New Book—Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism

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Re: New Book—Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism

Postby liminalOyster » Mon Apr 16, 2018 8:50 pm

Heaven Swan » Mon Apr 16, 2018 6:52 pm wrote:To address your reference to the Dalai Lama being “a self-avowed Marxist” and Jerky’s suspicion of China as Chandler’s Puppetmaster—she says that what bothers her is the deception of followers and donors that the Dalai and other Tibetan Lamas have perpetrated by making formal economic//religious alliances with the Chinese Government while still garnering sympathy and raising money from westerners in the Free Tibet campaign.
\


Hmmm. Her claim doesn't make much sense.

The Chinese are still involved in using weird tactics to undermine the Dalai Lama. Foremost is the very odd Dorje Shugden / New Kadampa Tradition campaign in which British Gelugpas were (likely) paid by China to transform a lesser known (and questionable) protector deity into the central figure of their practice in order to undermine the DL. Talk about "mind control" - that tactic is super weird as it has appealed to Brits (and other Westerners) rabid quest for authenticity by telling them that the DJ is the real real deal and is being suppressed by the DL. Which has lead to the godawful look of a bunch of pasty faced brits with shaved heads and robes protesting the DL for suppressing "their" right to religsious freedom (he condemns the practice, more or less.) That part is no CT - there have been defectors who've come clean about receiving Chinese $ for this goal.

As for the NKT, pretty much any major city in the US now evidences an unusual number of big glossy promo postcards advertising NKT as a generalized intro to meditation - usually saying some variant of "Meditate in LA / NYC / Boston / etc ". Little doubt they are being funded by the Chinese also.

edit:

I missed Jerky's suspicion but I highly doubt Chandler is anything but an adept writer (not as good researcher) with an axe to grind. Her book is self-published I believe and has received very little traction.
Last edited by liminalOyster on Mon Apr 16, 2018 9:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: New Book—Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism

Postby Iamwhomiam » Mon Apr 16, 2018 9:22 pm

Post by Jerky » Mon Apr 16, 2018 8:54 am

And immediately I have to wonder whether China is behind this anti-Tibetan push.

I doubt it. But surely they'll promote the book's sale, well, its storyline, anyway.

Anyone who chooses to follow the Left Hand Path should expect to get fucked over, but still, my sentiment towards Ms. Chandler aligns with liminalOyster's, below:

Post by liminalOyster » Mon Apr 16, 2018 4:17 pm

This is basically Alex Jones for the South Beach set. I get that Chandler had a terrible experience. I respect that. And there's no doubt at all that guru abuses of power has been a real and ongoing source of serious harm in Tibet and in the west. But this book reads like the same kind of fantastical neuroses that Tibetan Buddhism teaches is the very material (our thoughts, paranoias, etc) with which we work in order to cultivate discriminating awareness wisdom, which is not at all about authority, hierarchy, external source, lamas, etc.

I so hope someday someone will take on the project of writing that history - of the dark side of Tantra in the West - without also dismissing it or discarding it altogether. It is a story that needs to be told but thus far has mostly been attempted by those whose anger and remorse seems to prevent great integration of ambiguity.


Indeed. Thank you for sharing your take on Chandler, etc.

Thank you Heavenly Swan for your discussion prompting fully explanatory OP.
I'm wondering if Chandler's returned to her Christian roots. I do remember hearing her story more than a few years ago. I believe you'd need to do some more research on Buddhism in China, especially of more recent developments regarding China's controversial appointment of a young lama to lead the Chinese Buddhists. The shadow's penetrating deeply wherever bright light shines - surely you've noticed.

We should expect ever more condemnation of eastern practices of Yoga and meditation by westerners in future from our evangelical Christians.

Sounder, I've agreed with all you've written. Did you post your work here? (or maybe I saw it on a woodworkers site?)

Edit:

Dang! I forgot this juicy tidbit - Chandler used to work for Nxivm! https://extibetanbuddhist.com/sex-branding-cult-nxivm-and-dalai-lamas-endorsement/
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Re: New Book—Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism

Postby liminalOyster » Mon Apr 16, 2018 10:31 pm

Wait, what? Am I blind - I skimmed the NXIVM piece and am not seeing that she used to work for him/them.
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Re: New Book—Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism

Postby Iamwhomiam » Tue Apr 17, 2018 1:04 am

No, no, it's not you it's me!! Of course I misread Parlato's bit as having been written by Chandler:

When I worked for NXIVM/Bronfmans, I was told by a high ranking NXIVM official that, prior to the Dalai Lama’s coming to speak [before he canceled the first time] the Bronfman sisters pledged to donate $1 million to him.


The quote's from a few paragraphs above the last photo accompanying the article here.

