Trauma, Despair and Faith: Generational Resonances in Exiled Tibetans

Abstract

Since the Holocaust much has been written about the violent horrors of the last and the present century. Suddenly recognized as the ‘hated and disowned other’ and driven away from their world of intimate connections, exiled people live with inexpressible angsts which are unconsciously passed on from parents to children, to their children and still further on. The shadow of the past is cast on refugees as unlike on any other diaspora. In spite of, or because of, the lived trauma, sometimes a creative symbolization of losses can take place as the collective makes space for emotional holding. This is indeed rare but not impossible. The present writing dwells on one such collective—the Tibetans housed in India with whom I have worked closely for long as a psychoanalytic researcher. The following account highlights certain ways in which the trauma of uprootedness offsets transgenerational crises and how an exodus acknowledges its past such that a simultaneous remembering and mourning of psychic pain and the carving out of hope is kept alive, especially for those who were exposed to the trials of violent displacement in childhood. Drawing from their inspiring movement that remains imbued by a Buddhist perspective, I also look forward to sharing a few thoughts on healing possibilities which hold restorative value for not only the Tibetans but humanity at large. In a fragmented world torn by the powerful aspiration of each country to become a mighty nation, the Buddhist stress on ‘non-self’ and universal responsibility offers a unique imagination of the ‘nation’ and important insights related to non-violence, forgiveness, compassion, selfhood, and a non-antagonistic relationship with the other—one’s perpetrator. It is of significance to note that such an ambiance is held in place by an attuned spiritual leader, the fourteenth Dalai Lama who mitigates the despair of generations by playing the role of a ‘transitional’ and ‘transformative object’. This writing also dwells on the role of a psychoanalytic researcher as an empathetic witness, a psychic container and a co-traveller.

1. Introduction

‘Tibet in Turmoil’

For us it has been different than for any other oppressed group. The Germans and the Jews were existing in the same time-space continuum but for us two hundred years of life and history were condensed in a single moment of take over and expulsion…. How could have our parents made sense of this massive trauma?

(Jamyang Norbu in Vahali 2020, p. 41)

Tibet is the tenth largest country and the biggest geographical colony across the globe and the Tibetans are amongst the most violently suppressed people (Kong 2018; Gyatso 2001). Yet the story of Tibet offers a counter narrative to the usual cyclical repetition of history as ‘today’s victim becomes tomorrow’s victimizer’.

To briefly recapitulate, the power balance between Tibet and China has oscillated since the 13th century on one or the other side. In the 20th century, after a decade of tussle between the local Tibetan people and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China, in March 1959 armed Chinese troops laid siege to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet and within three days they defeated the 80,000 resisting Tibetans by their sheer military power. Under the cover of darkness, the 24-year-old spiritual and political head of the country, Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama made a heroic escape and sought asylum in India. In the next decade, over 100,000 refugees followed the Dalai Lama into refuge (Platt 1995). Since then, the refugee community has been surviving under circumstances marked by uprootedness and ongoing upheavals. Overnight from being persons, thousands became ‘nobodies’, invisible entities destined to live the fallouts of a choiceless historical fate.

More recently, hundreds of Tibetan torture survivors—ex-political prisoners incarcerated by the Chinese State have taken asylum in India. So far more than 1.2 million (one fourth) of the 6+ million total population of Tibetans have been killed under the Chinese occupation in prisons, under torture and other State sponsored programmes, including public trials, in which children and disciples were interned or forced to execute their parents and spiritual mentors (Lutzer and Mathiasen 1992). A majority of Tibet’s 6000+ ancient monasteries and heritage sites have been demolished. In effect, in the last 60+ years, inside Tibet, Tibetans have suffered cultural and religious genocide and near total loss of human rights (Gyatso 1989). There has been a systematic rewriting of the history of Tibet such that children living in occupied Tibet were cut off from the perils borne by their parents who could not speak or share out of fear of State terror (Vyugan 1994). A powerful conspiracy of silence enveloped the relationship between grandparents, parents and children with the younger generation being divorced from their spiritual heritage, also former ways of life (Vahali 2020).

