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Monk Wirathu’s 969 quotes the

Dalai Lama’s Kalachakra

 

A group of American Buddhists has launched an English-language website promoting the 969 movement of the Terror-Monk Wirathu in response to the negative western media surrounding the ultra-nationalist Buddhist campaign in Burma. (See Time article: Buddhist Terror) On this Website the violence against Muslims is justified through the Kalachakara-Tantra and the Shambhalah Prophecy and quotes parts of it to explain the position of their violence. Here a part of the text, cited to support the 969 movement, which mentioned also the Dalai Lama:

“The Kalachakra is a Tibetan Buddhist doctrine on the cycles of time. In addition to being a text, meditation practice, and initiation ritual, Kalachakra is a prophecy for the victory of the Buddhist religion in a war with Islam.

Beginning in 712AD and continuing through 1030AD, India was subject to massive annual invasions from Muslims who eventually conquered and destroyed much of the cultural heritage of India. In a final desperate act to annihilate Buddhism, in 1193, Nalanda University which was home to the greatest center of learnings in the East was destroyed, with thousands of monks beheaded. The destruction of the temples, monasteries, centres of learning at Nalanda and northern India to be responsible for the demise of ancient Indian scientific thought in mathematics, astronomy, alchemy, and anatomy. Much of what modern scholarship of Buddhist studies puzzles over today was contained in the manuscripts and minds of those who were lost during this calamity. However as the Kalachakra Tantra shows, the war between Dhamma and Islam is not over, nor is it. The prophecy includes detailed descriptions of the future invaders as well as suggested ways for the Buddhist teachings to survive these onslaughts.

The Dalai Lama has stated that the public exposition of this tantra is necessary in the current degenerate age. The initiation may be received simply as a blessing for the majority of those attending, however, many of the more qualified attendees do take the commitments and subsequently engage in the practice.”

 

Herre clearly the Kalachakra is identified as a text about Buddhism versus Islam. Ex-Tibetan Buddhist Chris Chandler makes the following comment: “969′s monk/leader Wirathu and his Burmese death squad, where Muslims are being persecuted and macheted to death in the name of this Theravadin Buddhism of ‘compassion and  ’peace’  is also influenced by the Dalai Lama’s Kalachakra prophecy, and its views on ‘liberation’, Quotes by the Dalai Lama and the on Kalachakra prophecies were on  Wirathu’s  website,  but since taken down.“

 

Sources:

Monk Wirathu’s 969 quotes the Dalai Lama’s Kalachakra – in:

http://zenpundit.com/?p=29028

American Buddhists Promote 969 Movement With Website – in: http://www.irrawaddy.org/latest-news/american-buddhists-promote-969-movement-with-website.html

Lifton’s Thought Control Criteria and the Cult of Tibetan ‘Buddhism’ – in: http://www.extibetanbuddhist.com/


Burma’s Buddhist Pogroms

by Angus Cargill

The surprise appearance of Nobel Peace Prize winner and prominent Buddhist Aung San Suu Kyi at Burma’s annual armed forces day celebration, together with the racially-inspired pogroms that have swept Burma over the past few months, incited in many cases by the rhetoric of Buddhist monks, have once again called into question the credentials of Buddhism as the religion of peace. In what seems to be a policy coordinated between Buddhist clergy and the military dictatorship, and unopposed by Burmese pro-democracy campaigners, attacks by mobs acting with “brutal efficiency” and incited by the “incendiary propaganda” of Buddhist monks, according to UN envoy Vijay Nambiar, have driven thousands of ethnic Rohingya from their homes into refugee camps in Burma or abroad. Mosques have been demolished, homes destroyed and Muslim-inhabited neighborhoods razed to the ground with the encouragement of Buddhist monks, who have held demonstrations calling for the expulsion of all members of the Muslim minority from Burma.

 

 

Burma’s President Thein Sein spelled out the ultimate aim of the campaign last July, when he called for the expulsion of all Rohingya from Burma, or their confinement in refugee camps. Speaking to UNHCR High Commissioner Antonio Guttierez, he said that it was “impossible to accept the illegally entered Rohingya, who are not our ethnicity” and mooted sending the group to a third country or UN administered camps.” “Illegally entered,” in this context refers to the exclusion of all Rohingya from Burmese citizenship by successive constitutions, which left them off the list of 130 ethnic groups defined as Burmese citizens.