I had read "about Christine..." at the bottom of her page just before and my brain's broken; sorry for the confusing error.
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Re: New Book—Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism

Postby Heaven Swan » Tue Apr 17, 2018 3:05 am

I’m only on page 105 of the book. Will look into her assertions about Chinese Gov financial ties with the Lamas and get back to you Liminal. Are you and Iamwho Iam Buddhists? (If you want to talk about it, of course),

Chandler is highly critical of the Tibetan Buddhist Tulku system in which a toddler is “found” then wrenched from his mother and raised in an androcentic monk environment where he is told he’s a god..,,which does sound like the recipe for creating a raging narcissist and a tragic form of child abuse in which the child is never acknowledged for who he is but instead, for his whole life is buried under who the adults say he is.
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Re: New Book—Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism

Postby liminalOyster » Tue Apr 17, 2018 10:11 am

Heaven Swan » Tue Apr 17, 2018 3:05 am wrote:I’m only on page 105 of the book. Will look into her assertions about Chinese Gov financial ties with the Lamas and get back to you Liminal. Are you and Iamwho Iam Buddhists? (If you want to talk about it, of course),

Chandler is highly critical of the Tibetan Buddhist Tulku system in which a toddler is “found” then wrenched from his mother and raised in an androcentic monk environment where he is told he’s a god..,,which does sound like the recipe for creating a raging narcissist and a tragic form of child abuse in which the child is never acknowledged for who he is but instead, for his whole life is buried under who the adults say he is.


Yes, I'm a sworn Buddhist but not a Tantrika and am mostly non-denominational.

I agree with Chandler that, from a base Western vantage, the Tulku system can be reasonably described as a textbook how-to in creating wounded narcissists. But the West is clearly no control population. I think it's a bit similar to Karma, in the sense that Westerners think they have a handle on it - a totally foreign but very elsewhere normal phenomena - but their understanding is way off. IOW, Karma has little to do with "consequence" which is only a poor western analogue for trying to grasp it. Instead, Karma is just a way of describing the innumerable causes and conditions that shape our experiences. Even things as simple as - which route did I drive home last night, what did I eat for dinner, what time did I go to bed - It's very ordinary.

Similarly, I think reincarnation is quite ordinary in all sorts of times and places throughout history. I have a (non-Buddhist/esoteric) friend whose daughter is named after her great grandmother and, from very early on, on being told they had the same name, started talking about herself and great grandma as the same being - ie "back when I was big [grandma's name]." IMHO the West's best attempt to grasp reincarnation as a foreign belief system is to essentially make it equivalent to fundamentalist Christianity as seen through the strict atheistic scientism of Bertrand Russell - ala, the body dies, therefore there is no afterlife, etc. IOW to make it delusion by using our own very rigid literalism to turn it into a strawman and so debunk it. Not to say I understand it at all.

I don't think we can impose a western idea of what it means to be "wrenched" from the nuclear family as, for the Tulku, it is taking place within a social milieu that sees the phenomena as a real, accepted thing. I am somewhat loathe, usually, to raise (male) circumcision as an example, but in this case, I think it's an exquisitely barbaric but terribly well-accepted practice in the west. For that matter, I have indigenous friends who think mandatory schooling by the state (much less mandatory vaccination) are simply savage ideas.

Mind you, I'm (at best) agnostic about Tulkus. There are more than a few now grown contemporary Western and some Tibetan Tulkus who think its a load of shit. There's a good documentary about one of them. I'll edit if I remember the info.
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Re: New Book—Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism

Postby Heaven Swan » Mon Apr 23, 2018 5:45 am

Thanks for weighing in Liminal. I skimmed through the book (hard to do on kindle) and couldn’t find the reference but hopefully I will. Haven’t had time to read more of the book either but will. Chandler was privy to the highest levels of Western Tibetan Buddhism. She describes being manipulated and psychologically controlled through mindfulness meditation. It’s a fascinating read.

I know that the religious monitoring branch of the Chinese Government is very active in the approved religions in China. Along with religious studies the monks and nuns have many hours of required Marxist studies and the organizational levels must toe the government line.

Historically China has had several religiously inspired insurgencies (Tai Ping and Boxer rebellions...) that have come very close to toppling Chinese governments so they are very skirmish about religions and religious movements.

For that reason it wouldn’t surprise me if among the various ways the Chinese Gov is maneuvering to monitor and control Tibetan Buddhism they might work with top Lamas to further their aims
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Re: New Book—Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism

Postby cptmarginal » Mon Apr 23, 2018 9:33 am

The Chinese are still involved in using weird tactics to undermine the Dalai Lama. Foremost is the very odd Dorje Shugden / New Kadampa Tradition campaign in which British Gelugpas were (likely) paid by China to transform a lesser known (and questionable) protector deity into the central figure of their practice in order to undermine the DL.


I was just thinking of adding something about that here in this thread, thank you for being on top of it.

Separately from anything to do with Tibet, there are several other "new religious movements" based in Buddhism that operate globally and have a political mission. A notable example is the Japanese group Soka Gakkai, who recruit members in America and elsewhere.

When it comes to separating a person's good work from the bizarre context surrounding it, appreciating the Dalai Lama's words is for me not any more difficult than similarly finding value from Krishnamurti's words. There are a lot of little things that he has said that have convinced me of his intelligence. An example would be his brave admission to the use of sex rituals and justification of esoteric tantra in his short book, How to Practice.
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Re: New Book—Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism

Postby Heaven Swan » Wed Apr 25, 2018 7:35 am

Soka Gakkai, the "Buddhists" who chant for a new Mercedes, has long been known to meet the criteria for being a dangerous and destructive cult.

https://www.culteducation.com/group/940 ... akkai.html

What I'm learning from "Enthralled" is that Tibetan Buddhism and perhaps most of Buddhism is not so different. They may not chant for hours and hours for luxury consumer goods but they do chant for the Lama's health and internal organs.

