At eighty-nine, the Dalai Lama has once again made global headlines—this time with a striking declaration in his new book, Voice for the Voiceless, denouncing the Chinese government’s ongoing attempts to dictate the terms of his next reincarnation. The irony of an officially atheist regime meddling in matters of deep spiritual significance is glaring enough. But even more troubling is the broader context: more than seven decades of systematic repression of Tibetan Buddhism under Communist rule. Yet this repression is only one part of a much larger, often overlooked narrative. The sustained assault on Buddhism by Communist regimes—within Tibet and far beyond—remains one of the most underreported tragedies of the modern era. The release of the Dalai Lama’s book offers a timely opportunity to revisit this grim history, take stock of its global dimensions, and reflect on its enduring significance.
While Westerners often associate modernity with the victory of secularism over past religious violence, many Asian Buddhists offer a different narrative: the repression of religion by governments committed to putatively progressive Marxist-Leninist and Maoist ideologies, even as the same governments claimed to respect religious freedom.
The story begins in the former Soviet Union, which inherited imperial Russia’s vast multiethnic domains, including the small, traditionally Buddhist areas of Kalmykia (north of the Caspian Sea) and Buryatia (near Lake Baikal). It later added Tuva (near China), another Buddhist enclave. These areas were spared persecution in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, but the situation changed dramatically in the late 1920s and 1930s. While some Buddhists argued that their belief system was more a philosophy (even an atheistic one) than a religion, diehard Marxist-Leninists begged to differ. “Buddhist atheism has nothing to do with militant atheism based on the Marxist appraisal of the laws of nature and society,” a writer in the quasi-official journal The Godless pointedly asserted in 1930. Buddhism encouraged “social passivity and…aloofness from the concrete historical situation,” chided the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
Such judgments signaled a new era of repression. In all three regions, Buddhist temples and monasteries were either destroyed or repurposed for nonreligious functions; one was even turned into a “museum of atheism” in the city of Ulan-Ude, where it portrayed Buddhism (and other religions) as an “opium of the people.” High-ranking lamas and monks regularly faced harassment, deportation to the gulag, or execution. For its intransigence during World War II, Stalin had the entire population of Kalmykia deported to Siberia or central Asia in 1943, leading to the deaths of around 28,000 people out of a population of 134,000. Soviet officials later had the name Kalmykia removed from the map, adding cartographic to demographic annihilation.
Hardly a “single memorial remains” of Buddhism, as one visitor to Soviet Buddhist regions observed in 1958:
In Asia Minor and Greece the ruins of ancient temples have been preserved, making it possible to study the ancient culture of Hellas. Nothing remains of Buddhist temples in Buryatia and Kalmykia. The fate of Lamaism in the USSR deserves attention as an example of the complete destruction of a religion and the destruction of a religious group as a group.
“Temples, spiritual literature, priceless treasures of the datsans [monasteries] were destroyed, plundered,” the Soviet Buddhist leader Lama Munko Tsybikov wrote after the collapse of the Soviet Union, surveying the earlier Soviet carnage. “Religious figures were persecuted…[and] thousands of lamas went through the torments of the Gulag.”
In the neighboring state of Mongolia, the situation was just as bad, if not worse. A Stalinist puppet regime, the Mongolian People’s Republic (founded in 1924), banned reincarnations in 1928 and offered incentives for lamas and monks (deemed inherently reactionary) to abandon their monasteries. Between 1937 and 1939, Khorloogiin Choibalsan led the so-called Great Repression, which included show trials, executions, and other forms of severe persecution. Mirroring events in the Soviet Union at this time, the Great Repression offered leniency if victims admitted to the crimes they were accused of, but this promise was rarely kept. Its real purpose was to help convince the populace that the state was only carrying out justice. “Only death could end my suffering. Therefore, I agreed to say anything they wanted,” one rare survivor recalled.
The scale of the repression led to new depths of brutality. As one official who worked at the Ministry of the Interior at the time admitted in 1962: “Because so many lamas were arrested, the prisons were unable to house them all. So, a campaign began to get rid of them…. Once or twice a week there would be a mass shooting of the lamas. Each time two or three truckloads full of lamas would be killed.” It is estimated that eighteen thousand people perished, and many of the bodies have yet to be recovered.
In addition, the Mongolian government forcibly closed or destroyed more than seven hundred monasteries. In the late 1930s, Ministry of the Interior and military personnel arrived at monastery after monastery to evict and often arrest the lamas who lived there. Items found inside these monasteries—including rare works of art and Buddhist scriptures—were confiscated or destroyed, frequently burned in large bonfires. At the Gandan Monastery in Ulaanbaatar, the towering Migjid Janraisig Buddha (25.5 meters high) was stripped of its gold and jewels before disappearing, only to resurface in pieces decades later in Leningrad. Some monasteries were repurposed for secular use, but many were simply abandoned or burned to the ground. “By July 20 [1938], out of 771 temples and monasteries, 615 have become ash heaps,” one Communist underling proudly reported to Moscow—though modern assessments place the total number of closures even higher. In a largely nomadic culture, these monasteries were often the only permanent structures for miles in any direction.
