Word: tibet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Tibet itself (with an army of just 8,500) was in an equally vulnerable state of remoteness when Chinese forces, newly united by Mao Zedong, attacked its eastern frontiers in 1950. Hurriedly, on the advice of the State Oracle (who delivered counsel while in a trance), the 15-year-old boy was invested with full political authority, and while still in his teens, he traveled to Beijing in 1954, against the wishes of his protective people, to negotiate face to face with...
Though the Dalai Lama deals with such problems serenely, having endured insurrections for a half-century, the issues of delegating responsibility and authorizing the reincarnations of departed lamas take on particular urgency as he passes through his 60s. The finding of a new Dalai Lama when all Tibet is in Chinese hands would in the best of circumstances be treacherous; but it became doubly so two years ago, when Beijing unilaterally hijacked the second highest incarnation in Tibet, that of the Panchen Lama, by placing the Dalai Lama's six-year-old choice under house arrest and installing a candidate...
...response to this, the man trained for 18 years in dialectics has been canny. More than a decade ago, he reminds me, he said that "if I die in the near future, and the Tibetan people want another reincarnation, a 15th Dalai Lama, while we are still outside Tibet, my reincarnation will definitely appear outside Tibet. Because"--the logic, as ever, is rock solid--"the very purpose of the incarnation is to fulfill the work that has been started by the previous life." So, he goes on, "the reincarnation of the 14th Dalai Lama, logically, will not be a reincarnation...
...half Marxist, half Buddhist," and has stepped back from his original demands of independence to calling only for an autonomous "Zone of Peace"). The pressure on him to forswear his policy of nonviolence has intensified as the years go by, and Chinese repression comes ever closer to rendering Tibet extinct...
...tells me, "my position has become weaker, because there's been no development, no progress. In spite of my open approach, of maximum concessions, the Chinese position becomes even harder and harder." Last year all photographs of the exiled leader were banned in Tibet, and monks and nuns continue to be imprisoned and tortured at will, in what the International Commission of Jurists long ago called a policy of "genocide." Yet, he argues, all but banging his fist on the arm of his chair, "to isolate China is totally wrong. China needs the outside world, and the outside world needs...