Tibet

Floor Speech

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Ms. PELOSI. I thank the gentleman for yielding and for calling this Special Order this evening.

Special it is, indeed, as we welcome His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, to Washington, D.C. Tomorrow, in a bipartisan way, House and Senate Democrats and Republicans will join in welcoming His Holiness. He is among one of the things we all agree on--his greatness and the honor he brings us with his visit.

Madam Speaker, I completely associate myself with every word of Mr. McGovern's comments. He talked about our visit to Lhasa, to Tibet, and to other places in China. We called him Mr. McGovern's spiritual leader of our visit. As the co-chair of the Lantos Human Rights Commission of the House of Representatives, he truly believes, as His Holiness says and as I heard him say today, that we are all God's children, and that is how we have to treat each other.

In listening to our colleagues of the previous Special Order, who were members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who discussed various issues of justice--social justice, health justice, and the rest--and who talked about Orlando, it focuses on how special His Holiness' visit is. In coming the day after the terrible massacre of many in the LGBT community, it is really something that should be a comfort to all of us. His Holiness' message of peace, of compassion, of respect for every person is a message of hope that is needed today, tomorrow, and the next day, which are the days His Holiness will be here, but it is needed as we go forward as well. He is a truly great man. When I awoke this morning so sad about what happened yesterday, I was full of hope about hearing what His Holiness would have to say about our responsibilities to each other.

Our colleague mentioned our November CODEL. It was something that many of us had been hoping to do for many years. We had been trying for 25 years to get a visa to visit Tibet, and the President of China gave us that opportunity. We went there to see, to learn, to observe, and to make judgments. We did not go there to burn bridges; we went there to build bridges. As Congressman McGovern said, we saw some areas in which we could work together, and we came back with some resolve, hopefully, to get other bridge building done.

I have seen His Holiness on many occasions. When he first came to Congress, I was brand new in Congress. He came under the auspices of Mr. Lantos, for whom the Human Rights Commission is named, and he brought us together in a group to listen to His Holiness' plan of action. It included respect for the environment and autonomy for Tibet but not independence. That was over 25 years ago that he had been talking about autonomy. While sometimes the Chinese Government doesn't accept that characterization, it is why many of us support His Holiness. As I mentioned earlier, he has friends on both sides of the aisle on both sides of the Capitol and also down Pennsylvania Avenue.

I remember with great pride when we presented His Holiness with a Congressional Gold Medal--again, with great bipartisan support. President Bush came. Not only that--and a bigger honor yet--Mrs. Laura Bush came as well. What an honor for His Holiness and what an honor for our country that our President showed that respect.

On that day when we talked about it, we had so many good things to say about His Holiness. One of the things was his unstinting support for peace as a positive example of how to make the world a better place--peace in the world, peace in our country, peace in our communities, peace in our families, peace in ourselves. That inner peace is what he has been preaching.

On this trip, we can see His Holiness as he embodies the wisdom and the courage to maintain what he calls a peaceful mind in a modern world, and we look forward to hearing what he has to say about that. In addition to saying we are all God's children and of the respect we need to have for each other and of the compassion that he advocates, His Holiness says that great changes start with individuals.

I will tell this story, which, I think, some may find amusing.

His Holiness is a gentle man. While he has big challenges and while he is the leader and the champion in the advocacy--I wouldn't use the word ``fight'' as he doesn't like words like that--for respecting the culture, the language, and the religion of the Tibetan people and the autonomy for them as a people, he does so in a very gentle way.

I met him here in the Capitol for the first time, and I saw him in Rio at the time of the Earth Summit in 1992, where he spoke as a religious leader. We also acknowledged that he was the first winner of the Nobel Prize--it was part of his proclamation and why he won--for his contribution in protecting the environment. It was the first environmental consideration in a Nobel Prize. How beautiful that was. I have seen him here many times, in California, in New York--you name it--and in Dharamsala, which is where he lives in India. Anyway, we were taking a delegation there to visit--a bipartisan, large delegation to visit him there.

And we saw some of the people right after the crackdown in Tibet-- coincidentally, we had our trip planned for a long time, but it happened to occur right after that crackdown. So many people were coming in from Tibet telling us what they saw there. It was pretty brutal, the reports that they gave us, and it was so sad.

So later in the day, when we had lunch with the couple hundred lamas from all over India, that part of India, many of them Tibetan Buddhist lamas, I explained what I had seen that morning and how transformative it was to see people get firsthand knowledge of the humanity of man and that we had to do something about it.

We had our Members there. One was going to help with this, and one was going to help with that. You know, there were all these things that we were going to do to help these people.

And then I said what I always said: if freedom-loving people do not speak out against oppression in Tibet because of our commercial interests with China, then we surrender all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world. Tibet remains a challenge to the conscience of the world, and we must respond to that.

