My Spiritual Journey Read online

  Tibetan feelings toward nature stem from our customs in general and not just from Buddhism. If you take the example of Buddhism in Japan or Thailand, in environments different from our own, the culture and behavior are not the same. Tibet’s natural environment, which is like no other, has had a strong influence on us. Tibetans do not live on a small overpopulated island. Throughout history we did not worry about our vast, sparsely populated territory, or about our distant neighbors. We did not have the feeling of being oppressed, unlike many other communities.

  It is perfectly possible to practice the essence of a faith or a culture without associating it with a religion. Our Tibetan culture, although largely inspired by Buddhism, does not draw all its philosophy from it. Once I suggested to an organization aiding Tibetan refugees that it would be interesting to study how much our people have been shaped by their traditional mode of life. What are the factors that make Tibetans calm and good-natured? People always look for the answer in our religion, which is unique, forgetting that our environment is also unique.

  The protection of nature is not necessarily a sacred activity, and it does not always require compassion. As Buddhists, we are compassionate toward all sentient beings, but not necessarily toward each stone, tree, or habitation. Most of us take care of our own house, without feeling any compassion for it. Similarly, our planet is our house, and we should maintain it with care, to ensure our happiness and the happiness of our children, of our friends, and of all the sentient beings who share this great dwelling place. If we think of our planet as our house or our “mother,” our Mother Earth, we will necessarily take care of it.

  Today we understand that the future of humanity depends on our planet, whose future depends on humanity. But that has not always been so clear. Until now, our Mother Earth has been able to tolerate our neglect. Today, however, human behavior, the population, and technology have reached such a degree that our Mother Earth can no longer accept it in silence. “My children are behaving badly,” she warns to make us realize that there are boundaries that should not be passed.

  As Tibetan Buddhists, we advocate temperance, which is not unconnected to the environment, since we do not consume anything immoderately. We set limits on our habits of consumption, and we appreciate a simple, responsible way of life. Our relationship to the environment has always been special. Our ancient scriptures speak of the vessel and its contents. The world is the vessel, our house, and we, the living, are its contents.

  The result of this is a special relationship to nature, since, without the container, the contents cannot be contained. It is not at all reprehensible for humans to use natural resources to serve their needs, but we should not exploit nature beyond what is strictly necessary. It is essential to reexamine from an ethical standpoint the share we have received, the share for which we are all responsible, and the share we are going to hand down to future generations. Obviously, our generation is going through a critical stage. We have access to forms of global communication, and yet conflicts occur more often than dialogues to build peace. The wonders of science and technology coexist along with many tragedies like world hunger and the extinction of certain forms of life. We devote ourselves to space exploration when the oceans, seas, and freshwater resources are becoming more and more polluted. It is possible that the peoples of the Earth, the animals, plants, insects, and even microorganisms will be unknown to future generations. We must act before it is too late.

  The Tibet of my childhood, paradise of wildlife

  THE TIBET I GREW UP IN was a wildlife paradise. Even in Lhasa one did not feel in any way cut off from the natural world. In my rooms at the top of the Potala, the winter palace of the Dalai Lamas, I spent countless hours as a child studying the behavior of the red-beaked khyungkar, which nested in the crevices of its walls. And behind the Norbulingka, the summer palace, I often saw pairs of trung trung (Japanese black-necked cranes), birds which are for me the epitome of elegance and grace, that lived in the marshlands there. Not to mention the crowning glory of Tibetan fauna: the bears and mountain foxes, the chanku (wolves), sazik (the beautiful snow leopard), the gentle-faced giant panda, which is native to the border area between Tibet and China, and the sik (lynx), which struck terror into the hearts of the nomad farmers.

  Sadly, this profusion of wildlife is no longer to be found. Without exception, every Tibetan I have spoken with who has been back to visit Tibet after an absence of forty or fifty years has reported on the striking absence of wildlife. Before, wild animals would often come close to the house; today they are hardly anywhere to be seen.14

  The Dalai Lama remembers his childhood fascination with different animals, especially the ones he saw during the three-month journey across Tibet to be enthroned in Lhasa. The Tibetan government officially protected animal life, posting proclamations every year declaring that “rich or poor, no one may harm or do violence to the creatures of the land and water.” But since the Chinese occupation, development of the land and hunting and fishing have steadily reduced the presence of wildlife. Animals have been hunted for their fur, their hide, their wool, and their organs, and many species are now extinct or endangered.

