When the press hits campus September 19, they are sure to notice the years of preparation at the University at Buffalo (UB). They might get a glimpse of an extraordinary campus event, students piled at the door, a few in traditional Tibetan dress. They might also catch sight of a small protest near Alumni Arena.
As the new semester opens up at UB, so has an opportunity to be a part of something historic: a visit from the first Dalai Lama to step on campus ground, indeed the first to venture outside of Tibet.
According to the fundamental doctrine of Tibetan Buddhism, Tenzin Gyatso is the fourteenth Dalai Lama in the lineage of the Bodhisattva, or “Buddha of Compassion.” Believers consider him a manifestation of the Buddha, the Enlightened Being, which returns to Earth to aid in the process of Enlightenment. As a human being, Tenzin Gyatso’s story is as fascinating as it is complex. Discovered as the successor to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama at age three, he was separated from his parents and began training of the highest order with Buddhist monks. And when China shook Tibet out of its isolation in 1950, a young Tenzin Gyatso was forced into his political position in a time of war.
The people of Tibet turned to him for leadership in the unrest. When he chose to flee his native land, some left their homes and followed him. This week, Kunchok Youdon, the daughter of one such family, will experience an occasion of a lifetime: meeting the man, His Holiness, who represents peace and guidance for her, who has changed her life and continues to do so with his message.
Not everyone is excited about the arrival, however. There is an active group on campus which has strongly disagreed with the Dalai Lama’s politics. These are the children of Chinese immigrants, or Chinese immigrants themselves, who protest the Dalai Lama’s visit and believe he is not the idealized image that the West has characterized.
To deal with the confusion and distractions the mind leans towards, Tibetan Buddhists use the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum, repeated over
and over again, to attain a sense of clarity. This repetition frees the mind of distractions and negativity, opening you up to an understanding about the world.
“It is very good to recite the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum, but while you are doing it, you should be thinking on its meaning, for the meaning of the six syllables is great and vast,” says the Dalai Lama. These utterances can be used to understand the complexity of the Dalai Lama’s visit to UB, his story, and the culture at play, as such an occasion requires a grain of knowledge and an open mind for a lotus to bloom.
Om
The Om syllable symbolizes the practitioner’s impure body, speech, and mind.
Though the Dalai Lama’s visit has been in the works for years now, fervor for the event skyrocketed last year. Along with giant posters of his portrait and advertisements for courses on Buddhism, one might have noticed another breed of flyers. If you were on campus in July, you might have walked by simple black-and-white sheets of paper, some with the Dalai Lama’s picture on it, some with a picture of Bin Laden right next to his. “Who is Dalai Lama? Please don’t be blinded by his words,” it urges. “He is not purely a religious figure, but a political exile.”
True as this description might be, the flyer offers a number of perspectives you might miss under the Distinguished Speakers heading. “He was not a human rights defender; he was a slave owner, a notorious slave system defender… He represents the interests of the slave owners in Tibet,” it continues. The flyers, all anonymous, peppered the walls and desktops of the University at Buffalo over the summer. They were removed and discarded before the Fall 2006 semester.
The man responsible for the bullet-points is Xiaobo Luo, a fourth-year graduate student studying Civil Engineering, and last year’s president of the Graduate Chinese Student and Scholars Association.
Luo’s beliefs are nothing if not controversial. “He is just an ordinary man,” he says of the Dalai Lama, proudly displaying a print-out from his website. Luo has collected excerpts from A. Tom Grunfeld to Wang Zai-Tian to Prime Minister Nehru, confirming China’s right to Tibet, the difficulty of Tibetan life prior to Communist liberation, and the Dalai Lama’s firm grip over its politics and people. But it is only in the United States that Luo has researched Tibetan history with such rigor.
In the small town near Shanghai where Luo grew up, Tibet was just a line in the history book. General understanding was gained from books and stories, and there were no doubts about it: the Dalai Lama never really ran Tibet, and hardly belongs there at all. So, when Luo moved to Buffalo three years ago, he decided to compile some research to prove it, and create a webpage for this alternate perspective.
