Lessons from Dharamshala

My looong overdue reflection on my trip to Dharamshala and the town's Tibetan Buddhist community.

artwork by Gabrielle Amar.

It’s been almost four months since our trip to India in February, and I still haven’t succeeded in shaking off this all-consuming resistance towards reflection. This resistance was easy to adopt when processing slipped and fell far behind doing early into the year, way before our trip to India. But my reflection resistance intensified -- and really got hold of me -- while there.

When I arrived back in Jerusalem, I shared my difficulty in processing what I had experienced in Varanasi and Mumbai with my high school English teacher. He responded to my message with a quote from Wordsworth:

“I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on..."

I like Wordsworth’s language. He makes my reflection resistance -- what’s really morphed into, in this situation at least, a fear of engaging with something that seems so insurmountable and feels so overwhelming -- seem okay, even romantic. I’d like to think that I’ve hesitated up until now to tackle writing about India because I have a slow subconscious, and it likes to take its sweet time mulling and contradicting and mulling some more. (I use the same excuse for the immature defeat I feel in writing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.) But a lot of it, in the end, really has nothing to do with me. I turn to Life of Pi to make my point.

Pi Patel suggests that if one were to turn Tokyo upside down and shake it, an incredible and diverse number of species would fall out of it, like loose change: a charge of tigers, slippery silver fish, exotic birds. I wonder what would happen if one took India, stuffed with 1,324,171,354 people, and did the same thing. I imagine streams of brilliant saris, bindis and shiva icons and amamahs and crosses, orange and yellow marigolds, falling lentils, tuk-tuks and motorcycles, banyans and champa trees.

I’m trying very hard now to turn my brain upside down and shake it, like Tokyo or India. I want my memories and reflections to fall out easily -- out of this mode of tranquility that Wordsworth describes, and into a bucket for me to collect and easily access. I know that’ll never happen, because India’s cultural richness alone -- I’m ignoring the sheer magnitude of its population -- will never fit neatly and fully into anything, even the biggest, lamest hypothetical bucket my imagination could ever conjure up.

So I’ve accepted the fact that It’s impossible to sit down and write about “India.” It’s Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Christian, Muslim, and ever so slightly Jewish. It’s composed of 29 states. It’s regarded as the most ethnically-diverse country in the world. So, I’ve realized, I can only tackle part of India. And I’ve decided to focus on .0077% of the country. I want to talk about an estimated 100,000 people among a population of 1.324 billion, the majority of whom live in a 27.6 km2 piece of land at the foothills of the Himalayas in a 3.278 million km2 expanse: the Tibetans of Dharamsala.

India holds the world’s largest Diaspora Tibetan population. Tibet is wedged between India (to the south) and China (to the north). Tibet had been under the rule of various Chinese dynasties, interim Nepalese control, and the QIng dynasty, before the Qing dynasty dissipated in 1912. Whether Tibetan culture is a distinct culture and whether the Tibetan people really are a people have been contested by the Chinese due in part to this history. The International Commission of Jurists, an NGO, recognized Tibet as an independent state between 1913 and 1950. The irredentist People’s Republic of China regarded Tibet as part of greater China when it sent its People’s Liberation Army to “liberate” Tibet in 1950. In the same year, the Dalai Lama, then only 15 years old, was appointed as the head of state.

Here’s some background: Mao Zedong established the People’s Republic of China on October 1st, 1949. During China’s Civil War, Tibet had aided Chinese Communists against the Chinese National Party during the Long March. Loyalties switched in 1950, after Radio Beijing began to announce that “the People’s Liberation Army must liberate all Chinese territories, including Tibet, Xinjiang, Hainan and Taiwan,” and the Chinese government moved in to occupy and absorb Tibet.

