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© Victor
& Victoria Trimondi
The
Shadow of the Dalai Lama – Part II – 5. Buddhocracy
and anarchy: contradictory or complementary?
5. BUDDHOCRACY AND ANARCHY: CONTRATICTORY OR COMPLEMENTRAY?
The grand sorcerers (Maha Siddhas)
The anarchistic founding father of Tibetan Buddhism: Padmasambhava
From anarchy to discipline of the order: the Tilopa lineage
The pre-ordained counter world to the clerical
bureaucracy: holy fools
An anarchistic erotic: the VI Dalai Lama
A tantric history of Tibet
Crazy wisdom and the West
The totalitarian Lamaist
state (the Tibetan Buddhocracy), headed by its
absolute ruler, the Dalai Lama, was — as contradictory as this may at first
appearance seem to be — only one of the power-political forces which
decisively shaped the history of Tibet. On the other side we find all the
disintegrative and anti-state forces which constantly challenged the
clerical sphere as dangerous opponents. As we shall soon see, within the
whole social structure they represented the forces of anarchy: „Thus, Tibetans understand power both“, writes
Rebecca Redwood French, „as a highly centralized, rigidly controlled and
hierarchically determined force and as a diffuse and multivalent force”
(Redwood French, 1995, p. 108). What are these „diffuse and multivalent”
forces and how does the „highly centralized … and hierarchically
determined” Buddhist state deal with them?
The powers which rebelled against the established
monastic order in the Tibet
of old were legion — above all the all-powerful nature of the country. Extreme climatic conditions and the huge
territory, barely developed in terms of transport
logistics, rendered effective state control by the lamas only partially
realizable. But the problems were not just of the factual kind. In
addition, from the Tibetan, animist point of view, the wilds of nature are
inhabited by countless gods, demons, and spirits, who must all be brought
under control: the lu
— water spirits which contaminate wells and divert rivers; the nyen — tree
spirits that cause illnesses, especially cancer; the jepo — the harmful ghosts of bad kings and lamas who broke their
vows; the black dü
— open rebels who deliberately turn against the Dharma; the mamo, also black — a dangerous breed of
witches and harpies; the sa — evil astral demons; and many others. They all posed
a daily threat for body and soul, life and possession in the Tibet of
old and had to be kept in check through constant rituals and incantations.
This animist world view is still alive and well today despite Chinese communist
materialism and rationalism and is currently experiencing an outright
renaissance.
But it was not enough to have conquered and
enchained (mostly via magic rituals) the nature spirits listed. They then
required constant guarding and supervision so that they did resume their
mischief. Even the deities known as dharmapalas, who were supposed to protect the Buddhist
teachings, tended to forget their duties from to time and turn against
their masters (the lamas). This “omnipresence of the demonic” kept the
monks and the populace in a constant state of alarm and caused an extreme
tension within the Tibetan culture.
On the social
level it was, among other things, the high degree of criminality which time
and again provoked Tibetan state Buddhism and was seen as subversive. The
majority of westerners traveling in Tibet (in the time before the
Chinese occupation) reported that the brigandry
in the country represented a general nuisance. Certain nomadic tribes, the Khampas for example, regarded robbery as a lucrative
auxiliary income or even devoted themselves to it full-time. They were
admittedly feared but definitely not despised for this, but were rather
seen as the heroes of a robber romanticism
widespread in the country. To go out without servants and unarmed was also
considered dangerous in the Lhasa
of old. One lived in constant fear of being held up.
In terms of popular
culture, there were strong
currents of an original, anarchist (non-Buddhist) shamanism which coursed
through the whole country and were not so easily brought under the umbrella
of a Buddhist concept of state. The same was true of the Nyingmapa sect, whose members had a very libertarian
and vagabond lifestyle. In addition, there were the wandering yogis and
ascetics as further representatives of “anarchy”. And last not least, the
great orders conducted an unrelenting competitive campaign against one
another which was capable of bringing the entire state to the edge of
chaos. If, for example, the Sakyapas were at the high point of their
power, then the Kagyupas would lay in wait so as
to discover their weaknesses and bring them down. If the Kagyupas seized control over the Land of Snows,
then they would be hampered by the Gelugpas with
help from the Mongolians.
The Lamaist state and
anarchy have always stood opposed to one another in Tibetan history. But
can we therefore say that Buddhism always and without fail took on the role
of the state which found itself in constant conflict with all the non-Buddhist forces of anarchy? We
shall see that the social dynamic was more complex than this. Tantric
Buddhism is itself — as a result of the lifestyle which the tantras require — an expression of “anarchy”, but only
partially and only at times. In the final instance it succeeds in combining
both the authoritarian state and an anarchic lifestyle, or, to put it
better, in Tibet
(and now in the West) the lamas have developed an ingenious concept and
practice through which to use anarchy to shore up the Buddhocracy.
Let us examine this more closely through a description of the lives of
various tantric “anarchists”.
The grand sorcerers (Maha Siddhas)
The anarchist element in the Buddhist landscape is
definitely not unique to Tibet.
The founding father, Shakyamuni himself,
displayed an extremely anti-state and antisocial behavior and later
required the same from his followers.
Instead of taking up his inheritance as a royal
ruler, he chose homelessness; instead of opting for his wife and harem, he
chose abstinence; instead of wealth he sought poverty. But the actual
“anarchist” representatives of Buddhism are the 84 grand sorcerers or Maha Siddhas,
who make up the legendary founding group of Vajrayana and from whom the
various lineages of Tibetan Buddhism are traced. Hence, in order to
consider the origins of the anti-state currents in Tibetan history, we must
cast a glance over the border into ancient India.
All of the stories about the Maha Siddhas tell of the spectacular
adventures they had to go through to attain their goal of enlightenment
(i.e., the ritual absorption of gynergy). Had they succeeded in this, then they could
refer to themselves as “masters of the maha mudra”. The number of 84 does not
correspond to any historical reality. Rather, we are dealing with a
mystical number here which in symbolizes perfection in several Indian
religious systems. Four of the Maha Siddhas were women. They all lived in India
between the eighth and twelfth centuries.
The majority of these grand sorcerers came from
the lower social strata. They were originally fishermen, weavers,
woodcutters, gardeners, bird-catchers, beggars, servants, or similar. The
few who were members of the higher castes — the kings, brahmans,
abbots, and university lecturers — all abandoned their privileges so as to
lead the life of the mendicant wandering yogis as “drop-outs”. But their
biographies have nothing in common with the pious Christian legends — they
are violent, erotic, demonic, and grotesque. The American, Keith Dowman, stresses the rebellious character of these
unholy holy men: „Some of these Siddhas
are iconoclasts, dissenters, anti-establishment rebels. [...]
Obsessive caste rules and
regulations in society and religious ritual as an end in itself,
were undermined by the siddhas’ exemplary free
living” (Dowman, 1985, pp. 2). Dowman explicitly refers to their lifestyle as
„spiritual anarchism” which did not allow of any control by
institutionalism (Dowman, 1985, p. 3).
Ling-tsang Gyalpo – a great Nyinma Phurba Master
The relationship with a woman so as to perform the
sexual magic rites with her was at the core of every Siddha’s
life. Whether king or beggar, they all preferred girls from the lower
castes — washer-women, prostitutes, barmaids, dancing girls, or cemetery
witches.
The grand sorcerers’ clothes and external
appearance was also in total contradiction to the image of the Buddhist
monks. They were demonically picturesque. With naked torsos, the Maha Siddhas wore a fur loincloth,
preferably that of a beast of prey. Huge rings hung from their ears and
about their necks swung necklaces of human bone. In contrast to the
ordained bhiksus
(monks) the grand sorcerers never shaved their heads, instead letting their
hair grow into a thick mane which they bound together above their heads in
a knot. Their style more resembled that of the Shivaite
yogis and it was difficult to recognize them as traditional followers of
Gautama Buddha. Many of the Maha Siddhas were
thus equally revered by both the Shivaites and
the Buddhists. From this the Indologist, Ramachandra Rao, concludes
that in the early phase of Tantrism the
membership of a particular religious current was in no way the deciding
criterion for a yogi’s world view, rather, it was the tantric technique
which made them all (independent of their religious affiliation) members of
a single esoteric community (Ramachandra Rao, 1989, p. 42).
