[Buddha-l] Re: Re: The Dalai Lama on Self-Loathing (Stuart Lachs)

[Stuart Lachs]

Stephen Hodge wrote
 "This article about their [Stuart and Roma Gelder] latter-day successor,
Parenti, also contextualizes
 the Gelders."
The article "A Lie Repeated: The Far Left's Flawed History of Tibet"
 by Joshua Michael Schrei

can be reached at

 http://www.studentsforafreetibet.org/downloads/A%20Lie%20Repeated.doc .

Thanks for the article on the background of the Gelders and in addtition on
Anna Louise Strong and A. Tom Grunfeld. I do however take issue with
Schrei's portrayal of Michael Parenti. My guess is that Schrei is
particularly bothered by Parenti's article
"Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth"  which can be accessed at
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html .

I have quite a different take on the article than Schrei. I hope people read
Paenti's article, which is fairly short, rather than only reading Schrei's
comments on the article.

I would like to make some points in the hope of  interesting people in 
reading  Parenti's
paper.

(  ) in the quoted paragraphs below refer to Parenti's footnotes which I 
give as F.N.  after the paragraph.

Tibet like any country has a complicated history as does the Dalai Lama and
his previous incarnations. The Dalai Lama besides being a religious leader
is also a political leader, which by any measure,  is a complicated juggling
act. Though I think the present D.L. is a wonderful and inspiring leader he
gets into "compromised " positions. Parenti points out,

"In 1995, the News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina, carried a
frontpage color photograph of the Dalai Lama being embraced by the
reactionary Republican senator Jesse Helms, under the headline "Buddhist
Captivates Hero of Religious Right."(39) In April 1999, along with Margaret
Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and the first George Bush, the Dalai Lama
called upon the British government to release Augusto Pinochet, the former
fascist dictator of Chile and a longtime CIA client who had been apprehended
while visiting England. The Dalai Lama urged that Pinochet not be forced to
go to Spain where he was wanted to stand trial for crimes against humanity.

F.N. 39 News & Observer, 6 September 1995, cited in Lopez, Prisoners of
Shangri-La, 3.

Lopez comments that his book [Prisoners of Shangi-La] "attempts to 
understand how
this is possible." He then adds, "Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism have long been 
objects of Western
fantasy."

Parenti also touches on the Dala Lama / CIA connection:

For the rich lamas and lords, the Communist intervention was a calamity.
Most of them fled abroad, as did the Dalai Lama himself, who was assisted in
his flight by the CIA. Some discovered to their horror that they would have
to work for a living. However, throughout the 1960s, the Tibetan exile
community was secretly pocketing $1.7 million a year from the CIA, according
to documents released by the State Department in 1998. Once this fact was
publicized, the Dalai Lama's organization itself issued a statement
admitting that it had received millions of dollars from the CIA during the
1960s to send armed squads of exiles into Tibet to undermine the Maoist
revolution. The Dalai Lama's annual payment from the CIA was $186,000.
Indian intelligence also financed both him and other Tibetan exiles. He has
refused to say whether he or his brothers worked for the CIA. The agency has
also declined to comment.(38)

F.N. 38 Jim Mann, "CIA Gave Aid to Tibetan Exiles in '60s, Files Show," Los
Angeles Times, 15 September 1998; and New York Times, 1 October, 1998; and
Morrison, The CIA's Secret War in Tibet.

Schrei in his paper mentions " Ironically, it was the Dalai
Lama who put an end to this resistance, by calling on the fighters to drop
their arms and embrace nonviolent means of conflict resolution."

I am not exactly sure of the source, but I believe it was in a paper by
Brian Victoria (forgive me Brian if I am wrong here), author of "Zen At War"
and "Zen War Stories" who wrote that the funding and training for the
Tibetan resistance, was headed by the Dalai Lama's brother. The Tibetans
were being trained at an abandoned army base in Colorado. The support  was
halted when the USA began its reapproachment with China. The Chinese made a
point of having the USA stop funding the Tibetan resistance, which the
Chinese viewed as a nuisance. The resistance was given some support for
about three years with instructions to close down their operations. I
believe one group of Tibetan fighters refused to stop fighting and was
pretty much destroyed. At any rate, it was after this defunding and lack of
training and support from the USA/CIA that things changed to  "calling on
the fighters to drop their arms and embrace nonviolent means of conflict
resolution."

Parenti  agrees with Schrei that most Tibetans want the Dalai Lama back, but
that is a different issue  than  wanting the old style Tibetan social order
back. Parenti writes,

Many ordinary Tibetans want the Dalai Lama back in their country, but it
appears that relatively few want a return to the social order he
represented. A 1999 story in the Washington Post notes that he continues to
be revered in Tibet, but

  . . . few Tibetans would welcome a return of the corrupt aristocratic
clans that fled with him in 1959 and that comprise the bulk of his advisers.
Many Tibetan farmers, for example, have no interest in surrendering the land
they gained during China's land reform to the clans. Tibet's former slaves
say they, too, don't want their former masters to return to power.
  "I've already lived that life once before," said Wangchuk, a 67-year-old
former slave who was wearing his best clothes for his yearly pilgrimage to
Shigatse, one of the holiest sites of Tibetan Buddhism. He said he
worshipped the Dalai Lama, but added, "I may not be free under Chinese
communism, but I am better off than when I was a slave."(42)

  F.N. 42 John Pomfret, "Tibet Caught in China's Web," Washington Post, 23
July 1999.

