Tibet and its Guardians – between China and the West (1)-2 - 文章分类_德语 - 藏传佛教真相|西藏密宗达赖喇嘛六字大明咒男女双修Lama-佛教佛法

Tibet and its Guardians – between China and the West (1)-2

Here again, we can ask, does not this central importance in Tibetan Buddhism of the Kalachakra Tantra with its Shambhala holy war, both the inner and the outer, have to do with the fact that something very martial and violent lives within Tibetan culture, as in that of the Mongols, who are these days resurrecting the cult of Genghis Khan as a national totem for their new post-communist state? Extending the benefit of the doubt, can it be said that in the Kalachakra Tantra and other texts and iconography which include violence and wrathfulness, Buddhist lamas were trying, out of compassion, to work with the ethnic grain of the Tibetan and Mongolian peoples, so to speak, in order to wean them off war and violence? Or did the martial aspects of Tibetan Buddhist practice rather reflect the same martial and violent, even pre-Buddhist elements in the Tibetan lamas themselves? Warrior monks were common in Tibet , as in other parts of the Buddhist world, and physical violence between monks of different monasteries and sects has frequently broken out over the centuries. The Kalachakra includes both venusian and martial elements; it combines a tantric sex ritual with forecasts and descriptions of apocalyptic war – a powerful mix. Exalted feelings of nationalism can all too easily lead to violence. It is interesting that as the Nazis were just beginning their rise to power in Germany, Rudolf Steiner indicated that there is a deep link between nationalism and sexuality.

The timing of the emergence of the difficulties outlined above for Tibetan Buddhism is noteworthy. Just as the global profile of the Dalai Lama rises to a peak in the late 1990s with the approach of the millennium, just as Tibetan Buddhism seems to be carrying all before it in the developed countries with doors opening everywhere, along come the two Trimondis, and the problem of Dorje Shugden. Tibetan Buddhism is still advancing in the West, the Dalai Lama is just completing a well-publicised ten day trip to Britain as I write, but more searching questions are being asked these days; people are waking, Tibetans and non-Tibetans, as if from a dream. (24) The broad threefold historical development of Buddhism also needs to be taken into account here. The historical Gautama Buddha (c.6th-5th cent. BC; dates uncertain), out of his great compassion for the suffering of human beings, taught a doctrine and a path of personal liberation from this world that would free one of the need to reincarnate again. After his passing into nirvana, Theravada, the first phase or stream of Buddhism, which developed very approximately between the time of Buddha and Christ , can be said to have been primarily concerned with individual liberation through attention to individual ethical and mental behaviour. Amongst other things, Buddhist logic and philosophy saw a great development in this phase. The second broad phase of Buddhism, Mahayana, which developed around the time of Christ , concerned itself more with the liberation of others and indeed all beings through the compassionate deeds of the Boddhisattvas, who abjured Nirvana until all sentient beings were saved. Out of this stream would come the more devotional and social action-oriented aspects of Buddhism. Buddhism as philosophy of life began to give way to, or rather include, Buddhism as a consoling religion for all and not just a spiritual practice for an elite. The key spiritual insight of this time was not complex logic and systematic thought to understand how the mind and phenomena work, as in the highly abstruse Abidhamma teachings of the first period (400-250 BC), but rather, the Mahayana concept of sunyata, voidness, which would lead among other things, to the silence of Zen. The third broad phase came from the 5th-6th centuries onwards as an extension of Mahayana: this was Vajrayana, also known as Mantrayana, Tantric or Esoteric Buddhism. This phase reached down more into the will and reflected the influence of indigenous ethnic cultures on Buddhism; on the one hand there was the development of a vastly more exalted cosmography; on the other, much more emphasis on ‘skilful means’, working through the senses, magical actions and shamanistic practices. This was the Buddhism that made its mark on Tibet. Vajrayana emphasised less the mind and more the rest of the human being – the body, the senses, even the passions, the transformation of evil habits into good.(25) This was a Buddhism that would appeal more to the Turanian type of nomadic peoples whose spiritual roots were wilder and more elemental, more related to outer, sense-world phenomena. This goes some way to explain the gruesome nature of much Tibetan Buddhist iconography and artwork. Imported from China , Vajrayana exerted a tremendous influence in Japan from the early 9th century on, but the more modest Chinese and Japanese Buddhists were evidently not so interested in the writhing, blissful couplings of the Tibetan Buddhist deities and their sexual consorts.