When the Tibetan Foreign Office stressed its history of distinctiveness and political independence to the Chinese government, Great Britain, the U.S. and India told Tibet that it should engage in direct negotiations with China rather than pursue another plan of action or resistance. The Tibetan government had denounced Chinese claims that Tibet was part of China. It tried to negotiate with the Chinese government following the Battle of Chamdo, in which the Tibetan army was captured and many Tibetan leaders were “re-educated” in Chinese Communist Party policies. The eventual Seventeen-Point Plan for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet, which included a mutual recognition of the “liberation” of Tibet and its absorption by the Chinese government, was signed in 1951 by the Tibetan government not because the two parties had agreed on the language or the terms themselves, but to prevent an immediate military advance on Lahsa and to preserve Tibet’s cultural autonomy, with the Dalai Lama as their leader.

From 1949 to 1979, many claim that 1.2 million TIbetans were killed under Chinese invasion or occupation. This figure remains contested. British historian Patrick French, former director of the Free Tibet Campaign in London, argues that the Chinese have killed 500,000 Tibetans.

Under Chinese occupation, 6,000 monasteries were burnt. Secret police were employed. Buddhists monks were harassed, beat, and shot. Chinese party sayings were engraved over Buddhist ones. Tibetans were arrested on fictitious charges, detained in rooms and suspended from ceilings after being subjected to torture during “interrogation” sessions. Mao Zedong created labor camps modeled after the Soviet Union’s gulags. I watched video footage of Chinese soldiers, who were positioned at the top of a mountain, shoot Tibetan refugees below them as they tried to pass through the Himalayas by foot. A few fell into the snow, and the others kept walking, totally exposed. About a thousand Tibetans were killed from fleeing the army alone.

The Chinese government also encouraged (and continue to encourage) Chinese citizens to move to Tibet. The PRC has invested billions of dollars in the development of both restive Tibet, as well as Xinjiang. Tibet’s influx of Chinese citizens, the majority of who were motivated by economic profit, consequently led to the sintification of Tibetan cities, specifically the capital Lahsa, and changed Tibet’s cultural and ethnic landscape. (The problem remains today, as the influx of Chinese investors and developers and citizens have bolstered the Chinese government’s monopolized control over tourism, encouraging visitors to “Take a Trip to the Holy Land” while at the same time, retaining its policies opposing religious practice or affiliation and punishing those who don’t follow them. Demographic shifts and Chinese dominance have also spread to other sectors and have limited job opportunities and rightful pay for Tibetan workers.)

In 1959, the PRC invited the Dalai Lama to the palace alone, which was seen as a red light to many. 300,000 TIbetans guarded the Dalai Lama’s palace to keep him from accepting the offer. The Tibetan uprising against the Chinese government failed, and the PRC sacked Lahsa and burned its monasteries. Thousands of civilians (some claim 87,000; others say up to 400,000) were killed. Many of the Dalai Lama’s guards were executed.

The Dalai Lama escaped to Dharamsala, a little village in northern India, through the Himalayas. He set up a government in exile there. About 80,000 people followed him.

Some Tibetans advocate for an overthrow of PRC’s rule over Tibet. In the 70’s, the Dalai Lama introduced his Middle-Way Approach, which has redefined the Tibetan plea for return by requesting a sovereign Tibet under Communist China.

~

Dharamsala is beautiful and peaceful. It reminded me a lot of Big Sur: the winding mountains, the spiky evergreens, the blue sky, the clean air. Cows walk slowly on the side of the paved roads. Monkeys scurry across passing cars and into trees. The streets are narrow, the shops small. They offer Indian scarves and tapestries and Tibetan ponchos and prayer beads. Of the different street foods we were told to avoid, momos and samosas fared most popular in our group.

I met three impressionabake figures from the Tibetan Buddhist community in Dharamsala: Palden Gyatso, Geshe Tenzin Damchoe, and Tenzin Gyatso (aka the Dalai Lama). The first two taught me many things that were, for the most part, unrelated to one another. Palden Gyatso challenged the purpose of compassion in my life and in Zionism. Geshe Damchoe made me compare and connect Buddhist teachings of self-negation and interdependence to Judaism, and also made me reconsider the purpose of the Dalai Lama’s leadership within the Tibetan Buddhist community and on a global stage.

