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

Steiner was speaking here about Britain, but the same could well be applied to the West in general. What lies behind the ‘hollow mockery’ of western spiritual alienation? After the religious wars of the 17th century in Europe, natural science came to dominate intellectual life; passionate ‘enthusiasm’ of any kind was frowned on, and a cool, intellectual rationalism was valued. Gradually, Europeans’ pride in their new technical, scientific and intellectual achievements, together with a parallel decline in understanding of spiritual affairs, combined to produce something completely new in European history – the cult of the modern. For the first time, Europeans began to feel contempt and distaste for their own past, especially for the age between the end of the Roman Empire and their own era. This was accompanied by an arrogance towards the ‘less civilised’ cultures they were encountering as they explored the wider world. As the teenager, full of his own growing sense of self, often begins to feel embarrassed about his childhood, forgetful or even contemptuous of it and of his elders, who he sees as representing the ignorant past, so European intellectuals looked down on the mediaeval past of their own culture and on other non-European cultures, with one notable exception.

During the 17th century, Jesuit priests (picture), impressed by much in China, brought back the first detailed descriptions of Chinese society, culture and philosophy, which found favour with many of the European intelligentsia. Reading the Jesuit accounts, they felt that in China, cool-headed philosopher-kings seemed to be in charge, technical science honoured, objective examinations provided for a meritocratic, well-ordered and rational society. Things Chinese, from porcelain, tea-drinking, silks and rococo-style chinoiserie had by about 1750 become the height of fashion in Europe. Then came the inevitable reaction. From the mid-18th century, stimulated by the publications of James Macpherson (the Ossian poems) and Horace Walpole (the Gothic novel), the pendulum began to swing back for some to a nostalgia for Europe’s lost culture of magic, simplicity, Nature-worship, the irrational, the numinous and the transcendent so that by 1800 the white powdered wigs of the Augustan Enlightenment were very much out of fashion. For the next 100 years cultural life in the West would be swayed by the struggle between the ‘rationalist’ Classical and the ‘anti-rationalist’ Romantic/Gothic modes. China was associated with the older inclination towards rationalism and both suffered accordingly in the more avant-garde salons of Europe. In 17th century Europe only Jesuit priests had had really close experience of China. As increasing numbers of traders and merchants came into real contact with the country in the late 18th century, they declared that they were not impressed – not least perhaps because the Chinese were not interested in what the westerners had to sell. As China’s cultural stock fell, another Far Eastern stock rose – that of Tibet and the mystical land of Shambhala that was associated with it. These too had first been revealed to Europe by Jesuits. The first westerner in Tibet was a Portuguese Jesuit, Antonio de Andrade. (12) It was another Portuguese Jesuit, Estevao Cacella , who brought West word of the magical land of Shambhala. In 1627, the year after Andrade, he entered eastern Tibet from Bhutan and died there three years later.

Translations of Buddhist works into European languages steadily began to appear after the Napoleonic era. As nostalgia for an imagined transcendent past replete with art and spiritual beauty grew apace, the longing for a Pure Land of spirit and art became overwhelming for many who recoiled from the burgeoning Industrial ugliness and materialistic obsessions of the Victorian age. Many cultural phenomena of the 19th century can be understood in terms of this polar perspective of spiritual ‘inflation’ of the self and the spiritual deflation of materialism which saw Man as but a machine or an animal. Interest in Buddhism – or rather, what they imagined to be Buddhism - grew steadily as people became familar with, for example, the works of Schopenhauer and then Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical movement; it was especially the latter which familiarised westerners with the notion that spiritual teachers of great wisdom, perhaps even the ‘Hidden Masters’ of world evolution, had always resided on the high Tibetan plateau. Many westerners longed to escape into an imagined past of nobility, aestheticism or simplicity, whether in the physical world, in the wilds of Africa or the vastness of the Indian Raj, or for example, in the worlds of art. Others sought transcendence in political causes, in revolutionary struggle for some romantic utopia, and were willing to sacrifice themselves at the altar of some national deity. Concepts of other dimensions, spiritual paradises, including Shambhala, were eagerly embraced by sensitive souls, not least by those with a growing sense of guilt or shame at what western humanity had done to itself, to nature and to non-western peoples. Such sentiments and motivations, redolent of the later ‘New Age’ movement, were rampant in educated circles in the decades before the First World War. Suppressed by the wars of the mid-20th century, such spiritual aspirations re-emerged powerfully in the 1960s when so many headed east in search of meaning, while Tibetan exiles and spiritual teachers headed west after the failed uprising of 1959, taking with them the teaching of Shambhala, which merged vaguely into stories of Atlantis and other lost civilisations, or combined with yearnings for brave new Aquarian communities of the future. Western attitudes towards Tibet and Shambhala cannot be understood without taking into account this 200 year-old story of western alienation. Chang Chun-yi, who once served in the Taiwan government as chairman of its “Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission,” commented:

