Dalai Lama Sparks Outrage With Remarks On Refugee Crisis: But Is He Right?

In speaking engagements through Europe, the Dalai Lama has repeatedly said that the refugees that have flooded European countries over the past few years should have plans to eventually go back to their homeland. Can we step back and provide ourselves a greater context for the Dalai Lama's opinion, so that we can appreciate a bit of the nuance inherent in the matter he is addressing? We live in interesting times. With an unprecedented amount of information now readily accessible on portable electronic devices, and the ability to broadcast publicly from those devices is becoming a matter of a few keystrokes. We are being presented with the opportunity to interact with and give our opinions on what other people are saying when they’ree thousands of miles away in real time. This opportunity can be used to deepen the dialogue of our personal and collective understanding about life, and share wisdom and insights that can be used for the benefit of all. All too often, however, this space becomes a forum for knee-jerk reactions and simplistic black-or-white characterizations on important issues that only serve to polarize rather than advance the discussion.

The remarks the Dalai Lama made on immigration and the refugee crisis during a recent tour of Europe are a case in point. I think we will all concede that the Dalai Lama is a pretty intelligent fellow, and certainly believes highly in compassion for all of humanity. He may not be the most eloquent speaker of the English language, and so he may not always be able to convey the optimal nuance when speaking about highly-charged geopolitical issues like refugees. That being said, his ideas certainly deserve a step-back and an examination of the bigger picture, which involves not only the context of his Buddhist faith but the realities of material-world geopolitics. While speaking to an audience in Rotterdam in the video below, one questioner said that she was surprised to have read statements the Dalai Lama had made, specifically that ‘Europe belongs to the Europeans,’ and that the refugees should go back to their home country. She asked him to give more details as to how that squares up with all the wonderful things he has said about love, acceptance, and equality. He acknowledges the responsibility that countries have to provide shelter and other necessities to those escaping unlivable and dangerous conditions at home, but stays true to his point on the matter: The refugees, from different countr(ies), I think, they themselves also should think, their home is their own land. So, in their own home, killing, bully(ing), a lot of suffering, therefore, they, something like, escape, so European countries must provide shelter to them...then the aim is, eventually they should return to their own land, to rebuild their own country. That’s my view, right from the beginning. For those who like to make the most simplistic and polarized interpretation of the Dalai Lama’s words, social media provides an immediate outlet for rebuking the words they seem to be taking very personally: Dalai Lama: Europe belongs to Europeans. Refugees should go home. Mr Lama: Where were you when these European countries bombarded these muslim countries and destroyed everything. Bloody Hypocrite and bootlicker. @DalaiLama — Younis A Bhat | یونس بٹ (@NtzYBhat) September 13, 2018 Dalai is a bigot of the first order. “The Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, told an audience in Malmö that refugees should return to their native countries to rebuild them.” Should the Dalai not lead by example by returning to Tibet.https://t.co/jcUrgvg3la — Sabina Basha (@SabinaBasha) September 13, 2018 However, this form of sound-byte communication, where all context is shed and key words and phrases are highlighted to give rise to extremist interpretations, is not going to contribute to the evolution of this discussion about immigration. I believe the Dalai Lama’s words, which represent a bold step into the material realm of geopolitics, are worth ruminating over through a basic context about cultures, nations and borders. Think of all cultures as collective experiments. Each culture has within it a morality, a notion of what they consider to be good and bad. Friedrich Nietzsche, often lauded as the great ‘Historian of Culture,’ said it this way in his epic allegory Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Many lands saw Zarathustra, and many peoples: thus he discovered the good and bad of many peoples. No greater power did Zarathustra find on earth than good and bad. No people could live without first valuing; if a people will maintain itself, however, it must not value as its neighbor values. Much that passed for good with one people was regarded with scorn and contempt by another: thus I found it. Much found I here called bad, which was there decked with purple honors. Never did the one neighbor understand the other: ever did his soul marvel at his neighbour’s delusion and wickedness. A table of values hangs over every people. Behold. it is the table of their triumphs; Behold. it is the voice of their Will to Power. It is laudable, what they think hard; what is indispensable and hard they call good; and what relieves in the direst distress, the unique and hardest of all, – they extol as holy. Each culture evolves and becomes strong (or becomes weak or dies out) based on the effectiveness of their ‘table of values,’ their ideas of what is right and wrong.

The more the citizens of a culture all reach for the things that are hard and yet are indispensable (what they consider ‘right action’), the stronger the collective becomes. Note that a ‘culture’ is often associated with a ‘race,’ but these are not really the same thing. Race is genetic, culture is ideological. Hence many races can be part of the same culture. Now think of nations with borders as the incubator for their experiment of culture, in which there is territorial space where it is safe and possible to carry out the experiment of that culture’s particular morals. Let’s not think about nations and borders as restrictions and limiters of the human experience, or as the ‘source’ of war in the world, before we first recognize that much of human progress has been achieved through the incubation of cultures within bordered territories. This is not to say that nations and borders should be considered the be-all and end-all of human evolution; again, let’s keep things in perspective here. If we can accept the general definitions I’ve laid out, then we can see that the Dalai Lama is very much talking with a deep understanding of the purpose behind cultures, nations, and borders. We are at a stage of human evolution where we are not quite ready to abandon the nation/border model, because the various cultural experiments have not quite run their course, and we have not quite developed nations that have become fully self-realized.

There are currently no nations that have become sovereign enough to be in a position to do nothing more than be of service to all other nations. And so, while recognizing on the one hand that love, humanity, acceptance, and charity are all aspects of the human experience that he espouses deeply, the Dalai Lama also recognizes that the pattern of increasing refugee migration in the world is causing a serious breakdown in the ‘evolution experiments’ going on in each host nation, to the extent that conditions globally for human life and human evolution are deteriorating. It is, I believe, with a deep compassion for the entire human race and our prospects to collectively evolve to a higher place that the Dalai Lama says that refugees should consider in their heart their role of potentially returning to their homeland when conditions allow it. While many people still jump the gun to judge statements made by public figures, our task in the awakening community is to appreciate–even relish–the delicious depth of nuance in these complex issues. For example, the Dalai Lama is not telling people that they should not immigrate to another country if they have a strong desire to assimilate into that country’s culture. He is addressing the massive exoduses of one culture into another, where those involved have not necessarily made a conscious choice to leave their culture behind and adopt a new one, in order to strengthen the cultural experiment they are going into. Yes, of course, ultimately the aim is for unity, and the grandest experiment that overlooks all the other experiments is one in which the elimination of all borders, nations, and cultural identities will be part of the human collective becoming one. Let’s just not get ahead of ourselves here, and ground our words and ideas in an understanding of where human evolution is at right now, as I believe the Dalai Lama does.

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