In the collective psyche the above are relegated to the space of unspeakable dreads and primitive anxieties leaving adults and children to grapple with the forceful unconscious returns and multiple manifestations of trauma (Hernandez 1998). Within such circumstances, any attempt at ameliorating distress can imaginably only lead to partial healing with vast arenas of the psyche still remaining under siege. In this sense the restorative directions that this reflection draws attention to need to be heard in relation to the resonances of despair that continue to echo in the refugee population (Alcock 2003). Moreover, while underscoring the uplifting possibilities in the Tibetan group self, this writing nowhere suggests that the following account speaks equally on behalf of all Tibetans. The purpose is to bring into focus certain crucial refrains in their transgenerational landscape which offer a direction for the experienced angst to be meaningfully engaged with.

2. Reflections on Methodology and My Personal Association with the Tibetan Diaspora

The Tibetan diaspora and the Sino-Tibetan context have been of interest to social scientists, particularly sociologists (Thapan 2016), anthropologists, historians and political scientists (Ahmad 2012; Mishra 2014). Tibet has also brought about a renewed curiosity in Buddhist philosophy as well as its healing dimensions (Brach 2009). However, so far very few psychological researchers have fully acknowledged their human condition or attended, in-depth, to the multidimensionality of their experiences. Most psychological efforts have used the medically oriented model of post-traumatic stress disorder or have ended up representing the Tibetans as ‘resilient Buddhists’ (Sachs et al. 2008; Terheggen et al. 2001). While the former approach undermines the structural and historical dimensions of their suffering, laying stress on the individual as the symptom bearer; the latter too becomes reductive as it paints a larger-than-life picture of the Tibetans as survivors. Research that fails to take into account the contextual dimensions of refugees’ experiences may end up negating their lived realities further and thus perpetuating the cycle of re-victimising those whose identities have already been under attack. In order to respectfully explore complex transgenerational themes, one needs to be well-acquainted with a perspective that is at once ‘inwardly deep going’ and also sensitively aligned to notions of socio-political justice.

My explorations took me to psychohistory—a methodology and method that on the one hand, questions the hegemonic power of history as being a ‘linear, rational and singular enterprise with any particular historical version as representing ‘The Truth’. On the other hand, while going beyond rationality and valuing the unconscious as an important source of knowledge, psychohistory questions the tendency of mainstream psychoanalysis to ignore the impact of social forces and structural oppression on the human psyche. It remains involved with the forceful influence of significant historical events on individuals and collectives even as they constantly co-create one another (Kakar 1970). Central to this framework are the notions of ‘crises’ and the ‘historical moment‘.

Within this perspective--experience, time and space are conceptualised as following a non-linear course with ‘ancient issues reemerging in ever new forms’ (Erikson 1994). Human life is understood as a struggle with tendencies of breakdown and breakthrough lying in the close neighbourhood of one another. The life history approach is premised on the belief that ‘even as one falls apart, one is holding so much of one’s world together’ (Lifton 1975). Hence the researcher remains involved with an entire continuum ranging from themes of loss and fragmentation to partial restitution, resilience and even the rebirth of the self. Such an understanding opens an avenue to engage with the psychological aftermath of socio-politically induced trauma without individualizing it or taking a quick resort to psychopathological categories.

Psychobiographies, life stories and narratives form the sources of data. A long training in working with human subjectivity, particularly in sensing unconscious themes (first and foremost, one’s own) and affective states in intersubjective domains precedes the researcher’s advent into the field. By associating with the lived experience of the participant, the researcher empathetically follows the narrator’s attempts at formulating and reformulating the stories of his/her life. Viewed from this angle, the very act of narrating one’s story is an intrinsic part of negotiating with one’s experiences and even life itself. As consistent analytic emphasis demands self-awareness, the psychohistorian remains self-reflexively aware of her influence and responsibility in the process of formulating and representing human narratives. The researcher’s listening standpoint priorities those aspects in communication which are otherwise difficult to articulate or are likely to be neglected, omitted or socially suppressed. Given that a psychoanalytic clinician-researcher has a rigorous training in receiving and processing uncomfortable and pain-laden feeling states, the researcher serves the role of a psychic container and co-traveller. In other words, the researcher is not merely seeking to ‘move on after collecting data’ but she often stays long enough with the participant as a fellow being, till the participant reaches a greater sense of connection and integration with one’s personal life story. This in other words is the psychoanalytic meaning of ‘bearing witness’ to aspects of another’s life which are evocatively charged.

