从政治学的角度来说，那些政客是不愿意把一个人当成神来看的。但现在很多人的心目中，是把达赖喇嘛看成殉道者了，He becomes a martyr（他成为一个殉道者）了！他本来没有做错什么，却无端遭到很多力量的压迫。但他们不愿意看到他这样的一个人成为殉道者成为神。尤其是把他当成敌人的那些人更不愿意。因为达赖喇嘛成了殉道者，那就会是永恒的存在。从政治学的角度，那些人已经失败了，百分之百的失败了。正如jesus was first martyr（耶稣是第一个殉道者），达赖喇嘛也是这样。
我：我从4月9号知道这个事件，到现在都十几天了，每天思考这些。今天读到齐泽克（Slavoj Žižek）写的一篇文章（《Suck My Tongue, Crush My Balls》），我把链接发给你啊，也许你已经读过了。齐泽克是当今世界很重要的知识分子，他在文章中提到了东方主义的视角，谈到了文化差异呀他者呀等等。他说了这样一段话：“我们现在都看到了达赖喇嘛作为‘他者’的一瞥，他不能被简化为像我们这样的人，他的他者代表着一个无法逾越的深渊。西方观察家对他滑稽动作的高度性化解释，反映了文化理解上不可逾越的鸿沟。”（另有译文《我什么都给你了 就剩下舌头让你吃了》这样翻译：达赖喇嘛是“一个不能被简化为跟我们一样的‘他者’，他与我们之间隔着一道无法穿越的深渊。西方观察家对他举止采取高度‘性化’解释，反映出不可逾越的文化理解鸿沟。”）
印度这方面，我认为是种性制度的原因。caste system (种姓制度)。在印度，达赖喇嘛的影响非常大。所以印度教派里的民族主义者，他们也不怎么喜欢尊者。然而在印度各宗教里，像达赖喇嘛影响这么大的人几乎没有，所以他们会有一些嫉妒，会没有文化的安全感。印度的民族太多了，宗教也很多，彼此之间的关系复杂，不过我觉得没什么太大问题，他们只是玩种姓制度。
为什么我会觉得这个事件反而很好？这是因为很多藏人其实生活在一个泡泡中，以为世界各地都支持我们喜欢我们，实际上不是这样的。在西方生活久了就会知道支持者只是一部分。这次就更清楚了：支持的人会一如既往地支持，而那些不支持的人到底是什么想法就暴露出来了，那么我们现在也不再是处女处男了，我们成熟了，innocent is Lost！（失去纯真），我认为这是对于藏人的意义。
这其实很有意思，可以看出藏人与西方人之间的文化差异出现了。就西方人来说，他们去文化不一样的地方，他们也有无法接受的事情。而他们这次对达赖喇嘛的批评是典型的东方主义。爱德华·萨义德（Edward Wadie Said）有一个词：Orientalist gaze (东方主义的凝视)，也就是说这是他们的看法，跟我们其实没有关系，是他们内心的投射。他们把嘴和舌头看成与性有关，这就是他们的理解。当然，也是因为比如天主教某些神职人员的性骚扰事例很多。还有就是某种变态化，Sexualization of children (儿童受到性化)。
Until recent weeks, the thought of having to defend the moral character of the Dalai Lama would have seemed absurd. Ever since he led the Tibetan people as a 24 year old through the shattering crisis of China’s invasion of Tibet, he has been one of the world’s most enduring symbols of moral leadership. He has lived his entire life in the public eye as a hardworking global champion of peace and nonviolence. Even now in his twilight years, he continues to spread his message of compassion and kindness every passing day.
Yet recently, along with Tibetans around the world, I felt an urgent need to speak up on the Dalai Lama’s behalf as the global media rushed to publish sensational headlines suggesting indecent behavior. With little heed to due diligence, media organizations pounced on an opportunity to cast an incriminating spotlight on an awkward public encounter with a young boy in India.[1] The televised event took place on stage in Dharmasala on February 28th. A month and a half later, a selectively edited video surfaced online accompanied by salacious text that created the impression of sexual impropriety.[2] Overnight, defamatory headlines appeared in respected publications world-wide and public slander exploded online with allegations of sexual abuse.
