‘Darkest day of our life’: Tibetans say Dalai Lama video was misinterpreted

Toronto is home to the largest community of Tibetan diaspora in Canada and a controversial video of their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has them speaking out about what they say are gross misinterpretations of their cultural practices.

In a now viral video, a young boy asked to hug the Dalai Lama at a public gathering back in February.

During the interaction, the Dalai Lama is seen kissing the child on the lips and heard saying “suck my tongue.” Online backlash was swift, with accusations of paedophilia and grooming. The Dalai Lama issued an apology thereafter.

Last weekend, a peace and prayer march organized by the Regional Tibetan Youth Congress of Toronto (RTYC) took to the streets in support of the Dalai Lama. Around 1,500 Tibetans participated in the march, urging people not to judge him based on a short video clip taken out of context and asking media to “tell the truth.”

“For the past 60 years he’s been traveling around the world spreading love, compassion. So there’s no way that you can judge especially him … especially about the tongue, it’s just a misinterpreted video,” says Sunny Sonam, president of RTYC.

Tibetans in Toronto took to the streets in a peace and prayer March on April 16, 2023, in support of their spiritual leader the Dalai Lama. CITYNEWS/Dilshad Burman.

He explains that the exchange between the Dalai Lama and the young boy was lost in translation.

“Our grandparents — they showed their love and compassion in that way. They will touch their forehead, they will … hug and they will kiss. And then the kids demand for more, and the grandpa will say like ‘I have nothing now, I have nothing to give you. Now what do you want, you want to eat my tongue too?”

“The Tibetans, the Indians, we come from a tradition where breasts, tongue, these concepts are not sexualized,” adds human rights activist Chemi Lhamo.

Sherap Therchin from the Canada Tibet Committee explains that the Dalai Lama is often playful with people and as it is not his first language, he speaks broken English, often mixing up words.

“In terms of what really happened on the actual event you see that the boy ask permission to hug His Holiness and it takes some time and two people actually to help His Holiness understand what the boy spoke in English,” he says.

“The boy [went] up, hugs His Holiness, gives a kiss on the cheek, a touch on the forehead in a traditional Tibetan style. And in between all of this, His Holiness speaks about peace, compassion, and reminisces about his own childhood, playing with his elder brother. By then we could sense the boy had evoked a sense of grandfatherly affection from His Holiness.”

He adds than in interviews with local media outlet Voice of Tibet immediately following the interaction with the Dalai Lama, both the boy and his mother express joy and gratitude.

In the video obtained by CityNews, the unnamed boy says “it was amazing meeting His Holiness and I think it’s a really great experience meeting somebody with such high positive energy … and you get a lot of that positive energy.”

“Once you get the positive energy I think you’re happier … and you smile a lot more. It was a really good experience overall,” he adds.

His mother, the organizer of the event, said she felt “totally blessed to have got these blessings from His Holiness.”

“He came, addressed us in person, taught about peace that the world needs and how everyone needs to feel together like brother and sister. I absolutely cannot express how I feel getting blessed by him.”

“Who are we to redefine what was a blessing for these community members as traumatizing, just because we see it that way?” says Lhamo.

She adds that the negativity directed toward the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan community has been devastating.

“For our community, the Tibetan people who have suffered for six decades at the hands of the Chinese government, [I am] someone who has been stateless for three generations — this week has actually been the most painful of all the experiences,” she says

“The world has just been so fast to rush to judge without even asking for two things — situational context, cultural context. Did we do any basic research? Did we speak to a Tibetan? You know, it’s been a week since that incident, and this is one of the first interviews that I’m doing from mainstream media.”

Lhamo says Tibetans feel like they are being forced to defend their identities and their existence.

“We’re being asked to defend ourselves with academic literature, which we don’t have because we were colonized for seven decades. So oral traditions, cultural practices, they weren’t preserved in ways that I could show you ‘here you go, let me show you that this is a cultural practice,'” she says.

“Let me remind you, you’re talking about a community that has been time and time disadvantaged, and then you’re asking them to prove themselves for being who they are.”

In addition, she feels the narrative around the video is going to have far reaching consequences for Tibetans on a global scale.

“[We will] continue to suffer the consequences for generations to come because of your rush to judgment,” she says.

“When we are going on world stages and continuing to fight for freedom, continuing to ask for justice … the world is not going to listen as well [ as they once did].”

Sonam adds that for him, the ideas of multiculturalism and inclusion have been brought into sharp focus as he watches his culture being vilified by those who he says don’t know enough about it.

“We totally understand how you guys felt. But try to understand us too. You guys talk about culture, you guys talk about diversity … what happened now?” he says. “It was the darkest day of our life — in India, in Nepal, for all the followers of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.”

“Being a Torontonian, I pride myself by saying that this community is very multicultural. So is that just trying different types of naan bread in different communities, trying out momos? No, it’s not. We must walk the talk of multiculturalism,” says Lhamo.

“When we talk about equity, diversity, and inclusion, it has to mean that we’re willing to look beyond this western, so-called modern lens because if we do not, then the undertones of racism, the undertones of our superiority complex, the undertones of ethnocentricism, really do show.”