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The Dalai Lama Looks Back (1984-09-27)
About this film
The present Dalai Lama assumed full power as the supreme spiritual leader of Tibet in 1950, the same year the Communist Chinese overran his country. He fled in 1959 after, as Mr. Buckley relates, "an uprising against the Chinese Communists which would result, in the ensuing decades, in a holocaust that ranks with Hitler's and Pol Pot's: 1.2 million Tibetans killed... --one-seventh of the population." The Dalai Lama "attempted, in India, to salvage what he could of the religious and historical culture of Tibet." Now, 25 years later, he had been invited to return and was pondering the invitation. He is an arresting world figure; but his ideas come strangely to Western ears: "if there is a clear-cut dialogue between Buddhists and Marxists it may help the Marxists and they may eventually become more human--less rigidity--for the Buddhists have the message of love and compassion ... and the Buddhists may learn some social and economic theory from Marxism. That is my dream."
Directors & creators
Southern Educational Communications Association
Subjects
public broadcasting, AAPB, Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr., Politics and government, Bstan-'dzin-rgya-mtsho, Dalai Lama XIV, 1935-, Tibet (China), Communism and Buddhism, China (Tibet), Buddhism
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