Your Civilization & Ours

Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.

From We Tibetans: An Intimate Picture, by a Woman of Tibet, of an Interesting and Distinctive People, by Rin-Chen Lha-Mo, 1926.

Your Civilization & Ours

If you have come with me as far as this, you will have seen that we are not a primitive people living in a desolate country, as some of your writers have it we are. Just before I came to Europe, a high official connected with Tibetan politics said in my presence, that the Tibetans were a simple people. His remark was so wide of the fact that l could not refrain from laughing. He was embarrassed and said he meant, by simple — honest, direct, unsophisticated, but that was not what he had meant, it did not fit in with the context. He meant we were primitive, childish. He knows we are not so, for he has spent many years matching his wits with Tibetan wits without much result.

He was merely giving utterance to a conventional statement about us put into vogue by the travellers. There were people present who knew nothing about Tibet, and he had no doubt often made this remark before and found it readily acceptable by those ignorant of us. He had not the courage of his own knowledge. It is so much easier to say what is expected than what is true, but contrary to established views. We have a saying that a dog dislikes being shown a stick; man, the truth.

I suppose our distant country holds little of interest for your public except for what of the strange can be written about it, and so you get a strange picture of us.

The most absurd and the most scandalous things are said about us, and there is no one to contradict them.

However, your writers often contradict each other. One will say we are an astute and crafty people, another, that we are dull and stupid. One, that the Tibetan is hopelessly lazy, another, that he is the best of workers. And sometimes a writer will even contradict himself. There was an instance of this in the recent visit of a party of lamas to Europe. One writer described them as being frightened by the marvels of your material culture; but he goes on to say that one of them said you were in danger of being enslaved by your own machines. That is not the remark of a man in fear, but of an acute observer.

I wonder the journalist did not see it, but I suppose he was misled by the convention about us being primitive. A primitive people ought to be alarmed by such wonders and so on. But we are not a primitive people. We are neither primitive nor bizarre. We are, like yourselves, a people with a highly developed culture, spiritual, social and material.

Our minds are no less active, our wits no less keen, than yours. In stature and strength the Tibetan is the equal of the Englishman. Big men standing six feet or more in height are common in Kham. Ours is a wonderful climate. The air is clear and invigorating. And our country is beyond compare in beauty. The Tibetan character is in tune with the environment. There is nothing mean about our people. Sunshine is constant in our land, and is reflected in the Tibetan soul.

We have health of mind and of body. There are very few weaklings amongst us, and hardly any lunatics and hysterical people such as you have in such numbers. Our people are active of mind and body. The Tibetan is a cheerful worker, vigorous and thorough. We do not fuss about something that has to be done, but do it and have done with it. We laugh at dull wits and slow hands, and find it wearisome just to see a lazy or a dull fellow at work. Why does he not get on with it? One feels like shaking him or doing the work for him. I have often felt like that since I left my country. We say of a lazy fellow that he eats like a pig and works like a worm. Of the man who is always saying he is going to do something and never does it, we say he is like the grasshopper which, in the cold of the night, resolves it will build itself a house the very next day, but the morrow arrived, hops about gaily in the warm sunshine with its resolution forgot.

But our work is so different from much of yours. It is mostly work on farm or ranch under the open sky, and the material objects of our use are made at home, between-whiles, at leisure. We have not your commercial and industrial system wherein men and women work to a set programme, all day long indoors.

We have not your passion for tidyness and system, which seems to pervade your lives, at work and at play. We do not plan out our days in advance and live according to a time-table, hurrying from this thing to that. We have more time to do what we want to, what comes into our minds at the moment, than you. We take things as they come, living a life less flurried, less trammelled than yours.

Our ethical standard is as high as yours. We believe in our religion, and endeavour to guide our lives by the will of Heaven. We believe that Heaven notes everything you do and that what you do of ill brings retribution and what of good, reward; that what you do and think makes you what you are and will be in future lives.

Our people are good-humoured, laughter-loving, loyal and honest, they do not try and over-reach each other, and men bad of heart are rare. We have none of your social unrest. Men are not jealous of people in better circumstances. We believe good fortune or ill fortune alike to be the result of conduct in past lives. One man succeeds in everything he undertakes; another, equally capable and diligent, fails in everything. The one is reaping the reward of past good deeds, the other is suffering for past ill deeds. There is no bitterness or hatred. In the next life the two may possibly change places. Punishment and reward, good fortune or ill fortune, are decreed by Heaven.

