Saint, sinner, slander, silence

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, a beacon of light in a world of media-generated shadows (Photo: Christopher Michel, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; edited by the author)

You’ve probably heard of the recent controversy around His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. You’ve probably formed an opinion on it, and while I sincerely hope not, you may have even believed what you read. I’m here to present a Tibetan’s perspective on a situation whose media coverage has (not for the first time) displayed equal cultural ignorance and sadistic delight in denigrating one of the most respected individuals on the planet.

I’m willing to bet that this story is the first time you’ve heard of Tibet in a long time, if not ever. This is at a time when Tibetan human rights are being violated worse than ever before. Think about that. Listen to what is not said and you’ll find that the silence speaks louder than words.

It’s important to remember that this isn’t the first time the Dalai Lama been flamed by the media. In 2018, speaking in Sweden, he sparked allegations of bigotry from his comments regarding refugees in Europe, saying, “receive them, help them, educate them…but ultimately they should develop their own country”, and that “Europe belongs to Europeans”.

I think he expressed a sentiment that most of us broadly agree with; countries should welcome refugees and let them stay if they wish, but the international community should work to ameliorate the situation in their homeland so they can one day return. “Europe belongs to Europeans” was a very poor choice of words on any account, but understandable given that he was referring to EU member states’ right to assert their own refugee policies. However, this context was exactly what the media deliberately omitted.

What struck me about this controversy was the sensationalist and reductionist wording of the corresponding headlines. Take this one by the Independent: Dalai Lama says ‘Europe belongs to the Europeans’ and suggests refugees return to native countries. For one of the UK’s biggest newspapers to flat-out say he suggested this is distorted and deplorable. The article deliberately decontextualised him and ignored his intended message; sadly, the coverage of the recent controversy is far guiltier of that sin.

Watching from 00:28 to 01:10, it is clear that the Dalai Lama leans away before they make contact. However, virtually every newspaper falsely says the boy leaned away.

Here's what I think happened. In Tibetan culture, if a child has been pestering you and you have nothing left to give them, you laughingly and exasperatedly say “eat my tongue” and stick it out until they squeal and run away. Unfortunately, His Holiness’s broken English meant that he instead used “suck”. I believe that this is the real motivation and explanation to the Dalai Lama’s actions, and I’m far from the only Tibetan to say this.

Some Tibetans have alternatively said that the Dalai Lama was using the traditional Tibetan greeting of sticking one’s tongue out to show you are not the reincarnation of the evil ninth-century king, Langdarma, alleged to have a black tongue. The media has cherry-picked which explanations they consider.

Here’s where it gets insidious. NBC (the third most-watched newscaster in American television, at the time of writing) darkly commented the tradition has “no mention of tongue-sucking”. The Independent also claimed “there is no mention in either this folklore or the broader traditional greeting of sucking the tongue”.

It isn’t that the media flat-out ignores Tibetan explanations of events; rather, it acknowledges them to undermine them. I’m not saying that Tibetan Buddhism is free from sexual abuse. It isn’t. But Christianity has a long and rich history of sexual exploitation by its senior figures, a history that is embedded in Western media and culture.

This situation is being forced through exactly this prism; sex scandals sell, especially when the Dalai Lama is allegedly the perpetrator. This imposition of Western sexual narratives exists even on the linguistic level; the Tibetan verb to suck, ‘jhip’, is not sexualised in our language, but it very much is in the Western and Anglophonic world. But of course, not one mainstream source I’ve read has mentioned that.

Another critical fact that Western media have conveniently ignored: the boy was interviewed by Voice of Tibet and said he greatly enjoyed meeting His Holiness, saying he thought it was “a great experience to meet someone with so much positive energy”. His mother, who was present, was similarly complimentary.

It isn’t just the Western media that’s perpetuating this narrative. The Global Times, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s ultra-nationalist newspaper, wrote an article on the event which swiftly descends into a conspiracy theory about “hostile international forces” using the Dalai Lama to bring down the CCP.

The Chinese media has long waged vitriolic campaigns against the Dalai Lama. Many of the Communist Youth League, numbering at 89m members, are recruited by the CCP to parrot party propaganda during significant political events and denigrate anybody who dares question the CCP.

During 2020, it was responsible for 7,000 troll attacks and over 50,000 comments at a Geneva forum run by the Tibetan government-in-exile. If you believe the Western media, you’re also believing the Chinese one.

What worries me most isn’t even what we’ve focussed on so far, but the sheer significance of the things left unsaid. As you read this, Tibetan national and cultural identity is being persecuted at the fastest rate in history.

Over 1m Tibetan children have been forcibly separated from their families and detained in “boarding schools” which are essentially brainwashing camps in which they are forbidden from speaking Tibetan or expressing Tibetan culture, and brutally beaten if they do not denounce the Dalai Lama and swear allegiance to the Party.

The CCP is damming Tibet’s rivers, Asia’s chief source of freshwater, at a dizzying pace, causing environmental and human devastation in downstream nations as far away as Cambodia. These repercussions will extend to the rest of the planet soon enough.

When it comes to Tibet, there’s plenty to be angry about. Much, much more than you know. But it isn’t what you think.