When a Soka member I met invited me to the center to chant for whatever I wanted plus of course for the leader's internal organs, which she said they did daily, I was astounded that anyone could fall for this BS and assumed that it was a fringe group of fanatics, and very different from real Buddhism. But that may have been wishful thinking...
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Re: New Book—Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism

Postby liminalOyster » Wed Apr 25, 2018 9:46 am

Heaven Swan » Wed Apr 25, 2018 7:35 am wrote:Soka Gakkai, the "Buddhists" who chant for a new Mercedes, has long been known to meet the criteria for being a dangerous and destructive cult.

https://www.culteducation.com/group/940 ... akkai.html

What I'm learning from "Enthralled" is that Tibetan Buddhism and perhaps most of Buddhism is not so different. They may not chant for hours and hours for luxury consumer goods but they do chant for the Lama's health and internal organs.

When a Soka member I met invited me to the center to chant for whatever I wanted plus of course for the leader's internal organs, which she said they did daily, I was astounded that anyone could fall for this BS and assumed that it was a fringe group of fanatics, and very different from real Buddhism. But that may have been wishful thinking...


I see how off-putting this could seem. But the role of the guru in tantra is, in part, symbolic of the world itself and of its health and of the health of all sentient beings. There really is no euro/western analogue for the guru relationship and so it can be tempting to slot it automatically into one of megalomania and/or worship or abuse. And there is no shortage of questionable guru figures who have crossed a line into exploitation of students. But there really are many upstanding ones as well.

Buddhism has three "vehicles," - the Hinayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana. The latter is only practiced in Tibetan (and a small number of Japanese) sects. The first two have essentially nothing whatsoever to do with the guru figure and are much more familiar to euro/western representations of Buddhism - long, ascetic mediation sessions in the former, and compassion and kindness for all beings in the second.
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Re: New Book—Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism

Postby Heaven Swan » Fri Apr 27, 2018 10:58 am

Liminal Oyster wrote:
Buddhism has three "vehicles," - the Hinayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana. The latter is only practiced in Tibetan (and a small number of Japanese) sects. The first two have essentially nothing whatsoever to do with the guru figure and are much more familiar to euro/western representations of Buddhism - long, ascetic mediation sessions in the former, and compassion and kindness for all beings in the second.


Ah, yes, Chandler says that as part of Vajrayana, the 3rd vehicle you mention, she was made to take a vow to keep the Lama's secrets.

I'm not so sure about the long, ascetic mediation sessions (self hypnosis?) but the merit system of compassion and good deeds and kindness for all beings were things I always liked about the religion, and my first exposure to Buddhism through writings of Thict Nat Han (sp?) was very positive.

Every exposure after that was negative though, now culminating in the research I'm doing which indicates that Buddhism is even more patriarchal and misogynistic than Catholicism. Many Catholic priests abuse children, and others, despite vows of celibacy are gay or have wives and children on the side, but apparently the Lamas do all that and more:---they expect to be worshiped not just as priests but as living gods, plus keep harems of women to absorb sexual energy from in their "high Tantric practices." Their whole Tantric practice and world view involves locking down female energy and "absorbing" it for their own uses.

I know you said you're not into Tantra, but how did you you get so into the religion Liminal? (If you want to talk about it of course) I'm always curious about the forks in the road that lead to people's big decisions in life.
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Re: New Book—Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism

Postby liminalOyster » Fri Apr 27, 2018 3:10 pm

Heaven Swan wrote:Ah, yes, Chandler says that as part of Vajrayana, the 3rd vehicle you mention, she was made to take a vow to keep the Lama's secrets.


Yes, there's nothing particularly secret about that, though. It's a vow callled Samaya between a Vajra master and his/her students. The way Chandler frames it is oddly sensational, IMO. The emphasis of the vow is similar to the eightfold path - the basic path of Buddhism - which many non-buddhists are familiar with. Most aspects of Tibetan Buddhism are "self-secret" IOW out in the open but not clear to the untrained eye. Samaya also includes ethical mandates including one against misogyny actually.

Every exposure after that was negative though, now culminating in the research I'm doing which indicates that Buddhism is even more patriarchal and misogynistic than Catholicism.


I am very sorry to hear that. I have had mostly good experinces with different sanghas, but there's no shortage of shitty Buddhist groups, too. But in itself,Buddhism (dharma) is a set of teachings that are almost all practical/experiential. Dharma is categorically neither patriarchal or misognyistic. Dharma itself is never the historical context when a teaching was given, but the logic of the teaching. The taint of misogyny in some Buddhist cultures is just more confusion, which all Buddhists agree is a cause of suffering, even if it only becomes clear later. IOW Buddhism has a sort of built in capacity to discard and disavow things which get attached to it but are contra to it.

the Lamas do all that and more:---they expect to be worshiped not just as priests but as living gods