We are from your point of view an unworldly people. Our religion enjoins it, and our priesthood sets the example. We do not consider it right to struggle for material things, even to have things our neighbour cannot have. Heaven has been kind to our country, giving us room for all and food for all. Wealth and rank are not the subjects uppermost in the Tibetan mind. We have not your incessant struggle and stress and strain, your race after wealth and your fear of poverty.

There is, indeed, no wealth in the country as you understand the term. One man has more horses and cattle than another, more land, more grain. He can employ more servants, and so on. But the mode of life of the one and of the other is much the same, for there is a limit to the amount of food a man can eat, of clothes he can wear, of servants he can use. We have not the many ways of spending money, which marks with you the gulf between wealth and poverty. With us the rich man necessarily lives much as the poor man does. The rich man in Tibet would be a poor man abroad. He would find it difficult to raise the money necessary to maintain the standard of living enjoyed by very ordinary people in your country. The cost of a big motor-car would swallow up an estate.

Yet in the essentials our material culture is the equal of yours. The average Tibetan house is better than the average house I have seen since I left my country. Our clothes are as durable and convenient as yours, and look better. Our food is varied and healthy. We have all the material things we require. Our craftsmen are skilled and the objects they make are a pleasure to the eye and enduring. They are all made by hand. You also seem to prefer hand-made things.

Civilization is not bound up in material things. A civilized people must have a sufficiency of them and that is all. We have it. You have more than it. You have a great many things we have not. Wonderful things. Your electricity and the various uses to which it is put, your steamers and trains and motor-cars and aeroplanes, especially your machines of all kinds. I am never tired of looking at your machines. What each does and how it does it. It is fascinating. And your astonishing radio. Here in a country cottage we listen to music being played in London. I am lost in admiration of such an ingenious thing. It is really marvellous that people should have thought out such wonderful things. And then there are the thousands of beautiful and useful objects in your shops. You are indeed a wonderful people to have produced all this wealth of material culture.

But there is another aspect of the matter. People can do without these things, but if they are there everybody naturally wants them, and so life becomes very expensive. And most people cannot afford many of these things they want. They work and work and work and yet do not get them. Few can attain the luxuries, but all want them. Wealth means that you may have them, poverty that you may not; if you have them you are respected by everybody, if you have not you are thought of little consequence. So wealth becomes the goal of endeavour, and men’s minds are taken off other things we consider more important. And some people in their struggle for wealth or fear of poverty set aside the principles of right-living, even of humanity, sacrificing their souls to this strange god whom we have not.

Your inventors have thrown amongst you a host of wonderful things and the people scramble for them, and with each new thing the struggle gets fiercer, but this does not mean the things are bad in themselves. They are not.

Take, for instance, your mode of conveyance and ours, the horse and the motor-car. Your motor-car is comfortable and swift and it is mechanical. It entails no hardship upon a living creature such as riding a horse does, so you have not the guilt towards Heaven of subordinating the interests of a dumb creature to your own. You may treat a horse with all consideration. We do, for the Tibetan loves his horse, but it is there to be ridden, to be used, and riding it is in itself a hardship upon it. But riding it is not so bad as making it pull a carriage. We have no carriages or carts in Tibet. I was shocked when first I saw a horse pulling a carriage, and it was long before I could bring myself to sit in one. I see, of course, it is only a question of degree, but that does not remove the distaste of it.

The motor is a great improvement upon the horse as a mode of conveyance, but it is not within the reach of all of you, whereas almost every Tibetan can have a horse to ride. This illustrates a point of importance. The things of your material culture are not available to you all, the things of ours are to us all. Even a Tibetan who is so poor as to have to be somebody else’s servant rides his master's horses. We have a saying that when a Chinese is ruined he uses his shoes as a pillow, a Tibetan and he rides a white horse. It means the Tibetan hires himself out as a servant and still has a mount.

I look upon your material culture like this. The things are very desirable in themselves and the spirit that produced them is beyond praise, but people should not misuse them nor struggle for them. The more desirable they are the greater the merit in renouncing them. Perhaps they are there just to be renounced. No, it can hardly be that, but they are certainly not to be misused. Perhaps that is the test which Heaven has put to you.

You are rightly proud of your material culture, but you must not think peoples without it are necessarily uncivilized. Civilization and material culture are not one and the same. Your peasants have but few of the things your townsmen enjoy, yet they are no less civilized, they might indeed be more. It is a question of spiritual outlook.

Lha-Mo, Rin-Chen. We Tibetans: An Intimate Picture, by a Woman of Tibet, of an Interesting and Distinctive People. Seeley Service & Co. 1926.

Rin-Chen Lha-Mo

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