Word: tibet
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...Tibetan exile community one of the success stories among refugee groups in recent decades. But no less important, perhaps, it has offered a possibility to many others on a planet where there are, by some counts, as many as 33 million official and unofficial refugees. By showing how Tibet can exist internally, in spirit and imagination, even if it is barely visible on the map, the Dalai Lama has been suggesting to Palestinians, Kurds and Uighurs that they can maintain a cultural community even if they have lost their territory. Communities can be linked not by common soil so much...
...Challenging ChinaYet even as the Dalai Lama has managed to make all these breakthroughs in the exile world, in Tibet itself he has made little visible progress over the past 50 years. Every Tibetan I've met remains immovably devoted to him. And yet, as he said to me 12 years ago, "in spite of my open approach of maximum concessions, the Chinese position becomes even harder and harder." The violence that broke out recently was a harrowing reminder of the fact that 98% of Tibetans have no access to their leader and are denied the most basic of freedoms...
...almost seem, in 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...
...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...
...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 of the global neighborhood. Whereas there were all of two Tibetan Buddhist centers in the West in 1968, there are now more than 40 in New York City...