Buddhism as Protest
Overview
This module explores Buddhism’s role in civil protest through the Lhakar Movement and a series of Tibetan self-immolations both of which began in response to China’s violent crackdown of Tibetan protest in 2008. Tibetans have been occupied by the Peoples Republic of China since 1950, leaving them without political, economic, or cultural autonomy. Buddhist practice was banned, monks and nuns were murdered, and monasteries were destroyed. Political protest is an expression of the body. Within a context of religious and cultural censure how one dresses, speaks, eats, and even what one buys can be leveraged as a form of civil resistance. While state violence and religious censure has vacillated over the decades, both movements help us understand how cultural genocide impacts the body politic but also Buddhism’s role in expressing agency.
Embodied Experience
The clip below describes how Lhakar mobilizes against the state’s criminalization of dissent by asserting Tibetanness. The Lhakar pledge encourages Tibetans, inside and outside of Tibet, to speak Tibetan, eat Tibetan foods, and wear Tibetan clothes to combat the Sinicization of Tibet. These strategies of non-violent resistance include Buddhist practices, such as praying at temples, public circumambulation, or even studying Buddhism. It also illustrates how the Lhakar movement unites Tibetans inside and outside Tibet in transnational solidarity over social media.
In 2009, a Tibetan monk In Tibet self-immolated in protest of increasing Tibetan subjugation, leading to a series of self-immolations by monks, nuns, and laypeople that would grow to over 100 in 2012. In the clip below, we see public demonstrations of solidarity by Tibetan monastics and lay people who march carrying pictures of those who have self-immolated, educating the larger public on the grave harm Tibetans experience through occupation.
Buddhism as Protest, Part I – The Lhakar Movement
Video Resources
In this video, Tibetan scholar and core contributor to the blog Lhakar Diaries, Dawa Lokyitsang, discusses the digital origins of Lhakar as a non-cooperative movement that both celebrates Tibetan culture but resists cultural erasure amidst new forms of Tibetan displacement.
Readings
“What Is Lhakar?” [Lhakar Diaries website]
“Tibetan Buddhism: Religious Freedom in China” [Freedom House website]
Buddhism as Protest part II – Tibetan Self-immolations
Video Resources
This documentary, Fire in the Land of Snow, provides some historical context for China’s long occupation of Tibet as well as Tibet’s long history of protest. It chronicles the series of self-immolations that began among monastics in response to the state’s violent censure of more normative forms of Tibetan protest that took place in 2008. The PRC exacted a near total ban on any Tibetan gathering or expression of culture and stoked racial division between Tibetans and Han Chinese through its media discourse. Many monastics were targeted as political dissidents and publicly shamed, producing moral outrage among monastic and lay Tibetans.
While freely available, due to the content, this video is age-restricted. Please watch it on YouTube here.
Readings
Society of Cultural Anthropology Forum, “Self-Immolation as Protest in Tibet”
Discussion Questions
- Why do you think the People’s Republic of China has banned Buddhist practice in Tibet? Why do you think it has criminalized all forms of dissent post 2008, such as marches, chants, carrying signs?
- How is the Lhakar movement centered on the body?
- Why do you think the Lhakar movement is an effective tool of non-violent resistance? How does it resist cultural erasure?
- Why do you think Buddhist practice is an important tool of resistance for Tibetans?
- Why is Buddhism so important to Tibetans?
- How does Lhakar unite Tibetans living in diaspora with those within Tibet? Why might this be important for Tibetans given their political circumstances?
- Why do you think Tibetan monastics began self-immolating? Why have lay people (non-monastics) begun self-immolating as well?
- Is self-immolating a Buddhist tradition? What does self-immolation morally communicate?
- How have these self-immolations impacted the larger Tibetan and even global community? How did you feel when you learned about them?
Additional Resources
Gyal Lo, “Is Chinese Rule in Tibet Colonial?”
Lhakar Diaries, “Celebrating Lhakar Through Learning: Summer Buddhism Retreat”
Dawa Lokyitsang, Lhakar Diaries, ““The Discursive Art of China’s Colonialism”
Cite This Module
Natalie Avalos. 2026. “Buddhism as Protest.” In Stephanie Balkwill and Amy Langenberg (eds.), Buddhist Bodies Collective. https://buddhistbodies.com/378-2/social-bodies/buddhism-as-protest/
Author Bio: Natalie Avalos
Natalie Avalos is an assistant professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies in the Ethnic Studies department at University of Colorado Boulder. She is an ethnographer of religion whose teaching and research examine Indigenous religious life, land-based ethics, healing historical trauma, and decolonization. She received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a special focus on Native American and Indigenous Religious Traditions and Tibetan Buddhism and is currently working on her manuscript titled Decolonizing Metaphysics: Transnational Indigeneities and Religious Refusal, which explores urban Indigenous religious life as decolonial praxis. She is a Chicana of Mexican Indigenous descent, born and raised in the Bay Area.