My connection with the Tibetans dates back to the early years of my childhood as I grew up in the Himalayas where a sizable section of Tibetan refugees too lived. As an adult, however, I have been involved with them for the last 25 years. I have extensively researched and written about the experiential continuities and disruptions across three generations of refugees and the psychological states of ‘recent arrivals’ as well as that of Tibetan torture survivors1.

Using the multimodal and sensorial psychoanalytic framework of listening where words and nonverbal modes of communication are considered rich signifiers of meanings exceeding the stated ones, I approached exiled Tibetans in an attempt to understand the impact of the historical moment of ‘expulsion’ on the flows of their transgenerational life. My training as a psycho historical researcher enabled me to use my subjectivity reflexively in sensing unconscious themes and intersubjective, including reveries and counter-transferential dynamics that emerged in the rhythms of our meetings. My personal history of belonging to a displaced family subsequent to the aftermath of the Indian subcontinent’s partition into India and Pakistan in 1947 helped me to connect with the anguish of my Tibetan fellow beings. It also posed a continuing challenge. “Disciplining the use of my subjectivity” as I listened to the Tibetans’ life stories, I traversed through rich spaces of identification and emotional differentiation (Erikson 1978). As this longitudinal, narrative-based work deepened, I realised the significance of complementing my training in psychoanalysis with contextually embedded and culturally proximal Buddhist and eastern understandings—the ‘life-world’ within which the Tibetans breathed and made sense of their ‘life-themes’. The journey has been an enriching one, with evolving and transformative possibilities for my personhood and professional identity.

The fieldwork for this effort was carried out in intermittent phases between the years 1996 and 2007 and then again from 2015–2019 in the second largest Tibetan settlement in India—at Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh. A long-term contact with several of the Tibetan participants was maintained. The research was purposive as I was guided by a search for a representation of life as lived by the exiled Tibetan community as a whole. In spite of the participants’ initial hesitations, as the communication deepened, most found our conversations to be worthwhile. Notwithstanding my teething doubts and their resistances, I was in fact surprised by the urgent need in most to share about their past. Many had never spoken openly about the same with their parents, children, or anyone in their extended network of relations. Several urged me to write about their collective fate. The hope that I would, as a researcher, take their stories to the world at large was one of the wishes they repeatedly deposited in me. I have borne that wish in my being and it has shaped my writings. However, the sensitive political context within which these conversations took place and their possible consequences for my participants and their family members added to my ethical responsibilities as I set forth to present their voices. In some instances, I changed their names and hid details that could identify them; in others I sought their permission and shared drafts of my writing before the research went for publication.

As mentioned above, a special regard for intersubjective dynamics and ethical considerations was at the heart of my research. As this work involved a recounting of painful parts of my respondents’ past, even prior to embarking on the field, I benefitted from the inputs of the research ethics committee of the University of Delhi, India, where this work was initially proposed as a doctoral research. Subsequently too, close supervision was sought from my doctoral supervisor who is a trained psychodynamic clinician. I also took dilemmas from field work to a peer supervision group that met regularly through the years. As the research deepened, concerns related to the same were taken up in my psychoanalytic training and personal work too. Research related to trauma and its vicissitudes poses fresh challenges at every twist and turn. I grappled with the same, including the emotional impact on myself as I became a listener to intense affects, especially the stories of Tibetan survivors of torture and even those who were grappling with multiple separations and losses. At different phases I needed support and holding myself.

In this particular writing, I am limiting myself to explore the psychological struggles of those who witnessed violence and experienced uproootedness in childhood. There are rich dimensions to the experience of this generation which propel me, in particular, to direct attention towards them. Caught between the vicissitudes of history, they have inherited a pain laden emotional legacy from their parents’ interrupted lives. In addition, their personal biographies remain under the grip of unfolding (unconscious) meanings associated with the early trauma they had themselves been subjected to. Further, as children of refugees who occupy the in-between-space, they are entrusted with the task to carve out hope and a sense of future for their children’s generation. It is as if despair and hope have become their constant companions. In the account below, I endeavor to say something of value about their existence in a ‘third space’ where loss and creativity, life and death themes and meaning and futility can co-exist. This is a space of paradoxes, held in place by the symbolization of losses and a return to faith made possible by distinctive processes in the larger community.

In the following pages time and again I return to the voices of my Tibetan fellow beings. In line with emancipatory frameworks of research, I believe that the power of their articulation best represents their lived trials. In the meaning making process, I remain a follower without desiring to impose my perspective or voice ‘over’ theirs.

