SOUTH AFRICAN’s will remember His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama as the monk once at the center of a diplomatic impasse when the South African government refused him entry to attend the 14th summit of Nobel Peace laureates in Cape Town in 2009, as well as the 80th birthday celebration of fellow Nobel laureate, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, in 2011 – ostensibly out of fear of upsetting the People’s Republic of China’s government, which to date accuses him of being a separatist.
But then, being at loggerheads with establishments is a familiar state of being for the 89-year old (at the time of this review) spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism born with the spiritual name Tenzin Gyatso – who continues to live as a stateless Tibetan in India, after fleeing into forced exile in 1959 at the age of 25, in the aftermath of the PRC’s invasion of his homeland in 1950.
Communist China’s incursion was in violation of the treaty of AD 821–822 which bore testament to the equal and independent status of both Tibet and China as contained in text which stated that both countries would abide by the frontiers they were then in occupation of – further declaring that: Henceforth on neither side shall there be waging of war nor seizing of territory.
When China broke that centuries old accord whilst the figure devotees refer to as His Holiness (who had been recognized as the Dalai Lama since the age of two) was a mere 16-year-old who had been called upon to assume temporal leadership of his country in November of 1950 – it would mark the genesis of his having to contend with the colossal neighbour his entire life (75-year and counting, of struggle), virtually as a leader in exile!
According to a historical overview of Tibet the Dalai Lama sketches, what Tibetans refer to as the “priest-patron” relationship (a model from which emanated the Tibetan lamas), began in 1260 when Genghis Khan’s grandson, Kublai, named Phagpa Lama the head of Buddhism within his domain.
Harking back to the Yuan dynasty proclaimed in 1271 by Kublai as Mongol rulers of China with Phagpa Lama as religious leader across Chinese territories, a noted specialist of the epoch named Herbert Franke concluded that “most of Tibet proper remained outside the direct control of the Sino-Mongol bureaucracy” – which per se corroborates the assertion that Tibet has always had the key attributes of an independent country which comprised of: its own national government, currency, passports, postal service, military, foreign relations, et cetera.
In an anecdote limning an early impression of his outlook on the role he’d been born into, the then 19-year-old Dalai Lama reminisced about a September 4, 1954 tete-a-tete meeting with the then 61- year-old Chairman Mao Zedong in Beijing – which concluded with the Chinese leader opening the teenager’s car door for him, shaking his hand and uttering, “Your coming to Beijing is coming back to your own home.”
During the same visit, he was introduced to international leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru (who’d welcome him when he arrived in India as a refugee in 1959) – as well as meeting Communist Party members such as Xi Zhongxun (the father to the current Chinese president Xi Jinping) whom he gifted a wristwatch.
Yet the welcome and affability displayed at the time for the young leader belied the conquest of his country, which at the time was in the fourth year of Chinese occupation.
Akin to that of another Nobel Peace laureate, viz Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the Dalai Lama’s approach against systemic repression has, over seven decades, been that of non-violence (a principle he refers to as, ahimsa) for the freedom of his people – one which has been dismissed by the occupier as “the splittist activity of the Dalai clique.”
Since Tibetans have no freedom to speak out – the spiritual leader states that he took it upon himself, since he went into exile, to be “the voice of the voiceless.”
Describing his people’s plight as an existential crisis in which their culture, language and religion is at stake – the sagely activist asserts that their right to custodianship of their homeland cannot be definitely denied, nor can their aspiration for freedom be crushed forever through oppression.
Presently the leader of the Dharamsala-based Tibetan government-in-exile, the activist once lambasted by the leader of the Communist Party in Tibet as “a wolf in a monk’s robes, a devil with a human face but the heart of a beast”, also mentions what he refers to as three periods of dialogue for a negotiated settlement – which begun in the 1950s, continued through the 1980s of Deng Xiaoping’s era and onto the first decade of the 21st century pending Xi Jinping’s presidency – which have sadly amounted to no progress because of the Chinese Communist leaders “only having a mouth to speak but no ear to listen.”
He wrote that despite there being no meaningful breakthrough with regard to the Tibet question to date – what gives him hope is that the relationship between the Tibetan and Chinese peoples has not irreparably damaged.
A symbol of Tibet and its unique civilization who in the past vowed that he’d only set foot again on home soil if the People’s Republic of China didn’t make any pre-conditions – that of recognizing Tibet and Taiwan as parts of China – upon his return, in Voice for the Voiceless, the Dalai Lama reminds the world of Tibet’s unresolved struggle for freedom and the hardship his people continue to face.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, in recognition of his advocacy for world peace and environmental concerns.
He has adopted the quest for the freedom and dignity of his people, his lifelong mission.
(The Dalai Lama celebrated his 90th birthday milestone on July 6).
A trade paperback, Voice for the Voiceless is published by HarperCollins UK and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R440
