Non-Violent Leadership of the Dalai Lama

From the Friday, October 19, 2007, Comment, Editorials section of the Toronto Star, page AA6, is an article about the non-violent leadership of the Dalai Lama and how it should act as a model for other world leaders:

WORTH REPEATING
Leader a model of non-violence

It is a given that whenever the Dalai Lama is honoured, China's Communist leaders lash out. It happened when the Tibetan spiritual leader, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was received by German Chancellor Angela Merkel last month, and it happened again Wednesday when the Dalai Lama met with President George Bush and was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in Washington.

The Dalai Lama said Wednesday that he felt "regret" over the tensions. It is our hope that leaders will continue to ignore China's protests and threats, and that by continuing to honour the Dalai Lama they will finally persuade Beijing to open serious talks about granting autonomy to Tibet.

The Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959 after the Chinese army crushed an uprising there, is a powerful symbol of Tibet's resistance to China's suppression of its religious culture. In Beijing-speak, the Dalai Lama is a "splittist," someone out to split off a chunk of China. Zhang Qingli, the Chinese party boss in Tibet, denounced the Dalai Lama as "a person who basely splits his motherland and doesn't even love his motherland."

The fact is that the Dalai Lama does love his motherland - Tibet - and is not trying to split it away from China. He said Wednesday that he is not seeking independence from China. What he wants, he says, is "meaning autonomy for Tibet."

We would like to think that the spiritual leader's lifelong dedication to non-violence and tolerance might also rub off on some of the people he meets in Washington. "Through violence, you may solve one problem, but you sow the seeds for another," is one of his statements that politicians everywhere might mediate upon. Or this: "The world has become so small that no nation can solve its problems alone, in isolation from others."

This is an edited version of an editorial in The New York Times yesterday.