The Maha Siddhas
wanted to provoke. Their “demonic nihilism” knew no bounds. They shocked
people with their bizarre appearance, were even disrespectful to kings and
as a matter of principle did the opposite of what one would expect of
either an “ordinary” person or an ordained Mahayana monk. It was a part of their code of honor to publicly
represent their mystic guild through completely unconventional behavior.
Instead of abstinence they enjoyed brandy, rather than peacemakers they
were ruffians. The majority of them took mind-altering drugs. They were dirty
and unkempt. They collected alms in a skull bowl. Some of them proudly fed
themselves with human body parts which lay scattered about the crematoria.
We have reported upon their erotic practices in detail in the first part of
our study, and likewise upon their boundless power fantasies which did not
shy at any crime. Hence, the magic powers (siddhis) were at the top of
their wish list, even if it is repeatedly stressed in the legends that the
“worldly” siddhis
were of only secondary importance. Telepathy, clairvoyance, the ability to
fly, to walk on water, to raise the dead, to kill the living by power of
thought — they constantly performed wonders in their immediate environs so
as to demonstrate their superiority.
But how well can this “spiritual anarchism” of the
Maha Siddhas be reconciled with the
Buddhist conception of state? In his basic character the Siddha is an opponent all state hierarchies and every
form of discipline. All the formalities of life are repugnant to him —
marriage, occupation, position, official accolades and recognition. But
this is only temporarily valid, then once the yogi has attained a state of
enlightenment a wonderful and ordered world arises from this in accordance
with the law of inversion. Thanks to the sexual magic rites of Tantrism the brothel bars have now become divine palaces, nauseating filth has become diamond-clear
purity, stinking excrement shining pieces of gold, horny hetaeras noble
queens, insatiable hate undying love, chaos order, anarchy the absolute state.
The monastic state is, as we shall show in relation to the “history of the
church” in Tibet,
the goal; the “wild life” of the Maha Siddhas in
contrast is just a transitional phase.
For this reason we should not refer to
the tantric yogi not simply as a “spiritual anarchist” as does Keith Dowman, nor as a “villain”. Rather, he is a disciplined
hero of the “good”, who dives into the underworld of erotic love and crime
so as to stage a total inversion there, in that he transforms everything
negative into its positive. He is no libertarian free thinker, but rather
an “agent” of the monastic community who has infiltrated the red-light and
criminal milieu for tactic spiritual reasons. But he does not always see
his task as being to transform the whores, murderers and manslaughterers into saints, rather he likewise
understands it as being to make use of their aggression to protect and
further his own ideas and interests.
The anarchist founding father of
Tibetan Buddhism: Padmasambhava
The most famous of all the great magicians of Tibet is,
even though he is not one of the 84 Maha Siddhas, the Indian, Padmasambhava,
the “Lotus Born”. The Tibetans call him Guru Rinpoche,
“valuable teacher”. He is considered to be not just an emanation of Avalokiteshvara
(like the Dalai Lama) but is himself also, according to the doctrine of the
“Great Fifth”, a previous incarnation of the Tibetan god-king. The reader
should thus always keep in mind that the current Fourteenth Dalai Lama is
accountable for the wild biography of Guru
Rinpoche as his own former life.
Legend tells of his wondrous birth from a lotus
flower — hence his name (padma means ‘lotus’). He
appeared in the form of an eight-year-old boy “without father or mother”,
that is, he gave rise to himself. The Indian king Indrabhuti
discovered him in the middle of a lake, and brought the lotus boy to his
palace and reared him as a son. In the iconography, Padmasambhava
may be encountered in eight different forms of appearance,
behind each of this a legend can be found. His trademark, which
distinguishes him from all other Tibetan “saints”, is an elegant “French”
goatee. He holds the kathanga,
a rod bearing three tiny impaled human heads, as his favorite scepter. His
birthplace in India,
Uddiyana, was famed and notorious for the
wildness of the tantric practices which were cultivated there.
Around 780 C.E. the Tibetan king, Trisong Detsen, fetched Padmasambhava into Tibet. The political intentions
behind this royal summons were clear: the ruler wanted to weaken the power
of the mighty nobles and the caste of the Bon priests via the introduction
of a new religion. Padmasambhava was supposed to
replace at court the Indian scholar, Shantarakshita,
(likewise a Buddhist), who had proved too weak to assert himself against
the recalcitrant aristocracy.
Guru Rinpoche, in
contrast, was already considered to be a tantric superman in Uddiyana. He demanded his own weight in gold bars of
the king as his fee for coming. When he finally stood before Trisong Detsen, the king
demanded that he demonstrate his respect with a bow. Instead of doing so,
Guru Rinpoche sprayed lightning from his
fingertips, so that it was the king who sank to his knees and recognized
the magician as the appropriate ally with whom to combat the Bon priests,
likewise skilled in magic things. The guru was thus bitterly hated by these
and by the nobles, even the king’s ministers
treated him with the greatest hostility imaginable.
Statue of Padmasambhava
The saga has made Padmasambhava
the founding father of Tibetan Buddhism. His life story is a fantastic
collection of miracles which made him so popular among the people that he
soon enjoyed a greater reverence than the historical Buddha, whose life
appeared sober and pale in comparison. Reports about Guru Rinpoche and his writings are drawn primarily from the termas
(treasures) already mentioned above, which, it is claimed, he himself hid
so that they would come to light centuries later.
From a very young age the boy already stood out
because of his abnormal and violent nature. He killed a sleeping baby by
throwing a stone at it and justified this deed with the pretense that the
child would have become a malignant magician who would have harmed many
people in his later life. Apart from his royal adoptive father, Indrabhuti, no-one accepted this argument, and several
people attempted to bring him to justice. At the urgings of a minister he
was first confined to a palace by soldiers. Shortly afterward the guru
appeared upon the roof of the building, naked except for a “sixfold bone ornament”, and with a vajra and a trident in his
hands. The people gathered rapidly to delight in the odd spectacle, among
them one of the hostile ministers with his wife and son. Suddenly and
without warning Padmasambhava’s vajra
penetrated the brain of the boy and the trident speared through the heart
of the mother fatally wounding both of them.
The pot boiled over at this additional
double murder and the entire court now demanded that the wrongdoer be
impaled. Yet once again he succeeded in proving that the murder victims had
earned their violent demise as the just punishment for their misdeeds in
earlier lives. It was decided to refrain from the death penalty and to damn
Padmasambhava instead. Thereupon a troupe of
dancing dakinis appeared in the skies leading a
miraculous horse by the halter. Guru Rinpoche
mounted it and vanished into thin air. Acts of violence were to continue to
characterize his future life.
As much as he was a master of tantric erotic love,
he decisively rejected the institution of marriage. When Indrabhuti wanted to find him a wife, he answered by
saying that women were like wild animals without minds and that they vainly
believed themselves to be goddesses. There were, however, exceptions, as
well hidden as a needle in a haystack, and if he would have to marry then
he should be brought such an exception. After many unsuccessful
presentations, Bhasadhara was finally found. With
her he began his tantric practices, so that “the mountains shook and the
gales blew”.
The marriage did not last long. Like the
historical Buddha, Guru Rinpoche turned his back
on the entertaining palace life of his adoptive father and chose as his
favorite place to stay the crematoria of India. He was in the habit of
meditating there, and there he held his constant rendezvous with
terrible-looking witches (dakinis). One document
reports how he dressed in the clothes of dead and fed upon their
decomposing flesh (Herrmann-Pfand, 1992, p. 195).
He is supposed to have visited a total of eight cemeteries in order to
there and then fight out a magical initiation battle with the relevant
officiating dakinis.
His most spectacular encounter was definitely the
meeting with Guhya Jnana,
the chief of the terror goddesses, one of the appearances of Vajrayogini.
She lived in a castle made of human skulls. When Padmasambhava
reached the gates he was unable to enter the building, despite his magic
powers. He instructed a servant to inform her mistress of his visit. When
she returned without having achieved anything he tried once more with all
manner of magic to gain entry. The girl laughed at him, took a crystal
knife and slit open her torso with it. The endless retinue of all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas appeared within her insides.
“I am just a servant”, she said. Only now was Padmasambhava
admitted.
Guhya
Inana sat upon her throne. In her hands she held a
double-ended drum and a skull bowl and was surrounded by 32 servant girls.
The yogi bowed down with great respect and said, “Just as all Buddhas through the ages had their gurus, so I ask you
to be my teacher and to take me on as your pupil” (Govinda,
1984, p. 226). Thereupon she assembled the whole pantheon of gods within
her breast, transformed the petitioner into a seed syllable and swallowed
him. Whilst the syllable lay upon her lips she gave him the sacrament of Amitabha,
whilst he rested in her stomach he was initiated into the secrets of Avalokiteshvara.
