Buddha found and lost in the Chinese nation of ‘Diversity in Unity’: Pema Tseden's films as a Buddhist mode of reflexivity

ABSTRACT

This essay examines how, under the conditions that religion has been appropriated to serve political purposes in modern China, the Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden makes use of the Buddhist mode of thought to reflect upon the complex situations his community is facing in order to seek a way of life that has been alienated by many forms of control and infringement. While modernity's impacts are subtly examined and Tibetan traditions are critically reviewed, the reflexivity in Pema Tseden's movies also breaks down the false dichotomies that have been conventionally upheld. Their aesthetic and political productivity precisely lies in the tension between the subjective intervention of telling stories and the muteness of banal realities in Tibet overwhelmed by numerous stereotypical representations.

KEYWORDS:

• Pema Tseden
• Tibet
• Film
• Buddhism
• Reflexivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It was the 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso (1876–1933), who declared Tibet politically independent from China in the early twentieth century, expelled Chinese citizens from the country, and began to modernize the nation.

2. After the establishment of the PRC in 1949, the practice of religion was allowed to continue to some degree until the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. During the decade of the Cultural Revolution, all religious practices were banned, monks were disbanded and most religious buildings were demolished. After the death of Mao and the rise of Deng in 1978, the Chinese government started to offer more cultural and religious autonomy for its citizens including the ethnic minorities. But the revival for Tibetans is not exactly a restoration of all religious practices to their original states since some may have reappeared but somewhat changed, and others may not re-emerge at all.

3. In addition, Tibetan Catholicism, a legacy of the European missionary works of converting the Tibetans to Christianity from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1950s, also comes back with the religious revival in China, further complicating Tibetan identity, if not exerting another centrifugal force on the ethnic community (Lim 2009).

4. Rinpoche is an honorific term, in Tibetan language, for reincarnated notable lama or teacher of Dharma as well as for abbot of monastery.

5. According to Barnett, Longing was the first full-length fiction film shot by Phagmo Tashi in China (or anywhere) in 1992 (2015, 135). But the film did not draw a lot of attention.

6. With limited resources, these independently funded ethnic films usually do not produce a Chinese dubbed version when released on DVD, different from the previous practice.

7. As Mahayana Buddhists say all things have Buddha-nature, so every film is covertly ‘Buddhist film’ (Desmarais 2009). As sci-fi The Matrix (dir. The Wachowskis, 1999) and thriller Donnie Darko (dir. Richard Kelly, 2001) have been included in international Buddhist film festivals, the term ‘Buddhist film’ could refer to films that are never intended to express a Buddhist theme (Whalen-Bridge 2014).

8. The term ‘shaoshu minzu dianying’ (literally, minority nationalities film) was created and has been widely circulated in PRC, but it is more a category or theme than a coherent genre.

9. Western Development campaign (Xibu daikaifa) is a development strategy for China's western region that contains more than 70 percent of the nation's area but whose economy lags far behind the eastern coastal regions.

10. Pema Tseden has not directly dealt with the alcohol abuse issue of the Tibetans in his films, but there are documentaries that touch on alcoholism in China's other minority groups. For example, The Last Moose of Aoluguya (Han da han, dir. Gu Tao, 2013) depicts how the Evenks, nomadic people that hunt and breed reindeer in the forests and mountains of north-eastern China, were forced to move from the forests to a new settlement built by the government. As much of their life as a hunter is gone and their tradition is dying out, they spend most of their days drinking in a suicidal manner.

11. Like all consumer hypes, the Tibetan mastiff mania did not last long. Tibetan mastiffs were once trendy must-have dogs for rich Chinese, selling for more than US$200,000. But declining interest has left many breeders with unwanted dogs that ended up at a slaughterhouse in northeast China where, at about US$5 a head. These once much-sought dogs could have been diced into hot pot ingredients, imitation leather or the lining for winter gloves (Jacobs 2015).

12. ‘Killing the Buddha’ is a Zen koan attributed to the nineteenth century Buddhist master Linji who teaches his students not to turn the Buddha into a concept, a fetish or an entity, and one seeks to be free to these thoughts and concepts.

13. In his critique of Western Buddhism, which may also apply to the Eastern origin, Žižek points out that such thought ‘preaching inner distance and indifference toward the frantic pace of market competition’, is arguably the most efficient way for us fully to participate in capitalist dynamics while maintaining the appearance of mental sanity – in short, the paradigmatic ideology of late capitalism (2003, 26).

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Kwai-Cheung Lo

Kwai-Cheung Lo, professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, and director of Creative and Professional Writing Program at Hong Kong Baptist University, is the author of Excess and Masculinity in Asian Cultural Productions (State University of New York Press, 2010), and Chinese Face/Off: The Transnational Popular Culture of Hong Kong (University of Illinois Press, 2005).