Running through the different topics that we touched upon and the lessons I’ve learned lies a question: Why do structures fall or change? By “structures,” I mean the vehicles and ideas intentionally utilized and/or made by humans in an attempt to organize, explain, our control the outcomes of an experience. In this piece, I explore the fall of various structures: our understanding of compassion, Jews’ and the general public’s relation to Zionism, long-distance nationalism and cultural preservation, control we try to exercise in taming our emotions and minds.

Palden Gyatso:

Palden Gyatso is an 87-year-old Tibetan Buddhist monk. His eyes are gray but bright. He’s bony. Fragile. His back is a little hunched. He wears dentures over his pink gums. He managed to traverse Dharamshala’s hilly roads and walk to our hotel to speak to us on Shabbat in Dharamshala.

Palden spent 33 years of his life in prison. In 1959, he was arrested and imprisoned for seven years in what had been a Buddhist monastery prior to the Chinese occupation of Tibet. He was caught trying to escape at the Tibet-Indian border in 1962, and had his seven-year sentence doubled to fifteen years. He was sent to a labor camp directly after. In 1979, he escaped again, was caught posting signs calling for Tibetan independence, and was incarcerated for another nine years. In 1992, thirteen days after being released, he escaped to Dharamsala.

During his 33 years in jail, Palden had his teeth knocked out with an electric cattle prod. His feet were shackled for more than two years at once. He was kept from seeing any of his friends or family members for 24 years. He ate used leather and the bones of dead animals and worms and mice in the labor camp. He was lashed. He was interrogated and beat for not answering questions “correctly” or for remaining silent.

Throughout those 33 years, Palden stuck to the Buddhist resolve of nonviolence. He remains today both a staunch activist for Tibetan independence and a believer in nonviolence resistance.

What was it exactly that sustained Palden’s inner strength, his spirit? How can he forgive people? And now does he not hold anger in his heart or harbor resentment towards his past?

When we asked him these questions on Shabbat morning, Palden kept returning to the principle of compassion.

Palden explained to us that everyone wants happiness. No one wants suffering. We often convince ourselves that we can reach happiness by defeating or controlling what we perceive to be its inhibitors: people, events, words. Palden recognizes that the PRC, too, are striving for happiness, albeit a much different one from the Tibetans. It’s from this recognition that his compassion stems, and it’s from this recognition that he’s been able to turn compassion into a continuous practice.

After hearing his answer, I found myself facing a second question: how can compassion act as a mobilizing force, an active agent for change?

~

It’s late Shabbat morning. We are huddled around Palden in a circle. He arrived at the hotel about an hour ago and has been answering our questions. My director asks him what he would tell the Chinese police officers who arrested him if they were sitting in our room. “I’m still alive,” he says.

~

I hear “Am Yisrael Chai” in my head.

~

It is Friday night in Dharamshala, the night before Palden’s visit. The Kabbalat Shabbat service has just begun. We are singing a song from Tihilim. The opening words go: “shiru l’Adonai, shir chadash.” “Sing onto God a new song.”

~

I sing the words. And I cry. I see Jews singing those words for the first time after the Partition Plan, after the War.

~

It didn’t take much for me to see the Zionist parallel in the Tibetan Buddhist struggle for independence. I found it telling when my director told our group prior to our trip that many Tibetan Buddhist refugees identify with Jewish history and our fight: our fight against persecution and cultural disintegration and suffering and killings, our fight for a homeland, for existential security, for religious freedom, cultural flourishing, and self-determinization.

I recognize, of course, that our experiences and historical circumstances differ quiet greatly: we called for a return to our homeland after thousands of years of exile, and were more opposed to the events of an oppressive history, not necessarily to the actions of one particular oppressor. Sure, we had to fight the Nazis before the state of Israel was established, but Zionism predated the Holocaust. The Tibetans, on the other hand, have been directly fighting against Chinese occupation.

The Tibetans want a return to a previous order. Our fight did not just concern the regaining of something lost (organized peoplehood), but the establishment of a totally new order (Jewish autonomy).

When the meaning of our prayers, in 1948, changed, and the prayers themselves, including the one from Thilim that made me cry on Shabbat, transformed into new songs, we too became a new people. Our independence liberated us. We suddenly held power in the making of our own self-concept and in the Jewish future.

