New Opium for Intellectuals:
Tibetan Buddhist Chic in the West
By Andrei Znamenski – The University of Memphis
The Dalai Lama is a worldwide traveler, constantly
visiting Western Europe and North America,
where he has been building support for the Tibetan cause and promoting
Tibetan Buddhism as the doctrine of non-violence, human rights, and respect
for the environment. According to the Dalai Lama and his numerous acolytes,
Tibetan Buddhism is capable of resolving ecological problems, alleviating
individual stresses and anxieties, eradicating problems of corporate
culture, improving education and gender equality, and, ultimately, will
bring about peace. The Tibetan Buddhist religion is frequently billed as a
spiritual wisdom for the twenty-first century, which resonates well with
Western intelligentsia that, since the nineteenth century, has never held
its indigenous Christianity in high esteem and that, at the same time, has
craved for spiritual fulfillment. In just the United States alone, the
official number of known participants in Tibetan Buddhism has reached 3
million people. One can observe
similar developments in other Western countries. The prestige of Tibetan
Buddhism on the Western cultural scene has reached its highest peak.
In the public eye, Tibetan Buddhism acquired a status
of uncorrupted high spiritual wisdom to be emulated and disseminated. If
you ask the average educated person about his or her impression of Tibetan Buddhism,
a standard answer would be filled with such key words as "reverence
for all life," "eternal peace," "harmony,"
"meditation," "non-violence," and "ecological
wisdom."
Recently, during His Holiness's May visit to Austria,
when he was awarded a gold medal by a local government in Corinthia, he reminded people that the Buddha
instructed not to take his words of wisdom for granted, but to explore,
investigate, and verify them. Let's
follow the Dalai Lama's suggestion and explore if the image of Tibetan
Buddhism as a totally peaceful, healthful, and serene religion matches reality.
Let us start with the famous and widely repeated
statement that Tibetan Buddhism has been preaching the doctrine of
non-violence from the time immemorial.
After September 11, 2001, “Der Spiegel,” a
German popular weekly, published an article about the presence of religious
fundamentalism in world religions -- a neat Multikulti
attempt to extend to other major religions what is now mostly perpetrated
by militant Islam. Sure enough, the magazine found abundant evidence of
religious fundamentalism in Christianity and Judaism. What is interesting
here is that Tibetan Buddhism was totally excluded from this list. It is
time to change this false perception.
The stereotype of Tibetan Buddhism as a historically
non-violent tradition is simply not true. Many predecessors of the
present-day Dalai Lama were engaged in military campaigns against Tibet's
neighbors. Professor Robert Thurman, one of the deans of American Buddhist
studies and the personal representative of the Dalai Lama in North America,
has insisted that the 5th Dalai Lama, the one who built up Tibet
as a unified country in the early modern age, was a very peaceful and
benign politician. In reality, in 1660, this great state builder ordered
the ruthless suppression of a popular revolt, sanctioning the execution of
men, women, and children [Lydia Aran,
"Inventing Tibet," Commentary 1 (2009): 40-41]. In fact, in
Tibetan Buddhist tradition, a group of the "elect," so-called Bodhisattvas
(individuals who reached sainthood but decided to stay in this world to
assist the ordinary people), were allowed to transgress common principals
of morality and commit a murder if it benefitted
the Tibetan Buddhist religion. Professor David Gray, an expert in Tibetan tantras, informs us that such a moral license issued to
this group of the "elect" created tension for Tibetan Buddhists
who originally, like the rest of Buddhists, had subscribed to the notion of
compassion and respect for living beings. Eventually, this double standard
resulted in the emergence of a practice of so-called “compassion killing.”
As applied to practical life, a Buddhist, who for various reasons must
commit a murder, has to have a good intention when resorting to this act of
violence [David A. Gray, "Compassionate Violence? On the Ethical Implications
of Tantric Buddhist Ritual,” Journal of Buddhist
Ethics 14 (2007): 240-271].
