Relations With The Government
During the 1959 Tibetan Rebellion he made the crucial decision to remain in China rather than flee to India. Between 1960 and 1980 he returned to a nomadic lifestyle in order to avoid the Cultural Revolution.
In 1980 Jigme Phuntsok founded the Serthar Buddhist Institute (also called the Larung Gar Buddhist Institute, near the town of Sêrtar (Chinese Seda). The Institute's popularity grew until there were 8500 students at the site, including about 1000 ethnic Chinese as well as students from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia.
In 1987 Jigme Phuntsok met and befriended the Ninth Panchen Lama. In 1989 he also met the 14th Dalai Lama, whom he refused to denounce for the Lama's separatist activities. After this the Chinese government refused him permission to travel for any reason.
Around 1999 the Sichuan United Work Front pressed him on the issue of his support for the Dalai Lama, and demanded that he reduce the number of students at the Institute (either to 150 or to 1400, depending on reports). Jigme Phuntsok refused. In summer of 2001 several thousand members of the People's Armed Police and the Public Security Bureau descended on the site, razing its structures and dispersed its students.
Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok died of heart failure in 2004, at the age of 70 in Tibet.
Read more about this topic: Jigme Phuntsok
Famous quotes containing the words relations with the, relations with, relations and/or government:
“Major [William] McKinley visited me. He is on a stumping tour.... I criticized the bloody-shirt course of the canvass. It seems to me to be bad “politics,” and of no use.... It is a stale issue. An increasing number of people are interested in good relations with the South.... Two ways are open to succeed in the South: 1. A division of the white voters. 2. Education of the ignorant. Bloody-shirt utterances prevent division.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“She has problems with separation; he has trouble with unity—problems that make themselves felt in our relationships with our children just as they do in our relations with each other. She pulls for connection; he pushes for separateness. She tends to feel shut out; he tends to feel overwhelmed and intruded upon. It’s one of the reasons why she turns so eagerly to children—especially when they’re very young.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)
“All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy, avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)