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The Shadow of the Dalai Lama – Part II – Intro file:///C:/Scrapbook/data/20060816164651/index.html The Shadow of the Dalai Lama – Part II – Intro The Shadow of the Dalai Lama – Part II – 2. The Dalai Lama (Avalokiteshvara) and the Demoness (Srinmo) © Victor & Victoria Trimondi Part II POLITICS AS RITUAL The Shambhalization plan for Japan is the first step toward the Shambhalization of the world. If you participate in it, you will achieve great virtue and rise up to a higher world Shoko Asahara In order to be able to understand and to evaluate the person of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and the history of Tibet, we must first set aside all of our contemporary western conceptions in which the domains of religion and politics, of magic and government decisions, and of worldly and spiritual power are separate from one another. We must also not allow ourselves to be influenced by the public self-presentation of the exiled Tibetan head of state, by his declarations of belief in democracy, by his insistent affirmations of peace, by his ecumenical professions, or by his statements on practical politics. Then a closer examination reveals the entire performance, oriented to western values, which he offers daily on the world political stage, to be a political tactic, with the help of which he wants to put through his atavistic and androcentric world view globally — a world view whose dominant principles are steeped in magic, ritual, occultism, and the despotism of an ecclesiastical state. It is not the individual political transgressions of the Dalai Lama, which have only been begun to be denounced in the Euro-American media since 1996, which could make his person and office a fundamental problem for the West. Even if these “deficiencies” weigh more heavily when measured against the moral claims of a “living Buddha” than they would for an ordinary politician, these are simply superficial discordances. In contrast, anybody who descends more deeply into the Tibetan system must inevitably enter the sexual magic world of the tantras which we have described. This opens up a dimension completely foreign to a westerner. For his “modern” awareness, there is no relation whatsoever between the tantric system of rituals and the realpolitik of the head of the Tibetan government in exile. He would hardly take seriously the derivation of political decisions from the Kalachakra Tantra and the Shambhala Myth. But it is precisely this connection between ritual and politics, between sacred sexuality and power which is — as we shall demonstrate — the central concern of Lamaism. European-American ignorance in the face of atavistic religious currents is not limited to Tibetan Buddhism, but likewise applies to other cultures, like Islam for example. It is currently usual in the West to draw a stark distinction between religious fundamentalism on the one hand, and the actual human political concerns of all religions on the other. The result has been that all the religious traditions of the world were able to infiltrate Europe and North America as valuable spiritual alternatives to the decadent materialism of the industrialized world. In recent years there has not been much demand for a sustained critical evaluation of religions. Yet anybody who reads closely the holy texts of the various schools of belief (be it the Koran, passages from the Old Testament, the Christian Book of Revelations, or the Kalachakra Tantra), is very soon confronted with an explosive potential for aggression, which must inevitably lead to 1 of 303 8/16/2006 4:48 PM The Shadow of the Dalai Lama – Part II – Intro file:///C:/Scrapbook/data/20060816164651/index.html bloody wars between cultures, and has always done so in the past. Fundamentalism is already present in the core of nearly all world religions and in no sense does it represent an essential misunderstanding of the true doctrine. [1] The Dalai Lama is without doubt the most skilled and successful of all religious leaders in the infiltration of the West. He displays such an informed, tolerant, and apparently natural manner in public, that everybody is enchanted by him from first sight. It would not occur to anybody upon whom he turns his kindly Buddha smile that his religious system is intent upon forcibly subjecting the world to its law. But — as we wish to demonstrate in what follows — this is Lamaism’s persistently pursued goal. Although understandable, this western naiveté and ignorance cannot be excused — not just because it has up until now neglected to thoroughly and critically investigate the history of Tibet and the religion of Tantric Buddhism, but because we have also completely forgotten that we had to free ourselves at great cost from an atavistic world. The despotism of the church, the inquisition, the deprivation of the right to decide, the elimination of the will, the contempt for the individual, the censorship, the persecution of those of other faiths — were all difficult obstacles to overcome in the development of modern western culture. The Occident ousted its old “gods” and myths during the Enlightenment; now it is re-importing them through the uncritical adoption of exotic religious systems. Since the West is firmly convinced that the separation of state and religion must be apparent to every reasonable person, it is unwilling and unable to comprehend the politico-religious processes of the imported atavistic cultures. Fascism, for example, was a classic case of the reactivation of ancient myths. Nearly all of the religious dogmata of Tantric Buddhism have also — with variations — cropped up in the European past and form a part of our western inheritance. For this reason it seems sensible, before we examine the history of Tibet and the politics of the Dalai Lama, to compare several maxims of Lamaist political and historical thought with corresponding conceptions from the occidental tradition. This will, we hope, help the reader better understand the visions of the “living Buddha”. Myth and history For the Ancient Greeks of Homer’s time, history had no intrinsic value; it was experienced as the recollection of myth. The myths of the gods, and later those of the heroes, formed so to speak those original events which were re-enacted in thousands of variations by people here on earth, and this “re-enactment” was known as history. History was thus no more and no less than the mortal imitation of divine myths. “When something should be decided among the humans,” — W. F. Otto has written of the ancient world view of the Hellenes — “the dispute must first take place between the gods” (quoted by Hübner, 1985, p. 131). If, however, historical events, such as the Trojan War for example, developed an inordinate significance, then the boundary between myth and history became blurred. The historical incidents could now themselves become myths, or better the reverse, the myth seized hold of history so as to incorporate it and make it similar. For the ancient peoples, this “mythologizing” of history signified something very concrete — namely the direct intervention of the gods in historical events. This was not conceived of as something dark and mysterious, but rather very clear and contemporary: either the divinities appeared in visible human form (and fought in battles for instance) or they “possessed” human protagonists and “inspired” them to great deeds and misdeeds. If human history is dependent upon the will of supernatural beings in the ancient view of things, then it is a necessary conclusion that humans cannot influence history directly, but rather only via a religious “detour”, that is, through entreating the gods. For this reason, the priests, who could establish direct contact with the transcendent powers, had much weight in politics. The ritual, the oracle, and the prayer thus had primary status in ancient societies and were often more highly 2 of 303 8/16/2006 4:48 PM The Shadow of the Dalai Lama – Part II – Intro file:///C:/Scrapbook/data/20060816164651/index.html valued than the decisions of a regent. In particular, the sacrificial rite performed by the priests was regarded as the actual reason whether or not a political decision met with success. The more valuable the sacrifice, the greater the likelihood that the gods would prove merciful. For this reason, and in order to be able to even begin the war against Troy, Agamemnon let his own daughter, Iphigeneia, be ritually killed in Aulis. Very similar concepts — as we shall demonstrate — still today dominate the archaic historical understanding of Lamaist Buddhism. Religion and history are not separated from one another in the Tibetan world view, nor politics and ritual, symbol and reality. Since superhuman forces and powers (Buddha beings and gods) are at work behind the human sphere, for Lamaism history is at heart the deeds of various deities and not the activity of politicians, army leaders and opinion makers. The characters, the motives, the methods and actions of individual gods (and demons) must thus be made answerable in the final instance for the development of national and global politics. Consequently, the Tibetan study of history is — in their own conception — always mythology as well, when we take the latter to mean the “history of the gods”. What is true of history applies in the same degree to politics. According to tantric doctrine, a sacred ruler (such as the Dalai Lama for example) does not just command his subjects through the spoken and written word, but also conducts various internal (meditative) and external rituals so as to thus steer or at least influence his practical politics. Ritual and politics, oracular systems and political decision-making processes are united not just in the Tibet of old, but also — astonishingly indeed — still today among the Tibetans in exile.