The page in his website, www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~xluo2/tibet/tibet.htm, is titled “Tibet of China.” The subtitle goes on to explain, “Tibet is an inalienable part of China’s territory and under the full sovereignty of China since the thirteenth century.”
Tibet was indeed incorporated into the Mongolian Empire in the thirteenth century. However, the Mongol rulers allowed secular leadership to Tibetan Buddhists, and in the sixteenth century declared the remaining lineages of the Dalai Lamas to be the official government. In 1907, a treaty between Britain, China, and Russia confirmed Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, and the Chinese established direct rule over Tibet for the first time.
This attention on Tibet was short-lived, as a series of wars kept the Chinese army occupied, leaving Tibet in a comfortable state of self-rule and isolation. But in 1950, The People’s Liberation Army entered Tibet, crushing an untrained ceremonial Tibetan army, burning temples and villages, eradicating all traces of religion, and forcing the fourteenth Dalai Lama into his role as political leader, and later, political exile.
Prior to Communist intervention, Tibet functioned as a feudal serf system, with most of the population as peasants working the land of estate holders. This accounts for Luo’s notion of slave ownership, but Jeanette Ludwig, associate professor at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and current instructor of Asian Studies 394, remains unconvinced.
“The French have a proverb,” she says, “‘When you want to kill your dog, you say he has rabies.’ China has always claimed that the Dalai Lama was a hegemonic slave owner who held people in thrall with his religious and political power. Then you can say China liberated Tibet.”
It remains a matter of socio-economic debate whether or not the people of Tibet were indeed liberated by the Liberation army. Whether Tibetans existed in peace and prosperity under a theocracy as the Dalai Lama has implied, a theocracy His Holiness himself has noted to be corrupt, or whether there was any room for social mobility, with 60 percent of the population as serfs, mostly illiterate, is left to the historians. Some have said that Communist China has actually benefited Tibet as a whole by introducing sewage and transportation systems and disrupting the aristocratic government. But the methodology of any socio-political revolution is cold and bloody, as temples were destroyed, monks were tortured, and families were uprooted. The entire Tibetan way of life continues to undergo what Professor Ludwig refers to as a “cultural genocide,” where the mere possession of the Dalai Lama’s picture is illegal.
But this is a debate a young Tenzin Gyatso was unprepared for and could not have anticipated when the oracle declared his fate, when his title took on so many connotations.
Mani
Mani, meaning “jewel,” symbolizes the path or altruistic method to becoming enlightened with compassion and love.
The Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso, or “wish-fulfilling jewel” as he is sometimes called, has had an interesting path from his small village of Taktser, in far northeastern Amdo. He was born on July 6, 1935, to relatively wealthy farmers, the fifth of nine children. His story really begins before his third year, when a government search was conducted in order to find the next Dalai Lama.
As the tale goes, the embalmed body of Thupten Gyatso, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, was discovered one day with his head turned in a new direction. “Shortly after that, the Regent, himself a senior lama, had a vision,” writes Tenzin Gyatso in his autobiography Freedom in Exile. Looking into the waters of a sacred lake, the Regent clearly saw specific Tibetan letters float into view. These were followed by the image of a monastery with a turquoise and gold roof, and then he saw a small house with strangely shaped guttering. With this, the Regent led the party to a monastery in Kumbum, the one of his vision, and shortly thereafter, the home where Tenzin Gyatso lived was discovered.
The leader of the search party did not reveal the nature of his visit and stayed observing the child, who recognized him immediately. Next, he placed objects that belonged to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama before the child, along with some items that did not. In each instance, the child crawled up to his predecessor’s object, shouting “It’s mine! It’s mine!” The search party was convinced.
From there, the young reincarnation of the Dalai Lama was swept away to a childhood of meditation and text analysis, sometimes with very kind monks, sometimes not. Political decisions were handled by advisors and were discussed every day during the morning meeting with the government. A schedule of tutoring would continue, “then followed the most important part of the young Dalai Lama’s day,” Tenzin Gyatso writes. “Play.” Luckily, the leader of Tibet had a good collection of toys.
