TEÓDULO LÓPEZ MELÉNDEZ, Writer and Journalist - Caracas, Venezuela
The governments didn't lean toward the justice and the peace and the happiness they still shine for their absence. When the two thousand five hundred years they were completed from Parinirvana to that we should have arrived of agreement with the Buddhist tradition. It lapsed the year of 1956 and Latin America, for example, it was full with military dictatorships.
However, above the millennial tradition, it should not surprise us the active participation of the monks in situations like that of the old Burma (changed the name to Myanmar for the military dictatorship) or with deep roots in the resistance opposed in the Tibet to the Chinese dominance. They are not simply some monks with the closed eyes and that they pray.
In the Buddhism more than a deity lives a deep respect toward the being's dignity. The only one proclaims that he made Buddha of itself it was that of a human being. The retirement, the isolation, the simple interiority, is maybe it that us Westerners perceive of the Buddhism, forgetting the deep sensibility that implies toward the human thing and their civic commitments. It is what has been given in denominating a socially committed spirituality. As part of an interdependence of all the things, of the care of all the existent one, it is perfectly comprehensible the rebellion of the monks against the injustices of this world, call you military dictatorship in Burma or direct attack against the millennial traditions in the Tibet.
We are not able to, then, to imagine to some careful monks that look at the history with apprehension. They embody an ethical emancipatoria, one that includes democracy, validity of the freedom of speech and active resistance to what they have denominated cultural genocide in the Tibet. From the dominance of the Mongolian ones until the arrival of the Jesuit, the Tibet enjoyed a good autonomy and it is hardly in the XVIII century when China intervenes causing the first facts of violence directly.
Then the Englishmen to the beginning of the XX century until the concession of the sovereignty to China. The return of the Dalai Licks and the return of the autonomy, that is to say, tempting earth not only for the oriental but also for the Westerners that played with her, divisions to implant the dominance, peon in the international chess, long forgetfulness, escapes, exiles, returns and conspiracies, an entire history where the patient but not other people's monks had protagonistic participation. Let us don't forget that the Dalai Licks it reincarnates and there another game settled down until our days, another possibility to maneuver denying some reincarnation and designating to finger another above the Buddhist method of producing the identification.
The Tibet has lived all the Chinese incidents, from the cultural revolution until our days, suffering the induced erosion of its culture and of its millennial principles, an inseparable culture of the religious principles. One that has shown in profuse literature, in the cinema, in the painting, in the sculpture, in the dance, in the theater and in the opera.
They are, yes, locked in their monasteries the monks that have spilled blood in Burma and in Tibet. They contemplate the moving of the reality maybe, but it is not a pensiveness like we can call to the selfishness like we perceive it in occident. They legitimate their presence in the world and they go of the hand of the freedom, of the equality and of the tolerance. The monks sense with the closed eyes, it is an intuition that comes from the interiorización in the spirit and that it goes without hesitations (they have demonstrated it) toward the external world by means of the rebellion and the resistance against the injustices.
The Chinese squashing of the current Tibet, one marked by population's massive mobilization, to make ethnically of that high territory a Chinese county considered, it shows to the world the dark side of the régime of Beijing. An economically open régime, massive consumer of matters cousins for the sake of a galloping industrialization, but one that continues being not one in spite of having loosened some controls democratic, one governed by the Communist Party with the consequent intolerance toward the dissidence.
It happens to the Chinese their placement in cabinet in eves of some Olympic Games where intencionaban shows as a country shot toward the future without control and without possibilities of failure. As in Burma, where the cibernautas got ready them to send the images and the testimonies of the slaughters, also in the millennial Tibet the images and the informations of the global culture have sprouted as mushrooms to alert to the world of a slaughter, of a ferocious attack against the seemingly passive monks of the closed eyes.
The history is full with the extinction of cultures and of civilizations. Only almost none was based on the tolerance (I use the almost to avoid me a blunder, but all were guerreristas, sacrifice them, violent and conquerors). In the mestizo America we don't find any marked one for the tolerance, neither in the current Mexico and Peru, where the before Columbus civilizations met unpublished advance marks and development, but whose characteristics were the dominance and the intolerance. One believes, this way, in the impossibility of death of the Tibetan culture, and a lot less than the loss of the Buddha, the one that was not God, the one that became divine for it proclaims it of their man condition.
He cannot die what is based on the interiorización and the detachment, what doesn't obviate the commitment with the world that is outside of the monasteries, the world that he can it turns from the closed eyes and that it can be named in the rhythmic mantra, but that it is also manifested in the street giving the blood for the sake of the principles. We attend the expansion of the new world power, to a massive industrialization that absorbs like sponge the matters cousins, to the commercial emporium that is exhibited in some Olympic Games, to the hungry China of might and of domain, to the new insurgencia reality in the world scene, but there, in the heights, perviven doesn't unite medieval caves but, on the contrary, the eternal principles always renovated of a commitment with the man's spirituality and with its historical presence.
The men will always have the intuition of the closed eyes of the Buddhist monks, like form of life, as renouncement example but of solidarity, and of course to Buddha, framed for always in the tolerance and the respect toward the other religions. For the wise called nepalí he will always live Siddhartha Gautama, the intelligent ‘' or illuminated ‘', the man that Buddha was made and that he found the nirvana. That culture is unquenchable.