After leaving her lotus (i.e., vagina) he received the sacraments of the
body, the speech, and the spirit. Only now had he attained his immortal vajra body.
This scene also grants the feminine force an
outstanding status within the initiation process. But there are several
versions of the story. In another account it is Padmasambhava
who dissolves Vajrayogini
within his heart. Jeffrey Hopkins even describes a tantra
technique in which the pupil imagines himself to be the goddess so as to
then be absorbed by his teacher who visualizes himself as Guru Rinpoche
(Hopkins, 1982, p. 180).
Without doubt, Padmasambhava’s
relationship with Yeshe Tshogyal, the karma
mudra given to him by Indrabhuti,
and with Princess Mandavara, the reincarnation of
a dakini, display a rare tolerance. Thus
within the tradition both yoginis were able to
preserve a certain individuality and personality over the course of
centuries — a rare exception in the history of Vajrayana. For this reason it
could be believed that Padmasambhava had shown a
revolutionary attitude towards the woman, especially since the statement
often quoted here in the West is from him: “The basis for realizing
enlightenment is a human body. Male or female — there is no great
difference. But if she develops the mind bent on enlightenment, a woman's
body is better” (Gross, 1993, p. 79).
But how can this comment,
which is taken from a terma from the 18th century (!), be
reconciled with the following statement by the guru, which he is supposed
to have offered in answer to Yeshe Tshogyal’s question about the suitability of women for
the tantric rituals? „Your faith is mere platitude, your devotion
insincere, but your greed and jealousy are strong. Your trust and
generosity are weak, yet your disrespect and doubt are huge. Your
compassion and intelligence are weak, but your bragging and self-esteem are
great. Your devotion and perseverance are weak, but you are skilled at
misguiding and distorting Your pure perception and courage is small”
(Binder-Schmidt, 1994 p. 56).
Yet this comment is quite harmless! The “demonic” Guru Rinpoche
also exists — the aggressive butcher of people and serial rapist. There is
for instance a story about him in circulation in which he killed a Tibetan
king and impregnated his 900 wives so as to produce children who were
devoted to the Buddhist teaching. In another episode from his early life he
was attacked out of the blue by dakinis and male dakas. The story reports that “he [then] kills the men
and possesses the women” (R. Paul, 1982, p. 163). Robert A. Paul thus sees
in Padmasambhava an intransigent, active,
phallic, and sexist archetype whom he contrasts
with Avalokiteshvara,
the mild, asexual, feminized, and transcendent counterpole.
Both typologies, Paul claims, determine the dynamic of Tibetan history and
are united within the person of the Dalai Lama (R. Paul, 1982, p. 87).
Many of the anecdotes about Guru Rinpoche which are in
circulation also depict him as a boastful superman. He paid for his beer in
a tavern by holding the sun still for two days for the female barkeeper.
This earned him not just the reputation of a sun-controller but also the
saga that he had invented beer in an earlier incarnation. His connection to
the solar cults is also vouched for by other anecdotes. For instance, one
day he assumed the shape of the sun bird, the garuda, and conquered the lu, the feminine (!) water spirits. Lightning magic
remained one of his preferred techniques, and he made no rare use of it. An
additional specialty was to appear in a sea of flames, which was not
difficult for him as an emanation of the “fire god”, Avalokiteshvara. His siddhis
(magic powers) were thought to be unlimited; he flew through the air, spoke
all languages, knew every magic battle technique, and could assume any
shape he chose. Nonetheless, all these magical techniques were not
sufficient for him to remain the spiritual advisor of Trisong
Detsen for long. The Bon priests and the king’s
wife (Tse Pongza) were
too strong and Guru Rinpoche had to leave the
court. Yet this was not the end of his career. He moved north in order to
do battle with the unbridled demons of the Land of Snows.
The rebellious spirits, usually local earth deities, constantly blocked his
path. Yet without exception all the “enemies of the teaching” were defeated
by his magic powers. The undertaking soon took on the form of a triumphal
procession.
It was Guru Rinpoche’s
unique style to never destroy the opponents he defeated but rather to
demand of them a threefold gesture of submission: 1. the demons had to
symbolically offer up to him their life force or “heart blood”; 2. they had
to swear an oath of loyalty; and 3. they had to commit themselves to
fighting for instead of against the Buddhist teachings in future. If these
conditions were met then they did not need to abandon their aggressive,
bloodthirsty, and extremely destructive ways. In contrast, they were not
freed from their murderous fighting spirit and their terrifying ugliness
but instead from then on served Tantric Buddhism as it terrible protective
deities, who were all the more holy the more cruelly they behaved. The
Tibetan Buddhist pantheon was thus gradually filled out with all imaginable
misshapen figures, whose insanity, atrocities, and misanthropy were
boundless. Among them could be found vampires, cannibals, executioners,
ghouls (horrifying ghosts), and sadists. Guru Rinpoche
and his later incarnations, the Dalai Lamas, were and still are considered
to be the undisputed masters of this cabinet of horrors, who they regally
command from their lotus throne.
His victory over the daemonic powers was sealed by
the construction of a three-dimensional mandala,
the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet. Samye symbolized nothing less
than a microcosmic model of the tantric world system, with Mount Meru at
its center. The inaugurating ceremony conducted by Padmasambhava
was preceded by the banishment of all venomous devils. Then the earth
goddess, Srinmo, was nailed down, in that Guru Rinpoche drove his phurba (ritual dagger) into
the ground with a ceremonial gesture. Among those present at this ritual
were 50 beautifully adorned girls and boys with vases filled with valuable
substances. Durong the subsequent construction
works the rebellious spirits repeatedly tried to prevent the completion of
the temple and at night tore down what had been achieved during the day.
But here too, the guru understood how to tame the nightly demons and then
make construction workers of them.
In the holiest of holies of Samye
there could be found a statue of Avalokiteshvara which
was said to have arisen of itself. Apart from this, the monastery had
something of an eerie and gloomy air about it. The saga tells of how once a
year Tibet’s
terror gods assembled on the roofs of the monastery for a cannibalistic
feast and a game of dice in which the stakes were human souls. On these
days all the oracle priests of the Land of Snows
were said to have fallen into a trance as if under the instruction of a
higher power. Because of the microcosmic significance of Samye, its protective god is the Red Tsiu, a mighty force in the
pandemonium of the highlands. “He possesses red locks,
his body is surrounded by a glory of fire. Shooting stars fly from his eyes
and a great hail of blood falls from his mouth. He gnashes his teeth. ...
He winds a red noose about the body of an enemy at the same time as he
thrusts a lance into the heart of another” (Nebesky-Wojkowitz,
1955, p. 224).
A puzzling red-brown leather mask also hung in the
temple, which showed the face of a three-eyed wrathful demon. Legend tells
that it was made from clotted human blood and sometimes becomes alive to the horror of
all. Alongside the sacred room of the Red
Tsiu lay a small, ill-lit chamber. If a
person died, said the monks, then his soul would have to slip through a
narrow hole into this room and would be cut to pieces there upon a chopping
block. Of a night the cries and groans of the maltreated souls could be
heard and a revolting stench of blood spread through the whole building.
The block was replaced every year since it had been worn away by the many
blows.
Guru Rinpoche, the former incarnation of the Dalai
Lama, was a explosive mixture of strict ascetic
and sorcerer, apostle and adventurer, monk and vagabond, founder of a
culture and criminal, mystic and eroticist, lawmaker and mountebank,
politician and exorcist. He had such success because he resolved the
tension between civilization and wildness, divinity and the daemonic within
his own person. For, according to tantric logic, he could only defeat the
demons by himself becoming a demon. For this reason Fokke
Sierksma also characterizes him as an uninhibited
usurper: “He was a conqueror, obsessed by lust of power and concupiscence,
only this conqueror did not choose the way of physical, but that of
spiritual violence, in accordance with the Indian tradition that the Yogin's concentration of energy subdues matter, the
world and gods” (Sierksma, 1966, p. 111).
The orthodox Gelugpas
also pull the arch magician to pieces in general. For example, one document
accuses him of having devoted himself to the pursuit of women of a night
clothed in black, and to drink of a day, and to have described this
decadent practice as “the sacrifice of the ten days” (Hoffmann, 1956, p.
55).
