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How self-immolations affect Tibetans (3)

(Xinhua)

08:26, February 05, 2013

"I was startled when I learned that my son set himself ablaze. Although such things have happened recently, I never thought that it could fall on my family," Tsering Tokyi, Sangdegye's father, says.

His mother Wandetso rests her head on her knees when she talks about her son. She quietly recites Buddhist sutras and rubs her prayer beads, but later the sutras will give way to sobs.

"We don't know how to move on," says Namgyal, Sangdegye's grandfather.

A Tibetan official with the Gannan prefecture government says the Dalai Lama clique often chooses Tibetans facing financial pressures who have received little formal education, young people or those caught in family feuds as the target of inciting self-immolations. Instigators have sometimes told potential self-immolators that the Dalai Lama will "pray for you after your death."

Tibetan Buddhism's traditional belief in the afterlife also plays a role in self-immolations. The monk, who fled Tibet for India after a failed uprising in 1959, once said those who commit self-immolation in this life will be reborn in the afterlife.

"It is sheer destruction of humanity," says the Tibetan official who asked not to be named. "Why did you goad 17- or 18-year-olds to self-immolate? Why didn't you self-immolate?"


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