  In Tibet the mountains have become bald as monks’ heads

  ECOLOGICAL PROBLEMS ARE NEW TO ME. In Tibet we used to think that nature was pure. We never asked ourselves if it was all right to drink the water from a river. But the situation has changed during our exile in India or other countries. Switzerland, for instance, is a magnificent, impressive land. But its inhabitants tell us, “Don’t drink the water from this stream; it’s polluted!” So little by little, Tibetans learned and realized that certain things are dirty and unusable. Actually, when we settled in India, many of us fell sick and had stomach problems because we had drunk polluted water. It is through experience and meeting experts that we learned about ecology.

  Tibet is a large country with a vast territory at a high altitude and with a cold, dry climate. These conditions probably provided the environment with a natural form of protection by keeping it clean and cool. In the meadows in the north, in the mineral zones, in the forests and river valleys, there were many wild animals, fish, and birds.

  Once I was told a strange thing. The Chinese who settled in Tibet after 1959 were farmers who built roads and liked meat very much. They used to go duck hunting, buttoned up in their army uniforms or in Chinese clothes that alarmed the birds so they flew far away. Eventually, these hunters resorted to wearing Tibetan clothes. This is a true story! This happened especially during the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when there were still a large number of birds.

  Recently, a few thousand Tibetans went back to their birthplace in Tibet. They all say the same thing. They say that forty or fifty years earlier, immense forests covered their native land. Today the mountains have become bald as monks’ heads. There are no more tall trees, and sometimes even the roots have been dug up and taken away. That is the present situation. In the past one would see large herds of wild animals, but now there are almost none left.

  Large-scale deforestation in Tibet is distressing. It is not just regrettable for the natural sites that have lost their beauty, but also for the inhabitants who find it hard to find wood to heat their houses. This is a relatively minor point compared to the grave consequences of deforestation viewed from a wider perspective.

  The majority of Tibet comprises arid zones at high altitudes. Thus, the earth there needs more time to renew itself than in lower-altitude regions with a humid climate. Negative effects are felt for a longer period of time. Moreover, the rivers that irrigate most of Asia, including Pakistan, India, China, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—the Yellow River, the Brahmaputra, the Yangtze, the Salween, and the Mekong—all originate in Tibet. Pollution of the rivers has catastrophic repercussions for the countries downstream. Yet it is at their source that both widespread deforestation and drilling for mines are occurring.

  According to Chinese statistics, there are 126 types of minerals in Tibet. When these r
esources were discovered, the Chinese exploited them intensively, taking no protective measures for the environment, so that deforestation and mining sites are causing more and more floods in the lowlands of Tibet.

  According to climatologists, the deforestation of the Tibetan plateau will change the impact of cosmic radiation on ice (since forests absorb more solar radiation) and that will affect the monsoon, not just in Tibet but in neighboring regions. So it is of prime importance to preserve the very fragile environment of the high plateau. Unfortunately, in the Communist world, as we’ve seen in countries like the former Soviet Union, Poland, and the former East Germany, many problems of pollution were caused by negligence. Factory production was increased with no care taken to avoid harming the environment. The same situation is being repeated in the People’s Republic of China. In the 1970s and 1980s, no one paid any attention to the pollution, but since then there has been a rise in consciousness. I think the previous situations arose from ignorance.

  In Tibet it seems that, when it comes to the environment, Chinese officials are applying discriminatory measures: negligence seems to be occurring in regions inhabited by certain ethnic groups. A Tibetan who comes from the region of Dingri in the south of Tibet told me about a river from which villagers drew their drinking water. The Chinese in the People’s Liberation Army living in the area had been instructed not to drink it, but no one informed the Tibetans of the risks linked to its consumption. So they continue to drink it. This shows that Chinese disregard continues and is not due to a lack of information but to other reasons.

  The lives of six million Tibetans are in grave danger because of pollution. Children are already suffering from diseases linked to air pollution. There is an immense amount of suffering and anguish that isn’t heard about abroad but is confined to the secrecy of humble homes. It is in the name of innocent people that I speak.15

  A policy of systematic deforestation, done for China’s profit, has deprived Tibet of half its forests. The consequences, denounced by the Dalai Lama, are devastating and affect all of Asia. During the floods of the Yangtze that caused a national catastrophe in China in August 1998, the central government admitted that the tragedy was caused by the massive deforestation around the river’s sources in the Tibetan province of Kham. At present, quotas have been established to protect the forests, but they are rarely respected. In these conditions, the vegetation no longer regenerates, and the desertification of the Tibetan plateau continues, reducing the output of the main rivers by one-quarter. Four hundred large cities in China now suffer from a dearth of water, and in the countryside the harvests are affected by a lack of irrigation.

  As the Dalai Lama reminds us, the subsoil of the high Tibetan plateau is rich in minerals, which are many and diverse. This abundance of mining resources was one of the main reasons for the Chinese invasion of 1949. The Chinese continue to exploit large deposits of uranium, chrome, gold, lithium, borax, iron, and silver. Oil and natural gas reserves in the region of Tsaidam constitute a prime energy supply for China’s accelerated industrialization.