It was different with the Fifth Dalai Lama — for
him Guru Rinpoche was the force which tamed the
wilds of the Land
of Snows with his
magic arts, as had no other before him and none who came after. As magic
was likewise for the “Great Fifth” the preferred style of weapon, he could
justifiably call upon Padmasambhava as his
predecessor and master. The various guises of the guru which appeared
before the ruler of the Potala in his visions are
thus also numerous and of great intensity. In them Padmasambhava
touched his royal pupil upon the forehead a number of times with a jewel
and thus transferred his power to him. Guru Rinpoche
became the “house prophet” of the “Great Fifth” — he advised the hierarch,
foretold the future for him, and intervened in the practical politics from
beyond, which fundamentally transformed the history of Tibet (through the
establishment of the Buddhist state) almost 900 years after his death.
The “Emperor” Songtsen Gampo and the “Magician-Priest” Padmasambhava,
the principal early heroes of the Land of Snows,
carried within them the germ of all the future events which would determine
the fate of the Tibetans. Centuries after their earthly existence, both
characters were welded together into the towering figure of the Fifth Dalai
Lama. The one represented worldly power, the other the spiritual. As an
incarnation of both the one and the other, the Dalai Lama was also entitled
and able to exercise both forms of power. Just how close a relationship he
brought the two into is revealed by one of his visions in which Guru Rinpoche and King Songtsen Gampo swapped their appearances with lightning speed
and thus became a single person. A consequence of
the Dalai Lama’s strong identification with the arch-magician was that his
chief yogini, Yeshe Tshogyal, also appeared all the more often in his envisionings. She became the preferred inana mudra of
the “Great Fifth”.
Under the rule of Trisong
Detsen (who fetched Padmasambhava
into Tibet)
the famous Council of Lhasa also took place. The king ordered the staging
of a large-scale debate between two Buddhist schools of opinion: the
teachings of the Indian, Kamalashila, which said
that the way to enlightenment was a graded progression and the Chinese
position, which demanded the immediate, spontaneous achievement of
enlightenment, which suddenly and unexpectedly unfolded in its full
dimensions. The representative of the spontaneity doctrine was Hoshang Mahoyen, a master of
Chinese Chan Buddhism. In Lhasa
the Indian doctrine of stages was at the end of a two-year debate
victorious. Hoshang is said to have been banished
from the land and some of his followers were killed by the disciples of Kamalashila. But the Chinese position has never
completely disappeared from Tibetan cultural life and is again gaining
respectability. It is quite rightly compared to the so-called Dzogchen teaching, which also believes an immediate act
of enlightenment is possible and which is currently especially popular in
the West. For example, the important abbot, Sakya
Pandita, attacked the Dzogchen
practices because they were a latter-day form of the Chinese doctrine which
had been refuted at the Council of Lhasa. In contrast the unorthodox Nyingmapa had no problem with the “Chinese
way”. These days the Tibetan lama, Norbu Rinpoche, who lives in Italy, appeals explicitly to Hoshang.
Of its nature, the Dzogchen
teaching stands directly opposed to state Buddhism. It dissolves all forms
at once and it would not be exaggerating if we were to describe it as
“spiritual anarchism”. The political genius of the Fifth Dalai Lama, who
knew that a Buddhocracy is only sustainable if it
can integrate and control the anarchic elements, made constant use of the Dzogchen practice (Samuel, 1993, p. 464). Likewise the
current Fourteenth Dalai Lama is said to have been initiated into this
discipline, at any rate he counts Dzogchen
masters among his most high ranking spiritual intimates.
It is also noteworthy that in feminist circles the
famous Council of Lhasa is evaluated as the confrontation between a
fundamentally masculine (Indian) and a feminine (Chinese) current within
Tibetan Buddhism (Chayet, 1993, pp. 322-323).
From anarchy to the discipline of the order: The Tilopa lineage
The reason the Maha Siddha Tilopa
(10th century) is worthy of our special attention is because he and his
pupil Naropa are the sole historical individuals
from the early history of the Kalachakra Tantra who count among the founding fathers of
several Tibetan schools and because Tilopa’s life
is exemplary of that of the other 83 “grand sorcerers”.
According to legend, the Indian master is said to
have reached the wonderland of Shambhala and
received the time doctrines from the reigning Kalki
there. After returning to India,
in the year 966 he posted the symbol of the dasakaro vasi (the “Power of Ten”) on the
entrance gates of the monastic university
of Nalanda
and appended the following lines, already quoted above: “He, that does not
know the chief first Buddha (Adi-Buddha),
knows not the circle of time (Kalachakra).
He, that does not know the circle of time, knows not the exact enumeration
of the divine attributes. He that does not know the exact enumeration of
the divine attributes, knows not the supreme
intelligence. He, that does not know the supreme intelligence, knows not
the tantrica principles. He, that does not know
the tantrica principles, and all such, are
wanderers in the orb transmigratos,
and are out of the way of the supreme triumphator.
Therefore Adi-Buddha must be taught by every true
Lama, and every true disciple who aspires to
liberation must hear them” (Körös, 1984, pp.
21-22).
While he was still a very young child, a dakini bearing the 32 signs of ugliness appeared to Tilopa and proclaimed his future career as a Maha Siddha to
the boy in his cradle. From now on this witch, who was none other than Vajrayogini,
became the teacher of the guru-to-be and inducted him step by step in the
knowledge of enlightenment. Once she appeared to him in the form of a
prostitute and employed him as a servant. One of his duties was to pound
sesame seeds (tila)
through which he earned his name. As a reward for the services he
performed, Vajrayogini
made him the leader of a ganachakra.
Tilopa always proved to be the androgynous sovereign of
the gender roles. Hence he one day let the sun and the moon plummet from
heaven and rode over them upon a lion, that is, he destroyed the masculine
and feminine energy flows and controlled them with the force of Rahu the darkener. At another point, in
order to demonstrate his control over the gender polarity, he was presented
as the murderer of a human couple “who the beat in the skulls of the man
and the woman” (Grünwedel, 1933, p. 72).
Another dramatic scene tells of how dakinis angrily barred his way when he wanted to enter
the palace of their head sorceress and cried out in shrill voices: “We are
flesh-eating dakinis. We enjoy flesh and are
greedy for blood. We will devour your flesh, drink of your blood, and
transform your bones into dust and ashes” (Herrmann-Pfand,
1992, p. 207) .Tilopa defeated them with the
gesture of fearlessness, a furious bellow and a penetrating stare. The
witches collapsed in a faint and spat blood. On his way to the queen he
encountered further female monsters which he hunted down in the same
manner. Finally, in the interior of the palace he met Inana Dakini, the custodian of tantric
knowledge, surrounded by a great retinue. But he did not bow down before
her throne, and sank instead into a meditative stance. All present were
outraged and barked at him in anger that before him stood the “Mother of
all Buddhas”. According to one version — which is
recounted by Alexandra David-Neel — Tilopa now
roused himself from his contemplation, and, approaching the queen with a
steady gait, stripped her of her clothes jewelry and demonstrated his male
superiority by raping her before the assembled gaze of her entire court
(Hoffmann, 1956, p. 149).
Tilopa’s character first becomes three dimensional when we
examine his relationship with his pupil, Naropa.
The latter first saw the light of the world in the year of the masculine
fire dragon as the son of a king and queen. Later he at first refused to
marry, but then did however succumb to the will of his parents. The
marriage did not last long and was soon dissolved. Naropa
offered the following reason: “Since the sins of a woman are endless, in
the face of the swamp mud of deceptive poison my spirit would take on the
nature of a bull, and hence I will become a monk” (Grünwedel,
1933, p. 54). His young spouse agreed to the divorce and accepted all the
blame: “He is right!”, she said to his parents, “I
have endless sins, I am absolutely without merit ... For this reason and on
these grounds it is appropriate to put an end to [the union of] us two” (Grünwedel, 1933, p. 54). Afterwards Naropa
was ordained as a monk and went on to become the abbot of what was at the
time the most important of the Buddhist monastic universities, Nalanda.
Nevertheless, one day the ecclesiastical dignitary
renounced his clerical privileges just as he had done with his royal ones
and roamed the land as a beggar in search of his teacher, Tilopa. He had learned of the latter’s existence from
the dakini with the 32 markings of ugliness (Vajrayogini).
While he was reading the holy texts in Nalanda,
she cast a threatening shadow across his books. She laughed at him
derisively because he believed he could understand the meaning of the tantras by reading them.
