对图博特来说，自焚作为一种公众抗议的手段是陌生的，用这种手段抗议的不断发生说明很多藏人已经拥抱起所谓极端的“自我牺牲”，并把它看做是民族主义的复现。“献身”毕竟是个肉体和民族双含的现代民族主义的关键词。像自杀炸弹袭击，自焚也不能用个人动机来解释，但自焚不是暴力行为，宁愿将痛苦施加给自己也不伤害别人；是个召唤良心的恐怖行为。对于同族或同信仰的人而言，此行为是个信心和身份的表达；以民族的角度很容易使自焚者奉为英勇烈士。他们的行为提供象征资本；曝露压迫者和当权者的不公。这是个用来逼迫让步的行为。然而在中国，就像所有独裁国家，不会有这样的结果，因为自焚对当权者只不过像绝食抗议，等于敲诈。
就像自杀炸弹袭击本质不是伊斯兰行为，自焚作为抗议方式也同样不是佛教行为。我们为何将目前在境内发生的这些事件跟宗教关联起来是因为大多数自焚者是僧人或曾经是僧人。他们的行为既不是顿首信仰也不是美德，而是表示一种完全不同的举措：他们是经常被屈辱以及无能容忍地被需求符合与服从的“愤怒” 产物。特别是境内的宗教人士被逼迫承受爱国主义教育和反对所谓的“达赖集团”的活动；迫使他们反复证明爱国和对共产党的忠诚，这些活动被僧尼们看做是个不祥腐朽的政权，因此必需阳奉阴违。那是很难坚持的任务，现在我们可以看到已经拒绝服从。就像汉娜·阿伦特所说：愤怒不会产生于贫困，但产生于我们的正义感的侵犯。当人们看到有理由质疑能被改变但不改变的情况时，这就引起他们的愤怒反应。
对突尼斯摊贩穆罕默德·突阿齐齐的自焚而言，他的目标既不是信仰的表达也不是点燃阿拉伯之春的火花，而是否定当权者以及国家对肉体和生命刻划烙印。自从1963年释广德以自焚抗议他认为反佛教的越南政府，自焚已进入全球政治和抗议词汇，被有怨气和有原因对抗不公的人所模仿和使用。就藏人而言，在没有其他表达途径的情况下，自焚是必然的，它成为生命的迹象，表明反对国家实力的个人的存在。自我暴力是个 求生意志和抵制身体和空间的强制转型的象征性的姿态。
滑稽的是，政治行为的牺牲是中共自己引进图博特的，六十年代最有名的榜样战士雷锋曾敦促所有国民完全奉献于国家，而藏人自焚就是雷锋残留的效应。图伯特历史中没有为国家和信仰献身的传统；由中共创造和拥护的这个抵抗语言对藏人其实是个陌生的概念，然而现在已在使用。
藏语里没有跟英语“牺牲(sacrifice)”相等的词。因为难以表达这个概念所体现的感情，藏人使劲寻找适当的词汇来表达这个概念。最近对自焚表达的牺牲行为最接近的词是“rang srog blos btang”（放弃生命），但这并没有为伟大的事业献身的含义。藏文词“lus sbyin”，意思是（献身），这也是用来表达佛陀把自己的身体捐给饿虎的故事。以宗教礼品的方式自我奉献没有抗议和否认的涵义。因此，寻找新的术语反映藏人中政治话语的移动性质以及抗议和抵制的全球语言的到处渗透。
不管藏人继续采取任何可怕的抗议方式，中共当权者都不会让步。在威权体制下，抵抗和压制的循环周期是僵化政权不可避免的结果。此外，藏人的抗议也不会唤起大多数中国人的良心。这不仅是因为中国缺乏发达的民间社会，也是因为在中国普遍认为暴力和恐怖是可以被利用的，如拉勒·阿萨德所说，暴力和恐怖可以用于“不文明的人口”因为“他们没有主权国家”。他们对藏人的死亡不会感到震惊，反而重申藏人的野蛮。中国民族大学的学者熊坤新在《环球时报》上所说的“藏人这么好斗是因为地理和历史因素”就意味着这种心态。
藏人觉得经济和资源开采与征服为目的的现在这个政权之下不会有任何改变的可能性。把僧众看做是跟现代中国不协调的主要元素，无经济生产力并拒绝切合于市场资本主义和消费使人解放的国家新自由主义信仰。对少数民族一胎化政策的“慈善豁免”与他们无关，并否定征服和控制民族的各种各样的技术，因此要更着重监督他们且要用特殊的惩戒使他们的主观性弯向国家意愿。以前有个僧侣告诉我：政府的诸多管教束缚徒劳得像个陶工制造无底的花瓶。所有问题，归根结底，就是在这个制度下“不可能过上有意义的人生”。这就是今天藏人自焚主要根源。
2012年3月28日
Transforming the Language of Protest
By Tsering Shakya
The Tibetan region of Ngaba (Ch: Aba) in Sichuan province is engulfed in a wave of self-immolations by young Tibetan monks and nuns. At the time of writing, twenty-five cases have been reported and immolations have spread to other Tibetan areas. The latest report is of a monk setting himself on fire in Rebkong (Ch:Tongren), Qinghai Province. Why are such actions happening? What are the causes and motivations of those involved?