 

Where Rohingya continue to live, ghettoes have already been established. An article in today’s Democratic Voice of Burma stated that “Sittwe’s Muslim quarter, Aung Mingalar, which is home to some 7,000 people, has been cordoned off by police since June and residents who venture outside risk being arrested or beaten…. “We hardly have any food provisions,” Mohammed Rafi from Aung Mingalar told DVB. “We don’t even have any doctors to cure us when we are ill. Nor are we allowed to go outside for treatment.”

 

No statement has been made criticizing any of these events by any Buddhist leader, including the other Buddhist recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Dalai Lama.

 

In neighbouring Sri Lanka, a country which prides itself as having preserved one of the earliest and purest forms of Buddhism, even more bloodthirsty ethnic conflict with the Hindu Tamil minority led to massacres at the end of the civil war in 2009 which left at least 30,000 dead and, according to the Sri Lankan Catholic Bishop Joseph Rayappu, 146,679 unaccounted for. Sri Lankan Buddhist monks have been equally prominent in fanning the flames of ethnic and religious tension there, leading demonstrations in 2002 which prevented a peaceful settlement to the civil war, assassinating Prime Minister S.W.R.D Bandaranaike in 1959 for making concessions aimed at reconciliation with the Tamils (1), and most recently storming a mosque which they claimed was on ancestral Buddhist territory. The Japanese Zen Buddhist leadership, according to the Zen priest Brian Victoria, writing in “Buddhist Warfare,” a collection of essays published by the Oxford University Press in 2010, displayed “fervent if not fanatical support of Japanese militarism.” (2)

 

The first formal European convert to Buddhism, Helena Blavatsky, who took Buddhist vows in Sri Lanka in 1880, was a rabid anti-Semite, translations of whose books were the first in Germany to bear the swastika, and whose Theosophical Society laid the foundations for the foundation of the Nazi Party in 1920. So what could the reason be for such vicious racially inspired violence breaking out in these three Buddhist countries, between them accounting for a substantial majority of Buddhist worshippers in the world today? Coincidence? Well, maybe, but consider a few thought-provoking facts. Early European Buddhists were almost exclusively anti-Semitic and deeply racist promoters of the myth of the “Aryan master race,” which they believed had followed a religion similar to Buddhism. The philosopher Schopenhauer, who was the first European to call himself a Buddhist as well as being a rabid and offensive anti-Semite, the anti-Semitic composer Wagner, even the SS leader Himmler were all serious students of Indian and Buddhist philosophy. The first formal European convert to Buddhism, Helena Blavatsky, who took Buddhist vows in Sri Lanka in 1920. Her protégé, Anagarika Dharmapala, was the chief ideologist of Sri Lankan nationalism, and in his writings and speeches preached a militant race theory that praised the “Aryan” Buddhist Sinhalese and denigrated the other races of Sri Lanka, including the “shylock-like” Muslims. From 1911 until the 1950s the “Island Hermitage” of German, Croatian and British monks in Sri Lanka was led by the German monk Nyanatiloka, who refused to ordain one of his fellow monks because he was Jewish and during wartime internment chose the “Fascist “ section of his prison camp over the “Democratic” section, and two of its prominent British members joined after reading the writings of the Italian fascist Julius Evola, another scholar of Buddhism, who was also a member of the SS research branch, the “Ahnenerbe.” The writings of the first European Buddhist monk, Allan Bennett, who was ordained in Burma, show a deep obsession with the racial aspects of Buddhism, but this connection with European racism seems to have borne even more sinister fruit in the 1930s with the rise of Burmese Nationalism. According to the German historian Hans Berndt Zoellner, U Saw, the third pre-independence Prime Minister of Burma from 1941-1942 , translated Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” into Burmese, and published it in his newspaper. The Austrian Professor Volker Zotz (3), who cites Zoellner, also quotes a saying popular in Burmese nationalist circles during World War II. “Germany and Japan, come safely to us, because you are of the Sakya race,” Sakya referring to the Buddha’s clan name.

 

If the conflicts in Burma and Sri Lanka are set to continue the marriage made in hell between Asian Buddhism and European race theory, of which Nazi Germany was not the only, but by far the worst example, then they may be even more difficult to solve than we have thought up to now.


Footnotes:

(1) Patrick Peebles, 2006, History of Sri Lanka, Greenwood, USA.

(2) Buddhist Warfare p 111.

(3) Volker Zotz: Swastika und Hakenkreuz. Vortrag. München 22. Oktober 2012


The author was formerly a lecturer in the Tibetology Department of Minzu University in Beijing, and is currently lecturer for the Northern Consortium of UK Universities. His translation of the biography of Nagtsang Nulo from Tibetan into English is due to be published by Duke University Press next year.