Within any ethnic group or individual, any culture or custom, all understand what committing suicide means. Buddhism opposes suicide, and believes that it is a kind of violence towards oneself. Most Tibetans believe in Buddhism, and the Buddhist Way includes the belief that all living things are part of a chain of causation (karma), which moves the individual from one life to the next. Buddhists believe in such principles as right concentration, right mindfulness, right speech and right action, and so they see suicide as forbidden.

 The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) claims that it has liberated “millions from serfdom” or slavery and brought happiness to Tibet.  However, as early as in 1962, the tenth Panchen Lama wrote a “70,000-word letter” to the CCP, conveying the grief of anguished Tibetans calling out.

 “Do not let people starve! Do not let Buddhism perish! Do not extinguish the people of our snow-capped mountains!”

For the past 50 years, there have been many group and individual protests in Tibet, and the number of suicides has been unprecedented throughout Tibetan history.  Based upon historical and oral records, the number of suicides peaked in late 1950’s and during  communist China’s “Cultural Revolution”.  

When I was investigating the “Cultural Revolution” in Lhasa, an elderly man recalled that one day in 1959, he personally witnessed four monks throw themselves into the Lhasa River to their deaths. The Lhasa River flowed quietly while their crimson red robes slowly sank.

After the Tibetan incident last March, suicide surged again across Tibet.   On March 23, 2008, monk Tuomei from the Lhasa Ramoche Monastery  hung himself; on March 27, monk Lobsang Jinpa from the Kirti Monastery in Amdo Ngaba of Sichuan Province hung himself, and a 75-year-old monk from the Ngaba Gomang Monastery killed himself; on April 16, the blind monk Thoesam from Ngaba Monastery committed suicide; on April 28, a villager named Tri Lhamo near the Wonpo Monastery in Sershul County of Sichuan Province  hung himself; on October 18, 17-year-old student Yonglunzhu Cairang from the No. 2 National Middle School in Jianzha County of Qinghai Province jumped off a building.  These are only a few examples.

It is obvious that they felt the pain of living surpassed the pain of reincarnation, just as Lobsang Jinpa from the Kirti Monastery wrote in his suicide note.

“It is impossible to live under the Chinese oppression even for a minute or an hour, let alone a whole day.” Yonglunzhu Cairang wrote in a suicide note, “I use my own life to tell the world that Tibetans have no freedom.”

On February 27 of 2009, the third day of the Tibetan New Year, after the annual great prayer festival was cancelled in Aba of Sichuan Province (Ngaba in Tibetan), 24-year-old monk Tabey from the Kirti Monastery raised high a photo with the Tibetan flag and the Dalai Lama, lit the oil-soaked robe, and ran on the street engulfed in flame, to protest the darkness that hangs over Tibet. This may be the first time a Tibetan inside mainland China spoke his mind through self-immolation.  Tibetan history must remember Tabey, just like Thupten Ngodup,  the monk in exile who immolated himself in New Delhi, India in 1998 during  a hunger strike in protest of China. The difference is that Tabey was shot by the CCP’s military police right at the scene. The military police that have who now fill the towns and monasteries since last March  fired at Tabey’s burning body.

With these piercing and painful gunshots still ringing in their ears, the CCP released to the world what they called a “white paper” entitled “Fifty Years of Democratic Reforms in Tibet.”  A Han writer-in-exile, Chen Weijian, commented on the CCP’s so-called white paper.

 “No matter how they deliberately cover up their crimes and flaunt themselves, it was the monk who by taking his life through his self-immolation that reveals the true human rights situation in Tibet.  The extremely evil regime is utterly devoid of conscience and capable of doing such a thing.”  

The significance of Tibetans’ self-sacrifice, though outside mainland China, is just like the poem written by a poet-in-exile for the self-immolated monk Thupten Ngodup,

“Cutting through the sky that had been silent for ages, it awakened the snow-capped mountains that had slept for hundreds of years.”

To read the original in Chinese click here