If you want information about Tibet, let me know.

I am a westerner who was raised Tibetan Buddhist so I’m pretty familiar with Tibetan history and… it’s really not the country which gets painted as this peaceful utopia free from political intrigue or human rights abuses that was all about enacting and embodying compassion.

There’s contemporary examples of this, and perhaps the most obvious example is the Karmapa controversy (try figuring that little doozy on your own without being steeped in Tibetan history lol) which often overlooks significant issues such as the struggle over who would hold the seat of Rumtek monastery in Sikkim and lay claim to the considerable amount held in trust for the Karmapa (which featured a wealthy patron, at one point, stationing a small private military to prevent one of the Karmapas from entering the monastery) along with suspicious death of Jamgon Kongtrol Rinpoche and his delegation in a car accident when he was instructed to “test the brakes” on a newly serviced car (BMW? Mercedes? I forget…) or the historical significance of the then-Dalai Lama outlawing the recognition of the Tai Situpa lineage (and liquidating his monastic holdings and forcibly converting the Kagyu monks under his tutelage to the Gelug school) and the current Dalai Lama lifting this centuries-long ban and the implications this would have on the recognition of the current Karmapa(s).

Then there’s historical examples of this, like the famous example of the politically-influential polymath Lungshar, whose son was considered for being a reincarnation of the next Karmapa (this process of recognising reincarnations, strangely enough, tended to exclusively occur to children within wealthy and politically influential families such as Lungshar’s) who was sent as part of a delegation to Europe by the British who were courting Tibet at the time as they sought to expand their colonial holdings from India up into Tibet. Lungshar was smitten by western political systems and he sought to bring about reforms to democratise the Tibetan theocracy.

Unfortunately for Lungshar, his son died under suspicious circumstances around the time that his agenda for political reforms was running into direct opposition by the conservative political powerbrokers in Tibet (monks/lamas and aristocrats) and, in a surprising turn of events, Lungshar was “discovered” to have been practising black magic (they found a piece of paper with someone’s name on it inside his shoe which was considered black magic - this name happened to be of the aristocrat Timon who held high offices in the Tibetan theocracy and who happened to be a conservative and the main figure who openly opposed Lungshar’s reform agenda. How they knew to check Lungshar’s shoes is a matter for speculation…) and so, as punishment, Lungshar had his eyes gouged out on Timon’s order and Lungshar lost his political influence and the movement supporting the liberalisation of the Tibetan theocracy was effectively extinguished by this act.

There’s this extremely romanticised, idyllic notion that westerners tend to have about Tibet (and the fact that Avatar: The Last Airbender is something treasured by westerners rather than being looked at with a skeptical eye for all of its overt orientalism, to me, speaks volumes about just how canonised this notion is) but history paints a markedly different picture than the one we tend to have.

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