I think part of the issue with this is kind of a mistranslation. Chogyam Trungpa talked at one point about how the West really had no equivalent to the student/teacher Vajrayana relationship and the closest but imperfect comparison he could find was the king and his subject. But there are no gods in Tibetan Buddhism. There are manifestations and emanations of previous teachers, deities, ghosts, elemental beings more or less, but no gods. Indeed whether or not these beings are "real" in a western philosophical sense is a kind of impossible rhetorical questions. Yes, I see how supplication and prostration can certainly look alot like worship to someone coming from a xtian background, but they are more like forms of humility in general and or commitment to waking up - which the guru helps with but is not the cause of. That last part is, IMO, very critical here. Because the riches of the Vajra master and his/her abundance are also symbolic, for all that it might dovetail with 1) what *looks* like a bereft exploiter in our society, and 2) our distaste for monarchy.

keep harems of women to absorb sexual energy from in their "high Tantric practices." Their whole Tantric practice and world view involves locking down female energy and "absorbing" it for their own uses.


For all the years Chandler ostensibly spent studying the Vajrayana this is a really strangely unfamiliar way of describing it. In fact, this reads much more like a negative aspersion on so called "Tantric sex" and etc which is basically as authentic as Spencer Gifts and has as much relation to Tibetan Buddhism as fortune cookies do to Shanghai. People get super fascinated by the idea there is a core hidden teaching involving body fluids, vampiric energy practices, etc. Even Crowley and Blavatsky IMO seemd to fixate on the open representations of sexuality. These things are absolutely real historically and there are lots of lurid examples of them being abused and manipulated in the US. No doubt. But they hardly define tantra itself. The sensationalism around it in the euro west has always seemed to reveal a prurience and diminished capacity for abstract thinking that is seemingly innate to minds raised in Western epistemologies. The yabyum, for instance, is an iconic representation of wisdom (prajna) and compassion (karuna), which are male/female and so rendered as a het sex act when what they actually point to is progress on the path of meditation and good form in dealing with the world and other setient beings.

There is misogyny, inequity and sex abuse in the history of Tibetan Buddhism. Some of it continues today. But to say "their whole Tantric practice and world view" is about subjugating and exploiting women is nonsensical (no offense to you.) In my experienes with studying tantra, I've seen some gender expectations that seem a bit out of date for sure, but nothing that remotely borders on exploitation. Plus there have always been many very important female Bodhisattvas and deities and teachers. And there has been a long willingness to grow with the times, among TB communities connected to the US/West.

I would really urge you to check out Lama Tsultrim Allione. She's a US-raised lama who was, I believe, the first Western woman to be ordained as a Tibetan nun. And she's super fierce. I believe she may have a biography out too. Also, for a genuinely great if highly disturbing, story, check out Diamond Mountain and what happened there under lama Michael Roach and lama Christy. Probably an RI thread about it. Maybe in AD's TIDS thread.

I know you said you're not into Tantra, but how did you you get so into the religion Liminal? (If you want to talk about it of course) I'm always curious about the forks in the road that lead to people's big decisions in life.


Just started meditating at one point about 15 years ago because I could tell I really needed it.
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Re: New Book—Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism

Postby Heaven Swan » Sat Apr 28, 2018 5:55 am

Quotes are from LO's post above

Just started meditating at one point about 15 years ago because I could tell I really needed it.


Oh okay.I see. So you wanted to learn about meditating and turning inward and ended up in a religion with a very complex (according to your explanations) way of interpreting reality.
In any case thanks for your openness in discussing it, especially since Chandler's book and other information I'm discovering is highly critical.

...IOW out in the open but not clear to the untrained eye. Samaya also includes ethical mandates including one against misogyny actually.


Mandates that are not followed, especially by the leading Lamas don't mean much and end up being nothing but camouflage and smoke in the eyes of more sincere, lower level followers.

In addition to being in the highest level, Chandler took care of Chogyam Trungpa's (who you mention in the next paragraph) son for over six years therefore was privy to the private lives of the leadership. For those who don't know Trungpa was the first celebrity Lama who brought Tibetan Buddhism to the West, prior to the Dalai Lama. He also founded Naropa Institute and oversaw an ever-expanding network of Buddhist centers. Before he died of late-stage alcoholism in 1987 he appointed a successor-- Thomas Rich, a westerner, who, although he was already suffering from AIDS, did not stop having sex with students and the serial female sexual consorts that Tantra tells them are vital to their path to enlightenment (by absorbing their energy through sex).
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Re: New Book—Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism

Postby Heaven Swan » Sat Apr 28, 2018 6:22 am

This Parenti article clarifies so many things about one of the possible sources of the Tibet=Shangrila myth in the West, i.e. the longstanding CIA economic and espionage/military support of the Tibetan Lamas in exile as part of their worldwide anti-communist crusade.



Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth

http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html
(updated and expanded version, January 2007)

I. For Lords and Lamas

Along with the blood drenched landscape of religious conflict there is the experience of inner peace and solace that every religion promises, none more so than Buddhism. Standing in marked contrast to the intolerant savagery of other religions, Buddhism is neither fanatical nor dogmatic--so say its adherents. For many of them Buddhism is less a theology and more a meditative and investigative discipline intended to promote an inner harmony and enlightenment while directing us to a path of right living. Generally, the spiritual focus is not only on oneself but on the welfare of others. One tries to put aside egoistic pursuits and gain a deeper understanding of one’s connection to all people and things. “Socially engaged Buddhism” tries to blend individual liberation with responsible social action in order to build an enlightened society.