Christianity arose in time between the two world faiths of Buddhism and Islam, which began approximately 600 years on either side of it. Rudolf Steiner saw Christianity in the course of time entering into a relationship with both of these and gaining something from both over periods of time lasting 600 years. From its often difficult encounter with Islam, among many other things, a particular gain for the western Christian world was natural science; the cultural transfer took place from 600-1200 and then was elaborated in the West from 1200-1800. From approximately 1800 onwards, according to Steiner (lecture of 19.3.1911), the Christian culture of the West would enter into a relationship with the world of Buddhism. We are still only 200 years into the first phase of this, which will end c.2400 – interestingly, that is around the time given in the Kalachakra for the Shambhala War. 600 years of elaboration by the Christian world of what it has learned from Buddhism will then follow. According to Steiner, that learning will, above all, relate to the understanding of karma and reincarnation, and it is noteworthy that Tibetan Buddhism focuses on this more than do other types of Buddhism due to its need for illustrious reincarnation lineages for its grand lamas. Robert Thurman and those on the opposite pole to him, such as the cyberneticist Ray Kurzweil, (26) imagine that Christianity will largely or entirely have disappeared from the West by 2400, just as Buddhism itself disappeared from India. Thurman hopes that by then much of the world will have become a Buddhocracy, ruled by the ‘spiritual science’ of the Tibetan lamas and governed in accord with the omniscient wisdom of Chenrezig, the Boddhisattva of Compassion, who is said to be an incarnate presence in the successive Dalai Lamas.

For Steiner, however, the relationship between Christianity and Buddhism will not at all bring any illumination of the essence of Christianity from the Buddhist side, and indeed, the Dalai Lama has had little enlightening to say on the matter; he seems to see Christ as simply another great enlightened teacher of love and compassion. Steiner , by contrast, emphasised not so much Christ ‘s teachings as His Deeds, notably His Resurrection. How then does Steiner, a Christian esotericist, view Tibetan Buddhism? He was quite forthright about it. Tracing Tibetan culture back to Atlantean times, he said: “the things that developed later in Tibet are such that they cannot be used anymore today….in this Tibetan culture something has been preserved in a bad form that originally had a relatively good form. Above all, the principle of rulership has taken a not very acceptable form.” He went on to describe the process of choosing a new Dalai Lama, a process which in its present form originated in the 13th century and was systematised by the 2nd Dalai Lama Gendun Gyatso (1475-1541):

You can imagine that the worst kind of abuse was rife. If the old Dalai Lama was no longer wanted they would simply look for a child and say: ‘The soul of the old Dalai Lama has to enter into this child. First he had to die, however. And the priests made sure that this happened at the right time. The people then believed that the soul of the old Dalai Lama had entered into the soul of the child. …They thought it was always the same soul, and to them it was always the same Dalai Lama; he merely changed his outer body. It was not like this in the original culture, and extraordinary mischief has developed out of it. You can see from this that the priests had gradually found ways of managing affairs in such a way that their supremacy was assured.(27)

Indeed, only one of the Dalai Lamas between the 7th and the 13th survived into his adult years; most were removed by assassination before they grew up. For Steiner then, the rule of the monastic priesthoods of Tibet no longer has spiritual validity; it has become decadent and even dangerous; this is evidenced today in the phenomena surrounding the Dorje Shugden controversy. But the modern age, which began in the early 15th century at the very time the Gelugpa sect (Yellow Hats) were formed by the great lama saint Tsongkhapa, is not an age that will suffer theocracies (or ‘clerocracies’) of any kind. Rule by monasteries belonged to a previous epoch, and the spirit of all-male priesthoods to an even earlier one. The time for esoterically sealed oligarchies of any kind is over. Clearly, for hundreds of thousands of Tibetans inside and outside the country, their culture revolves around their lamas and monasteries, but it has been obvious, since Britain ‘s bloody invasion of Tibet in 1904, that this mediaeval culture could no longer remain apart from the rest of the world. The British had forced China to open, the Americans did the same to Japan, then the British to Tibet; now China has in effect forcibly ‘exported’ Tibetan Buddhism around the globe and is bringing the modern world into Tibet. For good or ill, Tibet is no longer a Forbidden Land , a ‘Lost Horizon’. For centuries, the Tibetans had idealised their country as Avalokitesvara’s Pure Land; that is the meaning of the Potala palace of the Dalai Lamas in Lhasa – ‘the abode of Chenrezig (Avalokitesvara)’, Buddhisattva of Compassion, who is said to be incarnate in the Dalai Lama, who ruled from that palace. The Tibetans believed they were the people who had been saved by Chenrezig. Tibetans do not see their country as the centre of world civilisation, like the Chinese have seen China ; rather, they see it as the proper land for Buddhism.”… if foreigners entered this land, the pure Buddhist land would be instantly spoiled, the people would lose their happiness, receive the Buddha ‘s punishment, and fall into misery forever….Thus the Tibetans prohibited the entrance of foreigners into their country. When they found strange travellers, they would at once chase them out….Some explorers were killed….Tibetans who tried to invite foreigners were punished in a cruel manner.” (28)