3. Actualizing the Paradox: Creativity amidst Despair

Journeys of traumatized Tibetan Children

Refugee

When I was born

My mother said you are a refugee…

On your forehead between your eyebrows

There is an R embossed

My teacher said

I scratched and scrubbed

On my forehead I found

A brash of red pain

(Tenzin Tsundue 2004)

Thousands of Tibetan children were orphaned as their parents died during the transition. They were brought up in Tibetan Children’s Villages by foster mothers—women who had themselves lost their children or were widowed during the transition into exile (Vyugan 1994). Others were infants, babies or little ones as they made their advent into the refuge. Still others were born in those early years to refugee parents who themselves were struggling to survive under very difficult conditions. Recounting those years, Jetsun Pema, the sister of the Dalai Lama writes:

The scene at Mcleod Ganj was one of complete chaos; three buildings, just one shop and canvas tents everywhere. The Tibetans were in rags, children crying and trembling with cold and fear and the women seemed stunned by the weight of their misfortune. What suffering must have they gone through before arriving at this town of misery?

(Pema 1997, p. 29)

Some of those who as children lost their homeland carry distinctive memories of what they had left behind; others have a mental haze that covers the aches experienced during those early years. However irrespective of whether they retain vivid personal memories or otherwise, all have inherited a powerful legacy of losses. The unstated but palpably felt echoes from the collective past became loud whispers inscribing their psyche with indelible marks. Growing up with emotionally vulnerable parents or in Tibetan Children’ Villages; in schools and Tibetans settlements too, as their shared past was constantly reemphasized their developmental trajectories fused with the same.

By the time I met her, Phonstok Dolma had reached middle age. She was extremely eager to talk about her memories of flight from Tibet. On the way her mother had given birth to her little brother and died in the process. A stunned little girl, Dolma, had at age 12 become ‘mother’ nursing her newborn brother. There was little space for her to mourn her own ‘beloved mother’ lying dead close by. Subsequently too as a refugee, she has felt overwhelmed by the hardships that life has continuingly thrown at her. It has been difficult for her to find the space or time to absorb the emotional impact of the same. Forty years later on when she spoke to me, she particularly stressed on fears of being erased, forgotten and wiped out as a refugee. In the process of her passionate narration, at one time, she wept bitterly saying:

“…for how long will we be able to tell our children where we came from… and for how long will our children be able to hold onto the idea of an imagined past”.

At this moment she entrusted me with the responsibility to write about her life. As her listener, I became the repository of her powerful emotions and the witness she had been waiting for all her life. Hence it is hardly surprising that twenty years later too, the story of Dolma’s life continues to stir my conscience.

Like in other historical survivors, in Tibetans too there is a need to protect their parents. Similar to ‘children of the holocaust’, they remain preoccupied with recovery, restitution and the symbolic completion of their parents’ interrupted life cycle (Bergmann and Jucovy 1982). They are also sensitive to separations and carry the desire to ‘protect suffering people in general.’ And like refugees elsewhere, a part of them too seeks “identity via engagement with others pain; this exposes them to feelings of vulnerability but also special humane strengths, stamina and abilities” (Wardi 1991).

The urgent need to recover the past and make some sense of it propels the refugee’s child to find ways of integrating experiences which otherwise would have remained unknowable and inexpressible (Winnicott 1965). This directs us to the specific difficulties which many children of survivors have with growing up in families where an awareness of their parents’ past and continued suffering is ever-present but rarely explicitly mentioned (Bettelheim 1979). Often in these families a protective collusion of silence seems to have developed between parents and children in an attempt to ward off the effects of the traumatic events and the overwhelming losses which the parents had experienced. Works from the holocaust and from immigrant populations, particularly Jewish families who emigrated from Eastern Europe during the early part of the last century, point towards this powerful intergenerational dynamic (Bergmann and Jucovy 1982).

Ani Dawa, a second-generation Tibetan nun, shared she was in her mother’s womb when the latter reached India. On the way, her father died and so had seven of her older siblings. Ani Dawa ‘factually knew’ these tragic aspects of her familial history but her mother did not speak about them to her daughter. With the conscious intent of sparing her mother further pain, Ani Dawa never questioned or showed curiosity. I wondered whether her choice of participating in the mother’s ‘empire of silence’ was unconsciously guided by somewhere sensing that ‘emotional knowledge’ of familial events which predated her birth would be too much to bear. A compassionate person, she finally chose to become a nun. I thought to myself that beyond all rational reasons, was Ani Dawa’s choice to join the nunnery a way of coming to term with the impossibilities of her intergenerational past and making ‘the intolerable, tolerable’? (Bion 1962) By ‘relinquishing’ the world of ‘desire and anxiety’, as a Buddhist nun she no longer needed to go into the specifics of her personal life history. This choice led to the silencing of questions which she never dared to pose or ask.

