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Religion meets politics

The participation of monks in the recent unrest in China's ethnic Tıbetan regions is likely to bring an increased government presence in Tıbetan Buddhist monasteries.

Adam Minter commented in a Shanghai Scrap post on the suggestion made by Public Security Minister Meng Jianzhu last week that monasteries will be given more "patriotic education":

There is no additional information available on just what Meng Jianzhu meant when he claimed that the Tıbetan monasteries would be required to implement more Patriotic education, it seems unlikely to result in the unity that Document 19—now twenty-six years old—was trying to produce. That said, I feel fairly confident in claiming that an enhanced Patriotic curriculum in the monasteries will neither make them feel more free, or unified with China. Such an approach—coercive under any definition—is precisely what Document 19 labeled a “leftist” tendency worth stamping out. Whether it will be stamped out is something that I’m in no position to assess; but what is abundantly clear—to me, at least—is that the official thinking on the Tıbetan question is now located somewhere in the mid-1980s.

The likely counterproductive effects of increased government regulation was the subject of an article in the 5 October, 2007, issue of Phoenix Weekly, written in light of the central government's new regulations governing the reincarnation of tulkus, known as "living Buddhas" (活佛) in Chinese.

The historical narrative presented in the article (translated below) is essentially the one used by the Chinese mainland, with an additional bit of slight-of-hand that uses close Qing involvement in the selection of tulkus in Mongolia as justification for a government hand in Tıbetan tulku lineages. But the truly interesting part of the article is its discussion of the state of the current system for recognizing reincarnations.

As in other sectors, government regulation of the tulku system has opened up new avenues for abuse. Giving the government the ultimate authority to approve tulkus strips the temples of their ability to deal with troublesome tulkus. Worse, the practice of seating tulkus on local legislative bodies, however rubber-stamp they may be, adds a secular dimension to the religious office and gives more of a temptation to local officials to sell off their approval to the highest bidder.