XPost: alt.philosophy.zen, alt.religion.buddhism.tibetan, cn.culture.buddhism   
   XPost: talk.politics.tibet, talk.religion.buddhism   
   From: peter.terpstra7@gmail.com   
      
   Introduction to HH Dalai Lama’s My Appeal To the World by Robert Thurman   
      
   I am deeply honored to present to the English-speaking world His Holiness the   
   Dalai Lama’s fifty-year-long, sustained,   
   emergency appeal to the world community for help, on behalf of his beloved   
   people of Tibet, skillfully arranged and powerfully   
   elucidated by Sofia Stril-Rever, originally published in French, and ably   
   translated by Sebastian Houssiaux.   
      
   The brave people of Tibet have been undergoing extreme suffering for   
   sixty-five years, since the invasion that began in 1949,   
   at the hands of the Communist government of the People’s Republic of China   
   (PRC).   
      
   The nation of Tibet—known to its inhabitants as “Böd Khawajen,” Böd,   
   the Land of Snows—have lived on their three-mile-high   
   plateau, “the roof of the world,” in relative peace since the ninth   
   century.   
      
   The Great Fourteenth Dalai Lama—the author of the half century-long   
   “Appeal” of the present work—faced in 1950 the   
   invasion of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the immediate loss of his   
   inherited token defense force, a treaty imposed   
   under duress for the euphemistically named “Liberation of Tibet,” and a   
   gradually intensifying occupation of his entire country.   
      
   His calls for help to the Indian government, the U.S. government; and the   
   United Nations went mostly unanswered. In this dire   
   situation His Holiness the Great Fourteenth Dalai Lama has never given up   
   seeking the (de facto if not necessarily de jure)   
   freedom of his people and the restoration of their livelihood and culture in   
   their homeland, and has steadfastly refrained from   
   calling for violent intervention. He even, for the last forty plus years, has   
   maintained a “middle way” approach toward the de   
   facto Chinese annexation of Tibet, calling for a genuine autonomy for all his   
   people, a true freedom for Tibet within China,   
   under a “one country, two systems” arrangement.   
      
   Despite the agony of the loss of over a million of his compatriots, the   
   continuing decimation of his monastic brothers and   
   sisters, the suppression of their culture, the destruction of thousands of   
   sacred monuments and institutions, he still patiently   
   repeats his calls for dialogue, for reconciliation, for reasonable negotiation   
   with the PRC leaders.   
      
   I have heard people say that he is well-intentioned but hopelessly naïve in   
   expecting a positive response from leaders who daily   
   show themselves to be unrelenting in their dictatorship over their own people   
   and unswerving in their campaign of local   
   colonialism and mercantilist expansion over the  economies of the other   
   nations of the world.   
      
   His Holiness the Dalai Lama tends not to respond to the challenges with such   
   specifics, but he himself has expressed his view of   
   the world beyond Tibet and China and India and has proclaimed in no uncertain   
   terms, in numerous public forums, that the   
   twenty-first century cannot be a century of war and violence like the   
   twentieth.   
      
   Dialogue and reconciliation of conflict are the only options with any chance   
   of success, according to his vision of the modern,   
   interconnected, technologically empowered world. He never gives up his   
   conviction of the basic human goodness lodged   
   somewhere deep down, even within people who are acting to all intents and   
   purposes as deadly enemies. He does not lose sight   
   of that, he reaches out to it, and he steadfastly performs his “act of   
   truth,” bearing witness to the inevitable freedom of his   
   people and all people, even those trapped in the momentum of enmity. He is   
   today the living icon of the satyagraha, the   
   “enacting of truth,” that Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and so   
   many less well-known others, especially the heroic   
   women of our world, so powerfully exemplify.   
      
   Year after year, decade after decade, he cries out the truth in these appeals   
   to the world on behalf of his people. He speaks   
   fifty times, each year on the day of March 10th, when his people were   
   massacred on the streets of Lhasa and throughout   
   Tibet, as they rallied for their freedom from the foreign occupation; they   
   fought and died in his defense, during his miraculous   
   escape into the larger world to tell their story, to make known the truth of   
   Tibet and the Tibetans.   
      
   Persistently and patiently he made these appeals from exile, even when the   
   powers that be turned their backs on him and   
   stubbornly held on to their denial of the suffering he pointed out to them.   
   Perhaps they couldn’t understand that he was not   
   speaking out of hatred of the Chinese aggressors, he was never demanding a war   
   of liberation. He was only asking for courage   
   in facing up to the truth, in speaking that truth to the power of the Chinese   
   governing elite, requiring of them a  basic human   
   honesty and decency as the price for their gaining their people’s rightful   
   place as a great nation in the modern world. World   
   leaders and businessmen and diplomats have become perhaps accustomed to the   
   “truth” not being a matter of objective facts   
   of history, not a matter of assessing the justice and injustice of the   
   situation, but rather as coming only from the barrel of a   
   gun, as a bargaining chip in a game of profit and power.   
      
   Even today, after so much futile waste and destruction during this last half   
   century—Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Middle East,   
   the “war on drugs,” and the current “war on terror”—they seem not to   
   understand that the Dalai Lama is being not naïve and   
   idealistic but practical and realistic in his call for dialogue under any   
   intensity of provocation. In this context I am extremely   
   grateful to Sofia Stril-Rever for her passionate and lucid work of bringing to   
   our attention and elaborating the true story of His   
   Holiness the Dalai  Lama’s My Appeal to the World.   
      
   It has the greatest relevance still today, and will endure in its importance   
   as we, the world’s people of the twenty-first   
   Common Era century, finally are empowered to realize our true potential in a   
   climate of peace, sustainability, and the spiritual   
   priority of the real happiness that comes from truth, wisdom, justice,   
   compassion, ethics, and love.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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