A glance at history, however, reveals that not all the many and widely varying forms of Buddhism have been free of doctrinal fanaticism, nor free of the violent and exploitative pursuits so characteristic of other religions. In Sri Lanka there is a legendary and almost sacred recorded history about the triumphant battles waged by Buddhist kings of yore. During the twentieth century, Buddhists clashed violently with each other and with non-Buddhists in Thailand, Burma, Korea, Japan, India, and elsewhere. In Sri Lanka, armed battles between Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils have taken many lives on both sides. In 1998 the U.S. State Department listed thirty of the world’s most violent and dangerous extremist groups. Over half of them were religious, specifically Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist. 1

In South Korea, in 1998, thousands of monks of the Chogye Buddhist order fought each other with fists, rocks, fire-bombs, and clubs, in pitched battles that went on for weeks. They were vying for control of the order, the largest in South Korea, with its annual budget of $9.2 million, its millions of dollars worth of property, and the privilege of appointing 1,700 monks to various offices. The brawls damaged the main Buddhist sanctuaries and left dozens of monks injured, some seriously. The Korean public appeared to disdain both factions, feeling that no matter what side took control, “it would use worshippers’ donations for luxurious houses and expensive cars.” 2

As with any religion, squabbles between or within Buddhist sects are often fueled by the material corruption and personal deficiencies of the leadership. For example, in Nagano, Japan, at Zenkoji, the prestigious complex of temples that has hosted Buddhist sects for more than 1,400 years, “a nasty battle” arose between Komatsu the chief priest and the Tacchu, a group of temples nominally under the chief priest's sway. The Tacchu monks accused Komatsu of selling writings and drawings under the temple's name for his own gain. They also were appalled by the frequency with which he was seen in the company of women. Komatsu in turn sought to isolate and punish monks who were critical of his leadership. The conflict lasted some five years and made it into the courts. 3

But what of Tibetan Buddhism? Is it not an exception to this sort of strife? And what of the society it helped to create? Many Buddhists maintain that, before the Chinese crackdown in 1959, old Tibet was a spiritually oriented kingdom free from the egotistical lifestyles, empty materialism, and corrupting vices that beset modern industrialized society. Western news media, travel books, novels, and Hollywood films have portrayed the Tibetan theocracy as a veritable Shangri-La. The Dalai Lama himself stated that “the pervasive influence of Buddhism” in Tibet, “amid the wide open spaces of an unspoiled environment resulted in a society dedicated to peace and harmony. We enjoyed freedom and contentment.” 4

A reading of Tibet’s history suggests a somewhat different picture. “Religious conflict was commonplace in old Tibet,” writes one western Buddhist practitioner. “History belies the Shangri-La image of Tibetan lamas and their followers living together in mutual tolerance and nonviolent goodwill. Indeed, the situation was quite different. Old Tibet was much more like Europe during the religious wars of the Counterreformation.” 5 In the thirteenth century, Emperor Kublai Khan created the first Grand Lama, who was to preside over all the other lamas as might a pope over his bishops. Several centuries later, the Emperor of China sent an army into Tibet to support the Grand Lama, an ambitious 25-year-old man, who then gave himself the title of Dalai (Ocean) Lama, ruler of all Tibet.

His two previous lama “incarnations” were then retroactively recognized as his predecessors, thereby transforming the 1st Dalai Lama into the 3rd Dalai Lama. This 1st (or 3rd) Dalai Lama seized monasteries that did not belong to his sect, and is believed to have destroyed Buddhist writings that conflicted with his claim to divinity. The Dalai Lama who succeeded him pursued a sybaritic life, enjoying many mistresses, partying with friends, and acting in other ways deemed unfitting for an incarnate deity. For these transgressions he was murdered by his priests. Within 170 years, despite their recognized divine status, five Dalai Lamas were killed by their high priests or other courtiers. 6

For hundreds of years competing Tibetan Buddhist sects engaged in bitterly violent clashes and summary executions. In 1660, the 5th Dalai Lama was faced with a rebellion in Tsang province, the stronghold of the rival Kagyu sect with its high lama known as the Karmapa. The 5th Dalai Lama called for harsh retribution against the rebels, directing the Mongol army to obliterate the male and female lines, and the offspring too “like eggs smashed against rocks…. In short, annihilate any traces of them, even their names.” 7

In 1792, many Kagyu monasteries were confiscated and their monks were forcibly converted to the Gelug sect (the Dalai Lama’s denomination). The Gelug school, known also as the “Yellow Hats,” showed little tolerance or willingness to mix their teachings with other Buddhist sects. In the words of one of their traditional prayers: “Praise to you, violent god of the Yellow Hat teachings/who reduces to particles of dust/ great beings, high officials and ordinary people/ who pollute and corrupt the Gelug doctrine.” 8 An eighteenth-century memoir of a Tibetan general depicts sectarian strife among Buddhists that is as brutal and bloody as any religious conflict might be. 9 This grim history remains largely unvisited by present-day followers of Tibetan Buddhism in the West.

