Five Mini Theses On Tibetan Self-Immolation, Based On Tsering Woeser's 'Tibet on Fire'
Tsering Woeser, Tibet on Fire, Self-Immolations Against Chinese Rule, translated by Kevin Carrico (Verso, 2016, originally published in French in 2013).
1.
According to Tsering Woeser, one of the main reasons Tibetans first chose to self-immolate as a protest against CCP erasure was because self-immolation does no harm to anyone else. For the immolator, the act itself, which involves the greatest pain conceivable, is not a form of suicide.
2.
The CCP often wilfully misreads the sacrificial act of the self-immolator as being contrary to Tibetan Buddhist teachings that rule against killing, appropriating the immolator’s own system of thought for the moment of condemnation in the same way that Eternal Love of Dream (2020) makes use of Uyghur beauty (Dilraba Dilmurat) to sell a pastoral fantasy of China to more than a billion Tencent viewers.
3.
Perhaps as Simone Weil starved herself in Ashford, Kent, according to the inner responsibility and beauty of the secret within the universe, so the self-immolator is making a gesture of not being able to signal to cosmic nutrition in any other way. Such is the reality of the CCP stricture, that an extreme act of dedicatory masochism becomes the only method of shouting. ‘Like a beggar’, Weil wrote in a letter to Maurice Schuman in 1943, ‘I have no argument except to cry my needs.’
4.
Woeser also notes that from the first, these self-immolators are classified as ‘terrorists’, in the same way that ‘protestors’ in the West may be turned into ‘insurrectionists’.
5.
As for Tibetan immolation in the present, it becomes impossible to say. Not only are Tibetan self-immolators seen by the CCP as ‘criminals’ and their families subject to persecution and often disappearance, but there has also been a suppression of any news and information related to the acts of these bodhisattvas, and therefore their profound and unthinkable meaning.