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China still hooked on 'son of India'

By Dhundup Gyalpo | Tibet Sun

Dhundup Gyalpo in a file photo taken in February 2010. File photo/Tibet Sun/Lobsang Wangyal/India

This is in response to the article titled “Dalai Lama insists on being son of India”, published recently by the official Chinese mouth-piece People’s Daily. As the article was marketed under the old pseudonym Yiduo, it appears to have been commissioned by the United Front Work Department.

The article by and large makes a lame rebuttal of His Holiness the Dalai Lama by cherry picking fragments of his recent comments and distorting them with a combination of outright lies, denials and propaganda. The article also tried to conclude with a condescending remark: “The writer hopes to see new responses to this article from both the Dalai Lama and his followers.”

Much has been written since about Why the Dalai Lama is son of India, including by the writer in question. I see no point in enumerating them again; for someone said that truth once spoken can never be recalled from its ever widening influence. Whereas repeating something ad nauseam, for a thousand times only means it must be a patent lie.

To cut a long story short, the aforesaid article was deeply grounded in misplaced and misinformed ideas, based on a fundamentally flawed argument. The article as such suffers from at least two cardinal blunders that flush its entire arguments down the gutter: It not only failed to grasp the etymology of “son of India”, but the entire context of situation as well.

The writer cries wolf over His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s recent comments, simply by sabotaging the significance and importance of a metaphorical expression, confusing “son of India” with “born in India” and “citizen of India”. Then the writer feigned innocent ignorance: How could the Dalai Lama claim to be “son of India” when he was apparently born to Tibetan parents in Tibet?! One could almost imagine them wrecking their brains for a logical explanation to this seemingly impossible contradiction of their own making.

This is not the first time that Beijing’s wild guestimation on Tibet affairs has gotten the wrong end of the stick, nor will this be the last, be sure of that.

Tibetan Buddhist terminology has various honorific or metaphorical expressions like “rgyal sras” (Ch: fozi) and “sras kyi thu bo” (Ch: shang shou dizi), which in actuality mean “the Bodhisattva” or “the spiritual heir” and “the most prominent disciple of Buddha”. If those metaphorical expressions are taken literally, they would mean respectively, “The son of the Buddha” (Ch: shijia muni de erzi) and “The eldest or best son” (Ch: zhangzi).

You don’t need to be a yin and yang expert to figure out that this expression, “son of India”, could only have a figurative meaning. It thus drives home the point that despite over 50 years of communist rule in Tibet, these official scribes (particularly the errand runners of China’s propaganda offensive) are still poorly informed, if not functionally illiterate on matters of Tibetan religion and culture. Otherwise, in the present context they would have simply interpreted “son of India” as “yindu zhizi”, instead of “yindu earzi”, and be done with it.

But, alas, this was not to be.

Those who have read Tibetan history understand that the Tibetans deeply cherish and take great pride in their historic bond with India. For Tibetans, India has always been Gyaghar Phagpai Yul (India, the Arya Bhumi), the “sacred land” where Buddhism was born.

“Tibet’s ties are stronger with India than with China; ties of language, trade and culture, not to speak of the strategic affinities between India and Tibet” said the late Dr Ram Manohar Lohia, an epic socioeconomic ideologue and Indian freedom fighter.

Given Beijing’s chronic propensity for distrust, they are bound to feel threatened by the rich heritage of Indo-Tibetan affinity from the ancient times.

The writer therefore tries to trivialise the nature of Indian-Tibetan relations by characterising it as merely religious. It claims that the Indo-Tibetan ties should be seen in the same spectrum of relations that India has (had) with other Buddhist peoples or nations.

Religion of course is not the be-all and end-all of Indo-Tibetan relations.

“India and Tibet are like two branches of the same Bodhi tree”, the late Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai said in a letter to His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Ancient religious texts mention that the Buddha had blessed the ‘Land of Snows’ and prophesied that Buddhism will flourish in that land. According to traditional narratives that are part and parcel of Tibetan heritage, the Indo-Tibetan ties could be traced as far back as the evolution of Tibetan race itself.

If you go by Acharya Prajnavarma, Tibetans are descendants of one Rupati, a commander of the Kaurav army in India, who fled to Tibet with his followers after the epic war of Mahabharata. (Another popular mythological origin describes Tibetans as descendants of a simian father and a mountain ogress).

“Whether we consider our geography, ancestry or our royal dynasty, India and Tibet have long had close ties with each other,” His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said in the past.

In terms of close geographic affinity, the sources of four major Indian rivers lie in Tibet, along with Mount Kailash and Lake Mansarovar, which are considered sacred by India’s major religious traditions.

The royal dynasty of imperial Tibet also commenced from an Indian King. Among the many theories about the origin of Nyatri Tsenpo, the first (recorded) King of Tibet, one popular view is that he was a King exiled from Magadha, India (127 BC).

For knowledge and wisdom, Tibet has always looked south, towards India. This is evident from the tradition of sending several hundreds of students to study in India, particularly in the 7th and 8th centuries. After returning to Tibet, one of those students, Thomi Sambotta, reformed the ancient Tibetan mode of writing on the basis of Indian Devanagari script, in addition to standardising Tibetan grammar based on Sanskrit. His literary accomplishments eventually paved the way for advancement in Tibetan civilisation down the ages.

The unique system of mass monasticism that flourished in Tibet throughout history and beyond was also founded by India’s Bengali prince turned monk, Shantarakshita. The illustrious scholar visited Tibet and founded the monastic order in the 8th century.

Thus, whenever China tries to downplay the ancient bond between Tibetans and Indians, it somehow invariably ends up showcasing the sheer lack of connection or commonness between Tibetans and Chinese.

Just as the Chinese never got over their traumatic history of Japanese occupation, the same also applies to the Tibetan people. This is also why Tibetans had never reckoned themselves Chinese, or Tibetan-Chinese for that matter, even when questioned at the tip of bayonet.

One great legacy that we have inherited from history is the Sino-Tibetan peace treaty of 821, which was engraved on three stone pillars, one of which still stands in front of the Jokhang temple in Lhasa. On that pillar was carved: “Tibetans shall be happy in Tibet and Chinese shall be happy in China.”

That I think is the closest we have ever got in understanding each other in a way that still makes perfect sense.

Copyright © 2010 Dhundup Gyalpo

Published in Tibet Sun