Religions have had a close relationship not only with violence but with economic exploitation. Indeed, it is often the economic exploitation that necessitates the violence. Such was the case with the Tibetan theocracy. Until 1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs. These estates were owned by two social groups: the rich secular landlords and the rich theocratic lamas. Even a writer sympathetic to the old order allows that “a great deal of real estate belonged to the monasteries, and most of them amassed great riches.” Much of the wealth was accumulated “through active participation in trade, commerce, and money lending.” 10

Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself “lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.” 11

Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, a member of the Dalai Lama’s lay Cabinet, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. 12 Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some Western admirers as “a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.” 13 In fact. it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served mainly as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order, protect their property, and hunt down runaway serfs.

Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeated rape, beginning at age nine. 14 The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.

In old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the “middle-class” families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery. 15 The majority of the rural population were serfs. Treated little better than slaves, the serfs went without schooling or medical care, They were under a lifetime bond to work the lord's land--or the monastery’s land--without pay, to repair the lord's houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand.16 Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners lease them out to work in a distant location. 17

As in a free labor system and unlike slavery, the overlords had no responsibility for the serf’s maintenance and no direct interest in his or her survival as an expensive piece of property. The serfs had to support themselves. Yet as in a slave system, they were bound to their masters, guaranteeing a fixed and permanent workforce that could neither organize nor strike nor freely depart as might laborers in a market context. The overlords had the best of both worlds.

One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: “Pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished”; they “were just slaves without rights.”18 Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a “liberation.” He testified that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord’s men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain, he claimed.19

The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery.20

The theocracy’s religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve in their next lifetime. The rich and powerful treated their good fortune as a reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives.


The Tibetan serfs were something more than superstitious victims, blind to their own oppression. As we have seen, some ran away; others openly resisted, sometimes suffering dire consequences. In feudal Tibet, torture and mutilation--including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation--were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, and runaway or resistant serfs. Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.”21 Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die. “The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,” concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet. 22

In 1959, Anna Louise Strong visited an exhibition of torture equipment that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, breaking off hands, and hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling. The exhibition presented photographs and testimonies of victims who had been blinded or crippled or suffered amputations for thievery. There was the shepherd whose master owed him a reimbursement in yuan and wheat but refused to pay. So he took one of the master’s cows; for this he had his hands severed. Another herdsman, who opposed having his wife taken from him by his lord, had his hands broken off. There were pictures of Communist activists with noses and upper lips cut off, and a woman who was raped and then had her nose sliced away.23

Earlier visitors to Tibet commented on the theocratic despotism. In 1895, an Englishman, Dr. A. L. Waddell, wrote that the populace was under the “intolerable tyranny of monks” and the devil superstitions they had fashioned to terrorize the people. In 1904 Perceval Landon described the Dalai Lama’s rule as “an engine of oppression.” At about that time, another English traveler, Captain W.F.T. O’Connor, observed that “the great landowners and the priests… exercise each in their own dominion a despotic power from which there is no appeal,” while the people are “oppressed by the most monstrous growth of monasticism and priest-craft.” Tibetan rulers “invented degrading legends and stimulated a spirit of superstition” among the common people. In 1937, another visitor, Spencer Chapman, wrote, “The Lamaist monk does not spend his time in ministering to the people or educating them. . . . The beggar beside the road is nothing to the monk. Knowledge is the jealously guarded prerogative of the monasteries and is used to increase their influence and wealth.”24 As much as we might wish otherwise, feudal theocratic Tibet was a far cry from the romanticized Shangri La so enthusiastically nurtured by Buddhism’s western proselytes.

II. Secularization vs. Spirituality

What happened to Tibet after the Chinese Communists moved into the country in 1951? The treaty of that year provided for ostensible self-governance under the Dalai Lama’s rule but gave China military control and exclusive right to conduct foreign relations. The Chinese were also granted a direct role in internal administration “to promote social reforms.” Among the earliest changes they wrought was to reduce usurious interest rates, and build a few hospitals and roads. At first, they moved slowly, relying mostly on persuasion in an attempt to effect reconstruction. No aristocratic or monastic property was confiscated, and feudal lords continued to reign over their hereditarily bound peasants. “Contrary to popular belief in the West,” claims one observer, the Chinese “took care to show respect for Tibetan culture and religion.”25

Over the centuries the Tibetan lords and lamas had seen Chinese come and go, and had enjoyed good relations with Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek and his reactionary Kuomintang rule in China.26 The approval of the Kuomintang government was needed to validate the choice of the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama. When the current 14th Dalai Lama was first installed in Lhasa, it was with an armed escort of Chinese troops and an attending Chinese minister, in accordance with centuries-old tradition. What upset the Tibetan lords and lamas in the early 1950s was that these latest Chinese were Communists. It would be only a matter of time, they feared, before the Communists started imposing their collectivist egalitarian schemes upon Tibet.

