Zen Blog

Nothing is permanent, so everything is precious. Here’s a selection of some happenings—fleeting or otherwise—in the Buddhist world this week.

Tibetan NYPD Officer Allegedly Spied for China

A Tibetan police officer in New York City has been arrested and accused of spying for China, ABC Eyewitness News reported this week. Born in the People’s Republic of China, 33-year-old Baimadajie Angwang is a community affairs officer in the 111 precinct in New York’s Queens and a US Army Reservist at Fort Dix. He acted “at the direction and control” of Chinese government officials at the consulate in New York to report on the activities of the local Tibetan community, according to the criminal complaint. He also allegedly assessed potential ethnic Tibetan intelligence sources and used his official position at the police department to give consulate officials access to senior NYPD officials. Angwang is also accused of committing wire fraud, making false statements, and obstructing an official proceeding. 

Since 2018 Angwang has been “in frequent communication” with an unidentified Chinese consular official he referred to as “Boss,” the FBI said. “Angwang also discussed the utility of developing sources for the PRC government in the local Tibetan community and suggested that the primary qualification for a source as follows: ‘If you’re willing to recognize the motherland, the motherland is willing to assist you with its resources,'” the criminal complaint said. “This is the definition of an insider threat—as alleged, Mr. Angwang operated on behalf of a foreign government; lied to gain his clearance, and used his position as an NYPD police officer to aid the Chinese government’s subversive and illegal attempts to recruit intelligence sources,” FBI Assistant Director of New York William Sweeney Jr. said in a statement.

Buddhist, Muslim Groups Boycott Leh Elections

Buddhist and Muslim organizations and political parties in Leh, Ladakh, have joined together to boycott upcoming elections in their region, India’s Economic Times reported this week. The elections, which are set to take place on October 16, are for the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council (LAHDC), which administers the Leh district of Ladakh, in the Indian region of Jammu and Kashmir. The council was created in 1995, following demands by Ladakhi people to make Leh a new Indian Union Territory because of its cultural and religious differences with the rest of the region. Last year, Ladakh became the first Buddhist-majority region in India, after the Indian government passed a bill revoking Jammu and Kashmir’s special status as an autonomous region and dividing the territory into two Union Territories (UTs), or states: Ladakh, and Jammu and Kashmir. However, Ladakh’s transformation into a distinct UT effectively stripped the region of its legislature, rendering the democratically elected LAHDC powerless, India’s Frontline reports. Now, Ladakhis plans to boycott the council elections until they can get a constitutional safeguard to protect their economic, political, and environmental interests under India’s Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, which makes separate arrangements for what are known as “tribal areas” in India. Ninety-seven percent of people in Ladakh identify as “tribal,” according to Frontline. 

Citing Religious Uses, Swastika, New York Votes to Keep Its Name

The town board of Swastika, New York voted unanimously to keep its name, despite the swastika’s connection to Nazi Germany. The town cited the symbol’s prior uses in Hinduism and Buddhism, Newsweek reported. While many people associate the swastika with white supremacy, Jon Douglass, the town supervisor of Black Brook (a small town which includes the unincorporated area “Swastika”), pointed out that Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religions have used a version of the swastika to represent spirituality. The area was named Swastika by settlers in the 1800s, and even during World War II, residents refused to change the name “just because Hitler tried to tarnish the meaning,” Douglass said. 

The existence—and persistence—of racism can be baffling. Our society sees the suffering of historically disadvantaged people and treats them with scorn rather than compassion. Buddhism would explain that our current situation is the result of karma. But what does that mean? Contrary to popular depictions, the Buddhist notion of karma is not a tit-for-tat system of crime and punishment where people suffer for their past sins. Karma is a theory of action and consequence that describes how good deeds generate good results and more good deeds in a positive feedback loop, while bad deeds do the opposite. Through the lens of Buddhist karma, we may be able to understand how racism and the pain it causes are perpetuated. 

For years, Zen Buddhist teacher Dr. Larry Ward has been working to use this Buddhist framework to shed light on racism in America—culminating in his new book America’s Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal (Shambhala; September 15, 2020), which tries to unearth the roots of our “racialized consciousness.” Trained in Thich Naht Hahn’s Plum Village tradition, Ward is the co-director of the Lotus Institute, where he offers teachings on “Deep Buddhism,” an approach to social engagement that draws from Buddhist and indigenous wisdom as well as trauma and resiliency work.

