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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
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
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.
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
Your absolutely correct on the pragmatics of the issue. This is clearly the best strategy for the Chinese government to take if they intend to keep control of Tibet. What most people would argue is that the moral issue here is the self-determination of a nation of people. The Tibetan people are culturally and linguistically distinct, and existed as an independent nation. Many Tibetans clearly wish to regain their independence, or at least to obtain assurances that their culture and traditions will be respected by the government.
The Dalai Lama has actually struck a much more conciliatory position than you ascribe to him in the years since his exile. First of all, his (or a future Dalai Lama) ruling the country in the fashion of the old kingdom is a non-starter- he himself was involved in organizing a government-in-exile independent of him and elected by Tibetan expats to represent the country. He has repeatedly stated in the last several years that his is not interested in seperating Tibet from China- let China manage the external affairs of the country, similar to the way Hong Kong now operates, while allowing Tibetans the same sort of local autonomy that China has been allowing to other 'Special' zones within the country. You'll notice that nearly ten years ago, the ICT and other organizations changed their slogan from 'Free Tibet' to 'Save Tibet'- indicating that preserving Tibetan language and culture is given a much higher priority than political independence, even if that means making permanent accommodations to China.
Finally, to say that only aristocrats and crooked monks lament the effect of China's invasion is a gross over-generalization. Yes, those groups had the most to loose. But there are plenty of ordinary Tibetans who are none too happy with the loss of their language, their religious institutions, and their national identity as a free nation.
Were conditions in Tibet before the Chinese invasion bad? Of course. It was a dirt-poor nation essentially stuck in the middle ages. The current (and immediately previous) Dalai Lama were interested in modernizing, and changing some of those conditions. Chinese investment has made material improvements in the lives of some, but those improvements tend to be concentrated in the hands of party loyalists. Much of Tibet's natural resources have been used to fuel growth in the rest of China; during the Great Leap Forward, Tibetans were allowed to starve while their agricultural output was sent back to the Chinese mainland, a pattern of exploitation of ethnic minorities that has been repeated many times by the PRC central government.
The number of Tibetans in Tibet has dropped by about 1/6th since the Chinese invasion, in the form of emigration to India and Nepal and deaths, due to starvation, executions, and military action. Forcible sterilizations have been carried out among ethnic Tibetans. The Tibetan language and traditional cultural expressions have been banned or strongly restricted. The sorts of cruel punishments carried out by medieval justice are still present, just updated in the form of electrocutions, torture, and beatings for individuals suspected of being linked with the independence movement, or showing reverence for the Dalai Lama. I think a lot of Tibetans would take their old medieval landlords over that- though even the medieval landlords themselves are now arguing for a democratic government.
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.
Here are some suggested substitutions to your text:
1. Replace "Chinese" with "British", "China" with "the British Empire", "Tibet" with "India".
2. Replace "Chinese" with "Soviet", "China" with "the USSR", "Tibet" with "Czechoslovakia".
3. Replace "Chinese" with "Belgian", "China" with "Belgium", "Tibet" with "the Congo".
4. Replace "Chinese" with "American", "China" with "the USA", "Tibet" with "the Philippines".
Which of these would you still defend? If not all, which ones and why not?
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.
Even though many people don't know much about Buddhism, the image they have of the Buddha is not too far off base.
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