and become its curators (interview with Ginguld, 2007).
The prominent role played by Israeli volunteers in the setting up of the Tibet Museum is not a coincidence. Although the two communities seem to be far removed from each other, there is a special connection between Tibetan and Jewish peoples on several levels. Indeed, of Tibetan Buddhism’s many Western adherents, a disproportionately large number are Jews, both inside and outside Israel. This phenomenon is large enough to constitute a community within a community, who have been dubbed JuBus or Jewish Buddhists by those in the know. To many intellectually curious and spiritually restless young Jews – most particularly Israeli Jews who live in a tense and aggressive environment – Buddhism offers an alternative to a Judaism that seems to them too conservative, too combative, or too spiritually depleted today. But to some Tibetans in exile, it is Judaism that holds an important key. In our conversation, Thubten Samphel had remarked: “The people we identify ourselves most closely with is the Jews – and this is regardless of the tragedy in the Middle East.” The long history of Jewish exile has obvious parallels for Tibetans, and the eventual establishment of Israel is an inspiration for their future. In the 1980s, after the breakdown of negotiations with the Chinese government, as the Dalai Lama confronted the likelihood of a very long exile for his community, he initiated a dialogue with Jewish religious authorities. One of the questions he asked them was: How do you keep your culture, your tradition, and your sense of self, alive in exile? How do you sustain a memory for 2000 years of diaspora?
Collecting and recollecting
In 1990 the Dalai Lama invited a delegation of rabbis to visit Dharamsala.18 In the course of their week-long dialogue, a rabbi described the first-century history of Jerusalem under the Romans leading to the destruction of their Temple and exile of the Jews. Unable to sacrifice at the Temple any more, the religious leaders chose not to build a substitute shrine where sacrifices could take place. Instead they reinvented their rituals in ways that would remind the community of its loss. As a member of the delegation observed, “The memory of the Temple was never lost … but it was turned into literature … The rabbis declared that reading about Temple laws was now the equivalent of Temple service” (Kamenetz 1994, 96).
The Tibetan response to exile has been different. As Lydia Aran observes in her study of Tibetan exilic representations of the past, the Tibetans “went into exile with their high priest, and under his leadership, have channelled their energy not into inventing the means to make their religion viable under the new circumstances, but into replicating in the Diaspora their ancient religious infrastructure, rituals, and institutions” (2005, 210). By rebuilding their Temple in exile, as it were, the Tibetan community has focused on being “the custodian of the Tibetan cultural identity, not a carrier of the memory of its destruction” (198). This has oriented the community toward the future – rebuilding monasteries, reconstructing traditions for tomorrow. As Jews, impelled by their own tradition of aniconism, eschew material relics to focus on the power of recollection, Tibetans attempt to make collections of the physical fragments of their past, and use them to somehow piece together a whole. Material remnants are overwhelmingly important in this effort, and any quarter that helps preserve them is seen as an ally. This would explain why the Dalai Lama so often blesses Western museums that have collections of Tibetan art.
In her essay, Aran carefully analyzes the Dalai Lama’s speeches and writings and finds that his most vivid description of the suffering of Tibetan people occurred in the very first book that he wrote shortly after fleeing from Tibet.19 In later utterances, the Dalai Lama dwells not on the tortures or deaths of the Tibetan people, but on the destruction of Tibetan religion and culture. Why is the Dalai Lama reticent about recounting human suffering, and why does he foreground the destruction of monasteries and icons instead? According to Aran, this choice is oriented precisely to counter the Chinese project. Despite the massive loss of life in Tibet since the Occupation, she asserts that the Chinese did not intend the genocide of the Tibetan people. Rather, China’s desire has been to rob Tibet of its identity, first through violent means, and now through the Sinicization of the populace. The Dalai Lama is countering the Chinese erasure of Tibetan uniqueness by preserving Tibetan culture in exile.
But Aran offers a more important explanation for the Dalai Lama’s reluctance to dwell on the suffering of Tibetans. As a Buddhist monk, and as one who is traditionally held to be the reincarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, the Dalai Lama’s spiritual commitment is toward all human beings – even the Chinese.20 To memorialize the Tibetan tragedy in ways that would keep alive a sense of anger and injustice would run counter to this ethical imperative. Inevitably, the Dalai Lama directs attention toward a positive project of a possible reconstruction, rather than a more fraught remembrance of lives that have been irrevocably lost.
In this context, a project like the Tibet Museum, with its focus on human suffering and loss, appears anomalous. Indeed in the memory projects of the Tibetan government-in-exile it will likely remain a singular instance, a reminder of a road ventured on, but eventually not taken by the official establishment of Dharamsala.
A road not taken, and taking to the streets
Since 2008, when Beijing prepared to host the Summer Olympics and pro-Tibet groups seized the moment to mount protests, a wave of resistance has been surging among Tibetans within and outside China’s Tibetan lands. Within China, resistance has met with severe repression, which has led to more desperate and extreme forms of protest. As the months pass, a terrible toll rises: of protestors who drench themselves with kerosene, drink the fuel, and burn themselves to death. At the time of writing, there have been 112 self-immolations. Most selfimmolators are young – in their teens or twenties – and many of them are monks or nuns. Even as the Chinese government attempts to control reportage of these self-immolations, news about them spreads via social media, occupies the international press, and evokes a horrified response that brings renewed visibility to the Tibetan cause. While many commentators characterize the immolations as violent or wasteful, the immolators’ own statements depict their act as an offering made for the greater good. Before he burned himself, Lama Sobha spoke of himself as a lamp: “I am giving away my body as an offering of light to chase away the darkness” (quoted in Sonam 2013, 96).
In response to the self-immolations, the Dalai Lama seems to be searching for a middle path, between honoring the martyrs and regretting the loss of lives in acts that he believes will have no effect on Beijing. Yet in the past few years, as the situation in the Tibet has escalated, several Tibetan exile groups have expressed disappointment with Dalai Lama’s Middle Way policy which accepts Chinese rule and only asks for greater Tibetan rights. Protestors also disagree with the government-in-exile’s focus on the future and the past rather than the present, on religion and culture rather than political realities. Where should these protestors go, when they seek a place for themselves that will serve not just as a place to meet but as a symbolic center that can articulate their frustration and their grief? In Dharamsala, when mourners gather to mark yet another immolation, they assemble in the street that leads to the Tibet Museum. This street now has an accretion of memorial sculptures wrought by many hands: a black obelisk erected by the Tibetan Youth Congress, a wall covered with a relief sculpture of protestors occupying a Tibetan map. The museum has become the pre-text for a thickening memoryscape dense with monuments to the tragedy of Tibet. A road not taken is now spilling into the street (Figure 2.6).
FIGURE 2.6 Street leading to the Tibet Museum and Dalai Lama’s Monastery, McLeodganj. The black obelisk is the Tibetan National Martyrs’ Memorial. The relief on the wall, showing protestors filling a map of Tibet, is by Lobsang Dhoyou, a former monk from Kham.
Photo courtesy of Latika Gupta.
Conclusion: Ghosts of future nations