I don’t think change is necessarily a part of what the Tibetans envision when they talk about independence. Yes, they’ve adopted a flexibility to the reality that if they were to return, it would most probably be to a Tibet with a different form of government and different demographics than Tibet pre-Sino occupation. That’s the result of long-distance nationalism, like long-distance dating. Circumstances change. People do too. But I wonder if the Tibetans recognize this reality, and feel like they would need to be a different people in order to sustain themselves.

I don’t know if the Tibetan people changed at large. I don’t know Palden well enough toknow if he even changed. But this is what I do know: Palden retained his sense of compassion throughout his suffering -- and that very act of retention was what both maintained and renewed his identity as a Tibetan Buddhist. And I find that to be what’s most striking and inspiring about his story.

It’s difficult to write about Palden for many reasons, mainly because it’s hard for me to write about compassion. It’s hard for me to automatically see compassion as not just a force of strength, but a sufficient one. It’s hard to see the full scope of its generativity. It’s hard to take compassion seriously.

After Palden’s session, at Shabbat lunch, I asked Palden a few questions. I first asked him in what order he considers himself a Buddhist monk, a Tibetan, and human. He told me he’s a human first, then a Tibetan, then a Buddhist monk. In many Jewish communities, at least in the more traditional ones, we’re taught to see ourselves as Jews first. After all, our experience as Jews are particular and differentiate us and dictate our worldviews more than just passively “being human.”

Why is the concept of a “shared humanity” important, if a part of myself is convinced that it’s not just overused, but devoid of any connective potential? Why do so many -- sometimes myself included -- think a shared humanity lacks practical application in the real world? And why do we think the same way about compassion?

What was even more interesting to me was that Palden saw himself as a Tibetan before a Buddhist monk. He’s identified himself as a individual through groups larger than himself. I’ve developed my sense of self in the opposite way: from the inside out, from placing more emphasis on the particulars and branching out from them. Perhaps a shared humanity is important, not because it holds mythical ties that underlie our physical/spiritual beings or connect some universal experience, but because it raises the question of how much of ourselves do we really owe to ourselves.

I then asked Palden about the Palestinian cause. It’s interesting to me that older Tibetan Buddhists identify with the Jewish narrative. Younger Tibetans identify more with Palestinians’ demands for the right of return against Israeli military occupation. I’m curious to know if there are Tibetans who identify with both narratives, because, in my mind, they parallel more than oppose one another.

I think Palden is freer than most of us, even those of us who have the security of a homeland. I think cynics would say that’s because he’s freed himself from himself: he recognizes and sees the humanity in the Chinese enemy. But there’s an important point for us to consider: what else is there for us to ground ourselves in, to be grounded in? It’s impossible to ground oneself within oneself, just as it’s impossible to grow a plant without soil.

I’ve left a lot of points unopened. I want to connect Palden’s practice of compassion for the Chinese and the necessity of this grand, or what many of us perceive to be an over-idealistically interdependent, interwoven humanity, and transpose that upon the current Arab-Israeli conflict.

Dharamsala reawakened within Zionism a potential for compassion. It reminded me of Zionism’s original and foundational concerns over human rights and decency.

It’s a fresh idea. And it stings a little write. Even to reread.

Smirk. Do it. I’m used to it. These kinds of comments tend to generate those kinds of responses. I earned membership into the liberal, impractical, unrealistic, delusional camp at my family’s Shabbat dinner table a while ago. But look at that: what does that response alone, that defensiveness -- my previous lessons learned and theoretical questions raised aside -- say about us? How does that defensiveness explain why we, myself included, don’t take compassion seriously? As a practice, as a mindset, as a form of interaction. As legitimate.

We’ve forgotten Tibet (perhaps the world never knew it to begin with), and we’ve also forgotten how to spell. I’m working on reminding myself about the forgotten “s” at the end of Zionism. I’m working on reminding myself that ZIonism contains many different and event conflicting strains of thought, different philosophies, different end goals and means of achieving them. Even if you’re not an “anti-Zionist,” or don’t see “Zionism” as a colonialist imperialist evil that the far-left has made it out to be, it’s hard not to swing to the other side and make the yearning and fulfillment of Jewish statehood not seem jingoistic, or of a superior, entitled cause, or make it into the same issue of us vs. them that the anti-Zionists have perpetuated and just distorted through a different ideological lens.

