Home » Tibet China » Views on the Chinese Liberation of Tibet

The day was spent walking about Lhasa, taking in the sight and the atmosphere. The Tibetan quarters are extremely pleasant and full of happenings. They have all remained pedestrian, with no space for cars. Every street is transformed daily into a street market and nightly into a restaurant and play area. It is filled with pilgrims in their best Tibetan costume, going around the temples on the Bakhor (pilgrims path circling every monastry or temple). It is filled constantly by a contradicting yet happy blurr of sights, smells and sounds.

Views on the Chinese Liberation of Tibet

Degrubenc
2005-12-09 12:57:16

Displayed times (last time: )

is a shoking sight. It is not even in disguise but openly advertised. It is even worse of an experience when it is seen with the Tibetan pilgrims doing their lamentations in the foreground, lying down on the floor every 3 meters, turning their prayer wheels and murmuring their prayers in front of the imported, vulgar, prostitutes - often busy knitting on the pavement in front of their shaby rooms. There are armed patrols at night and an omnipresence of
the uniform in the streets. There are more Chinese soldiers in Tibet than Tibetans...

In the morning, we visited the Jokhang monastery. Built in 650, it is not only the most ancient temple but also the most sacred in Tibet, as it contains a famous Buddha statue, gift of an Indian princess. The story goes that the statue formed itself, with no human intervention or help. During the 1959 cultural revolution, the outside wall was destroyed by Mao's tanks and the inside transformed into a pig stye. It has since returned to its former beauty.

This temple is also considered to be a site of importance for Tibetans as it is there that, in 1987, during the yearly large debate that follows the new year celebration, the Chinese puppet Panchen-Lama refused to sit on the throne normally reserved for the Dalai-Lama and paid hommage to the Dalai-Lama instead. The Chinese were furious and closed the temple for a number of months. The Panchen-Lama was given hospitality in a reeducation camp.

The temple is now the religious aim of all the pilgrims in Tibet: they journey for months if not years to see the statue of Buddha and pray in its sanctuary.

It really is
just that: a sanctuary from the madness and chaos of the outside streets. It is composed of little courtyards and corridors, prayer wheels and chapels shading the believer from the sun and giving a strong sense of peace and recollection to everyone who enters its massive gates.

...