Serenity
Enshrined: Tibetan Master Artist
TINLEY CHOJOR
by Ross Rice
The political situation took a turn for the worst starting
in 1951 when China took control of Tibet. Although the Dalai
Lama was initially given a high degree of autonomy, things
quickly soured as the Communist Chinese government began land
re-distribution in Eastern Kham and Amdo, causing an insurrection
that eventually spread to Lhasa, which the Chinese brutally
crushed in 1959. They subsequently used this event as a pretext
to rescind all autonomy, confiscating land and systematically
dismantling the culture. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama fled with
government principals, and formed a government-in-exile based
in Dharamsala, India. Tinley, married, with children, and
from a prominent Lhasa artisan family, was under careful watch
and unable to escape, and was thus forced to endure the brutality
of Chinese rule. Tragedy struck home even further in 1970
when Tinley’s wife became a casualty in one of the sporadic
uprisings that have occurred during the occupation. Throughout
this period, Chinese Red Guard fanatics destroyed over 6,000
Buddhist temples, sparing but a few, including the Potala—an
unconscionable loss of Tibetan culture, which finally abated
around the time of Chairman Mao’s passing. As one of
the only living qualified Tibetan Buddhist artists, Tinley
was instrumental in the eventual restoration process that
followed; a sometimes gratifying process of reclamation that
was yet made under duress by the Chinese regime. Still, this
roughly twenty-five year period remains a time that Tinley
would understandably prefer not to discuss.
Tinley and his second wife, Wangchen Pema (he remarried
in 1973) finally made their move out of Tibet in 1982, securing
passage to Nepal to work on the Pullahari Monastery, and then
on to India to work on the Rumtek Monastery, the Norbulingka
Institute, ...
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