Tibet: Culture on the Edge

Abstract

112 World Literature Today L ast year, thousands of Tibetan students took to the streets to protest the Chinese government’s decision to conduct all elementary and high school education in the official Chinese language, Mandarin. China has recently mandated that all children go through grade nine and has plans to increase it to grade twelve soon. If Tibetan nomads fail to send their children to school, they get fined. In order to standardize the educational curriculum, smaller village schools are being closed and consolidated into larger boarding schools. Many rural children of farmers and nomads living far from the boarding school are only able to go home once or twice a year. It doesn’t take long to see how children Tibet Culture on the Edge Phil Borges cover feature march–april 2013 • 113 cut off from their mother tongue would begin to lose their language. To be fair, the Chinese government is not alone in wanting to standardize the language of its citizens. We in the U.S. have our own debates about bilingual education, and we have a history of brutally forcing Native Americans not to speak their native languages. According to Ken Hale, a professor of linguistics at MIT, there are six thousand languages spoken on earth today, yet three thousand of them are not spoken by children. Every two weeks, another elder goes to the grave carrying the last spoken word of an entire culture. When the language dies, the culture dies. This is a silent extinction in that we scarcely hear about it in the media. If you spend any time with the Tibetans, you will most likely realize, as I have, what a special culture they have. I have never been with a people that return a smile and laugh as readily as above Lake Yihun Lhatso, 13,200 ft., Kham, Tibet. “This is the beautiful glacial lake of Yihun Lhatso. For those who have trained their minds and have the pure vision to perceive, the mountains and rocks surrounding the lake are said to assume the divine form of the Cakrasamvara mandala. Meditation on this mandala is an advanced Tibetan Tantric Buddhist practice that achieves enlightenment through the union of compassion and wisdom. This young monk from the Derge Gochen Monastery came to the lake to spend a week in meditation.” – Phil Borges 114 World Literature Today they do: having a cultural tradition and devotion grounded in compassion shows. If there was ever a good argument for a solid bilingual educational curriculum, this is it. It’s not only educational policy that’s threatening Tibetan culture—today it’s the changing climate. The Tibetan Plateau, with an average altitude of fourteen thousand feet, is known as “The Roof of the World.” It has also been called “The Third Pole” because next to the North and South Poles, its glaciers contain the largest volume of fresh frozen water on earth. More importantly , it is known as “The Water Tower of Asia” since the rivers flowing out of those glaciers supply nearly a third of the world’s population with their water. Because of its combination of high altitude and low latitude, the Tibetan Plateau as a whole is heating up twice as fast as the global average and the glaciers are disappearing at an alarming rate. In the northern areas, thousands of lakes have dried up, and deserts have grown to cover nearly one-sixth of the plateau. However, in the southern areas, the accelerating glacial melt has led to swollen rivers and much flooding. Almost all of the nomads and farmers I met complained about decreasing grasslands for their animals and erratic weather patterns that made timing the planting of their crops almost impossible. Living in one of the most fragile environments on earth, they are struggling to survive. I photographed several nomads next to the remains of glaciers they had lived near their entire lives. Returning to their summer grazing lands each march–april 2013 • 115 year since they were children gave them a unique perspective on the accelerating pace of glacial retreat. Many of these glaciers had shrunk to a fraction of their former size in just a few decades...