Planting mangoes for the future in Tibet.

Abstract

In the summer of 1985 I spent two months in Ganden Monastery, now in a Tibetan refugee camp in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. This is the story of why I went and what happened. Tibet hit the headlines in 1959 when the Dalai Lama, spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetan people, fled into exile in India. He was followed by thousands of refugees. Chinese invasion of Tibet must rank as one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century. two decades that followed witnessed the total destruc? tion of the Tibetan civilisation and culture. Conservative estimates place the total dead at 360000; Tibetans claim 1*2 million. Some were resistance fighters using antiquated weaponry against Chinese artillery, but most died in prison of starvation, or during political indoctrination sessions. Religious practice was outlawed, and over 5000 monasteries and shrines were destroyed. These events were largely ignored by the Western media and politicians. One of the handful of Westerners to have lived in Tibet and the representative of the British and Indian governments there, Sir Hugh Richardson, commented in 1982, The Tibetans had a civilisation that had developed for 1300 years. They had an immense literature and they had developed a very special practice of Buddhism. They are unique people, they have their own language and their own civilisation. Surely it is a tragedy to see any civilisation dying, even if it is not so long established, so literate and so polished as the Tibetans. Tibet has always been the physical manifestation of a spiritual ideal for me? a place high in the Himalayas ruled by an enlightened temporal and spiritual leader. A place where for centuries people have been exploring the mind while the civilised advanced nations have been exploring the world. Their world is internal, infinite; ours is external and finite. In 1983 during my second year holidays I travelled through Ladakh, a remote area of Tibet in the western Himalayas under Indian control. I found a people with a tremendous sense of joy and appreciation of every moment despite the adversity of exile. They regard this with a calm resilience, which is never pessimistic or passive. I met two Australian doctors working in a Tibetan refugee camp on the outskirts of Leh the capital of the region. They had worked there for a year, nine months of which they spent totally isolated when snow blocked the high passes. I was impressed by their determination and idealism both to work in such a place and to walk away from the intense competition of hospital medicine for so long. I decided to do something similar as soon as I knew enough to be of use. In the summer of 1985 at the end of the fourth year the opportunity arose. I took it, and from then on the project gathered its own momentum.