Eat the Buddha Quotes

“On a shelf there were small bowls for water, seven of them, each symbolizing offerings of drinking water, bathing water, flowers, perfume, food, incense and music.

An aspired state of mind: to be free of attachment, anger, stupidity, jealousy and arrogance.”
― Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

“To Delek, the family connections made sense of the madness. It also explained why so many resisters came from not only Ngaba, but Meruma. “Many of the king’s ministers lived there. It was a very spirited place,” he said. “They were influenced by family tradition to stand up to the Chinese.” The older generation produced the fighters. The younger people, educated during the time of the 14th Dalai Lama, took his teachings about nonviolence to heart. They couldn’t bring themselves to kill anyone but themselves.”
― Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

“The reasons why Ngaba led the plateau in self-immolation were obscure. Ngaba was not the worst-off town under Chinese rule. Its residents were wealthier than some others. The public facilities and infrastructure were much better than in many Tibetan towns in Qinghai province where sewage ran through open gutters of the streets and former nomads had been resettled in concrete boxes. Testifying before a U.S. congressional commission in 2011, Kirti Rinpoche suggested the reason was that Ngaba was the first place where Tibetans encountered the Chinese Communists in the 1930s. “The people of this region have a particular wound causing excessive suffering that spans three generations. This wound is very difficult to forget or heal,” Kirti Rinpoche testified.
Daniel Berounský, a scholar who contributed a paper at the Paris conference, also pointed to the high level of political awareness at the monastery. “When taking into account the historical outline concerning the kings of Ngawa [Ngaba] and the Kīrti masters, it becomes apparent that the monks are strongly affected by their past history, which is seen as a golden time.”
“A Tibetan Party official who penned a rare open letter published (and quickly removed) on a public forum blamed Shi Jun, the Party secretary for Ngaba prefecture. “Some called him the Lord of Demons, because he escalated small incidents into huge confrontations in order to secure his own advancement and to try to win brownie points,” wrote the official, who used his Chinese name, Luo Feng. He complained that Tibetan-speaking officials were excluded from promotion and that out of six hundred Party officials who had been recently promoted, only twenty spoke Tibetan. If you were Tibetan, you were an object of suspicion, Luo Feng wrote.”
― Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

“A scholar quoted in The New Yorker offered a cogent explanation: “Fire is the most dreaded of all forms of death,” he wrote, so “the sight of someone setting themselves on fire is simultaneously an assertion of intolerability and, frankly, of moral superiority….This isn’t insanity. It’s a terrible act of reason.”
― Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

“A peculiarity of Chinese rule over Tibet is the government’s insistence that Tibetans are happy, so happy that they while away their days singing and dancing. This ruse grows out of the Chinese Communist Party’s historical posturing as the defender of the oppressed. To absolve themselves of the sins of imperialism, it was essential that they show the Tibetans’ enthusiastic acceptance of Chinese rule. To this end, government propagandists devote inordinate effort to disseminating photographs, pamphlets, and books that show Tibetans with smiles stretched across their faces.”
― Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

“How many died in Ngaba? Exact numbers are hard to come by in China, a country with a penchant for statistics but a political culture that prefers not to publicize them when they present an inconvenient truth.”
― Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

“Until then, his anger at the Chinese government was vague and unfocused. He hated the way they condescended to Tibetans. He hated the Chinese companies that were cutting trees from Tibetan land and mining in sacred hills. He hated that you could be sent to jail for reading a banned book or pamphlet, that Tibetans were forced to learn the language of their oppressors, and that they had to go to lectures in which the Chinese government defamed His Holiness the Dalai Lama. But Tsepey hadn’t felt anger toward the Chinese as individuals—he had many Chinese friends and had dated Chinese women. He was a Buddhist who respected human life.”
― Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

“A quarter century of Communist rule had destroyed far more than it had created.”
― Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