After Naropa had with
much trouble located his master, a grotesque scene, peerless even in the
tantric literature, was played out. Tilopa fooled
his pupil with twelve horrific apparitions before finally initiating him.
On the first occasion he appeared as a foul-smelling, leprous woman. He
then burnt fish that were still alive over a fire in order to eat them
afterwards. At a cemetery he slit open the belly of a living person and
washed it out with dirty water. In the next scene the master had skewered
his own father with a stake and was in the process of killing his mother
held captive in the cellar. On another occasion Naropa
had to beat his penis with a stone until it spurted blood. At another time Tilopa required of him that he vivisect himself.
In order to reveal the world to be an illusion,
the tantra master had his pupil commit one crime
after another and presented himself as a dastardly criminal. Naropa passed every test and became one of the finest
experts and commentators on the Kalachakra Tantra.
One of his many pupils was the Tibetan, Marpa (1012-1097). Naropa
initiated him into the secret tantric teachings. After further initiations
from burial ground dakinis, whom Marpa defeated with the help of Tilopa
who appeared from the beyond, and after encountering the strange yogi, Kukkuri ("dog ascetic”), he returned from India to
his home country. He brought several tantra texts
back with him and translated these into the national language, giving him
his epithet of the “translator”. In Tibet he married several women,
had many sons and led a household. He is said to have performed the tantric
rites with his head wife, Dagmema. In contrast to
the yoginis of the legendary Maha Siddhas,
Dagmema displays very individualized traits and
thus forms a much-cited exception among the ranks of female Tibetan
figures. She was sincere, clever, shrewd, self-controlled and industrious.
Besides this she had independent of her man her own possessions. She cared
for the family, worked the fields, supervised the livestock and fought with
the neighbors. In a word, she closely resembled a normal housewife in the
best sense.
A monastic interpretation of Marpa’s
“ordinary” life circumstances reveals, however, how profoundly the
anarchist dimension dominated the consciousness of the yogis at that time: Marpa’s “normality” was not considered a good deed of
his because it counted as moral in the dominant social rules of the time,
but rather, in contrast, because he had taken the most difficult of all
exercises upon himself in that he realized his enlightenment in the so
despised “normality”. “People of the highest capacity can and should
practice like that” (Chökyi, 1989, p. 143).
Effectively this says that family life is a far greater hindrance to the
spiritual development of a tantra master than a
crematorium. This is what Marpa’s pupil, Milarepa, also wanted to indicate when he rejected
marriage for himself with the following words: “Marpa
had married for the purpose of serving others, but ... if I presumed to imitate him without being
endowed with his purity of purpose and his spiritual power, it would be the
hare's emulation of the lion’s leap, which would surely end in my being
precipitated into the chasm of destruction” (R. Paul, 1982, p. 234)
Marpa’s pragmatic personality, especially his almost
egalitarian relationship with his wife, is unique in the history of Tibetan
monasticism. It has not been ruled out that he conceived of a reformed
Buddhism, in which the sex roles were supposed to be balanced out and which
strove towards the normality of family relationships. Hence, he also wanted
to make his successor his son, who lost his life in an accident, however.
For this reason he handed his knowledge on to Milarepa
(1052–1135), who was supposed to continue the classic androcentric
lineage of the Maha Siddhas.
Milarepa’s family were
maliciously cheated by relatives when he was in his youth. In order to
avenge himself, he became trained as a black magician and undertook several
deadly acts of revenge against his enemies. According to legend his mother
is supposed to have spurred him on here. In the face of the unhappiness he
had caused, he saw the error of his ways and sought refuge in the Buddhist
teachings. After a lengthy hesitation, Marpa took
him on as a pupil and increased his strictness towards him to the point of
brutality so that Milarepa could work off his bad
karma through his own suffering. Time and again the pupil had to build a
house which his teacher repeatedly tore down. After Milarepa
subsequently meditated for seven nights upon the bones of his dead mother
(!), he attained enlightenment. In his poems he does not just celebrate the
gods, but also the beauty of nature. This “natural” talent and inclination
has earned him many admirers up until the present day.
Like his teacher, Marpa,
Milarepa is primarily revered for his humanity, a
rare quality in the history of Vajrayana. There is something so realistic about Marpa’s arbitrariness and the despair of his pupil that
they move many believers in Buddhism more than the phantasmagoric cemetery
scenes we are accustomed to from the Maha Siddhas
and Padmasambhava. For this reason the ill
treatment of Milarepa by his guru counts among
the best-known scenes of Tibetan hagiography. Yet after his initiation
events also became fantastic in his case. He transformed himself into all
manner of animals, defeated a powerful Bon magician and thus conquered the mountain of Kailash.
But the death of this superhuman is once again just as human as that of the
Buddha Shakyamuni. He died after drinking
poisoned milk given him by an envious person. The historical Buddha passed
away at the age of 80 after consuming poisoned pork.
Milarepa’s sexual life oscillated between ascetic
abstinence and tantric practices. There are several misogynous poems by
him. When the residents of a village offered the poet a beautiful girl as
his bride, he sang the following song:
At first, the lady is like a heavenly angel;
The more you look at her, the more you want to gaze.
Middle-aged, she becomes a demon with a corpse’s eyes;
You say one word to her and she shouts back two.
She pulls your hair and hits your knee.
You strike her with your staff, but back she throws a ladle….
I keep away from women to avoid fights and quarrels.
For the young bride you mentioned, I have no appetite.
(Stevens, 1990, p.
75)
The yogi constantly warned of the destructive
power of women, and attacked them as troublemakers, as the source of all
suffering. Like all the prominent followers of Buddha he was exposed to
sexual temptations a number of times. Once a demoness
caused a huge vagina to appear before him. Milarepa
inserted a phallus-like stone into it and thus exorcised the magic. He
conducted a ganachakra
with the beautiful Tserinma and her four sisters.
Milarepa’s pupil, Gampopa
(1079–1153), drew the wild and anarchic phase of the Tilopa
lineage to a close. This man with a clear head who had previously practiced
as a doctor and became a monk because of a tragic love affair in which his
young wife had died, brought with him sufficient organizational talent to
overcome the antisocial traits of his predecessors. Before he met Milarepa, he was initiated into the Kadampa
order, an organization which could be traced back to the Indian scholar, Atisha, and already had an
statist character. As he wanted to leave them to take the yogi poet (Milarepa) as his teacher, his brethren from the order
asked Gampopa ,: “Aren’t our teachings enough?” When he nonetheless
insisted, they said to him: “Go, but [do] not abandon our habit.” (Snellgrove, 1987, vol. 2, p. 494). Gampopa
abided by this warning, but likewise he took to heart the following
critical statement by Milarepa: “The Kadampa have teachings, but practical teachings they
have not. The Tibetans, being possessed by evil spirits, would not allow
the Noble Lord (Atisha) to preach the Mystic
Doctrine. Had they done so, Tibet
would have been filled with saints by this time” (Bell, 1994, p. 93).
The tension between the rigidity of the monastic
state and the anarchy of the Maha Siddhas is
well illustrated by these two comments. If we further follow the history of
Tibetan Buddhism, we can see that Gampopa abided
more closely to the rules of his original order and only let himself be temporarily seduced by the wild life of the
“mountain ascetic”, Milarepa. In the long term he
is thus to be regarded as a conqueror of the anarchic currents. Together
with one of his pupils he founded the Kagyupa
order.
The actual chief figure in the establishment of
the Tibetan monastic state was the above-mentioned Atisha
(982–1054). The son of a prince from Bengal
already had a marriage and nine children behind him before he decided to
seek refuge in the sangha.
Among others, Naropa was one of his teachers. In
the year 1032, after several requests from the king of Guge
(southern Tibet),
he went to the Land
of Snows in order to
reform Buddhism there. In 1050, Atisha organized
a council in which Indians also participated alongside many Tibetan monks.
The chief topic of this meeting was the “Re-establishment of religion in Tibet”.
Under Tantrism the
country had declined into depravity. Crimes, murders, orgies, black magic,
and lack of discipline were no longer rare in the sangha (monastic community). Atisha opposed
this with his well-organized and disciplined monastic model, his moral
rectitude and his high standard of ethics. A pure lifestyle and true
orderly discipline were now required. The rules of celibacy applied once
more. An orthodoxy was established, but Tantrism was in no sense abolished, but rather
subjected to maximum strictness and control. Atisha
introduced a new time-keeping system into Tibet which was based upon the
calendar of the Kalachakra Tantra,
through which this work became exceptionally highly regarded.
