Whither, Indeed, the Tsampa Eaters?
Becoming good Buddhists may well be a matter of people becoming something they look as though they might have been but never actually were.
Chogyam Trungpa, the renowned guru, once suggested a definition of Tibetan 'insiders', which included the features that: they should speak some variant of the Tibetan language, follow the Buddhist faith, and eat tsampa. 'Tsampa-eaters' is an evocative designation for ethnic Tibetans, but it has certain limits; not all Tibetans eat tsampa (and many tsampa-eaters are, of course, not Tibetan). By the same token, not all Tibetans are Buddhist, and so, resorting to linguistic categories, the rather clumsy term 'Tibetan-speakers' is probably the least unsatisfactory term English has to designate the totality of ethnic Tibetans within and outside the frontiers of the modern Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR).