http://revcom.us/a/firstvol/tibet/tibet1.htm

When the Dalai Lamas Ruled: Hell on Earth
Revolutionary Worker #944, February 15, 1998

Hard Climate, Heartless Society
Tibet is one of the most remote places in the world. It is centered on
a high mountain plateau deep in the heart of Asia. It is cut off from
South Asia by the Himalayas, the highest mountains in the world.
Countless river gorges and at least six different mountain ranges
carve this region into isolated valleys. Before all the changes
brought about after the Chinese revolution of 1949, there were no
roads in Tibet that wheeled vehicles could travel. All travel was over
winding, dangerous mountain trails--by mule, by foot or by yaks which
are hairy cow-like mountain animals. Trade, communications and
centralized government were almost impossible to maintain.

Most of Tibet is above the tree-line. The air is very thin. Most crops
and trees won't grow there. It was a struggle to grow food and even
find fuel for fires.

At the time of the revolution, the population of Tibet was extremely
spread out. About two or three million Tibetans lived in an area half
the size of the United States--about 1.5 million square miles.
Villages, monasteries and nomad encampments were often separated by
many days of difficult travel.

Maoist revolutionaries saw there were "Three Great Lacks" in old
Tibet: lack of fuel, lack of communications, and lack of people. The
revolutionaries analyzed that these "Three Great Lacks" were not
mainly caused by the physical conditions, but by the social system.
The Maoists said that the "Three Great Lacks" were caused by the
"Three Abundances" in Tibetan society: "Abundant poverty, abundant
oppression and abundant fear of the supernatural."

Class Society in Old Tibet
Tibet was a feudal society before the revolutionary changes that
started in 1949. There were two main classes: the serfs and the
aristocratic serf owners. The people lived like serfs in Europe's
"Dark Ages," or like African slaves and sharecroppers of the U.S.
South.

Tibetan serfs scratched barley harvest from the hard earth with wooden
plows and sickles. Goats, sheep and yaks were raised for milk, butter,
cheese and meat. The aristocratic and monastery masters owned the
people, the land and most of the animals. They forced the serfs to
hand over most grain and demanded all kinds of forced labor (called
ulag). Among the serfs, both men and women participated in hard labor,
including ulag. The scattered nomadic peoples of Tibet's barren
western highlands were also owned by lords and lamas.

The Dalai Lama's older brother Thubten Jigme Norbu claims that in the
lamaist social order, "There is no class system and the mobility from
class to class makes any class prejudice impossible." But the whole
existence of this religious order was based on a rigid and brutal
class system.

Serfs were treated like despised "inferiors"--the way Black people
were treated in the Jim Crow South. Serfs could not use the same
seats, vocabulary or eating utensils as serf owners. Even touching one
of the master's belongings could be punished by whipping. The masters
and serfs were so distant from each other that in much of Tibet they
spoke different languages.

It was the custom for a serf to kneel on all fours so his master could
step on his back to mount a horse. Tibet scholar A. Tom Grunfeld
describes how one ruling class girl routinely had servants carry her
up and down stairs just because she was lazy. Masters often rode on
their serfs' backs across streams.

The only thing worse than a serf in Tibet was a "chattel slave," who
had no right to even grow a few crops for themselves. These slaves
were often starved, beaten and worked to death. A master could turn a
serf into a slave any time he wanted. Children were routinely bought
and sold in Tibet's capital, Lhasa. About 5 percent of the Tibetan
people were counted as chattel slaves. And at least another 10 percent
were poor monks who were really "slaves in robes."

The lamaist system tried to prevent any escape. Runaway slaves
couldn't just set up free farms in the vast empty lands. Former serfs
explained to revolutionary writer Anna Louise Strong that before
liberation, "You could not live in Tibet without a master. Anyone
might pick you up as an outlaw unless you had a legal owner."

Born Female--Proof of Past Sins?
The Dalai Lama writes, "In Tibet there was no special discrimination
against women." The Dalai Lama's authorized biographer Robert Hicks
argues that Tibetan women were content with their status and
"influenced their husbands." But in Tibet, being born a woman was
considered a punishment for "impious" (sinful) behavior in a previous
life. The word for "woman" in old Tibet, kiemen, meant "inferior
birth." Women were told to pray, "May I reject a feminine body and be
reborn a male one."

Lamaist superstition associated women with evil and sin. It was said
"among ten women you'll find nine devils." Anything women touched was
considered tainted--so all kinds of taboos were placed on women. Women
were forbidden to handle medicine. Han Suyin reports, "No woman was
allowed to touch a lama's belongings, nor could she raise a wall, or
'the wall will fall.'... A widow was a despicable being, already a
devil. No woman was allowed to use iron instruments or touch iron.
Religion forbade her to lift her eyes above the knee of a man, as
serfs and slaves were not allowed to life the eyes upon the face of
the nobles or great lamas."

Monks of the major sects of Tibetan Buddhism rejected sexual intimacy
(or even contact) with women, as part of their plan to be holy. Before
the revolution, no woman had ever set foot in most monasteries or the
palaces of the Dalai Lama.

There are reports of women being burned for giving birth to twins and
for practicing the pre-Buddhist traditional religion (called Bon).
Twins were considered proof that a woman had mated with an evil
spirit. The rituals and folk medicine of Bon were considered
"witchcraft." Like in other feudal societies, upperclass women were
sold into arranged marriages. Custom allowed a husband to cut off the
tip of his wife's nose if he discovered she had slept with someone
else. The patriarchal practices included polygyny, where a wealthy man
could have many wives; and polyandry, where in land-poor noble
families one woman was forced to be wife to several brothers.

