Tibetans

Core values & worldview

Spend an evening with a Tibetan family, and sooner or later someone will mention “His Holiness”. For most Tibetans, the Dalai Lama is the emanation of Chenrezig (Avalokiteshvara), the bodhisattva of compassion and the protector of Tibet, and also the person who held the nation together after it lost its home. His photograph sits on altars in exile homes; inside Tibet, displaying it can bring arrest.^•

Faith woven into life. Tibetan Buddhism is Vajrayana: Mahayana teaching with tantric ritual, mantras, visualisation and devotion to the lama, the teacher. Ideas of karma and rebirth are taken seriously, and many Tibetans think of all beings as having been their mothers in past lives, a reason to treat them with kindness. Compassion (nyingje) is perhaps the most praised virtue.^•

Reincarnate lamas. Tibetans developed a unique system of tulkus, lamas recognised as reincarnations of their predecessors, starting with the Karmapas in the thirteenth century. The Dalai and Panchen Lamas are the best known, but there are hundreds. That is why succession is such a political issue.^•

Nation and memory. Tibetans are proud of an empire that rivalled Tang China, of their own script and literature, and of centuries of self-government under the Dalai Lamas. Most exile Tibetans, and many inside Tibet, regard the period before 1950 as one of independence, and the loss of that self-rule, the destruction that followed and the Dalai Lama’s exile as the central wound of their history.^•

Patience and humour. Visitors often notice how quick Tibetans are to laugh, even after terrible experiences. Many describe their endurance in Buddhist terms: anger only harms yourself, and suffering is impermanent too.^•

Daily life & customs

Circling and prayer. Tibetans “do kora”: walking clockwise around temples, stupas, mountains and lakes, often spinning prayer wheels and murmuring Om mani padme hum, the mantra of Chenrezig. The Barkhor circuit around the Jokhang in Lhasa is the busiest; Mount Kailash draws pilgrims from across Asia. Some devout pilgrims travel hundreds of kilometres by full-body prostration.^•

Home and hospitality. Guests are offered butter tea, salty and rich with yak or cow butter, and the cup will be refilled the moment you sip. A white silk scarf, the khata, is offered on greetings, farewells and visits to lamas. Many homes keep an altar with a Buddha image, butter lamps and a photo of the family’s lama.^•

Nomads and farmers. Traditionally, a large share of Tibetans were herders (drokpa), moving yaks, sheep and goats between seasonal pastures and living in black yak-hair tents; others farmed barley in the valleys. Yak butter, dried cheese, meat and tsampa, roasted barley flour, were the staples. Many nomads have now been settled in towns, which has transformed life on the grasslands.^•

Festivals. Losar, the Tibetan New Year in February or March, is the biggest celebration, with family visits, special foods and offerings. Saga Dawa, the fourth lunar month, marks the Buddha’s birth, awakening and death, and is a time for merit-making and kora. In exile, 10 March (Uprising Day) and 6 July (the Dalai Lama’s birthday) are also community gatherings.^•

Death. Tibetans often consult a lama at death; prayers guide the consciousness through the bardo, the intermediate state, for 49 days. On the high plateau, where wood is scarce and the ground frozen, “sky burial”, offering the body to vultures as a final act of generosity, was traditional.^•

Language. Tibetan, written in a script derived from Indian Brahmi in the seventh century, has very different spoken dialects in Ü-Tsang, Kham and Amdo, but a common literary language. Speaking and passing it on is, for many, an act of identity.^•

Wounds & sensitivities

1950 and 1959. The PLA’s entry in 1950 and the failed uprising and flight of the Dalai Lama in 1959 are the founding traumas of modern Tibetan life. Tens of thousands followed him into exile; many who stayed died in prisons, labour camps and the famine years.^•

Destroyed monasteries. By the end of the Cultural Revolution, the vast majority of Tibet’s thousands of monasteries had been destroyed or emptied, and monks and nuns were forced to disrobe. Many have since been rebuilt, but older Tibetans remember.^•

Controls on faith and speech. Inside China, monasteries are subject to “patriotic education”, numbers of monks are limited, and possessing images of the Dalai Lama, criticising policy or contacting exiles can lead to detention. Tibetans abroad are often careful about what they say, for the sake of relatives at home.^•

Self-immolations. Since 2009, more than 150 Tibetans inside China have set themselves on fire, most calling for the Dalai Lama’s return or for freedom. For Tibetans these are acts of sacrifice that should not be treated as spectacle.^•

The Panchen Lama. The boy the Dalai Lama recognised as the 11th Panchen Lama in 1995, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, disappeared into Chinese custody days later and has not been seen in public since. His fate is a deep and personal grief for many Tibetans.^•

“Shangri-La” romanticism. Tibetans are sometimes frustrated by Westerners who imagine them as serene mystics in a timeless land. They are a modern people with arguments, politics, pop music and smartphones.^•