Thinking of Ani Dawa, my mind returns to Choeling, a sensitive woman who was ten at the time when her father and paternal uncle were both killed as part of the Tibetan rebellion of 1959 in Lhasa. Along with her mother, she had gone to identify them amongst the dead lying on the streets strewn with blood. The powerful memory of a gushing wind sweeping by and herself as a little child trying to find her father amongst a row of adult, parental-like dead bodies lying still on the ground, has never faded from her mind. And yet she could not openly talk about it to her mother who subsequently lost several other family members too. Like Dawa’s mother, hers too maintained silence around these grief-laden aspects. The daughter intuited her mother’s distress and submerged her distinctive needs by fusing with her mother’s way of being.

During our conversations, she elaborated on the forceful resonances the date of her mother’s death—10 March 1982—evoked in her. It was not only capable of arousing intense feelings about her mother’s loss but also of the loss of her country, 10 March 1959 being the day of the Tibetan uprising against the Chinese invasion. That her mother departed on a day which held enormous significance for the community, had for Choeling, led to an entangled psychological fusion of the personal, historical and the political. This further complicated processes of mourning and healing. In her reminiscences she spoke of grieving for her mother and her homeland in a seamless, boundaryless manner.

Like Ani Dawa’s and Choeling’s account, there are relatable narratives from life-story interviews with adult children of Holocaust survivors as recounted in the ‘Living Memory of the Jewish Community Project’. One woman in her early 40s, interviewed for the National Life Story Collection, described how as a child the Holocaust images of her mother’s recurrent nightmares were reflected in her own nightmares and that she just ‘picked up the atmosphere’ without being told about or knowing it (Bergmann and Jucovy 1982).

Carrying similar resonances, many other Tibetans too shared reminiscences of ‘having bodily sensed and picked up the atmosphere’ as children. Without comprehending the disintegration that their country was undergoing they had begun to sense ‘grave events’ enter into their lives through silences, tense parental interactions, closed neighbourhood doors, vacant houses and the sudden loss of familiar faces around them. For those who travelled to India with family members, the losses during flight and thereafter were far too tremendous to be given voice to or shared by parents and elders. Nevertheless, for the children it became imperative to somehow fill the gaps and recreate the missing links of their parents’ past by inventing probable stories. It is as if they have thereafter never forgotten the stories, which were in fact, were never told to them. The effects on the then growing Tibetan children’s psyche are closely in line with research on second generation holocaust survivors the notion of post memory (Rony 2021). The recently emerging literature on post memory (Spitzer and Hirsch 2010; Rony 2021) has in depth explored the unconscious dynamics through which powerful experiences, including dreads, fears and anxiety laden losses—in effect the ‘hauntings of the past’, that ‘cannot’ or ‘must not’ be shared by survivors are communicated from one generation to the other, and beyond, through a sympathetic elaboration of fantasies and other evocatively charged imaginative processes. (Spitzer and Hirsch 2010). For the then growing Tibetan children too, the parental and community’s experience of being rendered refugees, has been transmitted so deeply and affectively that events which preceded their birth and consciousness, continue to forcefully colour their psyche; shaping and defining their present life choices, commitments and preoccupations. Defying attempts at narrative reconstruction, the impact of the above exceed the mind’s capacity to integrate or comprehend complex dimensions of one’s ‘emotional inheritance’ (Atlas 2022). Here it is of value to note that, while receiving narrations of persecution and resultant complications, including the marginality and social invisibility suffered by refugees, the listener-researcher is required to function as a psychological container for depositions of trauma, including complicated projections (Bion 1962; Bollas 1987). During our conversations, I often became the ‘significant other’ with whom ‘a beginning’ was made. As I stayed long enough to listen, participating in their attempts at constructing, reconstructing and reworking narrative figments from their biographies, they began to process hitherto indigestible emotional states. In the process I became the ‘other ‘who stood to validate their difficult emotional legacies.

