People should write of the suffering of millions of tortured individuals like the Panchen Lama and save them as humanity should not be a dead species, wrote Tenzin Jampa, a Tibetan student for the Tibet Rights Collective, a Delhi-based advocacy and policy research institute.
The Panchen Lama is considered the second most important spiritual leader in Tibetan Buddhism. The previous year, 2022 marked the 27th anniversary since Tibet’s 11th Panchen Lama was forcibly abducted by the Chinese government along with his entire family.
China has, however, not only kept his whereabouts a secret to date but has also not revealed the slightest details regarding his being alive or not.
Lama’s abduction by China stands as one of the longest-standing cases of enforced disappearance in the world today, reported Tibet Press.
On May 14, 1995, Gedun Choekyi Nyima was recognized by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama as the 11th Panchen Lama. Three days after that, he was abducted and since then has never been found.
As if this was not enough, the Chinese Communist Party even took the liberty to appoint a Panchen Lama of their own and forcibly made the Tibetans in Tibet accept him or at least put up an act of the world to show that they do.
According to Jampa, some would say that Lama is a living emanation of Buddha filled with limitless compassion and profound knowledge. Jampa, however, thinks otherwise. He said that he could not see the Buddha in the 6-year-old kid who was cruelly taken away. “I never can. I can only see the kid who must have been so traumatised by everything that happened,” Jampa wrote.
According to Jampa, the case of Lama should be enough to stop our hearts with pain and long for his freedom. But tens of thousands of other Tibetans, young and old, ‘disappear’ in their fight for a Free Tibet.
“They are slaughtered, kidnapped, and imprisoned. But we, the people of the world, allow this to happen when it should be filling us with rage,” Jampa wrote for Tibet Rights Collective.
He said that, as long as our body can move and our mind can think, we should never sacrifice our ideals of freedom. We should use the daggers of our language and our actions, to stab away at the heart of tyranny whenever we can.