Some 2,393 miles away from Jerusalem, Palden shook the shroud of my hesitancy in addressing “Zionism” -- the symbolic, politicized, hyberpolized, generalized, villainized, reduced debate topic that really fails to communicate the history it bears -- and Zionism, a yearning that originally addressed a humanitarian concern for the Jews. There is “Zionism,” a form, and then there is Zionism, an idea. Zionism as an idea is concerned with history: persecution, humiliation, ostracization, murder, genocide (including a spiritual genocide and loss of religious/cultural Jewish affiliation and pride).

Last week, I went to a book launch event for Gil Troy’s The Zionist Ideas. Michael Oren facilitated a panel discussion with Troy and journalist/former MK Dr. Einat Wilf on what Zionism and healthy dialogue surrounding it should look like. Wilf said something that really struck me. She said Zionism is like the first two feminist waves, or the black rights’ movement, or any other modern social movement that’s defined itself as a struggle against existing power structures.

Zionism’s basic call for the Jewish people’s right to statehood, self-determination and safety did and should still coincide with other movements’ advocacy for the representation and right to self-determination of other groups: of societies’ unrepresented, misrepresented, abused. Zionism even intersects with the Free Tibet Movement. And interestingly enough, I think it intersects with the Free Palestine movement.

The night before, I had told my friend Charlotte that I didn’t believe in the point or effectiveness of intersectionality. I said intersectionality often dilutes or conflates ideas (as I experienced firsthand at UC Berkeley last summer while watching students protesting Ben Shapiro’s visit to campus reference unrelated movements and causes). But Einat made me think.

I think Zionism should be part of a greater movement. I want our power and our independence to be part of a continuous movement calling for the freedom and equality and right to self-determination of all other people seeking freedom. If it’s so easy for Jews and Tibetan Buddhists to come together and find themselves in each others’ similar stories, Zionism should be able to work hand in hand with other liberation group. And its leaders should seriously reconsider its opposition.

The Tibetan yearning for a homeland and the Buddhist principle of compassion helped me better understand that Zionism and compassion, that independence and interdependence do not conflict. Palden did not just teach me about the Tibetan Buddhists’ yearning for a homeland. He helped me better understand -- and feel on an emotional level for the first time -- the depth and the desperation of the Jewish people’s yearning for a homeland, and on the flipside: the Palestinian people’s deep yearning for a homeland.

I don’t see why Zionism, the advocating for a Jewish homeland, cannot also mean advocating for a Palestinian homeland, if we both, Jews and Palestinians, know what yearning feels like firsthand. What’s prohibiting us from practicing this compassion, specifically in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is really a two-pronged failure: the world’s (specifically anti-Zionists’) failure in seeing Jewish independence as a mere extension and continuation of the liberation of unrepresented peoples; and Jews’ failure in making that a reality.

Geshe Tenzin Damchoe:

Tenzin Damchoe holds the title of “geshe,” an academic title earned with 25 years of study in Buddhist philosophy, science, and religion. He was born in Dharmsala and has lived there his whole life. He is happy, kind, composed, caring, and humble. He was extremely patient with me and accommodated my many questions and our haphazard interviews. His chuckle set off cascades of laughter within our group. Damchoe is one of my favorite people in the entire world.

Before we visited Damchoe in Dharmsala, he visited us in Jerusalem. It was his first time in Israel.

~

A few days have passed since Geshe’s arrival. It is Erev Tu B’Shvat, and I and a few of my friends offer to take Damchoe to a seder in Nachlaot. The event page asks guests to bring wine to ensure everyone will get four cups for the four prayers. Damchoe doesn’t drink alcohol.

We arrive late. The room is small; there isn’t much space between the white foldable chairs. The forty or so young people at the long tables reposition themselves every time another group enters. The crowd, altogether, looks like crooked teeth: some are leaning into the table and others out. Everyone is, for the most part, drunk. Heavily drunk. Voices compete. There is a constant murmuring amongst the tables. Talks drowns out the rabbi’s voice. No one is listening.

