Abe’s Assassin and the Potala Palace, Tibet

 The alleged motive for Shinzo Abe’s assassination and the Potala Palace, the legendary winter palace of the Dalai Lamas in Lhasa, Tibet. What’s the connection? Bear with me. Ten years or so ago, I visited Tibet, and climbed to the top of the Potala Palace, taking two hours to climb the thousand steps to the top and twenty minutes to walk down—it’s that steep. Our guide throughout our stay in Tibet, a young native Tibetan, was, like all his ethnic countrymen, resentful of the Han Chinese who dominated the economy and looked down on the native population. But surprisingly, he did not attribute the backwardness of the region solely to the Chinese government’s promotion of the Han majority over the Tibetan minority. He attributed it partly to the legendary spirituality of the Tibetan Buddhists, so admired and exoticized by the West, that led them to donate their earthly wealth to the temple rather than focus on the education and advancement of their people. His own mother, according to our young guide, gave whatever she was able to save to buy gold leaf to gild the statues of the temple, while he and his siblings went without.

Fast forward to three days ago, when a gunman shot down Shinzo Abe, the former Japanese Prime Minister, because, he alleged, Abe had ties to a particular sect, the Unification Church, to which the assassin’s mother had belonged and given donations and went bankrupt. This motive initially seemed far fetched to me but then I remembered our young Tibetan guide and his resentment of his mother’s devotion to her temple at the expense of the future of her children.