Modern attitudes

Middle Way or independence. Since 1988, the Dalai Lama and the exile government have sought “genuine autonomy” for all Tibetan areas within China, the “Middle Way Approach”, rather than independence. Talks with Beijing were held from 2002 to 2010 without result. Many Tibetans support the Middle Way out of loyalty and realism; others, like the Tibetan Youth Congress, still call for full independence.^•

Democracy in exile. In 2011 the Dalai Lama handed his political role to an elected leader, the Sikyong, ending nearly four centuries of the Dalai Lamas’ political authority. Exile Tibetans vote for the Sikyong and a parliament-in-exile.^•

Development and its costs. Beijing points to new roads, railways, schools, hospitals and rising incomes as proof of progress, and many Tibetans welcome better living standards. Critics, including many Tibetans, say development has brought Han migration to towns, resettlement of nomads, mining and dams, and boarding schools that weaken Tibetan language and religion.^•

Culture as resistance. Inside Tibet, a cultural movement keeps the language and identity alive through literature, film, pop songs and campaigns to speak “pure Tibetan” without Chinese words. Since 2008, many Tibetans have expressed identity in quiet ways, such as wearing Tibetan dress on Wednesdays (the Dalai Lama’s birth day of the week), a practice known as Lhakar.^•

Not all Tibetans are the same

Inside and outside. About 7.06 million people were counted as Tibetan in China’s 2020 census, and only about 3 million of them live in the Tibet Autonomous Region; the rest live in Tibetan areas of Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan. The exile community numbered about 128,000 in its 2009 survey, mostly in India and Nepal. Tibetans born in India, who have never seen Tibet, and Tibetans who grew up in Lhasa or Xining speaking Chinese at school, can have very different experiences.^•

Ü-Tsang, Kham and Amdo. Khampas, from the east, have a reputation as proud horsemen and fighters; Amdowas, from the north-east, are known for scholarship and trade. Their spoken dialects differ so much that they can find each other hard to understand.^•

Four schools and Bön. Tibetan Buddhism has four main schools: the Nyingma, the oldest, tracing itself to Padmasambhava; the Kagyu, led by the Karmapas; the Sakya; and the Gelug, the school of the Dalai Lamas. Bön, which Tibetans see as the pre-Buddhist religion, is a living tradition with its own monasteries. A small Tibetan Muslim community has also lived in Lhasa for centuries.^•

Devout, secular and in between. Some Tibetans are monks and nuns, many are devout laypeople, and a younger generation, inside and outside Tibet, may be more secular, more Chinese- or English-speaking, and more interested in hip-hop than in debate courtyards, while still feeling deeply Tibetan.^•

Himalayan cousins. Many people in Ladakh, Sikkim, Bhutan and northern Nepal, including the Sherpas, share Tibetan Buddhism and related languages but have their own distinct national identities.^•

Meeting someone

Conversation starters

• Losar and family. Asking how their family celebrates New Year, or what they eat, is a lovely opening.
• Food. Momos, thukpa, butter tea: most Tibetans have strong opinions about the best momos in town.
• Where their family comes from. Many exile Tibetans know their family’s home village in Kham, Amdo or Ü-Tsang, even if they have never been there.
• Music and film. Tibetan pop and folk songs, and films by Pema Tseden, are a source of real pride.

Topics to approach carefully

• Politics, if they live in China or have family there. A Tibetan visiting from China may face real risk talking about the Dalai Lama or politics. Let them lead.^•
  • "I Saw It with My Own Eyes": Abuses by Chinese Security Forces in Tibet, 2008–2010 — Human Rights Watch (2010)
• Independence or autonomy. People hold strong, different views; don’t assume.
• Self-immolations and family losses. Many families lost people to prison, famine or flight. Listen rather than probe.
• “Feudal serfdom”. Old Tibet had a hierarchical society with great inequality, and Tibetans themselves debate it, but leading with Beijing’s framing of a “hell on earth” will cause offence.^•
  • A History of Modern Tibet, 1913–1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State — Melvyn C. Goldstein, University of California Press (1989)
  • The Tibet-China Conflict: History and Polemics — Elliot Sperling, East-West Center (2004)

Common misconceptions

• “Tibet is just the Tibet Autonomous Region.” More than half of Tibetans in China live outside the TAR, in the historical regions of Kham and Amdo.^•
  • Communiqué of the Seventh National Population Census — National Bureau of Statistics of China, National Bureau of Statistics of China (2021)
  • The Tibetans — Matthew T. Kapstein, Blackwell (2006)
• “All Tibetans are monks who meditate all day.” Most are farmers, herders, traders, students and office workers, and many are city people.^•
  • Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West — Donald S. Lopez Jr., University of Chicago Press (1998)
• “Lama means any Tibetan monk.” A lama is a teacher, often senior; most monks are not lamas, and some lamas are married laymen.^•
  • Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism (rev. ed.) — John Powers, Snow Lion (2007)
• “The Dalai Lama is the Tibetan pope.” He is revered by all schools but is a Gelug lama; other schools have their own heads, and he has no formal authority over all Buddhists.^•
  • Dalai Lama — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism (rev. ed.) — John Powers, Snow Lion (2007)