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© Victor & Victoria Trimondi
The Shadow of the Dalai Lama – Part
II – 2. The Dalai Lama (Avalokiteshvara) and the Demoness (Srinmo)
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 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 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. Centrally, for the Lamaist elite,
“politics” means a sequence of ritual/magical activities for the fulfillment of a cosmic plan which is finally executed
by the gods (of whom the Lamas are incarnations). It is for this reason
that ritual life has such an important, indeed central status in a Buddhocratic state system. This is the real smithy in
which the reality of this archaic society was shaped. That apparently
“normal” political processes (such as the work of a “democratic” parliament
or the activities of human rights commissions for instance) exist
alongside, need not — as the example of the exile Tibetans demonstrates
-stand in the way of the occult ritual system; rather, it could even be
said to offer the necessary veil to obscure the primary processes.
The battle of the sexes and history
Let us return to Homer and
his times. The Trojan War vividly demonstrates how closely the history of
the ancient Greeks was linked to the battle of the sexes. A number of
gender conflicts together formed the events which triggered war: The
decision of Paris and the vanity of the three chief goddesses (Hera,
Athena, Aphrodite), the theft and the infidelity
of Helen and the sacrifice of Iphigeneia. The end
of the long drawn out and terrible war is also marked by bloody sexual
topics: The treacherous murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra, her
death at the hands of her son Orestes, the flight of Aeneas (from Troy) and
his marriage to Dido (the Queen of Carthage), the suicide of the abandoned
Dido and the founding of the Roman dynasties (through Aeneas).
The writer and researcher
of myths, Robert Ranke Graves (1895-1985), in a study which has in the
meantime received academic recognition, assembled a voluminous amount of
material which adequately supports his hypothesis that hidden behind all
(!) the Greek mythology and early history lies a
battle of the sexes between matriarchal and patriarchal societal forms.
This “subterranean” mythic/sexual current which barely comes to light, and
which propels human history forwards from the depths of the subconscious,
was also a fact for Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). In his comprehensive essay, Totem und Tabu
[Totem and Taboo], he attempted to draw attention to the sexual origins
of human culture.
As we shall show, this is
no different for the Lamaist “writing of
history”: on the basis of the sex-specific construction of the entire
tantric universe (masculine, feminine, androgynous), Tibetan history also
presupposes a mythologically based gender
relation. Since Vajrayana
essentially requires the suppression of the feminine principle by the
masculine principle, of the woman by the man, the history of Tibet is
analogously grounded in the repression of the feminine by the masculine.
Likewise, we find “female sacrifice” carried out at the center
of the tantric mysteries once more in the “myth-history” of the country.
The sacred kingdom
In many ancient societies
the “sacred king” was regarded as the representative of the gods. Worldly
and spiritual power were concentrated within this
figure. His proximity to the gods was judged differently from culture to
culture. In the old oriental community the kings exceeded the deputizing
function and were themselves considered to be the deity. This gave them the
right to rule with absolute power over their subjects. Their godly likeness
was in no way contradicted by their mortality, then
it was believed that the spirit of the god withdrew from the human body of
the holy king at the hour of his death so as to then incarnate anew in the
succeeding ruler. The history of the sacred kings was thus actually an
“epiphany”, that is, an appearance of the deity in time.
In the European Middle
Ages in contrast, the “sacred rulers” were only considered to be God’s representatives on earth, but the
concept of their dual role as mortal man and divine instance still had its
validity. One therefore spoke of the “two bodies of the king”, an eternal
supernatural one and a transient human one.
A further characteristic
of the political theology of the Middle Ages consisted in the division of
the royal office which formerly encompassed both domains — so that (1) the
spiritual and (2) the secular missions were conducted by two different
individuals, the priest and the king, the Pope and the Emperor. Both
institutions together — or in opposition to one another — decisively
determined the history of Europe up until modern times.
Every criterion for the
sacred kingdom is met by the Dalai Lama and his state system. His
institution is not even subject to the division of powers (between
priesthood and kingship) which we know from medieval Europe, but orientates
itself towards the ancient/Oriental despotic states (e.g., in Egypt and
Persia). Worldly and spiritual power are rolled
into one. He is not the human deput’y of a Buddha
being upon the Lion Throne; rather, he is — according to doctrine — this
Buddha being himself. His epithet, Kundun, which is on everybody’s lips following Martin Scorsese’s film of the same name, means “the presence”
or “precious presence”, i.e., the presence of a deity, or of a Buddha in
human form. To translate “Kundun” as
“living Buddha” is thus thoroughly justified. In Playboy, in answer to the question of the word’s meaning, His
Holiness replied, “Precious presence. According to Tibetan tradition 'Kundun' is a
term with which I alone can be referred to. It is taken to mean the highest
level of spiritual development which a being [that is, not just a person,
but also a god] can attain” (Playboy,
German edition, March 1998, p. 40).
