Learning to Serve and to Roam You Could Ask Almost Any Tibetan

CHAPTER FIVE LEARNING TO SERVE AND TO ROAM You could ask almost any Tibetan secondary student in Tibet or the diaspora where the writing system for Tibetan came from and they would tell you the story of King Songtsen Gampo and his seven ministers. While it is unclear if this story recounts actual events, it is the most well known account regarding the origins of the Tibetan writing system and as such is part of Tibetans’ collective memory. Through its retelling to successive generations of Tibetan children, it has helped to shape ideologies of literacy by linking the writing system to Tibetan religion and the Tibetan nation-state. In this version of the origination story, King Songtsen Gampo, the sixth century ruler of Tibet, is credited with having sent seven government ministers to India with the mission of bringing back a writing system that could be used to translate Buddhist texts into Tibetan. These ministers, however, met with many hardships while in India. Six of the ministers succumbed to illness or disease, leaving Thonmi Sambhota the sole minis- ter to return to Tibet with the writing system they had developed from the Indian Devanagari script. So famous is the story of this perilous journey and successful return that a statue of Thonmi Sambhota today stands in the main courtyard at the Tibetan Academy of Social Sciences in Lhasa. Outside the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in McLeod Ganj, there is a mural depicting him sitting cross-legged writing the Tibetan alphasyllabary1 on parchment. The story of the Tibetan script, King Songtsen Gampo, and Thonmi Sambhota, however, is more than just a tale of adventure and adversity. According to this widely known story, the King’s desire for a writing system stemmed from the perceived need to translate the Indian Buddhist texts into the Tibetan language. While it is probably more accurate that the King planned to use writing for keeping bureaucratic records (Snell- grove and Richardson 1995) rather than the spreading of Buddhism, today he is credited only with the latter motivation. Nevertheless, the telling 1 See Swank (2008) for a discussion of this terminology. 92 chapter five of this story establishes a connection between writing, religion and the Tibetan nation-state at the origins of Tibetan literacy. These connections have continued through to the present. As Tsering Shakya (1999, 158) stated, throughout Tibetan history “Tibetans have viewed writing as sacred . [and] primarily associated with Buddhism.” One of the main reasons for the persistence of this association is that King Songtsen Gampo was thought to be the incarnation of the patron deity of Tibet, Avalokitesvara, who afterward incarnated in the form of the Dalai Lamas starting from the seventeenth century. This historical continuity between the beginnings of Tibetan literacy and the present day has cre- ated an indexical relationship—“a linkage of speech [or here, writing] with social structure and cultural meaning” (Inoue 2006, 75)—between religion, the nation-state, and writing that has recontextualized (Ochs 1990) the past, creating a history in which literacy is, and was since its sixth century origins, intertwined with a Tibetan society that was neither under the rule of China or reconstituted in exile in India. While this indexical relationship between Tibetan writing, religion, and a pre-1950s Tibetan nation-state has persisted on both sides of the Hima- laya, it has undergone changes along differing paths. Yet in both com- munities (i.e. in exile and in Tibet) this indexical relationship is exploited through their respective educational institutions. In Tibetan exile schools, historical data on Tibet presented through the curriculum paint a picture of Tibet as something of a utopia, while in schools on the Tibetan plateau pre-1950s Tibet is framed as more of a dystopia. In McLeod Ganj, Tibetan literacy, as part of a language, culture, and religion triad, is seen as a means of preserving a ‘pure’ Tibetan nation- state. It is, further, the particular responsibility of youth in exile to preserve their culture (including literacy) for a return to a free Tibet. According to Nawang Phuntsog (1998, 36), “Tibetan children in exile share a responsibility to play a vital role in the struggle to free Tibet: they are the dream- keepers of an independent nation.” However, the stories and images of pre-1950s Tibet that are taught in the exile schools do not necessarily por- tray the realities of that era. Instead, “what is presented is a necessarily remembered or imagined Tibet” (Hess 2009, 56). An analogous process of remembering is present in the educational institutions in Chinese Tibet. Following the nationalist unrest in Tibet and pro-democracy demon- strations in Tiananmen and across China in the late 1980s as well as the relatively liberal education policies of the early to mid-1980s, including teaching Tibetan students about Tibetan culture in their native language, education in Chinese Tibet shifted toward a curriculum emphasizing economic advancements achieved under Chinese rule. In particular, one .

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