Redreaming the Nation: Embracing Otherness along with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet’s politico-spiritual vision

As the idea of the Nation has gained ascendance in modern times, it has also brought us to the brink of a deepening crisis. The Nation as an ‘imagined community’ operates through multiple exclusions, not only of those who are outside it, but also of aspects of its members that cannot be readily encompassed by its own descriptions and ambitions of national selfhood. Most nations tolerate sub-identities, for example of tribes, clans or regions, only as long as their overall power is not challenged. Any internal voice likely to be perceived as a threat to the Nation generally evokes a brutally suppressive reaction. This writing returns to the thoughts of Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet who is an engaged Buddhist practitioner. By delving into the exiled leader’s dream of free Tibet, it recovers many possible and creative meanings of what a nation could be. Standing close to political visionaries—for instance M.K. Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, B.R. Ambedkar amongst others—who have preceded him, the Dalai Lama too imagines the Nation through a non-antagonistic vision that embraces Otherness and strives for universal oneness. Drawing from Mahayana Buddhism, he provides ethical alternatives to the idea of the Nation as an independent, exclusive and self-sufficient entity. In particular, this writing returns to his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech of 1989, in which he dreams of Tibet as a free country where all differences and forms of otherness are embraced and respected. His vision is premised on the belief that a Buddhist deconstructive analysis of ‘self’ would make it possible for self (non-self) and other to co-exist gracefully. Along with Buddhist thought, the present effort uses psychoanalytic theory and the perspective of the unconscious to think through ideas of the Self, Other and the Nation.