Admittedly there is a story which tells of how a
wild dakini initiated him in a cemetery, and he
also studied for three years at the notorious Uddiyana
from whence Padmasambhava came, but his lifestyle
was from the outset clear and exact, clean and disciplined, temperate and
strict. This is especially apparent in his choice of female yiddam (divine appearance), Tara. Atisha
bought the cult of the Buddhist “Madonna” to Tibet with him. One could say
he carried out a “Marianization” of Tantric
Buddhism. Tara
was essentially quite distinct from the other female deities in her purity,
mercifulness, and her relative asexuality. She is the “spirit woman” who
also played such a significant role in the reform of other androcentric churches, as we can see from the example
provided by the history of the Papacy.
At the direction of his teacher, Atisha’s pupil Bromston
founded community of Kadampas whom we have
already mentioned above, a strict clerical organization which later became
an example for all the orders of the Land of Snows
including the Nyingmapas and the remainder of the
pre-Buddhist Bonpos. But in particular it paved
the way for the victory march of the Gelugpas.
This order saw itself as the actual executors of Atisha’s
plans. With it the nationalization of Tibetan monasticism began. This was
to reach its historical high point
in the institutionalization of the office of the Dalai Lama.
The pre-planned counterworld to the clerical
bureaucracy: Holy fools
The archetype of the anarchist Maha Siddha is primarily an Indian
phenomenon. Later in Tibet
it is replaced by that of the “holy fools”, that is, of the roaming yogis
with an unconventional lifestyle. While the “grand sorcerers” of India still
enjoyed supreme spiritual authority, before which abbots and kings had to
bow, the holy fools only acted as a social pressure valve. Everything wild,
anarchic, unbridled, and oppositional in Tibetan society could be diverted
through such individuals, so that the repressive pressure of the Buddhocracy did not too much gain the upper hand and
incite real and dangerous revolts. The role of the holy fools was thus, in
contrast to that of the Maha Siddhas,
planned in advance and arranged by the state and hence a part of the
absolutist Buddhocracy. John Ardussi
and Lawrence Epstein have encapsulated the principal characteristics of
this figure in six points:
- A general rejection of the usual
social patterns of behavior especially the rules of the clerical
establishment.
- A penchant for bizarre clothing.
- A cultivated non-observance of
politeness, above all with regard to respect for social status.
- A publicly proclaimed contempt for
scholasticism, in particular a mockery of religious study through
books alone.
- The use of popular poetic forms,
of mimicry, song, and stories as a means of preaching.
- The frequent employment of obscene
insinuations (Ardussi and Epstein, 1978, pp.
332–333).
These six characteristics doe
not involve a true anarchist rejection of state Buddhism. At best, the holy
fools made fun of the clerical authorities, but they never attacked these
as such.
The roaming yogis primarily became famous for
their completely free and uninhibited sexual morals and thus formed a
safety valve for thousands of abstinent monks living in celibacy, who were
subjected to extreme sexual pressure by the tantric symbolism. What was
forbidden for the ordained monastery inmates was lived out to the full by
the vagabond “crazy monks”: They praised the size of their phallus, boasted
about the number of women they had possessed, and drifted from village to
village as sacred Casanovas. Drukpa Kunley (1455–1529) was the most famous of them. H sings
his own praises in a lewd little song:
People say Drukpa Kunley is utterly mad
In Madness all sensory forms are the Path!
People say Drukpa Kunley’s organ is immense
His member brings joy to the hearts of young girls!
(quoted by Stevens,
1990, p. 77)
Kunley’s
biography begins with him lying in bed with his mother and trying to seduce
her. As, after great resistance, she was prepared to surrender to her son’s
will, he, a master of tantric semen retention, suddenly springs up and
leaves her. Amazingly, this uninhibited outsider was a member of the strict
Kadampa order — this too can only be understood
once we have recognized the role of the fool as a paradoxical instrument of
control.
An anarchist erotic: The Sixth Dalai Lama
At first glance it may appear absurd to include the
figure of the Sixth Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso (1683-1706), in a chapter on “Anarchism and Buddhocracy”, yet we do have our reasons for doing so.
Opinions are divided about this individual: for those who are sympathetic
towards him, he counts as a rebel, a popular hero, a poète maudit, a Bohemian, a romantic on
the divine throne, an affectionate eroticist, as clever and attractive. The
others, who view him with disgust, hold him to be a heretic and besmircher of the Lion Throne, reckless and depraved.
Both groups nonetheless describe him as extremely apolitical.
He became well-known and notorious above all
through his love poems, which he dedicated to several attractive
inhabitants of Lhasa.
Their self ironic touch, melancholy and subtle mockery of the bureaucratic Lamaist state have earned them a place in the
literature of the world. For example, the following five-line poem combines
all three elements:
When I’m at the Potala Monastery
They call me the Learned
Ocean of Pure Song;
When I sport in the
town,
I’am known as the Handsome Rogue who loves Sex!.
(quoted by Stevens,
1990, p. 78)
The young “poet prince” stood in impotent
opposition to the reigning regent, Sangye Gyatso (1653-1705), who claimed the power of state for
himself alone. The relationship between the two does not lack a certain
piquancy if, following Helmut Hoffmann, one assumes that the regent was the
biological son of the “Great Fifth” and thus stood opposed to the Sixth Dalai
Lama as the youthful incarnation of his own father. Nevertheless, this did
not prevent him from treating the young “god-king” as a marionette in his
power play with the Chinese and Mongolians. When the Dalai Lama expressed
own claim to authority, his “sinful activities “ were
suddenly found to be so offensive that his abdication was demanded.
Oddly enough the sixth Kundun accepted this without
great pause, and in the year 1702 decided to hand his spiritual office over
to the Panchen Lama; his worldly authority,
however, which he de jure but
never de facto exercised, he
wanted to retain. This plan did not come to fruition, however. A
congregation of priests determined that the spirit of Avalokiteshvara had left him
and appointed an opposing candidate. In the general political confusion
which now spread through the country, in which the regent, Sangye Gyatso, lost his life,
the 24-year-old Sixth Dalai Lama was also murdered. Behind the deed lay a
conspiracy between the Chinese Emperor and the Mongolian Prince, Lhabsang Khan. Nonetheless, according to a widely
distributed legend, the “god-king” was not killed but lived on anonymously
as a beggar and pilgrim and was said to have still appeared in the country
under his subsequent incarnation, the Seventh Dalai Lama.
Western historians usually see a tragic aesthete
in the figure of the poet prince, who with his erotic lines agreeably broke
through the merciless power play of the great lamas. We are not entirely
convinced by this view. In contrast, in our view Tsangyang
Gyatso was all but dying to attain and exercise
worldly power in Tibet,
as was indeed his right. It is just that to this end he did not make use of
the usual political means, believing instead that he could achieve his goal
by practicing sexual magic rites. He firmly believed in what stood in the
holy texts of the tantras; he was convinced that
could gain power over the state via “sexual anarchy”.
The most important piece
of information which identifies him as a practicing Tantric is the
much-quoted saying of his: „Although I sleep with a woman every night, I
never lose a drop of semen” (quoted by Stevens, 1990, p. 78). With this statement he not only
justified his scandalous relationships with women; he also wanted to
express the fact that his love life was in the service of his high office
as supreme vajra
master. One story tells of how, in the presence of his court, he publicly
urinated from the platform roof of the Potala in
a long arc and was able to draw his urine back into his penis. Through this
performance he wanted to display the evidence that in his much-reproached
love life he behaved correctly and in accordance with the tantric codex,
indeed that he had even mastered the difficult draw-back technique (the Vajroli method) needed in order to appropriate
the female seed (Schulemann, 1958, p. 284). It is
not very difficult to see from the following poem that his rendezvous were
for him about the absorption of the male-female fluids.
Glacier-water (from) 'Pure Crystal
Mountain'
Dew-drops from (the herb) 'Thunderbolt of Demonic Serpent'
(Enriched by) the balm of tonic elixir;
(Let) the Wisdom-Enchantress(es)
be the liquor-girl(s):
If you drink with a pure commitment
Infernal damnation need not be tasted.
(see Sorensen, 1990,
p. 113)
Other verses of his also make unmistakable
references to sexual magic practices (Sorensen, 1990, p. 100). He himself
wrote several texts which primarily concern the terror deity, Hayagriva.
