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Tibetan Monastic Universities: Education Preserves a Culture in Exile
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13571 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
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4 / 1988 |
3,819 Words |
| Author
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Ursula Bernis
Ursula Bernis is a freelance author and photographer. |
An early Western traveler to Tibet wrote:
"Why is it that the fate of Tibet has found such a deep echo in the world? There can only be one answer: Tibet has become the symbol of all that present-day humanity is longing for, either because it has been lost or not yet been realized or because it is in danger of disappearing from human sight: the stability of a tradition, which has its roots not only in a historical or cultural past, but within the innermost being of man, in whose depth this past is enshrined as an ever-present source of inspiration." (Govinda, 1970)
A generation after the Chinese communist takeover of Tibet, the damage to this ancient culture is staggering. Over 6,000 monasteries have been laid to waste. "Purified" of any traditional Buddhist terminology, the Tibetan language has been mixed with Chinese. Communist practice relies on erasing or rewriting "history" in the traditional sense. This is still occurring in Tibet today. The Tibetan people remaining in Tibet have been marginalized by an ever-increasing influx of Chinese immigrants.
It takes hundreds of years to evolve unique cultural traditions, and even longer to deepen and refine them. Tragically, it takes only a generation to destroy the structures through which a cultural heritage is expressed. But under the guidance of the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959 with some 80,000 Tibetans, the arts, science, and religion of this ancient civilization continue in exile.
The events of the past thirty years have had a great impact on Tibetan education, particularly the monastic universities. Traditionally there were two general kinds of education open to a Tibetan: Mahayana Buddhist training, which focused on extending a person's inner world, and education aimed at maintaining the existing government structures and cultural institutions. Training for government careers usually was carried out in private schools. A separate dimension of education was the training of physicians in the complex system of Tibetan medicine. Many monks, however, also learned healing techniques.
In Mongolia, there once were monastic universities even larger than those in Tibet that provided the same training. They were destroyed, however, during the Russian revolution. The only institutions now left to carry on the highly specialized training developed in the monastic universities exist among the Tibetan exile community in the vast, hot landscape of southern
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