Damchoe, the only non-Jew, is sitting quietly in his seat, reading the pamphlet explaining the blessings. There is an illustration of the four different mixtures of red and white wine that everyone but him will drink throughout the night (all red, mostly red and a little white, mainly white with a little red, and all white). I can’t help but notice the drawings’ resemblance to the yin/yang symbol.

Suddenly, a niggun erupts. People bang on tables. They holler. Clap. Beat their chests. We all climb onto our chairs and sing.

The Yin/yang is what the Taoists see in the world: duality. Buddhists see karma governing an interdependent unity. And for the Jews, amidst the little synagogue’s roaring, I begin to laugh to myself: the Jews only know disorder.

~

In The Jew in the Lotus, Rodger Kamanetz makes many distinctions between Buddhists and Jews: Buddhists worship emptiness; we worship God. Buddhism seeks self-negation and the abolishment of the ego; Judaism sees humans in God’s image, and seeks to bring us closer to God. Buddhism stresses temperance of the self for improvement; Judaism turns to the community as a means for improvement. Buddhism hopes to escape suffering; Judaism recognizes it’s inexplicable from our experience.

In addition to compassion, another central Buddhist tenet is interdependence.

Damchoe taught me that there are two planes of truth: a conventional and ultimate one. Everything exists as whole on a macro level, but not inherently. If you dismantle a car, you won’t find a car, but its pieces: a window, a wheel, a door. We don’t really exist as separate, defined individuals either. Our food depends on the labor of others; our knowledge on the works of others; our safety on the will of others.

This year, I’ve look at each of us as a sum of multiple parts. I’ve talked a lot with friends about how we are the mere sum of trillions of atoms, about how we are an accumulation of disparate forces and influences and separate processes. I’ve looked at the people around me and have seen them each as whole, not a mere cog in a larger system that Demchoe described.

What Buddhism proposes is quite radical: not joining your multitudes to build a sense of wholeness, but using yourself as the very prism to refract your own disparities.

Since we are all interconnected, Damchoe told me that we have to stop viewing life through the tension of the self against the other. We have to place ourselves and other people on one side, and harm on the other.

I’m all for compassion. But I worry about how easy it is for compassion into self-negation. (This is where I and Damchoe diverge; self-negation is not a negative concept to Buddhists, and part of me thinks that the western world should change the way we relate to it too) On a large scale, this applies to my concerns about the world’s sizeable and growing population of Jewish anti-Zionists, who think negating Jewish claims to the land of Israel and our history of exile will somehow bring us closer to an interdependent humanity and an actualized peace. But on a much smaller scale, it applies to my concerns for an increasing number of us who are trying to shape and rearrange and negate some of our most basic, primordial qualities through a process that Damchoe refers to as the malleability of the soul.

When Damchoe and I discussed the Buddhist idea of the malleability of the human soul, I felt uncomfortable. I found it paradoxical: the idea that we could somehow change our internal motivations and basic make-up through the externally-imposed motivation to be good people. Soul malleability reminded me a lot of neuroplasticity, the idea that our brains, to some degree, can have their physical structures changed with material learned or experiences gained, or the heart-changing power of education, both of which I don’t dispute. But the idea that we can change our soul, the way it’s naturally wired to process things -- consciously, intentionally -- sounded and still sounds artificial to me. A soul I think is a collection of feelings, and the beauty of feelings lies in the fact that we can’t control their spontaneity, their natural overflow, their depth. We can only deal with them. And I think trying to change them doesn’t necessarily change but negate what makes us most human: the fact that we can’t always bring things under our control.

My resistance points to a larger issue of if nature can be changed. Do structure (like religious doctrine, education, institutions, public figures and leaders) enhance us, or change us? This is where the Dalai Lama comes in.

