Trouble in Shangri-La.(Tibet)(Brief Article)

The weary Tibetan monks were panhandling a long way from home. In desolate Qinghai province several weeks ago, they sadly displayed ID cards and photographs from the Buddhist community at Sertar in Sichuan province, a 35-hour bus ride away. They had fled the enclave in mid-July following a crackdown in which Chinese authorities demolished more than 1,000 dwellings in a bid to drive devotees away. "We have no school, no homes and no money. I don't know what we're going to do," one tired-looking monk dressed in ragged maroon robes told NEWSWEEK.

When George W. Bush visits China next month, he'll be a long way from Sertar, too. But events there will be on the minds of some U.S. officials traveling with the president; Washington hopes to raise the issue at bilateral human-rights discussions that may resume later this month. Chinese authorities are expected to continue demolition until October, and in early August, NEWSWEEK has learned, a bomb exploded outside local government offices in the town of Kangding. Local Tibetans attribute the blast to Tibetan separatists angered by, among other things, the Sertar crackdown. With the world's attention focused on China during Bush's visit, any further unrest could well echo far beyond Sichuan.

Before the crackdown, the religious complex at Sertar had been something of a model of tolerance. More than 7,000 monks and nuns lived in the hillside community in Sichuan's Ganzi prefecture--the largest concentration of Tibetan clergy anywhere in the area of ancient Tibet. (In Tibet proper, the number of monks in each monastery is now strictly regulated by Beijing.) The area had become a powerful center of learning: more than 100 Tibetan Buddhist geshes, the equivalent of Western Ph.D.s, have been educated there, and many of them now teach in communities as distant as southern India. Previously Beijing could point to Sertar as proof that serious Tibetan Buddhist education took place in China, not only in exile. For that reason "the crackdown is perplexing," says John Ackerly of the Washington, D.C.-based International Campaign for Tibet. The religious community also included nearly 1,000 ethnic-Chinese monks--testimony to the kind of harmonious interracial mingling that Beijing often claims but rarely achieves.

Its very strengths, however, may have proved Sertar's downfall. A visionary Tibetan monk, Khenpo Jigme Phuntsog, founded the community in 1980 as a mountain hermitage known as Larung Gar. (Gar means "encampment"; it is not technically a monastery.) At first he had just 100 followers, who lived in crude stone huts and cooked over yak-dung stoves. But their numbers mushroomed as word of Khenpo Jigme's sophisticated Buddhist teachings--and his charismatic personality-- spread.

That ...