My Spiritual Journey by Dalai Lama (good books for 8th graders txt) 📕

suggested founding a secular ethics for the twenty-first century. He asserts that spirituality allows a revolution of the heart that is capable of awakening our consciousness. The spiritual dimension shows our human potential all that it is capable of by opening up the way for an inner transformation that can lead to transforming the world.

PART THREE

As the Dalai Lama

6

In 1959 the Dalai Lama Meets the World

I Was the Only One Who Could Win Unanimous Support

At sixteen, I become the temporal leader of Tibet

IN OCTOBER 1950, IN their campaigns in eastern Tibet, the People’s Liberation Army inflicted heavy losses on our troops, which were greatly inferior in number and poorly equipped. When we learned that the city of Chamdo had fallen into Chinese hands, our fears intensified. Faced with looming danger, the population of Lhasa mobilized to ask that I be made responsible and invested with temporal power.

Announcements were posted on the city’s walls, violently criticizing the government and demanding that I immediately take the country’s destiny into my own hands. I remember being filled with anxiety when this news reached me. I was only sixteen, and I still had to finish my religious training. What’s more, I knew nothing about the upheavals that had occurred in China and that led to the invasion of our country. I had received no political training. So I protested, citing my inexperience and my age, since usually a Dalai Lama relieves a regent of his responsibility at the age of eighteen, not sixteen.

It is clear that the long periods of regency were a weak point of our institutions. I myself had for several years been able to observe the tensions between the various government factions and their deleterious effect on the country’s administration. The situation was becoming catastrophic under the threat of Chinese invasion. More than ever, we needed unity, and as the Dalai Lama, I was the only one who could win the country’s unanimous support.

My cabinet decided to consult the State Oracle. At the end of the ceremony, the Kuten, staggering beneath the weight of his immense ritual headdress, came over to me and placed on my lap a kata, the white ceremonial scarf, on which he had written the words Thu la bap—"Your time has come.”

The oracle had spoken. I had to take on my responsibilities and prepare without delay to lead my country, which was getting ready to enter into war.

On November 17, 1950, the Dalai Lama officially became the temporal leader of Tibet. On October 1, 1949, Mao Tse-tung, victorious over the Nationalists, had proclaimed the birth of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing. Beginning in January 1, 1950, he made known his intention to “liberate” Tibet, which the Chinese traditionally called “the House of Western Treasures.” In the language of propaganda, “liberation” was a matter of putting an end to “Western imperialism” and to the “reactionary regime” of the last theocracy in the world. At the time, however, there were only seven foreigners in Tibet.

On October 7, 1950, forty thousand men from the People’s Liberation Army crossed the Yangtze, the eastern border between Tibet and China. Despite thefierce resistance of 8,500 Tibetan soldiers and considerable natural obstacles, the advance of the Chinese troops was relentless. It stopped only a hundred kilometers away from the capital, Lhasa.

The Tibetan government was summoned to send a delegation to Beijing to negotiate with the Chinese authorities the conditions of “peaceful liberation.”

We wrongly believed that isolation would guarantee us peace

THE THREAT TO THE FREEDOM of Tibet had not escaped the world’s notice. The Indian government, supported by the British, protested to the authorities of the People’s Republic of China in November 1950, declaring that the invasion of our territory threatened peace. But it was all in vain. We would have to pay the price of our ancestral isolation.

Geography cut our territory off from the rest of the world. Before, in Tibet, in order to reach the borders of India and Nepal, one had to plan for a long, difficult, monthlong journey from Lhasa through high Himalayan passes that were uncrossable for most of the year.

Isolation, then, is a characteristic feature of our country, and we had deliberately reinforced it by authorizing the presence of only a small number of foreigners. In the past, Lhasa was even called “the Forbidden City.” It is true that historically our relations with the neighboring peoples—Mongols, Manchus, and Chinese—were antagonistic. Above all, though, we wanted to live in peace, in the spirit of our religion. We had thought we could continue this peaceful way of life by remaining apart from the world. This was a mistake. And today I make it a duty to leave my door wide open to everyone.

The Dalai Lama rightly regrets that, out of a lack of interest in foreign politics and a lack of experience in international relations, Tibet neglected to make its independence officially known to the community of nations. The occasion had presented itself to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, who, during the first Chinese revolution in 1911, had proclaimed his country’s independence and expelled from Lhasa the Manchu ambans (the representatives of the emperor), along with a small garrison of Chinese soldiers.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, Tibet fulfilled all the criteria for de facto state sovereignty. It possessed a territory with defined borders and a government exercising its plenary authority and maintaining international relations. In 1947, during the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi, the Tibetan delegates sat, along with their flag, among the representatives of thirty-two nations. But Tibetan diplomacy was limited to contacts with bordering countries: British and then, in 1947, independent India, Nepal, Bhutan, and China. This status of de facto independence was not legalized through international recognition.

The independence of Tibet in relation