What Remains Of Us

What Remains Of Us is a documentary that was recently played here on our local documentary channel. I only caught a part of it, and am hoping to see a replay of it at some point (they usually do replays on this channel), but the part that I saw was terribly moving. A synopsis of the film is that a young female Tibetan refugee who had lived in south India due to the troubles in Tibet, and then later moved to Canada, returns to her Tibetan homeland, smuggling in a short video with some words of support and comfort for the Tibetan people. When she shows this video to varieties of different Tibetans, the sheer awe and reverence on the faces of these people as they witness their spiritual leader speaking to them, many of whom have never seen the Dalai Lama before, is just amazing to see. As soon as they see the Dalai Lama speak, they hold their hands together in a prayerful reverence for this beloved leader who has been exiled for so long from his homeland, and who now lives in India. I can't reiterate enough how their faces just beam when he begins to speak to them, and the respect they show him, even through the medium of a video player in which of course the Dalai Lama himself is only on film and not able to actually see these people, is jsut so moving. I guess this is a difficult DVD to get a hold of, for a number of reasons having to do with the security of those real persons who appear in the film, but if you can manage to see this, you will be inspired, awestruck and moved by it. This link (I still can't do links!) has more info, and pictures, from the film. Please take a look at it; the author of this blog does a much better job than I do in describing this film:

www.afterthelaundry.com/2009/09/what-remains-of-us.html

Tibet has been occupied by the Chinese, I believe since 1950, and the Dalai Lama, the Buddhist spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, has been exiled across the border in Dharamsala, India, for all of this time. In the meanwhile, the Chinese govt. has increasingly moved Chinese people into Tibet, to the point now that Tibetans are a minority in their own land, and are treated as second-class citizens. The ancient Tibetan culture is now in peril of being lost, as Tibetan youth are trained and educated in Chinese, and are taught to regard their traditional culture as one that is "backward" and primitive. The Chinese brutally repress any dissent in Tibet, and crush all manifestations of Tibetan culture. The Tibetan people though, are among the most spiritual people on this planet, and I believe that it is people such as these, that offer their prayers for all humankind and for all living things, in someway protect all of us from destruction. Please keep the Tibetan people, and the Haitian people, and those who wage war in the Congo and on the West Bank, and all peoples and all living things, in your prayers.