When I was finished, His Holiness spoke to the lamas there, and he said to the lamas: Now, let us all pray so that we could rid Nancy of her negative attitudes.

Well, I thought I was making the fight, but I am not going to be holier than His Holiness. A gentle approach is what he thinks is best and respectful. I take some level of pride in telling our Chinese friends--and they are our friends. He is your friend, too, in terms of damping down any, shall we say, exuberance when we learn what we consider to be grave injustices and human rights violations.

In honor of His Holiness' 80th birthday last summer--Richard Gere is the chairman of the International Campaign for Tibet and has really been a champion for His Holiness and the Tibetan people--Richard Gere and I wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed, and in it we said there is no better way to honor the Dalai Lama than by standing with him and the Tibetan people vowing to keep their cause alive. It is a beautiful culture, indeed.

To hear His Holiness, as I did today, speak in Tibetan, which I didn't understand except through translation, and have him explain that the Tibetan language is a beautiful language in specifics, in terms of explaining Buddhism and matters of faith and philosophy because of its intricacies. It enhances your appreciation and understanding of Buddhism to hear it in the words of the Tibetan language, and translated from Tibetan in terms of the intricacies of the language that you would need to translate it into English or another language.

So this language is important to the faith of Buddhism. It is important to the culture. It is important to the families. It is important, again, to the education of the children. And the attempts on the part of the Chinese to resettle Han Chinese, dilute the population of Tibetans in Tibet, is something that would be just really wrong, just plain and simple wrong. Again, it is a challenge to the conscience.

This morning, His Holiness spoke at the United States Institute of Peace, and he said real change comes through action. He said: You all ask me for my blessing, and people say nice things, but real change comes through action.

If I understood it correctly in the translation, he said that karma is not necessarily just about fate. It is about acting, action, taking action. So we all need to take action in what we believe in.

Again, every opportunity I get--and I thank the distinguished gentleman, the conscience of our codel and chair of the Tom Lantos Commission on Human Rights. Every opportunity I get, and this is one of them that I treasure on the floor of the House, to say what an honor it is to even be in the same room, the same place with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, a revered figure throughout the world.

The Dalai Lama's name is synonymous with everything that is good, and that is what we emphasized to our Chinese host. We had to move, as Mr. McGovern said, beyond their outmoded thinking into another place.

In terms of His Holiness, tomorrow when he comes to the Capitol, I will look forward to thanking him for his tremendous, inspiring leadership. ``Inspiration'' is such an inadequate word when it comes to what he is. We thank him for sharing the strength of his determination in pursuit of peace.

He was speaking about it today in terms of something that might take some years. We may not see it, some of us--you might, Mr. McGovern; I might not--a time when the world was completely at peace.

When he laughs, it is something very special. We hear the joyousness that transcends despair. In his words, we receive a message of hope and humanity when he is with us. In his presence, we feel inspired to make a difference, to make a difference in ourselves and in our world.

I talked earlier about President Bush coming to the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony, and I know that the President will be receiving His Holiness this week. Presidents have done that over time, which is a source of great pride for us in our country and in the relationship between His Holiness and our President. But it goes a long way back.

I will just close by saying, when His Holiness was a very little boy and he became the Dalai Lama, he received a gift from the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and he loved it because it was a watch, and the watch had the phases of the Moon.

Actually, my Apple watch has the phases of the Sun.

The watch had the phases of the Moon, and how prescient President Franklin Roosevelt was to send this little boy this watch, who would become so interested in science and thinking and the brain and faith and what the connection was among all of those factors.

But again, the relationship between an American President and His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, goes back to when he was a little boy, and it persists into his eighties now. That is something that, again, brings luster to us in our country that we have such a beautiful relationship with such a spiritual figure in the world.

So I look forward to welcoming him here tomorrow. Again, as I said to him today: You could not have come at a better time when we are so in mourning about what happened in Orlando to our LGBT loved ones, to their families, to the community in Orlando. We are grateful to the response of our first responders there and our law enforcement officials and local officials there.

Again, it is the spirituality that we need to recover and draw strength to go forward to make sure that we minimize any such actions that hopefully they never happen again. How wonderful that His Holiness is here to bring us that comfort.

With that, I am pleased and with great gratitude to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern) for being such a champion of human rights throughout the world. He and Mr. Pitts, his Republican counterpart, as co-chairs of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, do a great service to our Congress and to our country. They honor our values, the respect for the dignity and worth of every person, recognizing that we are all God's children. We all have a spark of divinity in us, and they always are speaking truth to power. I thank them for their commitment and for their courage, and to you, Mr. McGovern, for calling this Special Order today.

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