”We . . . have found that modernization brings many social flaws that can hardly be remedied [and] we naturally long for the lost past . . . the Tibetan race that lives there in relative isolation from the rest of the world and is quite content with its intellectual lot also has its ancient, unique, and mystical religious traditions. All of which fits in nicely with the Western concept of an ideal and lost past. So, in their minds, Tibet has become the world’s last pure land, sacred and inviolable. Unfortunately, Tibet is under Chinese Communist rule now, with it being understood that the Han Chinese are stripping the Tibetans of the right to pass on their own ethnic culture, using migration to eventually exterminate the race, and conducting nuclear tests in that pure land that could destroy the human race. How could that not fill post-modern Westerners who are ardent nature and peace-lovers with bitter hatred, [and] arouse real sympathy? That is a basic reason why the Western public takes such an absolutely different and extremist stance on the Tibet matter than does their government, and is the basic reason why the Tibet matter has ultimately become an international one.” (13)

The Tibetan Bulletin Online, the official journal of the Central Tibetan Administration of the Dalai Lama referred again in Nov. 2006 (Vol. 10. No. 6) to:

the desire of His Holiness the Dalai Lama that the Tibetan people must be empowered to preserve and expand upon Tibet’s precious spiritual traditions, which is of benefit to the whole of humankind, including the Chinese people. In order to do this, the Tibetan people, inhabiting the whole of the Tibetan plateau, which is one geographic and composite ecological unit, must be given sufficient political freedom to ensure the continued survival and integrity of a unique civilization.

Here we see the Tibetan claim, referred to earlier, to the whole of the Tibetan cultural-geographical region. We see also the assertion that Tibetan Lamaism is of benefit not only to China but to the whole of humanity. Buddhism may indeed be of some benefit to humanity, but the rulership and guidance of modern society by all-male monastic orders…?

It has occurred to many observers that In another of history’s great ironies, the invasion of Tibet by the supposedly ‘materialist’ Chinese Maoists in 1959 drove the profoundly ‘spiritual’ teachings of Tibetan Buddhism to the West as many Tibetan teachers relocated in Europe and America. But is this actually the case? Could it not be that the Chinese Communists in fact share with the Tibetans something of a magical, symbolic and ‘mythic conception’ of history:

…history for [the Chinese] was not simply a scientific study. It had the features of a cult, akin to ancestor worship, with the ritual object of presenting the past, favorably emended and touched up, as a model for current political action. It had to conform also to the mystical view of China as the Centre of the World, the Universal Empire in which every other country had a natural urge to become a part … The Communists … were the first Chinese to have the power to convert their atavistic theories into fact.(14)

There had always been a spiritual rivalry between the Tibetans and the Chinese since the two cultures first ‘met’ in the Tang era. The geomantically aware Chinese were only too conscious of the fact that, while they claimed that China was the Centre of the World, Tibet stood at the roof of the world, and China’s great rivers rose in Tibet. The Chinese have long been wary, even in some awe, of the much-vaunted magic powers that are said to reside in the Land of the Snows. The Tibetan lamas were treated with respect by the Chinese elite, especially under the (Manchurian) Ching dynasty (1644-1912). This awareness gave rise to a kind of symbolic spiritual struggle between the ‘magical’ worldviews of, for example, Chairman Mao and the current Dalai Lama. We recall that the Dalai Lama’s Yellow Hat (Gelugpa) sect had already defeated the ‘Red Hats’ in Tibet centuries before. After ten years of the Cultural Revolution, things looked bad for Tibet, but then, in 1976, China suffered a massive earthquake (over 200,000 victims), and shortly afterwards Chairman Mao died. After his death, the Chinese reversed their stance towards Tibet; their official gesture was now to offer everything short of full independence, but this only had the effect of stimulating Tibetan resistance.

The question can arise, absurd though it may seem to some: could Tibetan Buddhism take over China in the future and the apocalyptic Shambhala myth at the heart of the Kalachakra Tantra become the centre of an aggressive pan-Asian imperialism? This question is indeed not as far-fetched as it seems. First, as Indian Buddhism all but died out in its homeland and successfully rooted itself in other Asian cultures, so Tibetan Buddhism could also transplant itself elsewhere. Second, the Japanese and Koreans managed to fuse Buddhism with their native shamanistic traditions over a thousand years ago, and the Japanese imperialist regime in the 1930s actually sought to rally Mongols, Manchus and other East Asians round the Shambhala myth and use it to turn them against the West. Third, the feud between Beijing and Taiwan has been easing considerably of late, and in Taiwan Tibetan Buddhism has established a real presence, with half a million followers; hundreds of Tibetan Buddhist shrines have been built, and many Tibetan lamas visit every year. It is indeed not far-fetched to imagine that even as Han Chinese migrants and tourists pour into Tibet on the newly built railway, two Tibetan spiritual trojan horses will make their way into Han China from both Tibet itself along that railway, and from Taiwan, as it gradually reintegrates with the motherland. The Tibetans are already claiming that high lamas are reincarnating in Chinese families in Taiwan. (15)