~

It is late in the afternoon, and late into Geshe Damchoe’s week in Jerusalem. Damchoe and I are speaking in between lectures, and he suddenly unlocks his iPhone. He opens his camera roll and shows me a video. The camera follows a panorama of a few Tibetan Buddhists monks, dawned in their classic long crimson robes in a hospital suite, bending and snapping their torsos quietly in their seats. They are praying. Then, the camera turns to a hospital bed. Half-covered in a white cloth lies a pale, jaundiced corpse. Her face can be half-made out from the angle. The woman was Damchoe’s mom. “Buddhists spend their whole lives preparing for death,” he tells me casually. Death is not a taboo.

~

It is Geshe’s last night before he returns to Dhamarsala. We have a session for questions. Someone raises their hand and asks, “how will the next Dalai Lama be picked?” Damchoe freezes. He does not speak. He tries twice and fails both times. He starts to cry. The room is silent for a minute. He is paralyzed by thought and feeling combined.

~

The PRC has meddled and disrupted the order of Buddhist leadership appointment.

The People’s Republic of China, which rejects religion altogether, passed Order No. Five (made effective in September 2007), which granted its government authority in appointing the 14th Dalai Lama’s successor. The current Dalai Lama is regarded by the Tibetan Buddhists as the last of their spiritual leader’s reincarnations, since their next leader will be appointed not through the traditional system of emanation before death, but through the Communist government’s own discretion and meddling. The Dalai Lama issued a letter in 2011 claiming that in a few years, when he turns 90, a conference will be held to address whether “the institution of the Dalai Lama should continue or not.” If so, his office, the Gaden-Phodrang, will appoint their next leader instead. (It should be clarified that the Dalai Lama holds only -- officially at least -- a spiritual leadership role, not a political one. The Dalai Lama withdrew from his position in the Tibetan government in exile in 2011 as part of an effort to democratize the Tibetan political system and encourage greater citizen engagement.)

The dharma has been muddied and undermined before; the appointment of the 15th Dalai Lamai isn’t of a new issue. When Tibet fought the Gurkhas during the Sino-Nepalese War, they had called on the Manchus for military support. After the Gurkhas were expelled, the Manchus made a 29-point proposal “on the pretext of making the Tibetan government more efficient.” This included the Golden Urn system, which encouraged drawing lots to determine the reincarnation and appointment of potential lamas. This Golden Urn system was only used in appointing the 11th Dalai Lama, yet even a few hundred years ago, the Tibetan Buddhists have had to struggle with the preservation of their tradition.

The Panchen Lama is Buddhism's highest spiritual authority, second only to the Dalai Lama. In 1995, then six-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima was recognized by the Dalai Lama as the 11th Panchen Lama and was abducted by the Chinese Government two days later. Six months after, China announced the Panchen Lama’s “real incarnation” in Gyaltsen Norbu, the son of two Communist PRC members, who the Tibetan Buddhists refer to as the “false Panchen.” Nyima’s current location and status are unknown, despite Chinese representatives claims, as recent as 2016, that Nyima is safe and is living an ordinary life

What I saw when Damchoe cried was despair, and fear for a future loss of moral direction, religious tradition, and culture. Damchoe cried because of a spiritual genocide. Because the dharma has been disrupted. Because Buddhist institutions are bound to change and have already been disrupted.

But there was more than fear in Damchoe’s reaction. After all, the reality of death alone is not something to fear, as he taught me through his camera roll.

~

After the lecture, I approach Damchoe and ask him if the Dalai Lamai is divine, if he is a god. Damchoe says yes. This is our last conversation before he leaves Jerusalem.

~

It is a cold, foggy morning in Dharamsala. The rain just stopped. My classmates and I were told to dress nicely the night before for vague reasons. We are waiting outside of what was, just moments ago, an anonymous building. We have just been told that we will be meeting with the 14th Dalai Lama, and that we are standing outside of his palace. I am excited.

~

I was also skeptical, of course. This man claims to be a human being, one of seven billion, like the rest of us. But no one calls me “Her Holiness.” The Dalai Lama, in the eyes of his followers, holds an air of humility and an air of divinity. That dichotomy, which played out a week before when I watched Damchoe cry, turned me into a cynic even before our arrival in Dharamsala.