The present-day Dalai Lama -- who constantly talks
about ecumenical peace and harmony -- insists that, from early on,
non-violence has been part of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. There is no
doubt that Tibetan Buddhism shines if compared to current Islam, which is
still heavily loaded with militant ethics. Still, this current stance
propagated by the spiritual leader of Tibet has nothing to do with
Tibetan Buddhist tradition. In fact, Lydia Aran
and Elliot Sperling, two other experts on Tibetan
Buddhism, stress that before the present Dalai Lama picked up the concept
of non-violence (ahimsa) from the famous Hindu philosopher-politician
Mahatma Gandhi, neither of his predecessors preached or practiced
non-violence [Aran, "Inventing Tibet,"
p. 40; Elliot Sperling, " 'Orientalism' and Aspects of Violence in the Tibetan
Buddhist Tradition," http://www.info-buddhism.com]. Incidentally, Sperling has related an interesting anecdote about
Gandhi -- who did not know too much about Buddhism and who wrote to the
13th Dalai Lama somewhere in the 1920s -- expressing confidence that
Tibetan people steadfastly clung to the noble Buddha's doctrine of ahimsa.
In his reply, the Lhasa
ruler noted that he did not know what Gandhi was talking about!
Throughout history, like any other religions, Tibetan
Buddhism had to confront alien beliefs. Thus, in the early middle ages,
when aggressive Islam made deep inroads in Afghanistan
and Northern India, phasing out local
Buddhist communities, the latter came up with the doctrine of a holy war --
a mirror-image of an Islamic Jihad customized for the spiritual consumption
of Northern Buddhists who had to confront the Muslim invaders. Hence the presence in Tibetan Buddhism of
the famous Shambhala prophecy that predicted the
bloody Armageddon battle between the Buddhists and infidels. This battle
was to eventually result in the global triumph of Buddhists and arrival of
the Shambhala
Kingdom, a Buddhist
paradise, where the faithful would live rich and happy lives unmolested by
infidels.
The apocalyptic Shambhala
prophecy is part of the so-called Kalachakra Tantra teaching -- a collection of legends and
practices that represent the core of Tibetan Buddhism. An important element of that teaching is
the Kalachakra initiations performed by the Dalai
Lama and other top lamas. For the past thirty years, His Holiness has been
traveling around offering these initiations to thousands of Europeans and
Americans. College professors, students, bohemian intellectuals, and all
kinds of spiritual seekers flock to partake of this event. The most recent one took place last
summer in Washington, DC. According to the Dalai Lama, Kalachakra is a noble ceremony that builds up peace,
harmony, and friendship. At the same
time, not many of the Western participants are familiar with true nature of
this initiation.
Kalachakra is divided into two levels. The first one consists of
seven stages, which are available to all the interested public. During these first seven stages, an
initiate is invited to cleanse his mind and to surrender his individuality
to the will-power of the lama guru, who turns the adept's mind into an
"empty vessel" to be filled with the power of a Buddhist deity --
a guideline that is very questionable from the viewpoint of present-day
Humanism. Thousands of laymen in Tibet
and Mongolia
have viewed these mass initiations as rituals of empowerment, which
superficially might be compared with the public blessings performed by the
Roman Pope for Christian pilgrims. Historically, supreme lamas also
performed the first seven Kalachakra initiations
in times of conflict, inducting initiates into the ranks of Shambhala warriors.
The faithful expected that, in case of death, they would get access
to the Shambhala kingdom, the mythological
Buddhist paradise that was expected to arrive after the Armageddon battle
between the Buddhists and infidels.
The eight highest initiations of the second level are
available only to the elect monks. During these top initiations, the select
few are empowered by being exposed to various forbidden substances and
activities, for example, meat, alcohol, and sexuality. Here, a chosen male initiate (women were
not even considered candidates for the initiation) is taught to disregard
common diets and moral principles, which turns the participant into a
super-human being who is capable to go beyond good and evil.
Thus, old Kalachakra texts
both directly and indirectly stress that the highest initiations of Kalachakra tantra cannot be
completed without having intercourse with female consorts. According to the
Kalachakra tradition, during a symbolic or actual
intercourse performed during the highest initiations, male participants use
women as energy “donors,” mixing male and female fluids, which produces
spiritual power that helps these male initiates to acquire super-human
qualities. The ritual use of sexuality in tantras,
including Kalachaka, is not a secret. In fact, in
his famous Harvard lectures, the Dalai Lama himself noted that "sex is
used as a technique in the tantric path"
[The Dalai Lama at Harvard: Lectures on the Buddhist Path to Peace (1988),
p. 177].