Ward sat down with Tricycle via videoconference to discuss America’s Racial Karma,  how these harmful cycles are perpetuated, and how we can begin to move toward both individual reckonings with racism and collective healing. 

What do you mean by the phrase “racial karma?” Classically, karma is translated as action, and thought is considered a kind of action which drives and sustains karma. How we think creates karmic patterns that affect how we speak to and interact with one another. I believe that we’re still caught in patterns of speech we’ve inherited from a colonial past, as well as binary perceptions of the world that create opposition between people. Binaries close down possibilities through strict definition and set theoretical opposites off against one another—subject/object, tall/short, male/female, black/white, self/other. These binaries affect our perceptions of others. 

Last year, Ladakh became its own union territory of India, separating it from the state of Jammu and Kashmir. It now has a certain level of political autonomy, but Ladakh’s worries are far from over. Situated in a region of the Himalayas where the major sects of Tibetan Buddhism flourish side by side, Ladakh must deal with shrinking glaciers that threaten its already scarce water supply, continuous violence on its border with China, and educational policies from the Indian government that often undermine Ladakhis’ unique cultural norms. 

“Ladakh is still a fragile and developing region,” said Tsewang Chuskit, who recently graduated from Smith College with a bachelor’s degree in education and child studies (and a minor in government). This past spring Chuskit and another Ladakhi youth, Stanzin Angmo, became two of only a handful of Ladakhis to ever attend and graduate from an American college or university. Though the two young women were unable to walk across the stage for their diplomas or congratulate their friends in person due to the pandemic, they’ve already moved ahead with plans to be of service to the place they call home. 

“We face many problems—from both modernization and our own culture—but fortunately, Ladakhis are community-minded and change is coming,” Chuskit said.

Chuskit and Angmo are a sign of that change. They both attended Ladakh’s top-ranked Siddhartha School, a K-10 institution founded by Tibetan Buddhist monk and Ladakh native Khensur Rinpoche Geshe Lobzang Tsetan. 

“One of the daily lessons I received from my teachers and Khensur Rinpoche was to give back to the community,” Chuskit said. Former abbot of the Panchen Lama’s monastery in exile, Khensur Rinpoche established the Siddhartha School in Stok, near the city of Leh, in 1995. At the time, Ladakhi students graduating from tenth grade flunked the Indian national exam required for further education at an average rate of 97 percent per year. As a result, professionals in their area, including government employees, were overwhelmingly non-native. 

The Buddhist Film Foundation will launch a streaming site for Buddhist films, the Dalai Lama writes an op-ed about the climate crisis, and a monk advocates for peace at the India-China border. Tricycle looks back at the events of this week in the Buddhist world.

The Buddhist Film Foundation plans to launch a streaming site for Buddhist films in late 2020.

In 1959, tens of thousands of Tibetans followed their spiritual leader, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, into exile. Many of us are familiar with the dramatic flight through the Himalayas to the Indian subcontinent, and the 1959 “Tibetan Uprising” that occasioned it. But few experienced it like Gyaltsen Choden did. Born on January 1,1921, Choden is among the uprising’s oldest living survivors. At the time, he was a tsedrung, or monk official, serving as one of the caretakers at Norbulingka Palace, the Dalai Lama’s summer residence in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital city.

At the point when the Dalai Lama’s story goes to India, Choden’s trial begins at Norbulingka. His role was to stay behind and create the impression of normalcy so that by the time anyone noticed something was awry, His Holiness would be long gone.

Thupten Jinpa, the Dalai Lama’s principal English translator and founder and president of the Compassion Institute, calls Gyaltsen Choden’s life “a mirror of the complex story of Tibet and its people, from their rude awakening to modernity by the Communist Chinese invasion to their amazing adaptation to today’s globalized digital world.”

Jinpa explains that,“[a]s a government official of independent Tibet, Choden had the rare opportunity to see the now lost old Tibet; and as one of the Tibetan officials who joined the Dalai Lama in exile, especially as his representative in southern India, he oversaw the reestablishment and growth of Tibet’s great cultural institutions, like Drepung and Ganden monasteries, in their second home.”

(On a personal note, Thupten Jinpa adds, “As a Tibetan who grew up in exile in India, it is a source of pride and joy to see Gyaltsen Choden’s story told in Tricycle as he reaches the venerable age of one hundred.”)