The visible presence (Kundun) of a
god on the world political stage as the head of government of a
“democratically elected parliament” may be difficult to conceive of in a
western way of thinking. Perhaps the office can be better understood when
we say that the Dalai Lama is strictly bound to his tantric philosophy,
ritual procedures, and politico-religious ideology, and therefore possesses
no further individual will. His body, his human existence, and hence also
his humanism are for him solely the instruments of his divinity. This is
most clearly expressed in a song the Seventh Dalai Lama composed and sang
to himself:
Wherever you go, whatever you do,
See yourself in the form of a tantric divinity
With a phantom body that is manifest yet empty.
(Mullin, 1991, p. 61)
Nonetheless, it has become
thoroughly established practice in the western press to refer to the Dalai
Lama as the “god-king”. Whether or not this is meant ironically can barely
be decided in many cases. “A god to lay your hands on”, wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung in
1998 of the Tibetan religious leader, and at the same time the Spiegel proclaimed that,
“Ultimately, he is the Dalai Lama and the most enlightened of the
enlightened on this planet, that puts things in
the proper light.” (Süddeutsche Zeitung November
1, 1998, p. 4; Spiegel 45/1998,
p.101).
Eschatology and politics
The history of the
European Middle Ages was focused upon a single cosmic event: the Second
Coming of Christ. In such an eschatological
world view, human history is no longer a copying of myths or a playground
for divine caprice (as in the Ancient Greek belief in the gods), but rather
the performance of a gigantic, messianic drama played out over millennia,
which opens with a perfect creation that then constantly disintegrates
because of human imperfection and sin and ends in a catastrophic downfall
following a divine day of judgment. At the “end of time” the evil are
destroyed in a brutal cosmic war (the apocalypse) and the good (the true
Christians) are saved. A Messiah appears and leads the small flock of the
chosen into an eternal realm of peace and joy. The goal is called
redemption and paradise.
Eschatological accounts of
history are always salvational history, that is, in the beginning
there is a transgression which should be healed. A Christian refers to this
transgression as original sin. Here the healing takes place through the
Resurrection and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, as well as through the
resurrection from the dead of the goodly which this occasions. After this,
history comes to an end and the people, freed from all suffering, enter an
eternal paradise in a blissful time without history. For Christians it is
primarily the Apocalypse of St. John (The
Book of Revelations) which provides the script for this divine theater.
From a Buddhist/tantric
point of view human history — and consequently the history of Tibet — is
also experienced as a “salvational history”. Its
eschatology is recorded in the Kalachakra Tantra, the highest cult mystery of the Dalai Lama.
The Shambhala myth linked with this tantra also prophesies (like the Apocalypse of St. John) the appearance of a warlike messiah (Rudra Chakrin)
and the terrible final battle between good and evil. It is just that this
time the good are Buddhists and the evil are primarily Moslems. After Rudra Chakrin’s victory
the total “Shambhalization” of the planet (i.e.,
a global Buddhocracy) awaits humanity. This is
equated with an Eden of peace and joy.
A knowledge of the Shambhala vision is necessary in order to be able to
assess historical events in Tibet (including the Chinese occupation) and
the politics of the Dalai Lama. Every historical and practical political
event must — from a Lamaist viewpoint — be
assessed in the light of the final goal formulated in the Kalachakra Tantra
(the establishment of a worldwide Buddhocracy).
This also applies — according to the tantric teachings — to the evolution
of humankind.
Thus, in terms of
principle, the Tantric Buddhist vision resembles the traditional Christian
one. In both cases a realm of bliss is found at the outset which decays due
to human misdeeds and subsequently experiences a catastrophic downfall. It
is then re-created through the warlike
(!) deeds of a messianic redeemer. But in the Buddhist view this dramatic
process never ends, according to cosmic laws it must be constantly
repeated. In contrast to the conceptions of Christianity, the newly
established paradise has no permanency, it is
subject to the curse of time like all which is transient. History for
Lamaism thus takes the form of the eternal recurrence of the eternally
same, the ineluctable repetition of the entire universal course of events
in immensely huge cycles of time. [2]
History and mysticism
That the relationship
between individuals and history may be not just an obvious, active one, but
also a mystical one is something of which one hears little in contemporary
western philosophy. We find such a point of view in the enigmatic statement
of the German romantic, Novalis (1772-1801), for
example: “The greatest secret is the person itself. The solving of this
unending task is the act of world history”. [3]
In contrast, in the
Renaissance such “occult” interdependencies were definitely topical. The
micro/macrocosm theory, which postulated homologies between the energy body
of a “divine” individual and the whole universe, was widely distributed at
the time. They were also applied to history in alchemic circles.
