By Deepa Majumdar
His Holiness, the fourteenth Dalai Lama (Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, shortened to Tenzin Gyatso), a Nobel Laureate, has sanctified the Northeast with his uplifting presence. Surely it is not just his words that have this redeeming power, but his very presence. If his purifying power had to be pared down to bare essentials, what would these be? Can a person sanctify a land if he does not possess the virtues that counter the chief vices of this land? The answer has to be a resounding “No.” Indeed, the Dalai Lama derives his sanctifying power from his personal practice of the supreme virtue of non-violence. To redeem a terrain soiled by communal violence and arson attacks, a person needs to assert the greatest moral force ever … a power drawn from the virtue that quells its matching vice of violence. This virtue is not mere passivity, nor the cowardice displayed by running away from conflict, but rather, a conscious, deliberate practice of non-violence. When a person avoids temptation, exerts her free will, and chooses to practice non-violence in the teeth of violence, she gains an inner power that far supersedes the most sophisticated weapons ever … It is this invisible moral force of non-violence that possesses the power to quell visible forms of violence.
It is precisely this kind of the power that our Dalai Lama possesses, not merely by his being a devout Buddhist monk, nor by his status as the head of the Gelugpa spiritual lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, not even by his inspiring verbal avowals of non-violence … He possesses this power by his leadership and conscious choice to respond with non-violence to the decades-long, outrageous breaches of human rights by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in what was once Tibet. The case of Tibet is perhaps unprecedented in the history of the world. Not even Gandhiji’s immaculate practice of non-violence can compare … for although the British were violent in their colonial oppression, in no measure could their scale of violence compare with that of the PRC in Tibet.
In response to the provocation of the horrific violence of “nine eleven” in 2001, America launched the far greater violence of two hi-tech wars (Iraq, Afghanistan) in which hundreds of thousands of individuals lost their lives … most of them needlessly. The disproportion here can be matched only by a second example from the history of America. In 1941 the Imperial Japanese Navy bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor (Hawaii), but in 1945, America dropped two atomic bombs, one each in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this being the only instance of the use of nuclear weapons in the history of the world. In the recent past, our own Shillong saw the more-than-disproortionate, unwarranted violence perpetrated by pro-ILP miscreants against innocent non-tribal persons killed in brutal arson attacks. The three individuals who lost their lives, did so simply because they did not “belong” to the population indigenous to Meghalaya. Here, the provocation in question was mere fear of loss of identity, for which, the persons killed could hardly be held responsible. I shudder to imagine how Shillong or America would have reacted to the incomparably greater provocations unleashed upon a hapless Tibet by PRC … provocations that include torture, and the worst forms of human rights abuses … not for a day, not for a month, not even for a year … but for decades. PRC’s human rights abuses in Tibet far outweigh any good they brought about (abolition of slavery and serfdom, etc.). Indeed the tragedy of Tibet leaves its indelible impression on the mind of any person of conscience. It compels us to protest fearlessly against the barbaric actions of the Chinese Behemoth (PRC) now ascending on the horizon of History.
If ever the world has seen a conflict between David and Goliath, this conflict is not so much that between the Islamist Jihadist with his primitive weapons and America with its hi-tech weapons, as it is between one lone Person … namely, the Dalai Lama … and PRC. Indeed, it is a testament to the timeless-matchless superiority of moral force over worldly power (or the power of weapons), that a powerful government like the PRC is afraid of one solitary man … a penniless Buddhist monk … the Dalai Lama, who bears no grudges against the late Chairman Mao. The PRC is so afraid of His Holiness that it pressurizes individuals and institutions world-wide, to reject the Dalai Lama, threatening to punish Tibetans, if they carry even a photograph of their spiritual leader.
The Dalai Lama demonstrates perhaps the only successful example of Plato’s philosopher king, a concept that combines the political with the numinous. In fact, the Dalai Lama demonstrates more than anybody else, this particular strand of Asian politics … namely a numinous politics that combines the political with the spiritual, both at their highest levels, thus transforming the ordinary blood-stained revolution, to a revolution of the heart. Western civilization has long lost this capacity to conjoin two opposing principles … politics and spirituality … at their highest levels. When these principles combine at their lowest levels, we have the bloodthirsty actions of religious zealots. But Plato demonstrated through his concept of the philosopher king, that only someone who has directly and mystically encountered the divine, would qualify as the ideal political leader, no longer interested in worldly gains … In short, only the mystic would qualify as a perfect servant of his people. Great personages like Mahatma Gandhi and Aung San Suu Kyi demonstrate degrees of this same ideal. But it is perhaps our Dalai Lama who demonstrates Plato’s ideal with far greater intensity than anybody else, given his decades-long unstinted service to the cause of Tibet and the plight of the Tibetans. It is moving to see footage of His Holiness consoling distraught Tibetan refugees fleeing their homeland in terror. A person of the Dalai Lama’s stature could easily have summoned the great armies of the world to level the might of PRC. But the fact that he chose not to do so … saying that if Tibet were won back through violence, it would no longer be a Tibet anybody wanted … is the chief reason that he possesses the sanctifying power that he does. Shillong is indeed blessed by the presence of His Holiness, the fourteenth Dalai Lama.