Among the lower classes, family life was similar to slavery in the
U.S. South. (See The Life of a Tibetan Slave.) Serfs could not marry
or leave the estate without the master's permission. Masters
transferred serfs from one estate to another at will, breaking up serf
families forever. Rape of women serfs was common--under the ulag
system, a lord could demand "temporary wives."

The Three Masters
The Tibetan people called their rulers "the Three Great Masters"
because the ruling class of serf owners was organized into three
institutions: the lama monasteries possessed 37 percent of the
cultivated land and pasture in old Tibet; the secular aristocracy 25
percent; and the remaining 38 percent was in the hands of the
government officials appointed by the Dalai Lama's advisors.

About 2 percent of Tibet's population was in this upper class, and an
additional 3 percent were their agents, overseers, stewards, managers
of estates and private armies. The ger-ba, a tiny elite of about 200
families, ruled at the top. Han Suyin writes: "Only 626 people held 93
percent of all land and wealth and 70 percent of all the yaks in
Tibet. These 626 included 333 heads of monasteries and religious
authorities, and 287 lay authorities (including the nobles of the
Tibetan army) and six cabinet ministers."

Merchants and handicraftsmen also belonged to a lord. A quarter of the
population in the capital city of Lhasa survived by begging from
religious pilgrims. There was no modern industry or working class.
Even matches and nails had to be imported. Before the revolution, no
one in Tibet was ever paid wages for their work.

The heart of this system was exploitation. Serfs worked 16- or 18-hour
days to enrich their masters--keeping only about a quarter of the food
they raised.

A. Tom Grunfeld writes: "These estates were extremely lucrative. One
former aristocrat noted that a 'small' estate would typically consist
of a few thousand sheep, a thousand yaks, an undetermined number of
nomads and two hundred agricultural serfs. The yearly output would
consist of over 36,000 kg (80,000 lbs.) of grain, over 1,800 kg (4,000
lbs.) of wool and almost 500 kg (1,200 lbs.) of butter... A government
official had 'unlimited powers of extortion' and could make a fortune
from his powers to extract bribes not to imprison and punish
people.... There was also the matter of extracting monies from the
peasantry beyond the necessary taxes."

The ruling serf owners were parasites. One observer, Sir Charles Bell,
described a typical official who spent an hour a day at his official
duties. Upper class parties lasted for days of eating, gambling and
lying around. The aristocratic lamas also never worked. They spent
their days chanting, memorizing religious dogma and doing nothing.

The Monasteries: Strongholds of Feudalism
Defenders of old Tibet portray Lamaist Buddhism as the essence of the
culture of the people of Tibet. But it was really nothing more or less
than the ideology of a specific oppressive social system. The lamaist
religion itself is exactly as old as feudal class society. The first
Tibetan king, Songsten-gampo, established a unified feudal system in
Tibet, around 650 A.D. He married princesses from China and Nepal in
order to learn from them the practices used outside Tibet to carry out
feudalism. These princesses brought Tantric Buddhism to Tibet, where
it was merged with earlier animist beliefs to create a new religion,
Lamaism.

This new religion had to be imposed on the people over the next
century and a half by the ruling class, using violence. King Trosong
Detsen decreed: "He who shows a finger to a monk shall have his finger
cut off; he who speaks ill of the monks and the king's Buddhist policy
shall have his lips cut off; he who looks askance at them shall have
his eyes put out..."

Between the 1400s and the 1600s, a bloody consolidation of power took
place, the abbots of the largest monasteries seized overall power.
Because these abbots practiced anti-woman celibacy, their new
political system could not operate by hereditary father-to-son
succession. So the lamas created a new doctrine for their religion:
They announced that they could detect newborn children who were
reincarnations of dead ruling lamas. Hundreds of top lamas were
declared "Living Buddhas" (Bodhisattvas) who had supposedly ruled
others for centuries, switching to new bodies occasionally as old host
bodies wore out.

The central symbol of this system, the various men called Dalai Lama,
was said to be the early Tibetan nature-god Chenrezig who had simply
reappeared in 14 different bodies over the centuries. In fact, only
three of the 14 Dalai Lamas actually ruled. Between 1751 and 1950,
there was no adult Dalai Lama on the throne in Tibet 77 percent of the
time. The most powerful abbots ruled as "regent" advisors who trained,
manipulated and even assassinated the child-king Dalai Lamas.

Tibetan monasteries were not holy, compassionate Shangrilas, like in
some New Age fantasy. These monasteries were dark fortresses of feudal
exploitation--they were armed villages of monks complete with military
warehouses and private armies. Pilgrims came to some shrines to pray
for a better life. But the main activity of monasteries was robbing
the surrounding peasants. The huge idle religious clergy grew little
food--feeding them was a big burden on the people.

The largest monasteries housed thousands of monks. Each "parent"
monastery created dozens (even hundreds) of small strongholds
scattered through the mountain valleys. For example, the huge Drepung
monastery housed 7,000 monks and owned 40,000 people on 185 different
estates with 300 pastures.

Monasteries also made up countless religious taxes to rob the people--
including taxes on haircuts, on windows, on doorsteps, taxes on
newborn children or calves, taxes on babies born with double
eyelids...and so on. A quarter of Drepung's income came from interest
on money lent to the serf-peasantry. The monasteries also demanded
that serfs hand over many young boys to serve as child-monks.

The class relations of Tibet were reproduced inside the monasteries:
the majority of monks were slaves and servants to the upper abbots and
lived half-starved lives of menial labor, prayer chanting and routine
beatings. Upper monks could force poor monks to take their religious
exams or perform sexual services. (In the most powerful Tibetan sect,
such homosexual sex was considered a sign of holy distance from
women.) A small percent of the clergy were nuns.

After liberation, Anna Louise Strong asked a young monk, Lobsang Tel