Correspondingly, there was
the idea of the Zaddik,
the “just”, in the traditional Jewish Cabala and in Chassidism. The mission
of the Zaddik
consisted in a correct and exemplary way of life so as to produce social
harmony and peace. His thoughts and deeds were so closely aligned with the
national community to which he belonged that the history of his people
developed in parallel to his individual fate. Hence, for example the misbehavior of a Zaddik had a negative effect
upon historical process and could plunge his fellow humans into ruin.
Yet such conceptions only
very vaguely outline the far more thorough-going relation of Buddhist Tantrism to history. A tantra
master must — if he is to abide by his own ideas and his micro/macrocosmic
logic — take literally the magical correspondences between his awareness
and the external world. He must be convinced that he (as Maha Siddha,
i.e., Great Sorcerer) is able to exert an influence upon the course of
history through sinking in to meditation, through breathing techniques,
through ritual actions, and through sexual magic practices. He must make
the deities he conjures up or represents the agents of his “politics”, much
more than the people who surround him.
A king initiated into the
mysteries of Vajrayana
thus controls not just his country and his subjects, but also even the
course of the stars with the help of his mystic breathing. “The cosmos, as
it reveals itself to be in the tantric conception”, Mircea
Eliade writes, “is a great fabric of magic
forces, and namely these forces can also be awakened and ordered in the
human body through the techniques of mystic physiology” (Eliade, 85, p. 225).
A dependency of events in
the world upon the sacred practices of initiated individuals may sound
absurd to us, but it possesses its own logic and persuasive power. If, for
example, we examine the history of Tibet from the point of view of tantric
philosophy, then to our astonishment we ascertain that the Lamas have
succeeded very well in formulating an internally consistent salvational and symbolic history of the Land of Snows. [4] They have even managed to tailor this to the
person of the Dalai Lama from its beginnings, even though this latter
institution was only established as a political power factor 900 (!) years
after the Buddhization of the country (in the
eighth century C.E.).
It is above all the
doctrine of incarnation which offers a cogently powerful argument for the
political continuity of the same power elite beyond their deaths. With it
their power political mandate is ensured for all time. Bu the incarnations
have likewise been backdated into the past so as to lay claim to
politically significant “forefathers”. The Fifth Dalai Lama made extensive
use of this procedure.
Thus, in order
to present and to understand the Tibetan conception of history and the
“politics” of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, we are confronted with the four
ideas from an ancient world view described above:
1.
Tibet’s
history and politics are determined by the Tibetan gods.
2.
Tibet’s
history and politics are the expression of a mythic battle of the sexes.
3.
Tibet’s
history and politics orient themselves to the eschatological plan of the Kalachakra Tantra.
4.
Tibet’s
history and politics are the magical achievement of a highest tantra master (the Dalai Lama), who steers the fate of
his country as a sacred king and
yogi.
Even if one discards these
theses on principle as fantasy, it remains necessary to proceed from them
in order to adequately demonstrate and assess the self-concept of Tantric Buddhism, of the Dalai Lama, the
leading exile Tibetan, and the many western Buddhists who have joined this
religion in recent years. Although we in no sense share the Tibetan
viewpoint, we are nonetheless convinced that the “great fabric of magic
forces” (which characterizes Tantrism in the
words of Mircea Eliade)
can shape historical reality when many believe in it.
In the following chapters
we thus depict the history of Tibet and the politics of the Fourteenth
Dalai Lama as a tantric project, as the emanation of divine archetypes, and
as a sequence of scenes in the dramaturgy of the Kalachakra Tantra,
just as it is also seen by Lamaists. We must
therefore first of all introduce the reader to the chief gods who have
occupied the political stage of the Land of Snows since the Buddhization of Tibet. Then on a metaphysical level the
Lamaist monastic state is considered to be the
organized assembly of numerous deities, who have been appearing in human
form (as various lamas) again and again for centuries. We are confronted
here with a living “theocracy”, or better, “Buddhocracy”.
It is the Tibetan gods to whom Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, has made his human
body available and who speak and act through him. This may the reason why
His Holiness, as he crossed the border into India on his flight from Tibet
in 1959, yelled as loudly as he could, “Lha Gyelo — Victory to the gods!” (Dalai
Lama XIV, 1993a, p. 168). With this cry he opened them the gateway to the
world, especially to the West.
Footnotes:
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