From a tantric point of view his “seriousness” would also not have been
reduced by his getting involved with barmaids and prostitutes, but rather
in contrast, it would have been all but proven, because according to the
law of inversion, of course, the highest arises from the most
lowly. He is behaving totally in the spirit of the Indian Maha Siddhas when he sings:
If the bar-girl does not falter,
The beer will flow on and on.
This maiden is my refuge,
and this place my haven.
(Stevens, 1990, p.
78, 79)
He ordered the construction of a magnificently
decorated room within the Potala probably for the
performance of his tantric rites and which he cleverly called the “snake
house”. In his external appearance as well, the “god-king” was a Vajrayana
eccentric who evoked the long-gone magical era of the great Siddhas. Like them, he let his hair grow long and tied
it in a knot. Heavy earrings adorned his lobes, on
every finger he wore a valuable ring. But he did not run around naked like
many of his role-models. In contrast, he loved to dress magnificently. His
brocade and silk clothing were admired by Lhasa’s jeunesse dorée with whom
he celebrated his parties.
But these
were all just externals. Alexandra David-Neel’s suspicion is obviously spot on when she assumes: “Tsangyang
Gyatso was apparently initiated into methods
which in our terms allow or even encourage a life of lust and which also
really signified dissipation for anyone not initiated into this strange
schooling” (Hoffmann, 1956, 178, 179).
We know that in the tantric rituals the individual
karma mudras
(wisdom girls) can represent the elements, the stars, the planets, even the
divisions of time. Why should they not also represent aspects of political
power? There is in fact such a “political” interpretation of the erotic
poems of the Sixth Dalai Lama by Per K. Sorensen. The author claims that
the poetry of the god-king used the erotic images as allegories: the “tiger
girl” conquered in a poem by the sixth Kundun is supposed to
symbolize the clan chief of the Mongols (Sorensen, 1990, p. 226). The
“sweet apple” or respectively the “virgin” for whom he reaches out are
regarded as the “fruits of power” (Sorensen, 1990, p. 279). Sorensen
reinterprets the “love for a woman” as the “love of power” when he writes:
“We shall tentatively attempt to read the constant allusion to the girl and
the beloved as yet a hidden reference to the appropriation of real power, a
right of which he [the Sixth Dalai Lama] was unjustly divested by a
despotic and complacent Regent, who in actual fact demonstrated a conspicuous
lack of interest in sharing any part of the power with the young ruler”
(Sorensen, 1990, p. 48).
But this is a matter of much more than allegories.
A proper understanding of the tantras instantly
makes the situation clear: the Sixth Dalai Lama was constantly conducting
tantric rituals with his girls in order to attain real power in the state.
In his mind, his karma mudras
represented various energies which he wanted to acquire via his sexual
magic practices so as to gain the power to govern which was being withheld
from him. If he composed the lines
As long as the pale moon
Dwells over the East
Mountain,
I draw strength and bliss
From the girl’s body
(Koch, 1960, p. 172)
- then this was with
power-political intentions. Yet some of his lines are of such a deep
melancholy that he probably was not able to always keep up his tantric
control techniques and had actually fallen deeply in love. The following
poem may indicate this:
I went to the wise jewel, the lama,
And asked him to lead my spirit.
Often I sat at his feet,
But my thoughts crowded around
The image of the girl.
The appearance of the god
I could not conjure up.
Your beauty alone stood before my eyes,
And I wanted to catch the most holy teaching.
It slipped through my hands, I count the hours
Until we embrace again.
(Koch, 1960, p. 173)
A tantric history of
Tibet
The following, Seventh Dalai Lama (1708-1757) was
the complete opposite of his predecessor. Until now no comparisons between
the two have been made. Yet this would be worthwhile, then whilst the one
represented wildness, excess, fantasy, and poetry, his successor relied
upon strict observance, bureaucracy, modesty, and learning. The tantric
scheme of anarchy and order, which the “Great Fifth” ingeniously combined
within his person, fell apart again with both of his immediate successors.
Nothing interested the Seventh Dalai Lama more than the state bureaucratic
consolidation of the Kalachakra Tantra. He commissioned the Namgyal Institute, which still today looks after this
task, with the ritual performance of the external time doctrine. Apart from
this he introduced a Kalachakra
prayer into the general liturgy of the Gelugpa
order which had to be recited on the eighth day of every Tibetan month. We
are also indebted to him for the construction of the Kalachakra sand mandala and the choreography of the complicated dances
which still accompany the ritual.
Anarchy and state Buddhism thus do not need to
contradict one another. They could both be coordinated with each other.
Above all, the “Great Fifth” had recognized the secret: the Land of Snows was to be got the better of
through pure statist authority, it had to be controlled tantricly,
that is, the chaos and anarchy had to be
integrated as part of the Buddhocracy. Applied to
the various Tibetan religious schools this meant that if he were to succeed
in combining the puritanical, bureaucratic, centralizing, disciplined,
industrious, and virtuous qualities of the Gelugpas with the
libertarian, phantasmagorical, magic, and decentralizing characteristics of
the Nyingmapas,
then absolute control over the Land of Snows must be attainable. All the
other orders could be located between these two extremes.
Such an undertaking had to achieve something which
in the views of the time was impossible, then the Gelugpas were
a product of a radical critique of the sexual dissolution and other
excesses of the Nyingmapas.
But the political-religious genius of the Fifth Dalai Lama succeeded in this
impossible enterprise. The self-disciplined administrator upon the Lion
Throne preferred to see himself as Padmasambhava
(the root guru of the Nyingmapas) and declared
his lovers to be embodiments of Yeshe Tshogyal (Padmasambhava’s the
wisdom consort). Tibet
received a ruler over state and anarchy.
The political mythic history of the Land of Snows thus falls into line with a
tantric interpretation. At the beginning of all the subsequent historical
events stands the shackling of the chaotic earth goddess, Srinmo, by the king, Songtsen
Gampo, (the conquest of the karma mudra by the yogi). Through
this, the power of the masculine method (upaya) over the feminine
wisdom (prajna)
invoked in the sexual magic ritual precedes the supremacy of the state over
anarchy, of civilization over wilderness, of culture over nature. The
English anthropologist, Geoffrey Samuel, thus speaks of a synthesis which
arose from the dialectic between anti-state/anarchist and clerical/statist
Buddhism in Tibet,
and recognizes in this interrelationship a unique and fruitful dynamic. He
believes the Tibetan system displays an amazingly high degree of fluidity,
openness, and choice. This is his view of things.
But for us, Samuel is making a virtue of
necessity. We would see it exactly the other way around: the contradiction
between the two hostile extremes (anarchy and the state) led to social
tensions which subjected Tibetan society to an ongoing acid test. One has
to be clear that the tantric scheme produces a culture of extreme dissonance
which admittedly sets free great amounts of energy but has neither led
historically to a peaceful and harmonic society to the benefit of all
beings nor can do so in the future.
Samuel makes a further mistake when he opposes
clerical state Buddhism to wild tantric Buddhism as equal counterpoles. We have shown often enough that the
function of control (upaya)
is the more important element of the tantric ritual, more important and
more steadfast than the temporary letting loose of wild passions. Nevertheless
the contradiction between wildness (feminine chaos) and taming (masculine
control) remains a fundamental pattern of every sexual magic project — this
is the reason that ("controlled”) anarchy is a part of the Tibetan
“state theology” and thus it was never, neither for Atisha
nor Tsongkhapa, the two founding fathers of state
Buddhism, a question of whether the tantras
should be abolished. In contrast, both successfully made an effort to
strengthen and extend the control mechanisms within the tantric rites.
If the “political theology” of Lamaism
applies the tantric pattern to Tibetan society, then — from a metaphysical
viewpoint — it deliberately produces chaos to the point of disintegration
so as to ex nihilo establish law
and order anew. Internally, the
production of chaos takes place within the mystic body of the yogi via the
unchaining of the all-destroying Candali. Through this internal fragmentation the yogi is completely “freed” of his
earthly personality so as to be re-created as the emanation of the
spiritual horde of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and
protective deities who are at work behind all reality.