The issue was joined in 1956-57, when armed Tibetan bands ambushed convoys of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army. The uprising received extensive assistance from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), including military training, support camps in Nepal, and numerous airlifts.27 Meanwhile in the United States, the American Society for a Free Asia, a CIA-financed front, energetically publicized the cause of Tibetan resistance, with the Dalai Lama’s eldest brother, Thubtan Norbu, playing an active role in that organization. The Dalai Lama's second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup, established an intelligence operation with the CIA as early as 1951. He later upgraded it into a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet.28

Many Tibetan commandos and agents whom the CIA dropped into the country were chiefs of aristocratic clans or the sons of chiefs. Ninety percent of them were never heard from again, according to a report from the CIA itself, meaning they were most likely captured and killed.29 “Many lamas and lay members of the elite and much of the Tibetan army joined the uprising, but in the main the populace did not, assuring its failure,” writes Hugh Deane.30 In their book on Tibet, Ginsburg and Mathos reach a similar conclusion: “As far as can be ascertained, the great bulk of the common people of Lhasa and of the adjoining countryside failed to join in the fighting against the Chinese both when it first began and as it progressed.”31 Eventually the resistance crumbled.

Whatever wrongs and new oppressions introduced by the Chinese after 1959, they did abolish slavery and the Tibetan serfdom system of unpaid labor. They eliminated the many crushing taxes, started work projects, and greatly reduced unemployment and beggary. They established secular schools, thereby breaking the educational monopoly of the monasteries. And they constructed running water and electrical systems in Lhasa.32

Heinrich Harrer (later revealed to have been a sergeant in Hitler’s SS) wrote a bestseller about his experiences in Tibet that was made into a popular Hollywood movie. He reported that the Tibetans who resisted the Chinese “were predominantly nobles, semi-nobles and lamas; they were punished by being made to perform the lowliest tasks, such as laboring on roads and bridges. They were further humiliated by being made to clean up the city before the tourists arrived.” They also had to live in a camp originally reserved for beggars and vagrants--all of which Harrer treats as sure evidence of the dreadful nature of the Chinese occupation.33

By 1961, Chinese occupation authorities expropriated the landed estates owned by lords and lamas. They distributed many thousands of acres to tenant farmers and landless peasants, reorganizing them into hundreds of communes.. Herds once owned by nobility were turned over to collectives of poor shepherds. Improvements were made in the breeding of livestock, and new varieties of vegetables and new strains of wheat and barley were introduced, along with irrigation improvements, all of which reportedly led to an increase in agrarian production.34

Many peasants remained as religious as ever, giving alms to the clergy. But monks who had been conscripted as children into the religious orders were now free to renounce the monastic life, and thousands did, especially the younger ones. The remaining clergy lived on modest government stipends and extra income earned by officiating at prayer services, weddings, and funerals.35

Both the Dalai Lama and his advisor and youngest brother, Tendzin Choegyal, claimed that “more than 1.2 million Tibetans are dead as a result of the Chinese occupation.”36 The official 1953 census--six years before the Chinese crackdown--recorded the entire population residing in Tibet at 1,274,000.37 Other census counts put the population within Tibet at about two million. If the Chinese killed 1.2 million in the early 1960s then almost all of Tibet, would have been depopulated, transformed into a killing field dotted with death camps and mass graves--of which we have no evidence. The thinly distributed Chinese force in Tibet could not have rounded up, hunted down, and exterminated that many people even if it had spent all its time doing nothing else.

Chinese authorities claim to have put an end to floggings, mutilations, and amputations as a form of criminal punishment. They themselves, however, have been charged with acts of brutality by exile Tibetans. The authorities do admit to “mistakes,” particularly during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution when the persecution of religious beliefs reached a high tide in both China and Tibet. After the uprising in the late 1950s, thousands of Tibetans were incarcerated. During the Great Leap Forward, forced collectivization and grain farming were imposed on the Tibetan peasantry, sometimes with disastrous effect on production. In the late 1970s, China began relaxing controls “and tried to undo some of the damage wrought during the previous two decades.”38

In 1980, the Chinese government initiated reforms reportedly designed to grant Tibet a greater degree of self-rule and self-administration. Tibetans would now be allowed to cultivate private plots, sell their harvest surpluses, decide for themselves what crops to grow, and keep yaks and sheep. Communication with the outside world was again permitted, and frontier controls were eased to permit some Tibetans to visit exiled relatives in India and Nepal.39 By the 1980s many of the principal lamas had begun to shuttle back and forth between China and the exile communities abroad, “restoring their monasteries in Tibet and helping to revitalize Buddhism there.”40

As of 2007 Tibetan Buddhism was still practiced widely and tolerated by officialdom. Religious pilgrimages and other standard forms of worship were allowed but within limits. All monks and nuns had to sign a loyalty pledge that they would not use their religious position to foment secession or dissent. And displaying photos of the Dalai Lama was declared illegal.41

In the 1990s, the Han, the ethnic group comprising over 95 percent of China’s immense population, began moving in substantial numbers into Tibet. On the streets of Lhasa and Shigatse, signs of Han colonization are readily visible. Chinese run the factories and many of the shops and vending stalls. Tall office buildings and large shopping centers have been built with funds that might have been better spent on water treatment plants and housing. Chinese cadres in Tibet too often view their Tibetan neighbors as backward and lazy, in need of economic development and “patriotic education.” During the 1990s Tibetan government employees suspected of harboring nationalist sympathies were purged from office, and campaigns were once again launched to discredit the Dalai Lama. Individual Tibetans reportedly were subjected to arrest, imprisonment, and forced labor for carrying out separatist activities and engaging in “political subversion.” Some were held in administrative detention without adequate food, water, and blankets, subjected to threats, beatings, and other mistreatment.42

Tibetan history, culture, and certainly religion are slighted in schools. Teaching materials, though translated into Tibetan, focus mainly on Chinese history and culture. Chinese family planning regulations allow a three-child limit for Tibetan families. (There is only a one-child limit for Han families throughout China, and a two-child limit for rural Han families whose first child is a girl.) If a Tibetan couple goes over the three-child limit, the excess children can be denied subsidized daycare, health care, housing, and education. These penalties have been enforced irregularly and vary by district.43 None of these child services, it should be noted, were available to Tibetans before the Chinese takeover.