The viral video was in fact a short clip from a much longer interaction that was extraordinary for very different reasons. With his mother and grandfather seated on stage beside the Dalai Lama, the young boy first receives an affectionate bump on the forehead for formally presenting gifts on behalf of the honorary guests assembled. The Dalai Lama then looks up and reflects out loud that this exchange brings to mind his early childhood with his late brother Lobsang Samten — his one designated friend and playmate during an otherwise isolated childhood as a spiritual leader-in-training that began at the age of four. He proceeds to demonstrate how he and his brother once tussled with their heads.
Later in the program, the young boy approaches the microphone once more and requests a hug from the Dalai Lama. While the mother feigns exasperation and the audience is amused, the Dalai Lama acquiesces with a warm embrace. Then the 87-year old awkwardly makes an attempt at a jocular display of affection. He first requests a peck on the lips and then — to the shock of the world — he blithely sticks out his tongue and says in his halting English, “suck my tongue.”
Seen through the norms of our hypersexualized global culture, the video of the interaction is uncomfortable to watch. Even though the boy and his mother have both given media interviews expressing joy in having had this encounter with the Dalai Lama,[3] the viral video depicts an imbalance in power that leads viewers to associations with the well-known history of child abuse in many religious contexts.[4] There is also a slow-motion uncertainty as both the Dalai Lama and the boy seem not to know how to conclude this awkward performance of affection. Then by sticking out his tongue, the Dalai Lama reaches back to a gesture of play from his Tibetan traditional culture that can only be seen as bizarre for the rest of the world.
But for Tibetans from the Dalai Lama’s generation — those like my parents who had spent their formative years in an isolated Tibet — the episode was utterly free of any suspicion of abuse. In a traditional culture that does not sexualize the tongue, they could not discern what the world found offensive in this video. It was bewildering for them to learn that this innocuous encounter had turned the world’s opinion against the Dalai Lama. Many of the Tibetan elders who were asked to watch the video — from New York to Ladakh — did not hear a lewd request, but rather an innocent tease to a young boy. He was being asked to “chele sa” (eat my tongue) as was the way grandparents expressed to small children, “That’s it — all I have left to give you is my tongue.”
Taken out of both cultural and situational context, this tragic collision of norms points to a vast cultural gap. What looks disturbing through one cultural lens is seen as entirely innocent through another. Together with the information economy of the digital media and the herd mentality that comes with our short modern attention span, this presented a perfect storm for discrediting the symbol of the Tibetan movement.
The point of the viral video clip, it goes without saying, was to damage the image of someone China’s leaders have long publicly reviled and quietly feared. Since the Tibetan government was declared to continue in exile in India in 1959, an ongoing campaign has been conducted to malign the Dalai Lama as a respected public figure and the symbolic leader of Tibet.
This time, the attack on the Dalai Lama struck a chord. Within ten days of the public uproar, the BBC ran a breathless story on the Dalai Lama incident reigniting “Tibet’s ‘slave’ controversy.” While the term ‘slave’ appears in the sensational headline, the author buries inside the article an oblique acknowledgement of common knowledge that slavery did not exist in Tibet. Rather, Tibet’s society was comprised of people working on “estates owned by nobles, monasteries or the state” to whom taxes were paid. This desultory revelation, along with historian Tsering Shakya’s commentary on the absence of enslavement in Tibetan society, comes after a BBC shout-out to the Chinese government for recently creating ‘Tibetan Serf Emancipation Day.’ Chinese nationalist propaganda has now been dignified in mainstream media as “a long-running controversy over Tibetan history.”[6]
The startling uptick in anti-Tibet political sentiment converges with an underlying bias in the global public discourse that has contributed to the traction of the recent controversy surrounding the viral video. With the issue of Tibet stereotyped as a politically correct and hackneyed cause célèbre of global celebrities, and the Dalai Lama himself typecast as a globe-trotting religious figure carrying a message many see as naïve and underwhelming against the hard-nosed political challenge of the rising superpower of China, the real moral and political stakes of the question of Tibet have long been eviscerated by the chattering classes.