 Parenti quotes the Dalai Lama on his ideas on Marxism,

  In 1996, the Dalai Lama issued a statement that must have had an
unsettling effect on the exile community. It reads in part as follows:

 Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is
founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain
and profitability. Marxism is concerned with the distribution of wealth on
an equal basis and the equitable utilization of the means of production. It
is also concerned with the fate of the working classes-that is the
majority-as well as with the fate of those who are underprivileged and in
need, and Marxism cares about the victims of minority-imposed exploitation.
For those reasons the system appeals to me, and it seems fair. .  I think of
myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist.(47)

    F.N. 47 The Dalai Lama in Marianne Dresser (ed.), Beyond Dogma:
Dialogues and Discourses (Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic  Books, 1996).

 Schrei takes issue with Parenti's scholarship. He  writes:

    One would presume that a Yale Ph.D. would know the difference between
Chinese and Mongols. But apparently, in the Parenti-Grunfeld-Strong school
of history, one word is as good as another and a Chinese is as good as a
Mongol, as long as the point gets across.

   This is in response my guess in response to Parenti's:

  The Dalai Lama himself stated that "the pervasive influence of Buddhism"
in Tibet, "amid the wide open spaces of an unspoiled environment resulted in
a society dedicated to peace and harmony. We enjoyed freedom and
contentment."(4) A reading of Tibet's history suggests a different picture. 
In
the thirteenth century, Emperor Kublai Khan created the first Grand Lama,
who was to preside over all the other lamas as might a pope over his
bishops. Several centuries later, the Emperor of China sent an army into
Tibet to support the Grand Lama, an ambitious 25-year-old man, who then gave
himself the title of Dalai (Ocean) Lama, ruler of all Tibet. Here is quite a
historical irony: the first Dalai Lama was installed by a Chinese army. His
two previous lama "incarnations" were then retroactively recognized as his
predecessors, thereby transforming the first Dalai Lama into the third Dalai
Lama.

F.N. 4 Dalai Lama quoted in Donald Lopez Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: 
Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 
1998), 205.

  Toward the end of his paper Parenti write:

  To support the Chinese overthrow of the old feudal theocracy is not to
applaud everything about Chinese rule in Tibet. This point is seldom
understood by today's Shangri-La adherents in the West.

  The converse is also true. To denounce the Chinese occupation does not
mean we have to romanticize the former feudal régime. One common complaint
among Buddhist followers in the West is that Tibet's religious culture is
being undermined by the occupation. Indeed this seems to be the case. Many
of the monasteries are closed, and the theocracy has passed into history.
What I am questioning here is the supposedly admirable and pristinely
spiritual nature of that pre-invasion culture. In short, we can advocate
religious freedom and independence for Tibet without having to embrace the
mythology of a Paradise Lost.

Parenti continues:

 Finally, it should be noted that the criticism posed herein is not
intended as a personal attack on the Dalai Lama. Whatever his past
associations with the CIA and various reactionaries, he speaks often of
peace, love, and nonviolence. And he himself really cannot be blamed for the
abuses of the ancien régime, having been but 15 years old when he fled into
exile. In 1994, in an interview with Melvyn Goldstein, he went on record as
favoring since his youth the building of schools, "machines," and roads in
his country. He claims that he thought the corvée (forced unpaid serf labor
for the lord's benefit) and certain taxes imposed on the peasants were
"extremely bad." And he disliked the way people were saddled with old debts
sometimes passed down from generation to generation.(45) Furthermore, he now
proposes democracy for Tibet, featuring a written constitution, a
representative assembly, and other democratic essentials.(46)

  F.N.45 Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon, 51.

  F.N. 46 Tendzin Choegyal, "The Truth about Tibet."

  It seems that in comparison to Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, especially
so with Chan and Zen, there is much less critical looking at the development
and institutional history of Tibetan Buddhism and its role in Tibetan 
society.

  I hope others read Parenti's paper.

  All the best,

  Stuart

P.S. Parenti does quote the Gelders, Strong and Grunfeld quite a bit. But
he also quotes many others:

Melvyn C. Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the
Dalai Lama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 6-16.

Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000), 113.

Dalai Lama quoted in Donald Lopez Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan
Buddhism and the West (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998),
205.

Pradyumna P. Karan, The Changing Face of Tibet: The Impact of Chinese
Communist Ideology on the Landscape (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press
of Kentucky, 1976), 64.Michael Schrei


Melvyn Goldstein, William Siebenschuh, and Tashì-Tsering, The Struggle for
Modern Tibet: The Autobiography of Tashì-Tsering (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe,
1997).

Our ex-Nazi friend Heinrich Harrer, Return to Tibet (New York: Schocken,
1985), 29.

Elaine Kurtenbach, Associate Press report, San Francisco Chronicle, 12
February 1998.

Jim Mann, "CIA Gave Aid to Tibetan Exiles in '60s, Files Show," Los Angeles
Times, 15 September 1998; and New York Times, 1 October, 1998; and Morrison,
The CIA's Secret War in Tibet.

Report by the International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet, A Generation in
Peril (Berkeley Calif.: 2001), passim.

International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet, A Generation in Peril, 66-68,
98.