~

We are now inside, and the Dalai Lama is about to enter. We are all jittery. But I can’t focus. At least not on the Dalai Lama. I keep turning around. I can’t stop looking at the back of the room. Behind me is a small group of Tibetan pilgrims. They are prostrating, even the small elderly woman. Their eyes are closed. One woman is missing an iris in one of her eyes, and her body is convulsing. She looks ill.

~

The meeting just finished, and we are rushing out to get to the airport on time. I want to stay and watch. The prostrators in the back are bent, hunched, and it’s now their turn to meet with His Holiness. They are stooped as low as possible, bending while walking quickly in a hurried procession. There is no talking. Their guide barks and hits those not crouched low enough. They huddle around the Dalai Lama and shake, weep. No words are exchanged. They are then pushed away by the same guide.“ What have I just watched?” I ask myself.

~

Our meeting with the Dalai Lama surfaced many questions:

• What is the purpose of sanctification: to bring the divine closer to us, or to maintain its standing on a higher plane?

• What is the fine line between fulfilling the purpose of ritual objects and respecting religious figures, and worshiping those objects or people?

• Do we more often take issue with the effects of dogma over dogma itself?

• When is dogma inherently problematic? Unlike other ideologies, I think the manifestation and practicing of what I consider to be the most problematic element of Buddhism -- and of any other organized religion, including most strains of Judaism -- is the power people willingly invest in their leadership. Interestingly enough, the power that Buddhists have invested in the Dalai Lama has not negatively affected or hurt society, but rather contributed positively to humanity by spreading and encouraging compassion and nonviolence.

• Other ideologies that contain elements I also don’t agree with have manifested themselves in negative and harmful ways. What exactly is it in Buddhism that is being translated into an outcome different from those of ideologies with harmful manifestations?

Now, what does this all mean for India?

I talked about the Tibetan Buddhists in this paper, but India -- not this paper -- served as the form that made telling their story possible.

India is a religious nation. It is Hindu.

India was partitioned by the British in 1948. A Muslim Pakistani state was carved out of it.

India is the largest democracy in the world.

India upholds a separation between temple and state.

India holds a long history of toleration towards its religious and ethnic minorities.

And the most wonderful thing of all is that all of the India’s that I’ve mentioned refer to the same country.

I saw Hindus cremate dead bodies off of the ghats of the Ganges River; I watched orange and pink and yellow lights flash across the city of Varanasi during Shivratri, the Hindu festival for Shiva, the god of destruction; I passed Hindu shrines -- icons housed in little 4-foot structures -- while walking through big cities and while driving through the countryside; I visited a pink synagogue with a bedazzled mezuzah and Hindi calendar in Alibag, an island off of Mumbai, and another Jewish synagogue in New Delhli; I watched Sikhs chant and kneel in their Gurdwara as the music bounced and people prayed; I watched Muslim men walk out of halal meat shops next to vegetarian samosa stands from my bus window.

India’s Hindu majority was lucky to never have its presence in the area or history disrupted, and to never have its neighbors threatened. And that degree of peace has made way for the flourishing of various peoples and traditions.

India is what I want Israel to be: ethnically diverse, democratic, separated physically/politically from Muslim nationalists (in this case, the Palestinians) who also deserve their own independence -- all without having to compromise the centrality of Jewish culture or religion in society. I want a diverse society, a society effusing with people from different cultural and religious backgrounds, a society that embraces them and their stories. I want a society whose people can be compassionate, who can engage in dialogue, who don’t feel like they have to fight or cede to time and other growing neighboring populations. Who can resist self-negation while recognizing our greater interdependence with other people. I want a society who can see that we’re a part of a larger people and a larger global system in which we function as mere cogs -- and at the same time, I want a people who really does see and treat each individual as a whole world. Who can dissect people’s loyalties to their leadership to see how far their commitments have veered or how much they have changed. I want a society who doesn’t anticipate the rise and fall of diversity, even though people of exile are the rise and fall of much else.

To support Tibet:

https://www.freetibet.org/

Palden's Q&A session:

https://audiomack.com/song/kayla-1583/palden-gyatzo-1-2

The Dalai Lama:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=y0pAARviyKU