not, and whether you feel that they are wrongfully occupying Tibet or not, the fact is that they feel that this is their territory, and nobody in the world offers any serious challenge; ergo, Tibet is de facto a part of China. Nobody in their right mind would expect a country to allow an external, hostile, political power to influence the internal affairs of the country - the US have historically been very heavyhanded in similar situations (eg. the communist scare after WWII); many would still today argue that it was right of them.
The Dalai Lama is undeniably a political influence in Tibet, and he is undeniably hostile to the Chinese government; it is pure common sense that they want to minimize his influence on any part of the Chinese population (and as I pointed out, the Tibetans are de facto part of the Chinese population). It is not only common sense, it is the duty of any government to oppose any influence that would destabilise the society they are governing; and it is only fair to say that the Dalai Lama wants to destabilize the situation - after all, he wants the Chinese to leave and Tibet to be an independent nation. How could that be achieved without a war of independence? And even more - if the Chinese government were to say 'OK, we agree; we simply leave Tibet', that in itself would destabilize the country. Suddenly most Chinese investments would be withdrawn, most Han Chinese would probably leave etc; the result would be BIG PROBLEMS.
And while we are talking about the 'horrible repression of the Buddhists' - do you actually know what it was like in Tibet before? It was a feudal society (like Europe in the middle ages). If you were born into a rich family, you could get away with anything; if you were poor, you could get cruel and absurd punishments for small 'crimes' - like having a foot chopped off or your eyes gouged out. There is no doubt that it is better now. There is also no doubt that it could be better than what it is now, but it isn't too bad for most. The ones that howl and complain now are the ones who were members of the aristocracy or the corrupt monastries.
But China seems to be trying to help Tibetans to reincarnate ASAP:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzCl95A90P0
Just ask their border police.
The Tibetan Dali Lama, while he presents himself as a force for enlightenment, is really the head figure for what you might term the upper class of Tibet. 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. I note that the religous class seemed to do well for themselves before China turned up.
The thing is, they couched their control over Tibet in religious terms, to to properly destabalise that, China must work against their control on those same terms.
Not that I condone China, but they're not the only people with a bad record in this dispute.
The Dali Lama position has frequently been held by people whose selection was extremely useful politically (influential families and such). I find it all highly suspect. Probably because, since I have a reasonable self image, I don't need to delude myself that a country with a population mostly consisting of poor people prone to starvation at the slightest turn of fortune is somehow also the keeper of a path to some higher state of being.
In other news, Slashdot changes its slogan to "News for nerds, stuff that matters and anything that happens in China".
It's certainly a censorship issue but hardly related to the techie world, unless I missed the RFC on Buddhist reincarnation.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Even though many people don't know much about Buddhism, the image they have of the Buddha is not too far off base.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
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.
[Ego]out
Chinese history stretches back long enough that it's problematic for anyone to say that China is definitively anything. The Chinese Communist Party talks a lot about historical claims to this or that, such as Taiwan or Tibet. They base all their propaganda on it. But they're claims with feet of clay, so to speak.
The historical claims are many and conflict. For instance, we could just as easily and with equal evidence and authority back Mongolia's claim to all the territory we currently describe as "China" on the world map. Genghis Khan did conquer Han kingdoms fair and square and totally subjugate them. So perhaps Beijing and mainland Han should quit their bellyaching and submit to Ulan Bator's rightful historical claim to primacy over the People's Republic.
Or we could, ironically enough, substantiate Tibet's claim to a huge chunk of territory currently ascribed to "China." They won and subjugated that fair and square, too.
Or we could argue pretty forcefully that "China" belongs to the Manchus, since they thoroughly conquered China and formed its last dynasty, the Qing. Much of what we in the West think of as Chinese hallmarks (topknots, qi paos, those vests and leggings men used to wear) are Manchu in origin.
Even Han areas themselves have been separate kingdoms at many times throughout history, including the period of time when the South was a kingdom ruled from Nanjing "South Capital," and the North a kingdom ruled from Beijing "North Capital."
So China is now and always has been a completely artificial amalgam held together by force of arms. And given Beijing's policies of forced sterilization, Han colonization, and ethnic cleansing it does not appear as though the minorities that find themselves within the border of "China" will be able to get away from it for a long time, if ever. It sucks, but that's the reality.
The parent poster brought up the diversity of those elements that constitute China as an argument against self-determination for the Tibetans and other ethnic minorities in China like Mongols and Uighurs. After all, if everyone in China can't understand what in the heck the people from the next province over are saying, then why should the Tibetans be so special as to get to have their own country? But really, in a back-handed way it points up how absurd is the notion of a unified China that Beijing is always going on about. "China" is so fractious that it makes the San Andreas look like the Rock of Gibraltar. One hard push like an economic or environmental collapse and "China" would dissolve into a bloody civil war with 15 sides.
As a last, tangential, and completely personal aside, it would be wonderfully novel and refreshing if people educated in China could ever come out with a comment or point of view that's not state-sanctioned. But seeing's how the official history books there can all be summed up with "5000 years of history blah blah blah some stuff happened blah blah blah and then glorious Communism came to the People," it's probably a forlorn hope.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.