Tibet in Exile: An Interview with Pico Iyer

Saturday, 7 June 2008, 12:06 p.m.

By Jon Wiener (online)

BORN IN Oxford,
raised in California, a resident of Japan, Pico Iyer has captured his
itinerant life with books and essays that document his journeys to
Nepal, Cuba, and most recently, Tibet. He speaks with Dissent’s Jon
Wiener (“The Weatherman Temptation,” spring 2007) about his new book,
The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

Jon Wiener: There are six million Tibetans. But you write in
your new book that Tibet today is “slipping ever closer to extinction.”
Those are chilling words.

Pico Iyer: I wish they were overstated words, but they’re not.
The Tibet autonomous region is more and more a Chinese province. Lhasa
is now 65 percent Han Chinese, so Tibetans are a minority in their own
country. The Chinese are practicing what the Dalai Lama has called
“demographic aggression” – trying to wipe out Tibetan culture through
force of numbers. Two years ago they set up that high speed train,
which allows 6,000 more Han Chinese to come to Tibet every day. I first
saw Lhasa in 1985 just when it opened up to the world. It was still a
classic Tibetan settlement – two story traditional whitewashed
buildings, and the Potala Palace, the great residence of the Dalai
Lama. If you go there now, sadly, it’s like an eastern Las Vegas – huge
shopping malls, blue-glassed department stores, high rise buildings.
From most parts of Lhasa you can’t even see the Potala Palace.

J.W.: Isn’t Tibetan Buddhism still practiced openly in Tibet?

P.I.: It is. But there is a limit on the number of monks allowed
in each monastery. In old Tibet as much as 20 percent or more of the
population was monastic. Now there’s a limit of 500 monks per
monastery. These are monasteries that used to have 8,000 or 10,000
monks. They were the biggest monasteries in the world 70 years ago. Now
they are just shells.

J.W.: Since 1959 the Tibetan exile community has been based in Dharamsala, India.

P.I.: Yes. A thriving Tibetan culture exists in exile,
especially in India, where the Dalai Lama has done a good job of
sustaining everything that is essential about Tibetan tradition and
culture and religion, while getting rid of everything that is feudal or
outdated. In exile, he’s set up a living, modern version of Tibet – you
could call it “Tibet 2.0.”

J.W.: Let’s talk a little bit about the history of Tibet in
exile: Shortly after Mao’s Red Army triumphed in China, China invaded
Tibet in 1949-50. What happened when Tibet appealed to the UN in 1950
about the Chinese invasion?

P.I.: Tibet’s apparent sponsors at the UN were Britain and
India. And both Britain and India asked the UN not to listen. Tibet
never received an answer. Tibet suddenly realized it was completely
friendless, and that no country in the world would rise to its defense.
Ten years later, the US realized Tibet could be a pawn in its ongoing
struggle against China. But the Dalai Lama told me many years ago that
Tibet’s greatest mistake was to be too isolated. That’s why now he
speaks out against isolationists and in favor of dialogue. Even with
China. He says let’s not boycott the Olympics, because isolating any
country is only going to bring problems.

J.W.: A guerilla resistance in Tibet was aided by the CIA starting in the 1950s.

P.I.: Yes. The CIA really moved in during the 1960s, when they
trained Tibetans in Colorado, of all places, and set them up in Nepal.
The CIA wasn’t concerned about Tibet; they were only concerned about
trying to foil their great communist enemy China. It was a fitful
resistance but the CIA was more than ready to help – until Nixon and
Kissinger went to Beijing. At that point, the Dalai Lama realized that
violent resistance would only bring more suffering to his people, so he
sent a taped message to the guerillas in Nepal and told them to lay
down their arms. They did, but some of them were so heartbroken that
they took their own lives.

J.W.: The Chinese Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s was a turning point for Tibet.

P.I.: They tried to destroy Tibetan culture – much as they tried
to destroy their own culture, but even more brutally. According to
Tibetan estimates, 1.2 million Tibetans died – that’s 20 percent of the
population. All but 13 of the 6,000 monasteries were destroyed. Little
kids were asked to shoot their parents. Most violently, the Chinese
sought to tear apart every last shred of Tibetan Buddhist tradition.
Monks were asked to use sacred texts as toilet paper. It was a brutal
thing, which the Chinese government has since repudiated.

J.W.: In the Tibetan exile community today, is there a dream of return – the way there is for the Palestinians?

P.I.: There is a great dream of return. One often meets
Palestinians visiting the Tibetan exile center in India to share ideas.
The Dalai Lama has often talked to Jewish leaders about how they
managed to keep their culture alive before 1948 even though they had no
territory. Many of the young Tibetans are restless and say, “We’ve got
to act now.” The Dalai Lama keeps trying to restrain them, pointing out
how they’re outnumbered by the Chinese, pointing out that Washington
and London are not likely to come to their rescue, and that if you
confront China you’ll only bring more suffering on the Tibetans. The
Dalai Lama’s message is aimed in part at Palestinians and Uigars and
Kurds and the many exiles in the world, reminding them that “home” has
to do with the values inside yourself, and those can flourish wherever
you are. The Dalai Lama says, “I’ve lost my home, but I’ve gained the
whole world as part of my community.”

J.W.: You are saying Tibet can exist outside of Tibet.

P.I.: Yes. One of the happier ironies of recent history is that
even as Tibet is being wiped off the map in Tibet itself, here it is in
California, in Switzerland, in Japan. All over the world Tibetan
Buddhism is now part of the neighborhood. In 1968, there were two
Tibetan Buddhist centers in the West. By 2000, there were 40 in New
York alone.

J.W.: You write in your new book that the “second most urgent”
task facing the Dalai Lama is to keep Tibetan culture and history alive
for thousands of young Tibetan boys who dream about California.

P.I.: The Tibetans in India are in a poignant situation. They
are 100 percent Tibetan but none of them have seen Tibet. They are
living in a poor country in poor settlements, surrounded by beautiful
young women and men from California and elsewhere. Like people all
around the world in underdeveloped countries, they long to come to
America, the land of freedom and abundance. They imagine that the grass
is greener in California.

J.W.: There is a Tibetan government in exile. Is it run by the Dalai Lama?

P.I.: I’m so glad you asked that. One of the first things the
Dalai Lama did went he went into exile was to draw up a democratic
constitution, even with a clause allowing his own impeachment. He set
up a democratically elected parliament and prime minister in Dharamsala
which has full executive powers. That government is working smoothly.
The only drawback is that he is regarded by the Tibetans as an
incarnation of a god. So if it comes to listening to a prime minister
or listening to a god, Tibetans will always defer to the Dalai Lama.

J.W.: You’ve written about the fourteenth Dalai Lama. Will there be a fifteenth?

P.I.: He knows that as soon as he dies, the Chinese government
will alight on an amenable little boy, probably the child of Communist
cadre, and reenact a kind of monastic search and declare, “This boy is
the fifteenth Dalai Lama.” Of course he will be completely loyal to the
communist party and probably be an enemy of Tibet. This Dalai Lama, the
fourteenth, has been saying for 39 years now, since he was 34 years
old, that if there is a fifteenth Dalai Lama, he’ll be born outside
Tibet and China. But, he says, there may not be a fifteenth Dalai Lama.
Or it may be a woman. It won’t be discovered in the same way. My
suspicion is that he will depute someone to carry the weight and he
will tell Tibetans, “This person speaks for me. Please listen to him.”

–The above interview is reproduced from the online edition of
Dissent Magazine (www.dissentmagazine.org). Jon Wiener teaches U.S.
history at the University of California-Irvine; his most recent book is
Historians in Trouble.