This inverted logic of the tantras
corresponds on an outwardly level
to the production of anarchy by the Buddhist state. The roaming “holy
fools”, the wild lives of the grand sorcerers (Maha Siddhas), the excesses of the
founding father, Padmasambhava, the still to be
described institution of the Tibetan “scapegoats” and the public debauchery
during the New Year’s festivities connected with this, yes, even the erotic
games of the Sixth Dalai Lama are such anarchist elements, which stabilize
the Buddhocracy in general. They must — following
the tantric laws — reckon with their own destruction (we shall return to
this point in connection with the “sacrifice” of Tibet), then it legitimates
itself through the ability to transform disorder into order, crime into
good deeds, decline and fall into resurrection. In order to implement its
program, but also so as to prove its omnipotence, the Buddhist Tantric state
— deliberately — creates for itself chaotic scenarios, it cancels law and
custom, justice and virtue, authority and obedience in order to, after a
stage of chaos, re-establish them. In other words it uses revolution to
achieve restoration. We shall soon see that the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
conducts this interplay on the world stage.
It nonetheless remains to be considered that the
authority of Tibetan state Buddhism has not surmounted the reality of a
limited dominion of monastic orders. There can be no talk of a Chakravartin’s the exercise of power, of a world
ruler, at least not in the visible world. From a historical point of view
the institution of the Dalai Lama remained extremely weak, measured by the
standards of its claims, unfortunately all but powerless. Of the total of
fourteen Dalai Lamas only one is can be described as a true potentate: the
“Great Fifth”, in whom the institution actually found its beginnings and
whom it has never outgrown. All other Dalai Lamas were extremely limited in
their abilities with power or died before they were able to govern. Even
the Thirteenth, who is sometimes accorded special powers and therefore also
referred to as the “Great”, only survived because the superpowers of the
time, England and Russia, were unable to reach agreement on the division of
Tibet. Nonetheless the institution of the god-king has exercised a strong
attraction over all of Central Asia for centuries and cleverly understood
how to render its field of competence independent of the visible standards
of political reality and to construct these as a magic occult field of
forces of which even the Emperor of China was nervous.
"Crazy wisdom” and the West
Already in the nineteen twenties, the voices of
modern western, radical-anarchist artists could be heard longing for and
invoking the Buddhocracy of the Dalai Lama. “O
Grand Lama, give us, grace us with your illuminations in a language our
contaminated European minds can understand, and if need be, transform our
Mind ...” (Bishop, 1989, p. 239). These melodramatic lines are the work of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948).
The dramatist was one of the French intellectuals who in 1925 called for a
“surrealist revolution”. With his idea of the “theater of horrors”, in
which he brought the representation of ritual violence to the stage, he
came closer to the horror cabinet of Buddhist Tantrism
than any other modern dramatist. Artaud’s longing
for the rule of the Dalai Lama is a graphic example of how an anarchist,
asocial world view can tip over into support for a “theocratic” despotism.
[1]
There was also a close connection between Buddhism
and the American “Beat Generation”, who helped decisively shape the youth
revolts of the sixties. The poets Jack Kerouac, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder,
Allan Ginsberg, and others were, a decade earlier, already attracted by
Eastern teachings of wisdom, above all Japanese Zen. They too were
particularly interested in the anarchic, ordinary-life despising side of
Buddhism and saw in it a fundamental and revolutionary critique of a mass
society that suppressed all individual freedom. “It is indeed puzzling”,
the German news magazine Der Spiegel
wondered in connection with Tibetan Buddhism, “that many
anti-authoritarian, anarchist and feminist influenced former ‘68ers’
[members of the sixties protest movements] are so inspired by a religion
which preaches hierarchical structures, self-limiting monastic culture and
the authority of the teacher” (Spiegel,
16/1998, p. 121).
Alan Watts (1915-1973) was an Englishman who met
the Japanese Zen master and philosopher, Daietsu Teitaro Suzuki, in London. He began to popularize Suzuki’s
philosophy and to reinterpret it into an unconventional and anarchic
“lifestyle” which directed itself against the American dream of affluence.
Timothy Leary, who propagated the wonder drug LSD
around the whole world and is regarded as a guru of the hippie movement and
American subculture, made the Tibetan
Book of the Dead the basis of his psychedelic experiments. [2]
Already at the start of the fifties Allen Ginsberg
had begun experimenting with drugs (peyote, mescaline, and later LSD) in
which the wrathful tantric protective deities played a central role. He
included these in his “consciousness-expanding sessions”. When he visited
the Dalai Lama in India
in 1962, he was interested to know what His Holiness thought of LSD. The Kundun replied with a counter-question, however, and
wanted to find out whether Ginsberg could, under influence of the drug, see
what was in a briefcase that was in the room. The poet answered yes, the
case was empty. It was! (Shambhala Sun,
July 1995).
The Tibetan Lama Dudjom Rinpoche, the then leader of the Nyingmapa,
later explained the emptiness of all things to him. When Ginsberg asked him
for advice about how he should deal with his LSD horror trips, the Rinpoche answered, “If you see something horrible,
don't cling to it, and if you see something beautiful, don't cling to it” (Shambhala Sun, July 1995). This statement
became the life-maxim of the beat poets.
In Sikkim
in 1962, Ginsberg participated in the Black Hat ceremony of the Karmapa and at that early stage met the young Chögyam Trungpa. Ten years
later (1972) he was quoting radical poems together with him at spectacular
events. At these “readings” both “Buddha poets” lived out their anarchist
feelings to the full, with Lama Trungpa usually
being drunk.
It demonstrates his ingenious instinct for mental
context that the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, when asked whether he ever
meditated by Ginsberg, who was in revolt against the state and every form
of compulsion, answered, “No, I don't have to” (Tricycle, vol. 5, no. 2, p. 6). In contrast, we have learned
from other interviews with His Holiness that he spends four hours
meditating every morning, as is proper for a good Buddhist monk. The Kundun thus
has the appropriate answer ready for whatever the spiritual orientation of
his conversation partner may be. Through this he succeeds in making himself
popular everywhere.
His nonchalance on this occasion in contrast to
the in other contexts strongly emphasized meditative discipline is
congruent with Ginsberg’s fundamentally anarchist and anti-authoritarian
attitudes. In turn, the latter’s unconventional escapades are compatible
with the Tibetan archetype of the “holy fool”. For this reason, Ginsberg
also explained his poems to be an expression of “crazy wisdom”, a phrase
which soon proved to be a mark of quality for the anti-conventional
attitude of many Tibetan lamas in the West.
Within the tantric system of logic, the god-king
did not need to fear the chaotic and anti-bourgeois lifestyle of the
sixties or its anarchic leaders. Indeed, all the Maha Siddhas had been through a wild
phase before their enlightenment. The Beat Generation represented an almost
ideal starting substance (prima materia) for the divine alchemist upon the Lion
Throne to experiment with, and he was in fact successful in “ennobling”
many of them into propagandists for his Buddhocratic
vision.
From the beginning of his artistic career, the
famous and unconventional German conceptual artist, Joseph Beuys, saw
himself as an initiate of a shamanist/Tartar tradition. He justified his
renowned works in felt, a material used primarily by the Mongolian nomads,
with his affinity to the culture and religion of the peoples of the
steppes. A number of meetings between him and the Dalai Lama occurred,
which — without it being much discussed in public — were of decisive
significance for the development of the artist’s awareness.
In Amsterdam
in 1990 famous artists like Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage met with His
Holiness. The painter, Roy Lichtenstein, and Philip Glass the composer are
also attracted to Buddhism. In 1994 together with the Czech president and
former writer, Vaclav Havel, the Kundun amused himself over the erotic poems of his
anarchist predecessor, the Sixth Dalai Lama.
The god-king is even celebrated in the pop scene.
Major stars like David Bowie, Tina Turner, and Patty Smith openly confess
their belief in the Buddha’s teachings. Monks from the Namgyal
monastery, which is especially concerned with the Kalachakra Tantra,
perform at pop festivals as exotic interludes.
But – as we know — anarchist Buddhism is always
only the satyric foreplay to the idea of the Buddhocratic state. Just as wild sexuality is
transformed into power in Vajrayana, indeed forms the precondition for any power
at all, so the anarchist art scene in the West forms the raw material and
the transitional phase for the establishment of a totalitarian Buddhocracy. We can observe such a sudden change from
anti-authoritarian anarchy into the concept and ideas of an authoritarian
state within the person of Chögyam Trungpa, who in the course of his career in the USA has
transformed himself from a Dharma freak into a mini-despot with fascistoid allures. We shall later present this example
in more detail.
Footnotes:
Next Chapter:
6.
REGICIDE AS LAMAISM’S MYTH OF ORIGIN
AND THE RITUAL
SACRIFICE OF TIBET
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