Dalai Lama Renews Calls For Nonviolence While Protests Continue

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

From The Hindu:

“I have always made it clear that the expression of deep emotion should be in control. If it is out of control, we have no option. If the violent demonstration will continue, I would resign,” he told reporters here.

Disturbed by violent protests by Tibetans in various places, he asked the demonstrators to refrain from doing any harm to the Chinese people.

“I have always respected the Chinese people… Chinese communism. Even most of the Tibetan protesters are ideologically Communists. I think inside or outside China, if the demonstrators utilise violent methods, I am totally against it,” the Dalai Lama further said.

link: http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/…

Meanwhile, there are reports of Chinese police opening fire on protesters yesterday:

Residents of Luhuo said that a monk and a farmer appeared to have been killed and about a dozen people wounded in the latest violence in Tibetan areas of China. Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, said that one officer was killed when police confronted a “lawless mob” in Luhuo.

The demonstration began at 4pm when about 200 nuns from Woge nunnery and a similar number of monks from Jueri monastery marched towards the Luhuo Third District government office. They were joined by several hundred farmers and nomads, witnesses said.

Shouting “Long Live the Dalai Lama” and “Tibet belongs to Tibetans”, they approached the office. The paramilitary People’s Armed Police appeared and ordered the crowd to turn back. Witnesses said that shots were fired and two people appeared to have died. They identified one as Congun Dengzhu, a farmer, and the second as an unknown monk.

link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t…

Let me take a few moments to share with everyone what I know of nonviolence. Nonviolence is not reactive, but a proactive method one uses to demand justice and systemic change. It holds that in order to commit a violent act against another human being, that human being must first be dehumanized in order for the violence to be perpetrated and then justified. Nonviolence seeks to demand justice from your opponent without robbing him of his humanity, and in so doing it can rehabilitate your opponent while addressing the injustice so that reconciliation and true peace can be achieved.

Therefore, when I read the Dalai Lama’s calls to stop violence against the Chinese people, I believe he is reminding his followers that those who practice nonviolence do not allow themselves to hate their opponent, or dehumanize their opponent in any way. When he talks about the similarity in political views between Tibetan protesters and the Chinese authorities, he is pointing to the common ground that they share.

Finally, even if the Tibetan protesters achieve everything they want they will still, physically, be neighbors with the Chinese, and they will still have to co-exist side by side with them. By using nonviolence to achieve these ends, the possibility of a peaceful co-existance is far greater than what it could be using violence to achieve these goals.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed the way followers of nonviolence view human relationships in this way:

Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.

link: http://www.stanford.edu/group/…

Nonviolence insists that you be the way you ought to be, and demands – sometimes through unearned suffering – that your opponent do the same.

Please keep all sides of this conflict in your thoughts, prayers and meditations.