Last but not least, it is stressed that both in the
public and the secret Kalachakra initiations,
and, in fact, in the entire Tibetan Buddhist tradition, individual
empowerment cannot be accomplished without extinguishing an individual's
mind and its complete subordination to the will of a spiritual guru, an
"enlightened master," who is expected to navigate the initiate to
the "true path." In their
life-long research Victor and Victoria Trimondi,
cultural philosophers and writers, have documented and posted on their
on-line "Critical Forum Kalachakra" the
archaic elements of Kalachakra-tantra that should
raise the eyebrows of any humanist [http://www.trimondi.de/].
Like any other religion, various brands of current
Buddhism have not been immune to religious fundamentalism and harbor
traditions that are questionable from the viewpoint of Western humanism.
However, I was utterly shocked by the reluctance of the educated public to
explore the uncomfortable legacy of Tibetan Buddhism. The view of Tibetan
Buddhism as both a helpful therapeutic technique and a serene non-violent
religion has become so entrenched in our intellectual culture that any
attempt to question this established view is immediately assailed as a
dirty slander or Chinese Communist propaganda.
I personally encountered this last summer when, during
the Dalai Lama visit to Washington, His Holiness performed grand Kalachakra initiation, I posted a comment on the Huffington Post website trying to explain to its
readers that the traditional Kalachakra ceremony
had nothing to do with peace and tolerance and explained why. Giving credit to the Dalai Lama for
making several steps toward adjusting Tibetan Buddhism to the modern world
and to Western humanist values, I suggested that he should publicly
dissociate himself from the medieval misogynist rituals of Kalachakra. In
response, furious “true believers” attacked, not the substance of my
arguments, but me personally. I was called a Chinese Communist agent and an
insensitive person. One critic was appalled by the fact that I was writing
about Kalachakra without being initiated into
this noble tradition; according to this logic, if tomorrow I decide to
explore the Catholic Church, I will have to become a Catholic. To another critic, it was simply
mind-blowing how a person criticizing Tibetan Buddhism could possibly be
teaching in an American college. The most "rational" argument
came from a lady who, instead of addressing the raised issue, shot at me
with hysterical rants about American imperialism being responsible for
genocide against Native Americans and for keeping blacks in slavery for 200
years. I felt almost like being back in the good old Soviet
Union, where, in response to Western criticism for violation
of human rights, Soviet leaders routinely shot back by using the same
rants.
What I attempted to do in my heavily-criticized comment
was to simply draw attention to the fact that traditional Kalachakra (along with other Tibetan Buddhist
practices) was based on subduing ones' individual conscience to the
will-power of a spiritual guru. I
also pointed out that Kalachakra rituals were
focused on the exploitation of spiritual energy of women and on ethical
nihilism.
What we have to remember is that the version of Tibetan
Buddhism propagated by the Dalai Lama and his associates in the West little
resembles the indigenous Tibetan Buddhism, because it builds on the popular
Western concepts of human rights, feminism, humanism, and environmentalism,
which is perfectly fine because all religions are constantly changing and
never stay "traditional."
Like any religion, Tibetan Buddhism contains elements that might be
misused by inside and outside forces. For example, in its original
rendition, the Tibetan Buddhist doctrine of compassion does not mean
non-violence. It simply encourages
the faithful to work on behalf of people by bringing them to the true faith
-- Tibetan Buddhism. One can argue that it is potentially easy to build a
bridge between the religious compassion and humanistic values by muting the
message of proselytizing and putting more emphasis on humane compassion in
general. Let us hope that the present Dalai Lama moves in this direction.
Trying to meet the aspirations of Europeans and Americans sympathetic to
Tibetan Buddhism, he indeed has been downplaying some aspects of Tibetan
Buddhism that do not fit the tradition of Western humanism and
individualism. See, for example, his recent talks about gender equality and
the necessity to raise the status of women.