In a speech made in front of Chinese students in Boston ( USA ) on September 9, 1995, the Dalai Lama… nonchalantly proposes Tibetan Buddhism as China’s new religion: “A huge spiritual and moral vacuum is …being rapidly created in Chinese society. In this situation, the Tibetan Buddhist culture and philosophy would be able to serve millions of Chinese brothers and sisters in their search for moral and spiritual values. After all, traditionally Buddhism is not an alien philosophy to the Chinese people.”.(16)

In 1997 the Chinese government refused a request from the Dalai Lama to conduct a pilgrimage to the Wutai mountains in Shanxi province, China and discuss Tibet’s autonomy there with the [then] Chinese President Jiang Zemin. It is a location lamaism believes sacred to the bodhisattva Manjusri (17), who was traditionally associated with the Chinese emperor, and it is thus a geomantically significant area. A kalachakra ceremony conducted in such a spot could, in the magical Tibetan view, serve to launch ‘a spiritual conquest of China’. It is perhaps out of a sense of wary respect for the assumed ‘magical’ power of the Tibetan monks that Beijing has thus far shown its determination not to deal with the Dalai Lama officially even while it maintains back channel contacts with his ‘government-in-exile’ and pushes the claims of Tibet’s No. 2 religious figure, the Panchen Lama, whom it has controlled since 1995? Beijing is well aware of the custom that the Panchen and Dalai Lamas have to go through a formal process of ‘discovering’ each other’s reincarnations, thus in effect ‘selecting’ the next Panchen or Dalai Lama. Having chosen another boy, known as Qoigyijabu, as Panchen Lama, the Chinese authorities took the Dalai Lama’s choice, a boy named Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, into ‘protective custody’ in 1995. If the government controls the Panchen Lama, it has a chance to select who will be the next Dalai Lama.

China has never been an aggressive, missionarising culture in the religious sense; on the contrary, it has often been open to receiving missionaries of various kinds over the centuries, from Buddhism, Islam and Manichaeism to the pseudo-Christianity of the Taiping rebels (1850-64) and indeed Marxism itself. The current Chinese ‘neo-Confucianist’, semi-Marxist elite cannot but be aware of the effects on the Chinese State over the centuries of their people’s receptivity to ecstatic cults and religions. However, some conservative circles in both East and West would like to push this Chinese fascination with Tibetan Buddhism in a particular direction. There are those, for example, in Japan and Taiwan who hope that

…a Chinese reactivation of the Shambhala myth could… deliver a traditionally anchored pan-Asian ideology to replace a fading communism. As under the Manchus, there is no need for such a vision to square with the ideas of the entire people.(18)

In the West, the British former diplomat and ex-MP George Walden has this year authored a book (19) in which he raises the spectre that what he calls the normally ‘sheepish’ Chinese may be about to become more ‘wolfish’, and ‘Mongolian’ in spirit. But a resurgent Mongolia has as its central totems Genghis Khan and Lamaism, with its Kalachakra tantra teaching of the world ruler, the chakravartin, who will unite all Asia against the peoples of ‘the West’. Walden and others in the western media therefore are playing with fire, reawakening fears of a self-conjured ‘Yellow Peril’. For whilst it has often been noted that the peaceful religion of Mahayana Buddhism moved from India to minister unto the martial peoples of northeast Asia – and Buddhism can certainly be said to have contributed to ‘calming’ the Mongols – China is not to be confused with Mongolia. The peoples of East Asia are as different from each other as are those of Europe; there is no amorphous East Asian Yellow Peril. What there is in Tibetan Buddhism, however, is a religious doctrine that could be used in a perverted way to unite the peoples of East Asia and turn them against other peoples, just as the idea of the socialist brotherhood of Man was so used. For just as the noble ideal of the brotherhood of Man was accompanied in socialism by the nefarious doctrines of class struggle, the theory of surplus value and the materialist interpretation of history, so the noble truth of Buddhism is accompanied in Tibet by a doctrine of an apocalyptic racial conflagration, rituals of male superiority that are manipulative of women and of the female principle in general, and a social system of theocratic rule.