As the exigencies of socialist development, propaganda, and education took off in the following period, young people became effectively cut off from their religious heritage. Mongolians were reluctant to speak about what had happened in the 1930s; doing so could still be dangerous. As the historian Michael K. Jerryson puts it, “By the middle of the twentieth century following the reign of terror, generations of Mongols were completely removed from their religious history and culture.”
Incredibly, in 1961, a promotional brochure published by the Mongolian government had the chutzpah to recommend its religious policies to socialist-wannabe countries in the developing world: “The experience gained in destroying the structure of lamaseries and resolving the question of the lamas is not only instructive for our Party, but offers a lesson for all countries and their parties where, as in Mongolia, religion is strong.”
Mongolia’s path set a precedent for North Korea, Cambodia, China, and Tibet. When North Korea emerged from Japanese occupation after World War II and became an independent country in 1948, its leader, Kim Il Sung, castigated religious bodies as “parasites that exploit and waste money and food.” Hurried land reforms destroyed the material foundations of Buddhism (and other faiths), converting temples into tourist spots or civic buildings. This went hand in hand with the rise of the Marxist-
Leninist-inflected state ideology known as “Juche” (or self-reliance), which denigrated traditional faith systems and judged past religious leaders as threats to the consolidation of state power—the ideology’s primary aim. With the exception of a handful of Potemkin temples in and around Pyongyang, Buddhism in North Korea had fizzled out or gone underground by the 1960s. The noncompliant found themselves driven into exile, imprisoned, or slain.
As North Korea sealed itself off from the world and China plunged into the chaos of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Cambodian dictator Pol Pot looked on. Having fashioned his own strain of Marxist-Leninist nationalism during a study sojourn in France, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge set out to erase Cambodia’s cultural heritage in pursuit of a radical vision of society that rebooted the calendar to “Year Zero” in 1975, the year Phnom Penh was taken. At the heart of this cultural annihilation was an assault on Cambodia’s venerable Theravada Buddhist tradition. Buddhist institutions were systematically targeted: pagodas razed by so-called “pagoda-demolition squads,” monasteries ransacked, and sacred texts and relics destroyed.
In the 1960s, before the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power, Cambodia was home to some sixty-five thousand monks and novices. When the regime collapsed in 1979, only a few hundred remained. Most had fled the country, were forcibly conscripted into military service, or were killed. Roughly 20 percent of the population perished under Pol Pot’s venomous rule. As the scholar of Cambodian Buddhism Karl D. Jackson chillingly observes, “The Khmer Rouge policy toward Buddhism constituted one of the most brutal and thoroughgoing attacks on religion in modern history.”
After the Communist victory in 1949, the People’s Republic of China embarked on a secularizing course, combining Marxist-Leninist ideas about religion with those of previous Chinese anticlerical modernizers during the Republican era (1911–49), who promoted the mantra “smash temples, build schools.” “Very soon after 1949 when the Communist Party came to power,” the Buddhist Sun Shuyun wrote, “one of the first things it did was to remove two symbols of Buddhism—the monastery (the outward symbol), and the monks and nuns who wore orange robes and who could be seen throughout the country.” In 1961, writing during the calamitous Great Leap Forward (1958–62), Chinese Buddhism scholar Holmes Welch worried about Buddhism being “virtually eliminated.” If the government measures continued, he elaborated, “Buddhism, just a little less than two thousand years after it arrived in China, [would] be dead.”
But it somehow got even worse. Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–76) intensified religious persecution against Buddhism and other faiths, including China’s Confucian heritage. In a frenzy of revolutionary zeal, Mao mobilized idealistic youth known as Red Guards, working alongside the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), to attack the “Four Olds”: old customs, old habits, old beliefs, and old ideas. Buddhist shrines, monasteries, and temples were desecrated, while monks and other religious figures were routinely targeted in brutal “struggle sessions.” A defining public ritual of the Cultural Revolution, the struggle session aimed to extract public confessions and terrorize others into compliance. The accused might have their faces smeared with ink, be forced to bark like dogs, eat grass, or don humiliating costumes bearing signs with labels such as “purveyor of superstition” or “counterrevolutionary.”
The Cultural Revolution reached every part of China, but it hit Inner Mongolia particularly hard. There, it was comparable in many respects to the persecutions of Soviet-dominated Outer Mongolia in the 1930s. A poster affixed to a Buddhist temple in the region succinctly summed up the general Communist attitude to Buddhism: “Buddhism is like an ulcer that absorbs the vital energy of the people and prevents them from flourishing.” On August 28, 1968, two hundred Red Guards pillaged the Great Monastery of Gegen Süme, hauling out thousands of Buddhist statues and leaving the site a ruin. Similar scenes played out elsewhere, aiming at “the methodical destruction of [Inner Mongolia’s] religious patrimony,” as the scholar of Mongolian Buddhism Isabelle Charleux has described it. Lamas and monks not imprisoned or slain were obliged to join the ordinary workforce.