It must of course be deeply painful for Tibetans to see that these things have now happened: foreigners have entered, the pure land has been spoiled, many of the people have lost their happiness, have been punished, and have fallen into misery – for the time being. The more reflective among them have asked, why has this happened, and the more conservative answer: because the foreigners pushed their way in. Yet the bolder thinkers, such as Tenzin Gyatso himself, dare to suggest that this was inevitable and even necessary. When he dies, and he is 72 now, the Chinese will likely try to arrange his successor to suit themselves. Last year Beijing introduced a law requiring lamas who were going to reincarnate to submit applications to the government beforehand (!) – for westerners, a bewildering act, which suggests either great cynicism on the part of the Chinese authorities or else that they too are falling in with the magical, occult-political worldview of the lamas. For the Tibetan faithful, however, even more than his pronouncement on Dorje Shugden , Tenzin Gyatso ‘s speculation that the 14th might be the last Dalai Lama is surely even more bewildering. A very different spirit flowed through the short life and great work of Dhondup Gyal (1953-1985), considered the founder of modern Tibetan literature:

A thousand brilliant accomplishments of the past

Cannot serve today’s purpose,

Yesterday’s salty water cannot quench today’s thirst.

In the withered, tired and lifeless body of history,

Without the soul of today,

The pulse of progress will not beat,

The blood of progress will not run…

From The “Waterfall of Youth” (1983)

What actually motivates westerners in their support for Tibet ? What underlies Beijing ‘s strong determination to keep control of Tibet ? Why is 2008 proving to be such a significant year for China ? The second part of this article will consider the interaction between Tibet and its would-be guardians in Beijing and the West.

NOTES

(1) There are two main groups in Tibetan Buddhism, the older, Red Hat group, which includes the Nyingma, Sakya, Kadampa, and Kagyu sects, and the Yellow Hats, or Gelugpa Sect. The Dalai Lama is the temporal, but not the nominal spiritual head, of the Yellow Hat sect, founded in the 15th century.

(2) Tibetans and Mongols share the great epic of King Gesar , who was a kind of East Asian Arthur, the longest epic in the world. Incidentally, the original birthplace of Gesar is now understood to be Axu in the mainly Tibetan Garze prefecture of Sichuan Province . This is literally next door to Ngawa Prefecture (53% Tibetan in 2008), and also in Sichuan Province . Ngawa is where the recent 8.0 earthquake occurred on 12 May.

(3) Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs, Vol. 2 (Spring 2002)

(4) ibid.

(5) ibid.

(6) Bernard Faure , Space and Place in Chinese Religious Traditions. p355

(7) Exactly the same thing happened in Japan too after its adoption of Buddhism, although its Buddhist guardian deities tended not to be quite as ferocious as the Tibetans’.

(8) This problem is dealt with from different angles in videos posted at Youtube.com on the Internet. Search for videos about ” Dorje Shugden “. For a more thorough and scholarly perspective, see George Dreyfus . The Shuk-den Affair in “Perspectives”, Volume 4, No. 3, Tuesday September 30. Online at http://www.tibet.com/dholgyal/shugden-origins.html

(9) See n.3

(10) See. n.3

(11) Robert Thurman : father of the Hollywood actress Uma Thurman and close friend of Richard Gere . Thurman’s wife Nena was formerly married to Timothy Leary , who in the 1960s popularised the use of LSD in a Tibetan Buddhist ritual context.

