House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are only the latest of a long list of Americans who have reached out to besieged Tibetans.
For two decades, a group of influential American Buddhists, including scholar Robert Thurman, actor Richard Gere and composer Philip Glass, have been speaking out against China’s suppression of Tibet and calling on the Communist government to open talks with its exiled leader, the 14th Dalai Lama.
All three are longstanding advocates of the Tibetan cause through several Western groups at the forefront of efforts on behalf of the historic Himalayan country invaded by China in 1950 - so far, to no avail.
One effort is Tibet House, founded in 1987 at the request of the Dalai Lama, by a group including Gere, Glass and Thurman, who is best known as the father of actress Uma Thurman. The Manhattan center is a sort of cultural embassy intent on preserving Tibetan Buddhist religion, art and philosophy in the face of what the Dalai Lama has called “cultural genocide.”
The International Campaign for Tibet, chaired by Gere since 1995, promotes awareness of Chinese repression of Tibet around the world. As its best-known advocate, Gere has spoken about the suppression of Tibetan culture before the U.S. Congress, the European Parliament, and the United Nations Human Rights Commission.
But while those projects have helped to popularize the Dalai Lama and Tibetan culture, they have had no influence on China, which is engaged in another massive crackdown only months before the Summer Olympics. As the situation in Tibet has grown more dire, celebrities from actors Keanu Reeves and Goldie Hawn, to rock star Adam Yauch continue to flock to Dharamsala, India, home of the Tibetan government-in-exile, on the salvation circuit.
Thurman has the longest-standing friendship with the man originally known as Tenzin Gyatso, who describes himself as a simple monk, but who is revered by Tibetans as a god king and the living incarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama.
“He was found at the age of two by a search party of monks, led to him after rainbows arced across the northeastern skies of Lhasa, a star-shaped fungus appeared on the pillar of the Potala Palace, and the head of the corpse of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama repeatedly moved in a northeasterly direction,” according to a biographical essay by Pico Iyer.
Thurman’s connection to the Dalai Lama seems almost providential. As a young man, Thurman was living the high life married to Houston oil heiress Christophe de Menil, when he was blinded in his left eye while changing a tire and underwent a profound identity crisis. He left his wife and young child, and wandered through Turkey and Iran, eventually finding his way to Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama had set up a government in exile after fleeing Tibet in 1959.
The two men, who are close in age, became good friends, and Thurman was personally ordained by the Dalai Lama in 1965. After his return to the U.S., he would abandon his saffron robe, deciding he could be more effective in what he has called “the American equivalent of the monastery - the university.”
One factor in his decision may have been Nena von Schlebrugge, a former Vogue model who had been married to LSD guru Timothy Leary. After meeting at a party in New York, Thurman and von Schlebrugge fell in love, married, and had four children — the first of whom was Uma, who like several siblings, has grown up to be an advocate of Tibet. Thurman now teaches Indo-Tibetan Buddhism at Columbia University.
Gere, who is the monk’s most famous acolyte, met the Dalai Lama in the early 1980s and began making annual sojourns to Dharamsala.
The Hollywood star who has poured millions of his own money into human rights causes, also created the Gere Foundation, a nonprofit group which aids Tibetan refugees and promotes an autonomous Tibet.
“He’s the most simple man and the most complex man I’ve ever met,” Gere told Indian national television channel Doordarshan. “He’s an artist and he’s a farmer. He - like any great mind and heart - is able to engage each of us on a level where we exist.”
Whether he can engage a totalitarian government remains to be seen.
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