At another front, it remains of me to mention that the violent assault of uprootedness during childhood has initiated in them an ever-continuing exploratory journey. While this has meant grappling with grief, it has also simultaneously taken them to distinctive spaces of resilience and creativity (Vyugan 1994; Hollander 1998). It may be worthwhile to remember that it is to this generation that a confluence of expressive and distinctive Tibetan voices belong—of artists, intellectuals, historians, spiritual teachers, writers and political activists—representing significant aspects of the Tibetan ‘group Self’. As Bhuchung, a creative writer expressed:

History is living and any imagination of the future rests in the understanding of the past…as refugees we have to take care of our collective narrative, nurture it carefully.

(In Vahali 2020, p. 89)

As activists and thinkers, they take pride in their cultural values and yet creatively question, stretch and redefine the possible meanings of their identity as Tibetans. From a ‘God’ to be worshipped, for them the Dalai Lama has become a ‘spiritual politician’ who can be engaged with and internalized as a ‘real’ benevolent parental figure. This movement assumes a special relevance in the history of a formerly feudal society which demanded unquestioning submission to power—the most indisputable symbol of which has always been the institution and political seat of the Dalai Lama. The confidence in them that allows dialogue and sometimes defiance vis-à-vis this ‘real father-figure’ affirms healthy self-pride, also heralds a democratic space birthing newer subjective possibilities.

In effect, caught between the currents of history and the interplay of generations, they carry parental burdens in such a manner that, from the darkness of despair, some rays of hope can indeed shine to illuminate their children’s future. Themselves traumatised in childhood, as middle-aged people today, they identify with liminal and in-between spaces. They have found ‘a home’ in paradoxes and in provisional ‘in-between’ domains of hope and hopelessness and despair and faith. Marking their preoccupations are concerns about nation and nationlessness, past and future, remembering and forgetting, and holding on and giving up. However, a distinctive feature emerging from this generation’s work and writing is their clear claim over Tibet as a political entity. Their criticism of communism, too, is not prejudiced. Rather, it is based on a thorough reading of socialist theory and its failure in the Tibetan and Chinese context.

Given their intellectual preoccupations and capacity for critical thinking, we could say that they symbolize important aspects of the Tibetan ‘mind’ and conscience. Through their chosen trajectories, they strive to hold together the foundational pillars of intellection and those of ethics. Some of them have also become interested in reconceptualising spirituality and Buddhism as an engaged force of committed social action.

4. Faith and Reconciliation

Sometimes in the darkness of the night or in the space of silence, the Chinese too must be reflecting on their action…Millions of Chinese are suppressed by their own government. We must not forget that their suffering is the same as that of the Tibetans.

(Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama)

The Tibetan context suggests that when the crisis is of a shared nature, to a large extent, its restitution also lies in the collective cultural imaginary. The coming together of the individual and the community creates a flow of psychic energy, contributing to and redefining the contours of one another (Alcock 2003). Thus, for trauma to be historicized and given a place in the past where it actually belongs, a reflection on the meaning of life—of what it had meant prior to one’s losses and what it has come to mean subsequently for oneself and for one’s children is required (Bragin 2019; Hernandez 1998). The process of reconciling with one’s ‘fate’ takes place through many spontaneously emerging subtle routes, some conscious and many more unconscious—like lingering emotions, repetitive dreams and phantasies, seemingly incidental life trajectories and the force propelling passionate commitments. For children of survivors, and children who themselves were traumatized early on in life, psychic healing entails an ongoing cycle of ‘mourning’ which involves an internalization of the suffering—one’s own or of one’s parents/grandparents and its gradual working through (Freud 1917).

