A Tibet Benefit Album
Tibet
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MANTRA MIX: A Tibet Benefit Album Tibet |
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A vast land the size of Western Europe, Tibet is a 3600 metre high plateau encircled
by the earth's highest mountains - the Himalayas to the south, the Karakorum to the west,
the Kunlun to the north and Min Shan and Ta-hsueh Shan to the east. "The Land of
Snows" is also the source of the major rivers of Asia - the Indus, Brahmaputra,
Sutlej, Yangtse and Mekong. Remote, mysterious and magnificent, Tibet is a country encompassing landscapes of awesome and extreme beauty. In 1949 the armed forces of China invaded Tibet from the east. Since then, over 1.2 million Tibetans have died as a direct result of the Chinese occupation or as innocent victims of a policy that seeks to destroy the unique national identity of the Tibetan people and their rich and complete culture and religion. |
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The tally of facts is confronting: Some 6000 Tibetan
monasteries and sacred places have been destroyed. From the late 1950s until the mid
1980s, a policy of religious repression saw a reduction in the monastic community by over
100,000. Forced agricultural modernisation has resulted in wide-spread crop failures and
Tibet’s first recorded famines. Sixty timber trucks leave Tibet every hour with
valuable timber bound for China. The Indian Government has reports of three nuclear
missile bases on the Tibetan Plateau and an army of 300,000 Chinese troops are stationed
within Tibet. Chinese has replaced Tibetan as the official language. Tibet has disappeared
from world maps. The most serious on-going threat to the future survival of Tibet is the population transfer of Chinese nationals into Tibet. Tibetan exiles claim that 7.5 million Chinese now live in Tibet and that the six million Tibetans are treated in all ways as second class citizens. The Dalai Lama has labelled this total occupation and dilution of the Tibetan culture as a form of "cultural genocide." |
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More than 120,000 refugees including His Holiness now live
outside their homeland. Most have fled across the Himalayas to India, where the Dalai Lama
has been supported in establishing the Tibetan
Government-in-Exile at Dharamasala. Although not formally recognised as the Head of
State by any foreign country, or by the United Nations, the Dalai Lama's spiritual and
temporal authority as leader of the Tibetan people, and as a world figure of peace, is
undisputed. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. Throughout his 38 years in exile, the Dalai Lama has worked tirelessly to raise international awareness of the plight of the Tibetan people and has never wavered from an advocacy of non-violent means of regaining freedom for his people. In a bid to resolve the Tibetan situation, The Dalai Lama has also proposed a Five Point Peace Plan. The central tenet of this plan is to transform the whole of Tibet into Zone of Ahimsa - A Zone of "Non-harming". |
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The Dalai Lama believes that his country should become a
world peace sanctuary where individuals and organisations dedicated to the protection of
life could live in harmony with the natural environment. "Our Tibetan ability to
combine spiritual qualities with a realistic and practical attitude enables us to make a
special contribution - in however modest a way "A future free Tibet," he says, "will seek to help those in need throughout the world, to protect nature, and to promote peace. "This is my hope and prayer, that in future Tibet can contribute to the development of a more peaceful, more humane and more beautiful world." |
Tibet Links
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 Australia Tibet Council |
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