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The
Shadow of the Dalai Lama – Part II – Politics
as ritual
©
Victor & Victoria Trimondi
Part
II
POLITICS
AS RITUAL
The
Shambhalization plan for Japan is the first step
toward
the Shambhalization of the
world. If you participate in it,
you
will achieve great virtue and rise up to a higher
world
Shoko
Asahara
In order
to be able to understand and to evaluate the person
of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and the history of
Tibet, we must first set aside all of our contemporary
western conceptions in which the domains of
religion and politics, of magic and government
decisions, and of worldly and spiritual power
are separate from one another. We must also not
allow ourselves to be influenced by the public
self-presentation of the exiled Tibetan head of
state, by his declarations of belief in democracy,
by his insistent affirmations of peace, by his
ecumenical professions, or by his statements on
practical politics. Then a closer examination
reveals the entire performance, oriented to western
values, which he offers daily on the world political
stage, to be a political tactic, with the help
of which he wants to put through his atavistic
and androcentric world view globally — a world
view whose dominant principles are steeped in
magic, ritual, occultism, and the despotism of
an ecclesiastical state.
It is
not the individual political transgressions of
the Dalai Lama, which have only been begun to
be denounced in the Euro-American media since
1996, which could make his person and office a
fundamental problem for the West. Even if these
“deficiencies” weigh more heavily when measured
against the moral claims of a “living Buddha”
than they would for an ordinary politician, these
are simply superficial discordances. In contrast,
anybody who descends more deeply into the Tibetan
system must inevitably enter the sexual magic
world of the tantras which we have described.
This opens up a dimension completely foreign to
a westerner. For his “modern” awareness, there
is no relation whatsoever between the tantric
system of rituals and the realpolitik of the head of
the Tibetan government in exile. He would hardly
take seriously the derivation of political decisions
from the Kalachakra Tantra and the
Shambhala Myth. But it is
precisely this connection between ritual and politics,
between sacred sexuality and power which is —
as we shall demonstrate — the central concern
of Lamaism.
European-American
ignorance in the face of atavistic religious currents
is not limited to Tibetan Buddhism, but likewise
applies to other cultures, like Islam for example.
It is currently usual in the West to draw a stark
distinction between religious fundamentalism on
the one hand, and the actual human political concerns
of all religions on the other. The result has
been that all the religious traditions of the
world were able to infiltrate Europe and North
America as valuable spiritual alternatives to
the decadent materialism of the industrialized
world. In recent years there has not been much
demand for a sustained critical evaluation of
religions.
Yet anybody
who reads closely the holy texts of the various
schools of belief (be it the Koran,
passages from the Old
Testament, the Christian Book of Revelations, or the
Kalachakra
Tantra), is very soon confronted with an explosive
potential for aggression, which must inevitably
lead to 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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