What emerges crucially in the Tibetan transgenerational holding of pain, are the meanings ascribed to suffering by the community such that an engagement with lived trauma has enabled a renewal of identity and selfhood for especially those affected in childhood. Re-contextualizing the self and one’s losses within the larger Buddhist framework in which suffering is not only considered ubiquitous but also precious and valuable, the Tibetans’ discourse is of using past agonies as facilitative sources towards achieving spiritual strength (Gyatso 2012). Echoing the Dalai Lama’s vision, it is not rare for Tibetans to consider, ‘’one’s torturer as a teacher for he provides opportunities to practice patience and endurance… And how can one be angry with the perpetrator, deep down he is far more helpless and vulnerable”. Their strivings make us aware of a creative transformation of Buddhist philosophy into an everyday living psychology that (partially) helps ameliorate psychic distress (Brach 2009). The Buddhist emphasis on the inevitability of change and death; the transitoriness and impermanence of existence; the paradoxical play of dependent origination and emptiness; the refutation of the self as independent and self-sufficient and yet, the affirmation of an experiential self; the refusal to give in to ‘othering’ and hatred and the reality of interdependence, compassion and universal responsibility offer a compelling psychology within which containment of emotional upheaval is taking place through distinctive cultural idioms and reparative symbols (Gyatso 2001). Moreover, the Buddhist emphasis on the preciousness of human life, its stress on ‘karma’, and the timely presence of spiritual teachers have provided Tibetans with aspirational ideals to carry on even at times when passive resignation and suicide would have been an easier option (Gyatso 2012).

For those exposed to violence and displacement very early on in life the surrounding chaos felt particularly incomprehensible and destablising (Winnicott 1965). Consequently, an active reworking of Mahayana Buddhism into a livable psychology has led to the restoration of a moral universe, where faith and belief in the largeness of life and its benevolent forces has been reaffirmed in spite of the surrounding darkness and engulfing destruction. (Eigen 1981). Mitigating the anguish of historical burdens for traumatized Tibetan children, this is a gift carrying especial significance indeed. As the existentialists say, ultimately the only freedom that humans have is the meaning they can give to their suffering. For three generations of displaced Tibetans and survivors of torture, meaning and mourning have thus constituted the parallel frames within which, as symbolisation has taken place, fresh possibilities of creative living have gotten released (Vahali 2020). Also, the timely presence of a group process—a shared community of the distressed—has made it possible for them to empathetically connect with one other during many trying phases and across geographical locales, be it at refugee camps, work sites, transit homes for children, nunneries and monasteries or supportive homes for ex-political prisoners (Mishra 2014). Serving as transitional phenomenon and transitional objects these collective social forces are contributing to reduce the impact of past traumas and act as a facilitative, nurturing environment heralding the birth of future selves (Winnicott 1965).

Psychic restoration is also made possible by many ritual processes that facilitate remembrances of sorrows in a contained manner by the exiled group and especially their empathetically attuned spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. This had given birth to a third space where self and memory are reworked via reflection. This capacity for ‘thirdness’ counters the pull towards polarisation of the world into immutable binaries of ‘doer’ and ‘done’ (Bragin 2019; Benjamin 2017). In most victim groups an escalation of counter violence and hatred is justified by redirecting memory selectively to freeze the perpetrator as brutal and cruel. This leads to the pitting of a ‘narcissistically vulnerable self’ against the ‘all-powerful other’ who must for ‘justice to prevail’ be avenged and annihilated in the future. In the process, primitive layers of the psyche are activated through projection, projective identification, and dissociation and splitting to maintain the cycle of violence and counter-violence (Volkan 2018).

Acknowledging the trials of his more than six million people, the Dalai Lama actively intervenes and opens creative possibilities for psychic reparation. In the amelioration of their distress, he not only serves the psychological function of being a ‘container’ and ‘transitional object’, but also, ‘witness’ and ‘transformative other’ (Bion 1962; Winnicott 1965). As an attuned mother, he acknowledges the anguish of the Tibetans; receives their suffering with compassion and serves as an empathetic witness who validates their past (Laub 1992). In most of his public lectures he makes a special mention of what all the Tibetans have gone through and also non-judgementally directs attention to their urges of giving in to hatred, counter-violence and othering (Gyatso 2001). He functions as an ethical presence; a ‘transformative object’ (Bollas 1987). As he embraces them within his benevolent care, he reminds them that forgiveness is not an act of forgetting but actually one of remembering for it is only by remembering what one has gone through that true forgiveness can be reached.

However, remembrance of the past, the Dalai Lama contends is not an innocent or neutral act. And so he encourages his Tibetan children to remember their suffering in ways such that it strengthens their faith in Buddhism and makes them truer Tibetans and also humanises the Chinese. In Buddhism the idea of an independent and self-sufficient sense of individual self is contested. So is that of any antagonistic other. There is no external enemy to defeat, avenge or fight. The forces worth mastering are the power of one’s wishes and inner proclivities towards, greed, aversion and hatred. At the relational level, all sentient beings can be identified with as they too desire and suffer like oneself. This is the true foundation of universal responsibility as well as compassion and empathy (Gyatso 2001).

