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A rchive Date
[ 28-04-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Tibet ]
      [http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/London/Salim_Mansur/2004/04/28/438729.html
       
      Dalai Lama's message of peace
      SALIM MANSUR, For the London Free Press
      2004-04-28

      Lhamo Thondup, the name in Tibetan means "Wish-fulfilling Goddess," was born on July 6, 1935, in a remote Tibetan village. When not quite three years old, he was discovered, according to the rites of Tibetan Buddhism, to be the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama, Thupten Gyatso, who died in 1933 at age 57.

      Lhamo Thondup is the 14th Dalai Lama, and has lived in exile since 1959 from the land of his birth, which is under occupation by Chinese Communists.

      He makes his home in Dharamsala, India, and awaits the time when he, or a future Dalai Lama, will return to Lhasa, once again the capital of a free Tibet.

      This is the Dalai Lama's fourth visit to Canada (also 1980, '89 and '93). But it is the first time he has met with a serving prime minister against the wishes of China.

      Lama in Tibetan means a spiritual teacher, and Dalai means ocean-wide, referring to the breadth of wisdom.

      In the foreword to his autobiography, Freedom In Exile, he writes, "To me, 'Dalai Lama' is a title that signifies the office I hold. I myself am just a human being, and incidentally a Tibetan, who chooses to be a Buddhist monk."

      To Tibetan Buddhists, however, he is a god-king, revered as the living embodiment of bodhisattva, meaning "a being of enlightenment," who keeps returning to Earth to teach humans the path to liberation from the cycle of sufferings and rebirths in the space of a single lifetime.

      Being a bodhisattva also means to be an exemplar of compassionate living, a practitioner of non-violence and an apostle of peace.

      The teachings of the north Indian prince Siddhartha or Sakyamuni, the historic Buddha, born some 2,500 years ago, belong to the world's great spiritual treasury. Sakyamuni's wisdom formed the basis of Buddhism, which became - not unlike Christianity and Islam - an ethics of transcendent faith with a universal appeal.

      Buddhism came to Tibet from India in the seventh century AD, and it was so persuasive the people of the "land of snows" disowned their swords for the prayer wheel of Buddhist monks.

      A saying of the historic Buddha reads: "Life is not a problem to solve, it is a reality to experience."

      This reality of human construct is one of recurrent pain and sufferings, and death is not an end, but a renewal through rebirth until "nirvana," or liberation from this cycle, is won.

      Wisdom resides in drinking from this cup of sufferings without adding to the misery. How this can be done, and freedom from the "wheel of sufferings" attained, is Buddha's teaching.

      The Dalai Lama's life illustrates this path to freedom. It is a life without rancour; it confronts the evil of occupation without losing the dignity of compassion.

      In our world of unending insanity - genocides and ethnic cleansing, political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism, occupation and terror - the figure of the Dalai Lama as a wise and compassionate monk, solitary, stateless and an exile driven out of his ancestral home, reminds non-Buddhists how great and unending is the cosmic power of love in sustaining life despite evil.

      There is another dimension for the widespread affection and respect for this solitary monk, honoured with the 1989 Nobel Prize for Peace.

      That was a year of brutal repression in Lhasa by Chinese Communists when Tibetans demonstrated against occupation, and the year when the Berlin Wall was dismantled. The end of communism was no longer a theoretical possibility, it was a reality within sight.

      In the midst of tumult, the Dalai Lama was heard as the voice of sanity, and seen as the presence of serenity. It is his decency - his living unadorned by pomp and words unaffected by rhetoric - that is irresistible. In an age of excess, the Dalai Lama is a reminder of virtue's frugality.

      In our time, when just about everything is tainted by artifice, the Dalai Lama's decency resonates across the world as a balm for troubled spirits.

      Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Wednesdays.
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