For Tibetans everywhere, this episode has felt like a collective near-death experience. Never before had it been so clear how little the Dalai Lama was understood. Over decades in exile as the world’s most famous refugee, he has often been depicted as a caricature: so much was projected onto him and so often his name was invoked and used for the interests of others — vast and small, institutional and geopolitical. And at the end of his astonishing life, the world seemed ready to abandon him without a second glance.
For Tibetans, the Dalai Lama was never the two-dimensional figure who appeared on magazine covers or who smiled back from billboards. We all grew accustomed to his buoyant manner of speech as he spoke to thousands in packed arenas in his lurching, disconnected English sentences, often punctuated by his laughter at his own linguistic limitations.
But in the world of his native Tibetan language, the Dalai Lama appeared as an entirely different person. In Tibet, he was legendary by his early 20s. No one could remember a rising intellectual star who shone so brightly and at the same time possessed the ineffable qualities to carry the weight of a nation on his shoulders. From my youth, I remember how he spoke with transcendent grace at lightning speed, in thrilling glass-cut paragraphs, with the kind of precise, incisive clarity that left no doubt that his was the sharpest mind in the room. Even today, when he speaks in Tibetan, the Dalai Lama’s voice drops several registers and his personality transforms. His lighthearted demeanor is gone. In its place is a gravitas and unyielding focus that shows us that the suffering of others is fiercely present in his heart. All through his lifetime, he has commanded authority not only because of his political and spiritual inheritance but also because of his ability to convince a tired and beleaguered people to join him on his personal moral journey.
It has been in the Tibetan language that the Dalai Lama has transmitted a set of instructions on finding a pathway through an indifferent world as a dispossessed people. Even under brutal and paralyzing oppression, he modeled a vision of forgiveness as a form of empowerment. It was a lesson that both defined the Tibetan movement and touched the struggles of dispossessed people in every forgotten corner of the world.
I have seen this in my fieldwork as a researcher of territorial autonomy and self-governance. I saw it in the eyes of the Kurdish community organizer I met in a tiny nonprofit office just over an hour away from Mosul, Iraq, during the height of the suicide bombings. He had been working in obscurity painstakingly translating the Dalai Lama’s works into the Kurdish language. “This,” he said, “is what our people need to know.” He proudly showed me his manuscript.
I also saw it in the Karen spiritual leader I met deep inside the war-torn Karen state, in what had been the world’s longest-running insurgency in modern times before a ceasefire was established in their armed conflict against the Myanmar government. After a day of sitting in meditation alongside a thousand meditators, he called me in so he could recount the importance of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan cause for his own reimagining the Karen fight for self-determination.
And I felt this in the intensity of the Sahrawi law student I met in the Moroccan-occupied territory of Western Sahara. He had been missing classes and was on track to drop out because he spent all of his time at bloody protests that went unnoticed by the world. As he pressed a book about the Sahrawi people into my hands, he said that knowing how the Dalai Lama had made the Tibetan struggle visible to the world gave him a reason to continue to fight for his people — through law instead of violence on the streets. He now felt less alone.
In other words, what the Dalai Lama passed on to Tibetans has spawned a movement of movements, teaching the dispossessed everywhere to see themselves not as victims, but as empowered by their own intrinsic seeds of potential in an interdependent reality that is in a constant state of motion and change. His model has shown a vision of how to inhabit this imperfect world, how to transcend the staggering injustices of global politics and the arbitrariness of history, and how to honor and remain committed to goals that cannot be completed in a lifetime.
