Tibetan Diaspora, Education in

Diaspora

Tibetans have the three traits of a diaspora in the strictest sense of the term:

• 1.
  forced or involuntary exile;
• 2.
  limited access to a homeland—which is subsequently idealized; and
• 3.
  “triadic” interactions between the indigenous and at least two dispersed satellite communities.

Estimates of the Tibetan Diaspora population vary from 110,000 to 150,000—most probably in the range of 122,000—in contrast to 5.4 million living indigenously within Tibet and the People's Republic of China (PRC). The Diaspora population is distributed across South Asia (India: 110,000; Nepal: 20,000; Bhutan: 1,600) and Asia (Taiwan: 1,000; Japan: 60); North America (USA: 9,500; Canada: 4,500); Europe (Switzerland: 1,500; UK: 650; other: 1,200); and Australasia (Australia: 550; New Zealand: 60).

Migration for Education

Education is the principal motivation for Tibetan international migration. The conflicts between the Tibetans and the Chinese distill down to interrelated issues of education, self-governance, and development. Tibetans suffer from unequal access and choices in education in Tibet, which continue to drive their flight into exile. On the one hand, they have limited access to both bilingual and Tibetan language and cultural education. Consequently, they suffer from some of the lowest educational achievement levels in the PRC. At the same time, the state monitors and restricts access to traditional Buddhist monastic education and lifestyles. As a result, 75% of Tibetan refugees and emigrants leave Tibet for educational reasons—30% as children or students seeking a Tibetan education and 45% as monastics seeking a religious education and lifestyle.

Monastic Education (South Asia)

Formal education in the Tibetan Diaspora is of two dominant forms: modern “secular” education and traditional Buddhist monastic education. Tibetan Buddhist monastic education derives from 3rd- to 12th-century Indian scholastic Buddhism with its focus on the close study of texts with in-depth peer debates, generally conducted outside in monastic courtyards. This system of dialectical debate, referred to as tsen-nyi (literally, two words or, more accurately, definitions and divisions), has deep roots in the Indian traditions of public debate dating back thousands of years. Today it continues to be a key pedagogical technique to cultivate critical thinking within the monastic institutions of all four Tibetan Buddhist schools—the Nyingma, Kargyu, Sakya, and Gelug—but principally in the latter two. The standard monastic curriculum covers five classical topics and texts studied over a 2- to 5-year duration. The five topics are Buddhist epistemology and logic (Pramana or the science of valid cognition); the perfection of wisdom (Prajnaparamita); the Middle-Way Prasangika theory (Madyamika); Buddhist science of consciousness and matter (Abbidbarma); and the monastic code of conduct (Vinaya). Although different schools emphasize meditation to varying degrees during these formal education studies, all schools focus on higher Vajrayana studies and meditations at the capping or completion stage. The principle guiding this focus on meditation after intensive scholarship is that conceptual knowledge, in this case the study of liberation and wisdom, must ultimately be experienced directly to be fully realized or known as an embodied truth.

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