Word: lamas
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...July 2006 Chinese authorities intensified what the Dalai Lama calls "demographic aggression" by launching a high-speed train linking Lhasa to Beijing and other Chinese cities, thus allowing 6,000 more Han Chinese to flood into the Tibetan capital every day. Lhasa, sometimes known as an "abode of the gods," has turned from the small traditional settlement I first saw in 1985 into an Eastern Las Vegas, with a population of 300,000 (two out of every three of them Chinese). On the main streets alone, by one Western scholar's count, there are 238 dance halls and karaoke parlors...
...Dalai Lama, true to his thinking, points out that the Beijing-Lhasa train is neither good nor bad. "It is a form of progress, of material development," I heard him say four months ago, adding that Tibetans understand that for their material well-being, it is of benefit to be part of the People's Republic. The only important thing, he pointed out, was how its rulers use the train and whether they deploy it for compassionate purposes...
...considering Tibet, as if two different visions of freedom are colliding. For Buddhists, liberation traditionally means freedom from ignorance and so from the suffering it brings. For Chinese pledged to material development, freedom simply means liberation from the past, from religion and from backwardness. According to the Dalai Lama, at the sixth and most recent round of regular talks between Chinese officials and a delegation of Tibetans, the Chinese said, "There is no Tibet issue. Everything in Tibet is very smooth." To which the exiled Tibetans said, "If things are really as good as you say they are, then...
...Long RoadThe central question surrounding Tibet, of course, is what will happen when the current Dalai Lama dies. In preparation for that event, the man has been stressing for years that the function of any Dalai Lama is only to fulfill the work of the previous Dalai Lama; therefore, any young child selected by Chinese authorities and declared to be the 15th Dalai Lama, a Beijing puppet, will not be the true "Dalai Lama of Tibetan hearts." As practical and flexible as ever and holding to the Buddhist ideas of impermanence and nonattachment, he told me as far back...
...deeper issue, as the Dalai Lama always stresses, is that names and forms are unimportant so long as something more fundamental is sustained. The Buddha's job-and therefore that of his most prominent contemporary student-was not just to be clear-sighted and compassionate but also to show how compassionate and clear-sighted any one of us can be. In that regard, it hardly matters whether the terms Dalai Lama or Buddhism or even Tibet continue to exist. As it is, thanks to the exodus of Tibetans in the past half-century, Tibetan culture and Buddhism have become part...