A Brief Introduction to Tibet
By Larry
Romanoff, December 26,
2019
Westerners appear to have a willful blindness about
Tibet, with strong opinions often held by those who haven’t been there and
whose knowledge appears gleaned from misguided propaganda in the popular press.
The Western media have imposed on our imaginations an image of a fabled
theocracy where a reincarnated god rules over a peaceful people spinning prayer
wheels in a pastoral idyll. The West’s fascination with Tibet has turned it
into a mythic place upon which we project our dreams and our own spiritual
fantasies. The result is what I call the Shangri-La syndrome (1), millions of
Westerners choosing to believe in an attractive but wholly mythological,
romantic fantasy which has never existed.
The first adjective that would come to mind about
Tibet is ‘desolate’. Those who have been in the far North beyond the Arctic
Circle, or above the tree line in the North American Rocky Mountains or the
European Alps, will have some idea of the Tibetan landscape – which is 10,000
feet above the tree line. There is nothing hospitable about the isolated
conditions or climate in Tibet and few of us would live there by choice. Tibet
is a high-altitude desert with little oxygen, almost no rainfall, and harsh
temperatures. Only sparse numbers of the hardiest animals can survive there
and, in much of the land, the severe climate means that nothing, or almost
nothing, can grow. No one in Tibet has ever seen a tree or even a bush.