In texts, through thoughts, with pleasure

This is a: article, written by Birgit Kellner 899 days ago.
Keywords: Tibet today

It’s always interesting to look at the way the Dalai Lama is described in news items such as this one (probably online only for a very limited time). I’ll cite the juicier ones in German:

1. “das religiöse Oberhaupt der buddhistischen Tibeter” (twice)
2. “geistliches Oberhaupt der tibetischen Buddhisten”
3. “Buddhistenführer”
4. “geistlicher Anführer”

“Buddhistenführer” sounds awkward to me, but seems to have some currency (well, 146 Google hits in a very unrefined search); “geistlicher Anführer” sounds like a gang lord with some spiritual inclinations.

“Geistliches Oberhaupt” is very commonly used in this context. The added qualification “der tibetischen Buddhisten” is in a sense remarkably sophisticated, as it narrows down the range of persons in question to those which are Tibetans and those which are Buddhists (as opposed to Thai Buddhists or Tibetan Bon pos). This is fairly precise, even though it does not reflect that there might be, say, Karmapas who are Tibetan Buddhists, yet would not consider the Dalai Lama, a monk from the Gelugpa tradition, their “spiritual head”.

But it’s the first phrase that really caught my attention: what motivates journalists to refer to the DL as the “religious head of Buddhist Tibetans”?

The news item as such, which contains a number of grammatical errors and stylistic blunders, must have been written at great speed, as is customary in news releases of this type. Rather than being the product of a strong authorial intention, it is better taken as a linguistic snapshot, containing some buzzwords that simply drift around in the mediasphere.

So whence this particular buzzword, in particular, whence “Buddhist Tibetans”? Is this an unusually sophisticated recognition of the religious diversity of Tibet, alerting the reader that there are other religions there, too (Bon, for instance, or Islam)? Does it reflect the simple anti-essentialist insight that, while religion is important for all things Tibetan, there might also be Tibetans who choose not to be religious at all, and thus also not to be Buddhist? Or is this a reflection of a line of thought that sees Buddhism as foreign to Tibet and on the whole a rather bad thing, with “Buddhist Tibetans” aiming to imply that there are, in addition to naively credulous Buddhists that have been deceived by manipulative lamas, also reasonable and rational non-religious Tibetans?

Well, one can be hyper-sensitive. Maybe this is just simply the product of the journalist’s disdain for repetition, which artificially makes people continually look for new ways to say the same thing, even if they aren’t actually saying the same thing. (“Hey, Gonzo, let’s say ‘Buddhist Tibetans’ for ‘Tibetan Buddhists’, we already have ‘Tibetan Buddhists’ a few lines earlier.”)

Oh, and aunt Google does provide altogether 3 distinct occurrences of this phrase, none of which are particularly enlightening.