Self-immolation as a form of public protest, new to Tibet, demonstrates that many Tibetans have embraced the narrative of “self sacrifice” and have come to see it in the context of the resurgence of Tibetan nationalism. After all, giving one’s body is one of the key modern idioms of nationalism: the conflating of body and nation. Like suicide bombing, self-immolation cannot be explained by individual motivation. Yet, in contrast to the latter, self-immolation is not an act of terror and is seen instead as self-inflicted pain that causes no damage to others; it is seen as a horror intended to induce empathy. For co-nationals and the religious, the act is a statement of faith and identity; the former are quick to embrace the self-immolators as martyrs. Their act provides symbolic capital; it speaks of injustice from the perceived perpetrator to those in power. It is an act that is meant to coerce concessions. But in China, as in all authoritarian regimes, it is unlikely to lead to such an outcome, since the acts of self-immolation are like hunger strikes to the authorities. They are tantamount to blackmail.
Self-immolation as a form of protest is not intrinsically a Buddhist act any more than suicide bombing is an Islamic act. What links the current incidents to religion is that most of the Tibetans who have committed self-immolation have been monks, former monks or nuns. Their actions were not an obeisance to religion or the performing of virtue. Rather, they signify something entirely different: they are a product of “rage,” induced by daily humiliation and intolerable demands for conformity and obedience. Religious figures in Tibet have been particularly subjected to the discipline of patriotic education and the campaigns opposing the so-called "Dalai clique.” These campaigns, viewed by the monks as a regime of degradation, require them to endlessly feign compliance, obliging them to demonstrate repeatedly their patriotism and fidelity to the Communist Party. That is not an easy task to sustain, and we see that it has finally become something they refuse to do. As Hannah Arendt put it, rage arises not as a result of poverty but “when our sense of justice is offended.” People react with rage “where there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and are not.”
In the case of Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Tunisia, self-immolation was neither intended as a religious expression of virtue nor as a spark to ignite the Arab Spring. It was a disavowal of authority and of state inscription over body and life. Ever since the monk Thich Quang Duc self-immolated in 1963 as a protest against what he considered to be the anti-Buddhist stance of the Vietnamese government, the act of self-immolation has entered the global vocabulary of politics and protest, where it is imitated and appropriated by those with grievances and reasons to fight perceived injustice. For the Tibetans, self-immolation is invested with emotion and is deemed necessary in the absence of other options for expression. It becomes a sign of life and demonstrates one’s existence against the might of the Chinese state. Self-inflicted violence is a symbolic gesture of the will to survive and resist coercive transformation of body and space.
Ironically, sacrifice as a political act is something the Chinese Communists introduced to Tibet. It is a residual effect of Lei Feng, the model soldier of the 1960s who was the most famous exemplar in a campaign that called on all citizens to dedicate themselves totally to the nation. In Tibetan history, there is no tradition of sacrificing oneself for one’s nation or religion; this is an alien concept that Tibetans now have appropriated from the language of resistance coined and championed by the Communist Party.
There is no Tibetan term equivalent to the English word “sacrifice.” Tibetans struggle to find appropriate terminology to express this concept, having no easy way to convey the sentiments it embodies. The closest term used recently for self-immolation in the sense of an act of sacrifice is “rang srog blos btang” (giving up one’s life), but this does not have a sense of offering oneself for a greater cause. Nor does the Tibetan term lus sbyin, meaning “offering of the body,” which is used for the Buddha’s offering of his body as alms. The offering of the self as religious gift holds no connotation of protest or disavowal. Thus, the search for new terminology reflects the shifting nature of political discourse among Tibetans and its permeation everywhere by the global language of protest and resistance.
Whatever horrific forms of action the Tibetan protesters might continue to adopt, it is most unlikely they will achieve any form of concession from the Chinese authorities. In an authoritarian system, the cycle of resistance and repression is an inevitable consequence of the inflexibility of the regime. Moreover, the Tibetans’ protests will not make a dent on the consciousness of most Chinese. This is not only because China lacks a developed civil society but also because it is widely believed in China that violence and terror can be used, to borrow a phrase from Talal Asad, “against uncivilized populations” because “they lack a sovereign state.” There is no shock in the death of Tibetans; it merely reaffirms their barbarity. This was the implication behind the statement by Xiong Kunxin, a scholar from Chinese Minzu University, in the state newspaper Global Times that “geographic and historical factors made Tibetan people there more aggressive.”
There is a sense amongst the Tibetans of the impossibility of change under the current regime, bent as it is on economic and resource extraction and subjugation. The lives of monks and nuns are seen as incongruous in modern China, economically unproductive and refusing to fit into the current state’s neo-liberal belief that market capitalism and consumption will liberate everyone. Since the beneficent exemption of minorities from the one child policy is irrelevant for them, their lives negate the biopower of the state, and they therefore are subject to surveillance and particular kinds of discipline that must bend their subjectivity to the will of the state. As a monk once described it to me, the disciplinary strictures of the state are as futile as a potter making a bottomless vase. Beneath all other questions is this sense of the “impossibility of making a meaningful life.” This impossibility is the root cause of the self-immolations in Tibet today.
March 28, 2012
转自：http://www.facebook.com/notes/ogyen-kyab/抗议语言的转变/439316212751875
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