In this case, what prevents him from making another step in the same
direction by openly casting aside the medieval obscurantist Kalachakra tradition?
Attempts to smuggle such practices as Kalachakra into present-day Western spirituality are
very disturbing. I seriously doubt that the misogynistic ceremonies of
empowerment that infest the high Kalachakra
initiations can serve as a spiritual blueprint for building up harmony,
compassion, and gender equality. I also want to question the guru principal
ingrained in Kalachakra and other Tibetan
Buddhist practices, which simply invites spiritual and ideological abuse.
Attempts to issue a clean bill of trust to Tibetan Buddhism as a model
spirituality of the 21st Century is historically unwarranted. For example,
in the hands of shrewd management, a popular practice of using Buddhist and
Taoist spiritual consultants to reduce employees' stress and anxiety easily
turns into a tool of pacifying discontent workers who complain about
overwork and administrative abuse. What a wonderful spiritual technique
that is truly customized for a post-modern therapeutic welfare state! Leon Wieselter, who writes for The New Republic and who had analyzed this practice as
employed by Google, resorts to uncivil language by simply calling it a
“corporate mind-fuck” [Leon Wieselter, "Tao
Jones Index," The New Republic,
May 24 (2012)].
The last thing I am trying to do is to create an impression
that there is some other religious doctrine or ideology out there that is
better than Tibetan Buddhism. In
such an irrational field as the realm of the spiritual, where everything is
taken at faith value, I honestly do not see any difference among American
Southern Baptists, Tibetan Buddhists, Sufis, Wiccans,
Catholics, Mormons, or even Sun Dancing Lakota Indians. When dealing with these and other
spirituality groups, we may want to exercise a healthy skepticism instead
of singling one of them out as the only "true path" and creating
a new cultural fad designated to fix our social and spiritual problems.
Following the age-old Tibetan practice of seeking for a
powerful political sponsor, the Dalai Lama and his associates grasped well
that for Western society Tibetan Buddhism became an important part of a
cultural and spiritual self-critique and carved for themselves a good
ideological niche in Europe and North America. The roots of the mass fascination in the
West with Oriental religions, including Tibetan Buddhism, go back to the
1960s, when a large part of the European and American educated elite became
frustrated with Western Civilization, turned their eyes to Hindu, Buddhist,
Taoist, Native American and other non-Western cultures and spiritualities,
which, in their eyes, were good antidotes to the European culture infested
with materialism and individualism. These new spiritual, environmental, and
cultural utopias tinged with irrationalism partially filled the ideological
gap created by the decline of the old socialist/communist utopias, which
were grounded in science worship and rationalism. Originally a part of this
counter-cultural movement, Tibetan Buddhism acquired life of its own in the
West, and eventually became a part of the spiritual mainstream. Spearheading Tibetan Buddhism to the
West, the Dalai Lama and his fellow Tibetan exiles successfully capitalized
simultaneously on the status of Tibet as a victim of Chinese
oppression and on its image as an exotic non-Western country endowed with
high spiritual wisdom.
There is no doubt that, by now, Tibetan Buddhism has
become a part of the mainstream religious landscape in the West. Yet, for those numerous representatives
of educated Western elite who tend to smirk (and rightly so) at archaic
elements in Christianity and Judaism but who at the same time flirt (the
grass is always greener on the other side of the road) with such medieval
rituals as Kalachakra, it might be useful at
least to ask themselves if these rituals are helpful for a spiritual
renewal of our society or do they serve as mere publicity stunts to keep
going the interest of Westerners in the Tibetan cause, or, still worse,
simply harbor a vehicle for a totalitarian "mind-fuck" control.
Incidentally, shopping around for an additional life support, the partially
decomposed communist dictatorship in China might have realized the
potentialities of the latter. In an
unusual ideological twist, the Chinese elite has recently made an attempt
to highjack the Kalachakra ceremony from the
Dalai Lama by allowing for a puppet Tibetan guru to hold Kalachakra in Tibet as a grand religious show for
thousands of Buddhist pilgrims ["Panchen
Lama's Guru Offers Grand Buddhist Ritual," China Daily June 3, 2012].
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