(12) Available as a free online e-book at http://www.iivs.de/~iivs01311/SDLE/Contents.htm

(13) Trimondi, Shadow of the Dalai Lama, 6.7 online, see n.12

(14) Trimondi, Shadow of the Dalai Lama, 5.3 online, see n.12

(15) The German author Rüdiger Sunner quotes a member of the SS Expedition to Tibet (1938) who referred to a meeting with Karl Maria Wiligut , Himmler ‘s spiritual adviser. Wiligut was in a trance-like state, and spoke of : “my friends…in Abyssinia and America , in Japan and Tibet … all who come from another world in order to construct a new empire. The occidental spirit is thoroughly corrupted, we have a major task before us. A new era will come, for creation is subject to just one grand law. One of the keys lies with the Dalai Lama [!] and in the Tibetan monasteries.” The SS man said that Wiligut then referred to “the names of monasteries and their abbots, of localities in eastern Tibet which I alone knew about … Did he draw these out of my brain? Telepathy? To this day I do not know, I know only that I left the place in a hurry. Quoted by Trimondi, see n.11 above.

(16) ‘Buddhocracy’ and the ‘buddhocratic’ takeover, first of America and then the world, have been concepts enthusiastically promoted by Robert Thurman .

(17) Shambhala (Sanskrit: a place of peace/tranquillity/happiness) is an especially importamt concept in the Kalachakra Tantra. As with everything in Tantrism, it has an outer exoteric and an inner esoteric aspect. Thus it is believed to be a physical place somewhere beyond the Himalayas and also an inner state of being. “… nevertheless it is not a physical place that we can actually find. We can only say that it is a pure land, a pure land in the human realm. And unless one has the merit and the actual karmic association, one cannot actually arrive there.” – the Dalai Lama, 1985, Bodhgaya, India. For Steiner, Shambhala this was the etheric world, the first realm of spiritual existence and the world in which the Christ Being currently ‘resides’. Shambhala withdrew from general human perception c.3000 BC but since 1900 it is slowly becoming spiritually visible again. (lec. 6th March, 1910, The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric; online at http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19100306p01.html)

(18) http://kalachakranet.org/kalachakra_tantra_war_peace.html

(19) Asahara also met Kalu Rinpoche (a patriarch of the Tibetan Kagyupa sect) and Khamtrul Jamyang Dondrup Rinpoche (former General Secretary of the Council for Cultural and Religious Affairs in Tibetan Government in Exile) At their meeting in Feb. 1987, the Dalai Lama said to Aashara: Dear friend, … Look at the Buddhism of Japan today. It has degenerated into ceremonialism and has lost the essential truth of the teachings. … If this situation continues, … Buddhism will vanish from Japan. Something needs to be done. You should spread real Buddhism there [in Japan]. … You can do that well, because you have the mind of a Buddha. If you do so, I shall be very pleased. It will help me with my mission. - quoted by the Trimondis in The Shadow of the Dalai Lama http://www.iivs.de/~iivs01311/SDLE/Part-2-13.htm

(20) See n.12

(21) http://www.berzinarchives.com/web/x/nav/n.html_554862326.html

(22) http://kalachakranet.org/kalachakra_tantra_miscellaneous.html

(23) Dalai Lama and the Modern Kalachakra Initiations By Urban Hammar, Dept. of History of Religions, Stockholm University at www.teol.lu.se/indiskareligioner/conference04/13996670/panel2hammer.pdf

(24) During the Dalai Lama’s visit to Britain in May 2008, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a programme about China and Tibet 29 May. At first, it seemed even-handed, but soon shifted into the familiar media partiality. There was no mention of the CIA role in the uprising of 1959 or of CIA support for Tibetan guerillas from 1956-69; no mention of the role of Tibetans in the destruction of monasteries during the Cultural Revolution, and no mention of high-level western involvement behind the new impetus which has sustained the Dalai Lama’s ever-increasing global presence since the mid-1980s.

(25) It is possible that Tibetan and Indian Tantra were influenced to some extent by Manichaeism in this sense, due to the geographical proximity, but there is not the space here to go into this.

(26) See his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, in which he eagerly looks forward to the end of biological humanity by 2099. Interestingly, the model in his book is not Dolly, but Molly, a 23-year old woman who ‘evolves’ into a mechanical ‘sub-entity’, when there is no longer any difference between a human and a machine, so here too, we see a manipulation of the female: not use of the female for the sake of the male as in Tibetan Buddhist ritual, but actual abolition of both male and female altogether.

(27) 20 May 1924 Collected Works GA 353

(28) H.Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples (1964), p.332

This page was uploaded 30.9.2008. Last updated 2.7.2012

Home » 文章分类_德语 » Kritik an Lamaismus