And this brings us to the “Land of Snows”—Tibet—and the current Dalai Lama’s situation. In an effort to find a path of coexistence with the Communist government after the PLA first occupied Tibet in 1950, the young Dalai Lama made two trips to Beijing to discuss the Seventeen Point Agreement. Signed under pressure, the agreement affirmed China’s sovereignty over Tibet while ostensibly guaranteeing the region a measure of autonomy. Although conversations with Mao Zedong initially seemed encouraging, the Dalai Lama—as he recounts in his recent book—grew increasingly uneasy about the future of Tibetan culture. After one meeting, Mao told him bluntly that “religion is poison,” an obstacle to “material progress.”
China’s ongoing occupation reached a breaking point in 1959, when the people of Lhasa rose up against the PLA. In crushing the revolt, the military shelled Norbulingka Palace, the Dalai Lama’s summer residence, prompting him to flee the country. Disguised as a commoner, he made a harrowing journey across rugged terrain to India, where some eighty thousand Tibetans would eventually follow him. Condemned by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), he has remained in India ever since, residing in Dharamshala, which now serves as the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
The Cultural Revolution had an especially devastating impact on Tibet. Its rich Buddhist heritage suffered profound damage, including the desecration of the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa—the “Sistine Chapel” of Tibetan Buddhism. There and elsewhere, irreplaceable manuscripts, prayer wheels, and sacred statues were destroyed or repurposed. Mao’s quotations were carved into mountainsides over Buddhist prayers, and the culture’s signature display of prayer flags was banned. By the end of the Cultural Revolution, more than six thousand Tibetan monasteries had been despoiled, with only a few left standing. Tens of thousands of people were either slain or sent to labor camps. By the late 1970s, the once-flourishing monastic community had been nearly wiped out. As the Dalai Lama writes in his recent book:
In essence [during the Cultural Revolution], everything Tibetan was attacked: the practice of the Buddhist faith was outlawed; incense burning, ceremonies, festivals were banned; traditional songs and dances were prohibited. Struggle sessions and public humiliations were meted out to monks and “class enemies.” In brief, Tibet experienced a large-scale and systematic attempt to erase its cultural identity and collective memory.
More dispassionate scholarship confirms this assessment. As the historians Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer note in The Religion Question in Modern China, the period from 1966 to 1976 witnessed “the most thorough destruction of all forms of religious life in China, and perhaps in human history.” The Cultural Revolution’s assault on religion ranks among “the most furious in world history,” according to journalist and veteran China watcher Ian Johnson in The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao.
Although the Cultural Revolution has receded into history, the situation in Tibet today remains, to use the Dalai Lama’s word, “grim.” Under President Xi Jinping, Beijing has doubled down on its campaign to “Sinicize” Tibet—promoting Han Chinese resettlement, accusing many Tibetans of “splittism” (wanting to break free from China), and reshaping the region’s cultural identity to align with state ideology. Chinese has increasingly replaced Tibetan as the primary language of instruction in schools, while monasteries—long the spiritual heart of Tibetan life—have been subjected to suffocating surveillance. In some cases, police stations have been installed within monastery grounds, transforming places of contemplation into outposts of state control. The once-frequent acts of self-immolation by Tibetan monks—desperate protests against repression—have diminished not because of a change of heart on the monks’ part, but because the CCP now punishes the surviving families, making the cost of dissent unbearably high.
What is more, no one knows the whereabouts of the Panchen Lama, the second-ranking lama in Tibetan Buddhism, who was abducted by Chinese authorities as a child in 1995. Any display of the Tibetan national flag or even a photo of the Dalai Lama remains strictly banned. As the Dalai Lama sums up the current situation, “The simple fact is no one likes their home being taken over by uninvited guests with guns.”
As he nears the end of his life, the Dalai Lama recognizes Tibet’s difficult situation, but he is adamant that the Chinese government will not determine the selection of his successor. As he writes in the book:
The [next] Dalai Lama will be born in the free world so that the traditional mission of the Dalai Lama—that is, to be the voice of universal compassion, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, and the symbol of Tibet embodying the aspirations of the Tibetan people—will continue.
Despite the temptation to succumb to despair, he counsels hope. His problem, he emphasizes throughout the book, is not with the Chinese people, but with the CCP and its current leadership.
Western thinkers from John Rawls to Jürgen Habermas have equated modernity with secularism’s triumph over religious bigotry and obscurantism, assuming that it represents an inevitable marker of human progress. But this reflects a blinkered, often parochial view that overlooks the varied and fraught ways in which modernity has unfolded outside the West. From the Asian Buddhist perspective, modernity has frequently arrived not as unalloyed liberation but as secularist violence, coercion, and the suppression of spiritual traditions. In places like Mongolia, China, and Tibet, religious identity has appeared to modernizing states not only as a relic of the past but as a threat to their control—a wily competitor for the hearts and minds of people. Recognizing this complexity requires moving beyond a Euro-American framework and embracing a more global, multireligious understanding of how religion and secularism have interacted in modern history. The Dalai Lama’s storied, tragic life helps illuminate this broader perspective. For that, he deserves our deepest gratitude. May he enjoy many more years of life—and may his successor arrive from beyond the reach of the Chinese government.
