c. 1998 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ In a city where a plethora of issues struggle for attention, Tibet stands out to a degree matched by few others, thanks to a potent combination of celebrity glitter and a charismatic standardbearer _ the Dalai Lama _ whose become an icon of spiritual and political purity.

Last weekend, some 130,000 mostly young music fans jammed Washington’s Robert F. Kennedy Stadium for the Tibetan Freedom Concert, a two-day rock fest with a message of opposition to China’s nearly half-century military occupation of Tibet.

Monday (June 15), thousands gathered outside the Capitol to shout”freedom for Tibet”as both pop stars and politicians, human rights advocates _ and even a few Tibetans _ urged President Clinton to press Beijing during his upcoming visit to China to negotiate with the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled leader.

But despite such enthusiastic shows of support, Clinton so far has displayed little appetite for a forceful confrontation over Tibet with China, a leading U.S. trade partner. Beijing, for its part, remains adamant about maintaining a firm grip on Tibet.

So where does the movement for Tibet go from here?”Our concern is keeping the issue on the frontburner,”said John Ackerly, president of the Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet.”There’s no doubt the past year or so has been a peak one for Tibet. We had the movies (“Seven Years in Tibet”and”Kundun”), the concerts, the rally.”What’s next? We just keep hammering away, building awareness and support.” However, there are some hardcore Tibet supporters within the American Buddhist community who fear the wide popularity Tibet and the Dalai Lama now enjoy could soon begin to contract.

Should that happen, they warn, it could further dim the movement’s hopes for a political settlement at a time when increasingly frustrated young Tibetan activists living in exile in India have adapted a militancy missing since 1959, when a Tibetan uprising against the Chinese was brutally crushed.

The uprising led to the Dalai Lama’s escape to India, along with some 80,000 Tibetan refugees, and the start of the nonviolent campaign he has led ever since to pressure China into allowing his return home, to grant Tibet some measure of autonomy, and to preserve Tibet’s unique Buddhist culture.

The question now, say these supporters, is whether the Dalai Lama’s diplomatic effort to wrest concessions from China will bear fruit before young Tibetan hotheads _ who have already turned to hunger strikes and self-immolation _ become violent, tarnishing his image as a leader and Tibet’s as a land of spiritual innocents stoicly suffering from brutal oppression.

Ironically, the same perceived purity that has gained Tibet widespread sympathy _ plus a Nobel Peace Prize for the Dalai Lama _ could be the issue’s undoing among members of Congress and idealistic young Americans, the supporters say.

The image of Tibet in the popular American mind, noted longtime Tibetophile Donald S. Lopez Jr., is akin to the idealized earthly paradise of Shangri-La novelist James Hilton created in his 1933 classic”Lost Horizon.” This image of Tibet _ and the Buddhism that permeates Tibetan culture _”has become so romanticized in the West that people think everybody meditated there all the time _ which was far from true _ and there was no crime or disease,”said Lopez, author of”Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West”(University of Chicago Press).”This view of Tibet as a pristine society cannot be maintained, because no society is ever pristine, and when the true Tibet is discovered, there will be a backlash that will ultimately endanger the cause,”said Lopez, a professor of Buddhist and Tibetan studies at the University of Michigan.

Lama Surya Das, an American convert to Tibetan Buddhism who has served as a bodyguard and adviser to the Dalai Lama, said,”Westerners don’t understand the larger Tibetan story (so) they can get a little Sinophobic. They don’t know, for example, that Tibet and China have had a priest-patron relationship all through history and so it’s not news that when China feels powerful it wants political power over Tibet as well.” Traditional Tibetan culture, as China likes to point out, was an economically backward feudal theocracy ruled over by lamas, or monks, who largely sealed off their Himalayan enclave from the outside world.”The greatest value in Tibet is preservation; keeping things as they were when Tibet encountered Buddhism”in the eighth century, said Surya Das, who now runs the Dzogchen Foundation, a meditation center in Cambridge, Mass.”If Westerners knew what Tibet really was they wouldn’t be so enamored. It wasn’t a democracy; there was no universal education or health care. Women were oppressed. … Even the Dalai Lama now says Tibetan society needs reform.” Buchung Tsering, the International Campaign for Tibet’s director, agrees that much of the support for Tibet is”superficial. You see the suffering and you feel sympathy.” But Tsering, whose family fled Tibet 38 years ago when he was just 10-days-old, rejects the notion his homeland’s idealized image could be its Achilles’ heel.”A proportion of people are interested in Tibet because of the fantasy, but there is also a more serious group interested in human rights and religious freedom,”he said.”They become our strongest and best supporters.” Within Tsering’s response lies another potential problem for the free-Tibet movement, however.

As Tsering noted, the Dalai Lama has sought to gain support for Tibet in large part by portraying his cause as one of religious freedom, as the term is understood in the West. Some conservative Republican members of Congress have seized upon this to include Tibet in their campaign to force China to accede to greater religious freedom _ particularly for its Christian minority.

Yet a Tibetan Buddhist faction, comprised mostly of Western converts, has in recent months revealed a shadow side of the Dalai Lama on religious freedom.

Following the Dalai Lama from city to city during his most recent U.S. tour earlier this year, protesters charged him of condoning religious intolerance for banning a meditation practice centered on a protector deity called Dorje Shugden. The Dalai Lama says the practice is divisive.

The dispute is undoubtedly arcane for the vast majority of Americans, who know little about Tibetan Buddhism’s intricate theology or worship. Moreover, only a few dozen pro-Dorje Shugden supporters protested at various stops during the Dalai Lama’s visit _ although they say even their small numbers were significant in the context of traditional Tibetan culture, which regards the Dalai Lama as a virtual god-king.

Yet the issue garnered widespread national media attention _ a situation Lopez views as a harbinger of what may be ahead. The Dorje Shugden protests, he said, were the”first chink in the wall”protecting the Dalai Lama’s public image.

DEA END RIFKIN