  Mining carried out with no concern for the environment has disastrous consequences for the soil and the phreatic layer, which today are polluted by the toxic waste used in extraction. Far from putting a stop to these practices, Chinese industrialists are trying to increase them by attracting foreign investors. The Tibetans who had the courage to protest the destruction of the environment were rewarded with torture and long prison sentences.

  Reflections of a Buddhist monk on our ecological responsibility

  OVER THE COURSE of my many journeys throughout the world, to rich and poor countries, to the East and the West, I have seen people who enjoy every form of pleasure and other people who are suffering. Advances in science and technology seem to end up only in a one-sided and quantitative improvement of development that ought to represent more than just a few additional houses in new cities. And ecological balance, the basis of our life on Earth, has been greatly affected.

  In the past, the Tibetan people lived a happy life, in a nature preserved from all pollution. Today, everywhere in the world, including Tibet, ecological degradation is quickly catching up to us. I am completely convinced that if we don’t make a concentrated effort together, and if we fail to realize our universal responsibility, we will witness the gradual destruction of fragile ecosystems, the sources of our survival, which will lead to the irreversible and irrevocable degradation of Planet Earth.

  I composed these verses to express my profound concern and to solicit the efforts of all people to heal our environment and put an end to its degradation.

  O Lord Tathagata,16 born in the tree of the Ikshvaku lineage,17 O Unparalleled One who sees the all-pervasive interdependence Between environment and sentient beings,

  Samsara and nirvana, animate and inanimate, O You who teach in this world from compassion, Confer on us Your loving-kindness!

  O Savior, whom we invoke with the name Avalokiteshvara,18 Because You embody the compassion of all the Buddhas, We pray to You to make our minds ripen and bear fruit, So that we can observe reality without illusion. Stubborn self-centeredness, which has impregnated our minds Since beginningless time,

  Contaminates, soils, and pollutes the environment Created by the shared karma of all sentient beings. Lakes and pools have lost their clarity and freshness. The atmosphere is poisoned.

  The heavenly canopy of nature, rising into the burning firmament, Has shattered, and sentient beings Are suffering from diseases heretofore unknown. Mountains with eternal snows, resplendent with glory, Are bending and collapsing, reduced to water. The majestic oceans are overflowing their age-old limits And drowning islands.

  Fire, water, and wind expose us to countless dangers. Oppressive heat is drying out our luxuriant forests, Lashing our world with unprecedented storms, While the oceans are yielding their salt to the elements. Although peoples do not lack wealth,

  They cannot buy themselves the luxury of breathing pure air. Rain showers and streams no longer clean anything But become inert, powerless liquids.

  Human beings and living organisms, countless in number,

  Inhabiting the realms of water and earth,

  Are tottering beneath the yoke of physical pain

  Caused by malignant ailments.

  Their minds are weakened by laziness, stupidity, and ignorance.

  The joys of the body and mind have gone far, far away.

  We are uselessly soiling

  The beautiful bosom of our Mother Earth,

  Destroying her trees to serve our short-term greed,

  So that fertile soil becomes sterile desert.

  The interdependent nature of the external environment

  And the internal world of human beings,

  As described in the Tantras19

  And in treatises on medicine and astronomy,

  Has been verified by present experience.

  The earth is the house of living beings;

  It is equable and impartial to animate and inanimate alike.

  Thus spoke the Buddha with a voice that speaks the truth,

  Taking the great Earth as his witness.

  Just as a noble being recognizes the kindness of a wise mother And shows gratitude to her,

  So we should treat with affection and thoughtfulness The Earth, our universal mother, Who gives everyone equal nourishment. Let us abandon waste and pollution Of the clean, clear nature of the four elements, And let us stop destroying the well-being of peoples! Let us devote ourselves on the contrary to actions that benefit everyone!

  Buddha, the Great Sage, was born beneath a tree, Then sat beneath a tree to complete his Enlightenment,

  After having conquered his passions. And it is beneath two trees that he passed into nirvana. In truth, the Buddha held trees in high esteem. The place where the emanation of Manjushri, Lama Tsongkhapa,20 caused his body to be born, Is marked by a sandalwood tree

  Whose leaves by the hundreds of thousands bear the effigy o
f the Buddha.

  Is it not well known that certain transcendent deities,

  Eminent divinities and spirits of place,

  Establish their residence in trees?

  Flowering trees clean the wind

  And let us breathe an air that regenerates life.

  They charm the eyes and calm the mind.

  Their shade creates a welcoming place of rest.

  In the Vinaya,21 the Buddha advises monks

  To care for fragile trees.