As these two articles have indicated, the Buddhism of Tibet includes key elements that are no more in harmony with the essential spirit of Buddhism than crusaders and all-male monkhood are in harmony with the spirit of Christianity. It would not be desirable for Tibetan Buddhism and its monks to take the place of the presently fading Chinese version of Marxism and its Party cadres. If the notion that this could happen at all seems absurd to some, they should look again at how close-run a thing was the Great Taiping Rebellion of 1850-64. That movement, based on a non-Chinese religion (a form of pseudo-Christianity), grew from just two people to ruling over 30 million and might well have taken over the Chinese Empire had not the West thrown in its lot with the Ching dynasty; between 20 and 30 million died in the conflict. This is not to claim that Tibetan Buddhism would take over China by force (after all, it ‘conquered’ the Mongol Empire by peaceful means) but merely to indicate that a seemingly harmless religious movement can indeed ‘conquer’ a vast State, as the Romans experienced some 1700 years ago. It is not the conflict between the Dalai Lama and Beijing which poses a threat for the West and the world community, but rather, in contrast, a possible future cultural conquest of the “Chinese dragon” by the “Tibetan snow lion”.(20) Meanwhile, Robert Thurman, Richard Gere, and multitudes of Americans today earnestly believe in a ‘Buddhocratic’ conquest of America by the monks of Tibet and in the spiritual guardianship of the West by “His Holiness” the Dalai Lama. Stranger things have happened in the history of the world. We need to look not only at what is front of us, but to scan the horizon for what may be in the process of emerging, both within our own souls and in the world at large.

NOTES

(1) Grand Chessboard – American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997), p.38 Brzezinski ‘s book illuminates much of what has been going on in world affairs since the mid-1990s. His son Mark is also an adviser to Obama, while his other son Ian is current U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Affairs and advises the other presidential candidate, John McCain. Bzezinski’s daughter, Mika, is a prominent TV news journalist and presenter with MSNBC

(2) http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8673

(3) Grand Chessboard, pp.30-31

(4) http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3173.shtml

(5) ‘ Stans ‘: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgystan

(6) K.Meyer & S.Brysac, Tournament of Shadows – The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Asia (1999) pp.542-5

(7) Tournament of Shadows, p.552; see also Orphans of the Cold War (1999) by John Knaus, ex-chief of the CIA Tibet Task Force

(8) http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3173.shtml

(9) Wang Lixiong, TIBET : The PRC’s 21st Century Underbelly

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/ealac/barnett/pdfs/link14-wang-lixiong.pdf. See also Wang’s Reflections on Tibet http://newleftreview.org/A2380

(10) He practiced law in Washington D.C., London and San Francisco with the law firms of Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering, and of Pettit and Martin . He teaches international law at Golden Gate University, San Francisco. From 1991 to 1998 he was the general secretary of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO). During that time (1994-7) he was advisor to the Chechen government delegation on their negotiations with the Russian Federation and advisor to the Abkhazian government delegation in peace talks between Georgia and Abkhazia (1993-95). He is a member of the Netherlands Development Assistance Research Council (RAWOO), an advisory body of the Netherlands foreign ministry. He is the President and co-founder of Kreddha, an NGO that works for “prevention and resolution of violent conflicts between population groups and states”.

(11) Der Spiegel, No.16 (1998), p. 109

(12) He visited the western Tibetan kingdom of Guge in 1626 and converted its monarch, who had resented the growing power of Buddhist monks and saw Christianity as a counterweight. The monks called in the Muslim warriors of neighbouring Ladakh, who destroyed the 700 year-old kingdom of Guge completely.

(13) http://www.columbia.edu/itc/ealac/barnett/pdfs/link14-wang-lixiong.pdf.

(14) http://www.iivs.de/~iivs01311/SDLE/Part-2-14.htm

(15) Tibetan Review, May 1995, pp. 10-11

(16) Tibetan Review, Oct. 1995, p. 18

(17) Mt. Wutai, in the north of China, was regarded as one of the 4 sacred mountains of Buddhism in China and the abode of Manjusri on earth. Manjusri (Wenshu) is one of the four great bodhisattvas of Chinese Buddhism, the others being Avalokiteshvara, Kshitigarbha, and Samantabha. Manjusri (“Gentle Glory”, Ch: Wenshu; Tib: Jampelyang) Mahayana bodhisattva of wisdom (prajna), doctrine and awareness. He is often shown riding on a lion’s back, with a flaming sword in his right hand (wisdom cutting through ignorance error) and a flower-borne scripture in his left hand (the Prajnaparamita, ultimate realisation, enlightenment). In Tibet his wrathful form is that of Yamantaka, ‘Terminator of Death’.

(18) http://www.iivs.de/~iivs01311/SDLE/Part-2-14.htm

(19) George Walden, China : A Wolf in the World? (2008) and also Walden: ‘China, Red in Tooth and Claw’ in Standpoint magazine July 2008 (Issue 2). See also Pico Iyer, ‘The Real Dalai Lama’, in Standpoint magazine, August 2008 (Issue 3)

(20) http://www.iivs.de/~iivs01311/SDLE/Part-2-17.htm

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