“It is impossible to fathom current Tibetan attitudes toward the Chinese government without grasping the enormity of what befell them in the 1950s and early 1960s. Tibetans often speak about “when the Chinese invaded”—only to be chastised by Chinese who point out that this eastern part of the plateau had been part of the Qing dynasty’s China since the early eighteenth century. But the Qing emperors were Manchus, a northern people who were nominally Tibetan Buddhists. The Han Chinese were virtually strangers. And what difference does it make? When somebody who speaks a different language comes to your town, confiscates your home, your clothing, your shoes, and your food, destroys that which is most sacred to you, imprisons the young men in your family, and shoots those who resist, it feels like an invasion whether that person is a fellow citizen or not. Tibetans aren’t talking about the fine points of international law or the definition of sovereignty: they are speaking honestly about what they experienced.”
― Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

“Tibetans of this generation refer to this period simply as ngabgay—’58. Like 9/11, it is shorthand for a catastrophe so overwhelming that words cannot express it, only the number. But there are some evocative figures of speech. Some will call it dhulok, a word that roughly translates as the “collapse of time,” or, hauntingly, “when the sky and earth changed places.”
― Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

“Seeing the monks humiliated, statues smashed, and paintings burned shook Tibetans to the core. Buddhism provided the rituals through which the seasons were measured, births celebrated, and deaths grieved. The monasteries were Tibetans’ museums, libraries, and schools. Whether or not you were a true believer in the faith, there was no denying that Tibetan Buddhism had inspired an artistry that some compared to the splendors of medieval Christendom. The attacks on religion alienated Tibetans who might otherwise have supported the Communist Party’s efforts to stamp out feudalism and create social equality.”
― Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

“Tibetans also discovered a niche that was almost uniquely their own: collecting medicinal herbs. Herbs were commonly used in both Chinese and Tibetan medicine, and many of the more valuable were found on the Tibetan plateau. Beimu, an alpine lily used to treat coughs, grew at altitudes of more than 10,000 feet, and Tibetan nomads were perfectly situated to collect it. Most lucrative was Cordyceps sinensis, a prized ingredient in traditional medicine, believed to boost immunity, stamina, and lung and kidney function. Tibetans call it yartsa gunbu, meaning “summer grass, winter worm,” or simply bu, “worm,” for short. The worm is actually a fungus that feeds on the larvae of caterpillars. In the past, the worm was commonplace enough that Tibetans would feed it to a sluggish horse or yak, but the Chinese developed a hankering for it that sent prices soaring. Chinese coaches with gold-medal ambitions would feed it to athletes; aging businessmen would eat it to enhance their sexual potency. At one point, the best-quality caterpillar fungus was worth nearly the price of gold, as much as $900 an ounce. Tibetans had a natural monopoly on the caterpillar fungus. Non-Tibetans didn’t have the local knowledge or the lung capacity to compete. The best worm was in Golok, northwest of Ngaba. Nomadic families would bring their children with them, sometimes taking them out of school because their sharp eyesight and short stature allowed them to more easily scan the ground for the worm amid the grasses and weeds. The season ran for approximately forty days of early spring, the time when the melting snow turned the still-brown hills into a spongy carpet. The families would camp out for weeks in the mountains. In a good season, a Tibetan family could make more in this period than a Chinese factory worker could earn in a year. The Communist Party would later brag about how their policies had boosted the Tibetan economy, but the truth was that nothing contributed as much as the caterpillar fungus, which according to one scholar accounted for as much as 40 percent of Tibetans’ cash earnings. Unlike earnings from mining and forestry, industries that came to be dominated by Chinese companies, this was cash that went directly into the pockets of Tibetans. The nomads acquired the spending power to support the new shops and cafés. The golden worm was part of a cycle of rising prosperity.”
― Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

“Exact numbers are hard to come by in China, a country with a penchant for statistics but a political culture that prefers not to publicize them when they present any inconvenient truth.”
― Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

“In 2007, the State Administration for Religious Affairs issued an order that said in essence that one needed advance permission from the Chinese government in order to be reincarnated.”
― Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: The Story of Modern Tibet Through the People of One Town

“Checkpoints proliferated. It had always been a challenge for Tibetans to obtain passports to leave the country, but now they had trouble simply traveling inside China. It was a throwback to the day when you weren’t allowed to leave your commune. The rules varied from place to place and month to month, but you could never be assured of the ability to get where you wanted to go.”
― Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: The Story of Modern Tibet Through the People of One Town