The Dalai Lama’s age became a matter of particular urgency when The People’s Liberation Army entered the capital city of Lhasa and the People’s Republic of China began its “peaceful liberation” of Tibet on the anniversary of the Communists coming to power in China. At that point, the Dalai Lama had not been given full temporal power, and this was starting to worry the Tibetan people. As he explains in his autobiography, “There were two schools of thought: one consisted of people who looked to me for leadership in this crisis; the other, of people who felt that I was too young for such responsibility. I agreed with the latter group, but, unfortunately, I was not consulted.” The government took the Dalai Lama to see an oracle, who knew the path for this young boy. On November 17, 1950, a 15-year-old Tenzin Gyatso was given full temporal power over Tibet, two years earlier than planned.
After a failed agreement signed by the Dalai Lama’s delegation and the Chinese government in 1951, and an even more unsuccessful Tibetan uprising in 1959, he began to feel his life was in danger in Tibet. Along with followers, the Dalai Lama fled to Dharamsala, India, beginning his journey as a political exile, so soon after his induction as a political figure.
He has been on the move ever since, meeting with such leaders as Pope John Paul II, Bill Clinton, Indira Gandhi, and George W. Bush, just to name a few. He has been the first Dalai Lama to venture into the West, speaking at notable universities and doing interviews. He has published such books as The Art of Happiness, Ethics for a New Millennium, The Wisdom of Forgiveness, and An Open Heart. Indeed, he has become a global sensation to make Oprah jealous.
It is this journey which has allowed the Fourteenth Dalai Lama to move Tibetan Buddhism into the twenty-first century. His Holiness has opinions on everything from gay marriage to the Iraq war, lending himself to his share of controversy. He is more than willing to answer questions regarding his celibacy (a favorite for college students), his stance on foreign policy, and his acceptance of homosexuality. On the latter, he is reported to have said, “If the two people have taken no vows [of chastity], and neither is harmed, why should it not be acceptable?”
The Dalai Lama has also branched out into the world of science, an apparent contradiction in the ongoing “science versus religion” battle here in the U.S. He spoke at a neurology conference, amidst protests from the medical and Chinese communities, and has gone so far as to say that if science proves any portion of the Buddhist scriptures wrong, then the scriptures should be rejected altogether. These revolutionary ideas have come a long way from the birth of Buddhism more than 2,500 years ago.
Padme
The two syllables Padme, meaning “lotus,” symbolize wisdom.
The wisdom of Buddhism has been handed down since a quiet Siddhartha Guatama sat still and attained enlightenment. Born into riches, this Indian prince was surrounded by luxury and earthly pleasures. But one day, he ventured beyond his palace walls, encountering an old crippled man, a sick man, a decaying corpse, and a wandering holy man. From then on, he decided to seek the answers for the suffering of living things on Earth.
He tried strict asceticism for a few years before discovering what Buddhists now call The Middle Way, a path somewhere between self-indulgence and self-torture. After becoming the Buddha, he preached his first sermon, and the Buddhist philosophy has been spreading and morphing ever since.
As taught by Professor Ludwig in her Buddhism class, Therevada is the oldest form of Buddhism, translated as the “way of the elders.” Originating in Southeast Asia, Therevada is known for its separation of Buddhist lay-people from Buddhist monks.
The Mahayana form of Buddhism developed after that, translated to mean “the great way,” fusing the lives of monks and lay-people in the belief that one can learn from the other in order to attain enlightenment.
Mahayana then split into the two major categories we know today: Zen Buddhism from Japan (with a bit of Daoist influence from China), and Vajrayana Buddhism, the main practice of Tibet. Vajrayana means “the diamond path,” utilizing three Ms for attaining peace in ordinary life.
The Tibetan Mantras are syllables to pronounce in order to purify the speech of a practitioner, such as the popular Om Mani Padme Hum mantra.
Tibetan Mudras are hand positions designed to speed up the process of peace and compassion during meditation, in order to purify the body of a practitioner.
Finally, the Tibetan focus on Meditation is usually aided with visualizations in order to purify the mind of its negativity and worldly distractions. Practitioners often use Tanka, works of art portraying deities and guardians as embodiments of the struggle out of suffering and into Nirvana.