Nowhere has this wisdom spread so far or flourished so deeply as in Tibet itself. In the three decades that I have been working inside Tibet, I have witnessed the bright faith of Tibetans grow only more self-assured and more determined. For every self-immolator who perishes calling for the long life of the Dalai Lama, there are countless other Tibetans who grow even more determined to choose a life-affirming path for remaking the Tibetan world.
They teach the Tibetan language at night when they are barred from teaching during the day. They travel as far as needed to provide decent healthcare to all remote Tibetan communities when the state apparatus has long called it quits. They convince their communities to join them in protecting the land and the wildlife even when it requires putting their lives on the line. Tibetans inside Tibet, in other words, are doing the hard work of preparing themselves to become the best stewards of their homeland when no one else seems to believe in their capacity to self-rule.
This Tibetan determination has been fueled by a resolute faith in the vision of the Dalai Lama. It was not surprising when Tibetans in Tibet reacted with joy when the decades-old ban on the Dalai Lama’s image was suddenly lifted so that the viral video and the international condemnation could circulate in the Chinese cybersphere.[7] Overnight, the viral video garnered over 180 million views inside the PRC. But for Tibetans in Tibet, the storm of global moral censure simply underlined how little the Dalai Lama was understood, even internationally.
For Tibetans in exile as well as the peoples across the Himalayas, this global controversy has brought them closer not only to the Dalai Lama but also to each other as a struggle. For the first time, mass rallies and demonstrations in support of the Dalai Lama have spontaneously broken out from Ladakh to Sikkim to the disputed territory of Arunachal Pradesh. The global condemnation may have caused a collective near-death experience for many Tibetans. But it also created a new sense of time and space across all Tibetan and Himalayan communities — inside and outside Tibet — that is giving rise to a regeneration of the Tibetan political movement.
The question that remains is what the symbol of the Dalai Lama and his ideas will mean for the rest of the world. One of the tragedies of his defamation is that it grows out of a caricature that was manufactured by those who never understood him or had any sense of the true measure of his life. Will the Dalai Lama be seen through their cynical eyes and be projected as a declining global celebrity open for ridicule as media clickbait? Or will the world find the decency to rise above its worst impulses and honor a life that has been given entirely to the task of growing the best of ourselves as living beings on this planet?
After all, this global moral crisis in truth illuminates less about the character of the Dalai Lama than it does about ourselves and the kind of human community we are choosing to become.
Tashi Rabgey, Research Professor of International Affairs, George Washington University
April 2023
[1] Media organizations reacted instantaneously to a statement made by the Private Office of the Dalai Lama expressing regret for the incident. The apology was not an admission of wrongdoing but a regret that the meeting might have caused any hurt. This aligns with the Tibetan cultural practice of putting the needs and interests of others first and taking on the burden of negative sentiment, regardless of the circumstances.
[2] The edited video clip was uploaded with salacious text to the Twitter account YinSun@NiSiv4 on April 8th, 2023. The clip itself had first appeared days earlier on YouTube and on Change.org in a petition created by, among others, “Joseph R. Biden.” Within days, bots propelled the video clip to 7 millions views.
[4] For survivors of child sexual abuse, it is understandable that the optics of the viral video could trigger traumatic responses. However, many civic organizations have now condemned the allegations against the Dalai Lama of any such abusive intent, including from the RAHI Foundation, a nationally prominent and pioneering organization in India for survivors of child sexual abuse. Their statement on 22nd April states that there is no indication of sexual abuse, in intent or impact, in the encounter between the Dalai Lama and the boy on stage. https://drive.google.com/file/d/17wEL5ZtZRwFrtwkTVe_5qctjy44ClR4h/view?lt_utm_source=lt_admin_share_link See also Joshua Brallier Shelton, ‘Opinion: We need to think about the Dalai Lama’s actions very carefully,’ Tricycle, April 17, 2023.
图片取自VOT