Beyond giving into polarities, there seems to be a self-conscious effort in the Tibetans to remember the past in ways such that compassion and humaneness vis-à-vis the other can be kept alive. When I spoke to ex-political prisoners and while they recounted the horrific years they had spent in Chinese prisons, they remembered to mention small gestures of helpfulness by some of the Chinese people. The same attitude is often observable in those who as children had grown up in India. A number of them repeated the Dalai Lama’s emphasis by saying, “His Holiness reminds us that the Chinese are human beings just like us…some may be harsh but others are ready to help, they too are denied freedom. In fact we have friends and allies inside China, writers, activists and artists like ourselves.” (Tsering 2003).

What is remarkable is that despite their state of exiledom and ‘thrown-ness’, exiled Tibetans rarely consider themselves as weak and helpless. On the contrary, they assert healthy narcissistic pride and think of themselves as stronger in comparison to their Chinese oppressors (Tsundue 2004). A capacity to draw meaning through prayer while facing challenges, even torture, is a frequently shared memory by torture survivors (Gyatso 2001). Similarly, growing up as orphans many had countered the dread of nightmares by creating visualizations of the Dalai Lama uplifting them and holding their hand just as they ‘were about to fall from a high cliff’. The capacity to hallucinate an attuned and kind parental figure in the face of the surrounding bleakness speaks of powerful internalizations of faith in children grappling with losses, helplessness and loneliness (Pema 1997).

In ending this writing, I wish to return to Lhasang Tsering, an activist of yesteryear, who had been uprooted as a child of two. He has no conscious memories from that time. And yet his entire life has been committed to the Tibetan freedom struggle. In his own words:

…Homelessness like hunger is mental and not only physical… Whether or not I have clear memories of the immediate trauma, the tragedy has befallen us…And the more you long to return where you can’t; the pain increases and your entire life and psychology is slowly determined by this single factor.

(In Vahali 2020, p. 65)

His life story signifies a complete circle. As an adolescent, he was acutely sensitive about his refugee status. He reacted strongly to any hint of ‘injustice’ and discrimination directed at his ‘Tibetanness’. His fervent identification led him to serve in Tibetan militant organizations at Mustang. Thereafter he became an educationalist. Ultimately, he helped set up the Amnye Machen Insitute, an institute of Tibetan studies at Dharamsala, India.

From being an angry and passionate young activist, as a middle-aged thinker, Lhasang Tsering articulated a very different vision.

Our struggle is not based on hatred. And this we have to attribute to our culture and most of all to Buddhism. A very large share of the credit must go to His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. Individually, personally and collectively, he is tirelessly teaching the people that one must not nurture hatred…. If we can keep this teaching in mind, we can work to reduce any kind of violence against the Chinese by the Tibetans during the transition to freedom… avoiding any kind of human massacre.

(In Vahali 2020, p. 66)

This ethical concern for safeguarding and respecting the ‘other’—one’s identified perpetrator—runs from the Dalai Lama to Lhasang Tsering to several younger Tibetan activists. It rests on a differentiated insight that the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ are not polarized and that the suffering experienced by oneself must not be perpetuated and inflicted on the ‘other’. Instead, the endured trauma can become a conduit of empathetic imagination facilitating identification with the possible future of the ‘other’. How different is this concern from the usual psychodynamics that follow in most instances when a community is brutally uprooted or ripped apart (Erikson 1994). The resultant psychic splitting makes it so difficult for formerly victimized or expelled groups to self-reflectively engage with, or resist, the unconscious pull towards projection, projective identification, denial, dissociation, and also becoming the next victimizer. Lhasang Tsering’s imaginative futuristic concern for safeguarding the life of Chinese settlers in Tibet invokes a very different sense of ethical and universal responsibility. However, in spite of the faith that embraces him, it is not uncommon for him to touch despair given the unchanging political situation of Tibet. In one such moment, when I was with him, he made a meaningful return by saying:

Whatever you say of Tibet’s freedom, ultimately it is a human struggle and we must continue it on behalf of all the separated mothers and their lost children, on behalf of all the dead and for all the living in Tibet and elsewhere….

(In Vahali 2020, p. 67)

Almost twenty years later on, the resonances of his thoughtful words echo in my mind, as I think of the loss of human lives in contexts of war, colonization and several other forms of socio-political injustice.