Complications arise when referring to Buddhism as a religion, set in idea and creed as its Judeo-Christian counterparts in the West. “Western religions have the ‘God as my shield’ idea,” says Professor Ludwig. “In Buddhism, the individual has to spend a lot of time working through their own issues, wrestling with them. You are located in the cosmos, and you make the cosmos what it is, the same way it makes you what you are.”
There is no profession of faith or confession of sin. There are actions and reactions, as basic as the Newtonian laws of physics. One is able to find his or her own path to understanding the Buddha’s teaching, to make them personal and apply them in daily life. In this way, Buddhism has shaped itself around whatever culture fused with it.
“In the ‘20s and ‘30s, the Buddhist culture began taking on its Western forms, blossoming into its own version of Buddhism,” says Trudy Stern, who is today a dynamic businesswoman and proud owner of Tru-Teas, a tea and lunch boutique in the heart of the Elmwood strip, and quite active in the Tibetan Buddhist community in Western New York. She is the contact person for the Shambhala Meditation group, which meets every Tuesday night to read a passage from a Buddhist text, and sit in meditation on the events of the past week.
When asked about the challenges of being a Buddhist in contemporary American society, she replies, “You know, the power of the mind to be distracted by thoughts is exactly the same wherever you are. It’s like you’re looking for the sunshine of enlightenment, that gets obscured by all these clouds of fear. Like terrorism or war.”
For her, the Dalai Lama is a symbol of the peace and compassion we can experience in our everyday lives. “He stands for respect and dignity; all the things human beings have the potential to be, every single one,” Stern beams, anxiously awaiting his historic presence in the city of Buffalo.
Hum
Hum is the final syllable representing the indivisibility of method and wisdom.
All the hard work and preparation will culminate in a Day of Learning on September 19, a day of cancelled classes and cultural learning, atypical from every other day spent on campus during the semester.
The visit, as described in UB’s website of events (www.buffalo.edu/dalai_lama), runs from September 18 until September 20, offering a range of events and activities from sacred dance to a meditation led by UB alumnus and esteemed Buddhist teacher, Lama Surya Das. There is also an exclusive Interfaith Service on September 18, which required obtaining a voucher in order to purchase a limited number of tickets, and an even more exclusive luncheon with His Holiness himself by invitation only.
One such fortunate invitee is Kunchok Youdon, a graduate student studying International Relations in the Political Science department and current president of the Tibetan Student Association, a very small, very recently formed organization for Tibetan students studying at UB. The club now consists of ten Tibetan students, two of them undergraduate, and all have been invited to meet the Dalai Lama at the airport before attending lunch.
“My mother is making us traditional Tibetan dress for when we receive him at the airport. This is a very exciting opportunity for me,” says Youdon. Her mother is shipping the garments over from India, where the rest of Youdon’s family resides.
When her parents were children, they were among the followers of the Dalai Lama as they fled into India as refugees. They are currently without a country, neither as citizens of a Tibet without their leader, nor residents of an India which has never denied the sovereignty of China over Tibet.
But Youdon harbors no ill feelings; if anything, she is empathetic with the sentiments of her Chinese colleagues. “I totally understand their feelings; they’ve been told these things since they were kids. This has been just part of the story, but in America, you can get a different experience.”
Youdon is aware of the tensions between the Tibetan SA and some Chinese students, and she has studied the CIA involvement in the unsuccessful uprising of 1959. Yet, she is optimistic that the Dalai Lama’s visit can encourage an open dialogue and a general sense of peace on campus and in the community.
“This is why Dalai Lama prefers to visit universities and schools—because children are future law-makers and leaders of the world. You are a student,” she says, “This is the time to open up and see the world in different perspectives.”
Indeed, the student body saw a new perspective when Luo distributed his flyers. They asked questions and inquired about these different viewpoints. And, though the Graduate Chinese Student Association is not planning on attending the lecture, Luo confided that the Dalai Lama himself has invited all Chinese students to a private meeting during his visit to the university.
“Go and experience it so that you know what it is,” says Youdon of the Dalai Lama’s visit, “What is bad and what is good, figure it out for yourself.”
For more information on how to get tickets and where to be, visit www.buffalo.edu/dalai_lama or dalailamabuffalo.com for a list of ongoing community events.