For the rich lamas and secular lords, the Communist intervention was an unmitigated calamity. Most of them fled abroad, as did the Dalai Lama himself, who was assisted in his flight by the CIA. Some discovered to their horror that they would have to work for a living. Many, however, escaped that fate. Throughout the 1960s, the Tibetan exile community was secretly pocketing $1.7 million a year from the CIA, according to documents released by the State Department in 1998. Once this fact was publicized, the Dalai Lama’s organization itself issued a statement admitting that it had received millions of dollars from the CIA during the 1960s to send armed squads of exiles into Tibet to undermine the Maoist revolution. The Dalai Lama's annual payment from the CIA was $186,000. Indian intelligence also financed both him and other Tibetan exiles. He has refused to say whether he or his brothers worked for the CIA. The agency has also declined to comment.44

In 1995, the News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina, carried a frontpage color photograph of the Dalai Lama being embraced by the reactionary Republican senator Jesse Helms, under the headline “Buddhist Captivates Hero of Religious Right.”45 In April 1999, along with Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and the first George Bush, the Dalai Lama called upon the British government to release Augusto Pinochet, the former fascist dictator of Chile and a longtime CIA client who was visiting England. The Dalai Lama urged that Pinochet not be forced to go to Spain where he was wanted to stand trial for crimes against humanity.

Into the twenty-first century, via the National Endowment for Democracy and other conduits that are more respectable sounding than the CIA, the U.S. Congress continued to allocate an annual $2 million to Tibetans in India, with additional millions for “democracy activities” within the Tibetan exile community. In addition to these funds, the Dalai Lama received money from financier George Soros.46

Whatever the Dalai Lama’s associations with the CIA and various reactionaries, he did speak often of peace, love, and nonviolence. He himself really cannot be blamed for the abuses of Tibet’s ancien régime, having been but 25 years old when he fled into exile. In a 1994 interview, he went on record as favoring the building of schools and roads in his country. He said the corvée (forced unpaid serf labor) and certain taxes imposed on the peasants were “extremely bad.” And he disliked the way people were saddled with old debts sometimes passed down from generation to generation.47During the half century of living in the western world, he had embraced concepts such as human rights and religious freedom, ideas largely unknown in old Tibet. He even proposed democracy for Tibet, featuring a written constitution and a representative assembly.48

In 1996, the Dalai Lama issued a statement that must have had an unsettling effect on the exile community. It read in part: “Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability.” Marxism fosters “the equitable utilization of the means of production” and cares about “the fate of the working classes” and “the victims of . . . exploitation. For those reasons the system appeals to me, and . . . I think of myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist.49

But he also sent a reassuring message to “those who live in abundance”: “It is a good thing to be rich... Those are the fruits for deserving actions, the proof that they have been generous in the past.” And to the poor he offers this admonition: “There is no good reason to become bitter and rebel against those who have property and fortune... It is better to develop a positive attitude.”50

In 2005 the Dalai Lama signed a widely advertised statement along with ten other Nobel Laureates supporting the “inalienable and fundamental human right” of working people throughout the world to form labor unions to protect their interests, in accordance with the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In many countries “this fundamental right is poorly protected and in some it is explicitly banned or brutally suppressed,” the statement read. Burma, China, Colombia, Bosnia, and a few other countries were singled out as among the worst offenders. Even the United States “fails to adequately protect workers’ rights to form unions and bargain collectively. Millions of U.S. workers lack any legal protection to form unions….”51

The Dalai Lama also gave full support to removing the ingrained traditional obstacles that have kept Tibetan nuns from receiving an education. Upon arriving in exile, few nuns could read or write. In Tibet their activities had been devoted to daylong periods of prayer and chants. But in northern India they now began reading Buddhist philosophy and engaging in theological study and debate, activities that in old Tibet had been open only to monks.52

In November 2005 the Dalai Lama spoke at Stanford University on “The Heart of Nonviolence,” but stopped short of a blanket condemnation of all violence. Violent actions that are committed in order to reduce future suffering are not to be condemned, he said, citing World War II as an example of a worthy effort to protect democracy. What of the four years of carnage and mass destruction in Iraq, a war condemned by most of the world—even by a conservative pope--as a blatant violation of international law and a crime against humanity? The Dalai Lama was undecided: “The Iraq war—it’s too early to say, right or wrong.”53 Earlier he had voiced support for the U.S. military intervention against Yugoslavia and, later on, the U.S. military intervention into Afghanistan.54

III. Exit Feudal Theocracy

As the Shangri-La myth would have it, in old Tibet the people lived in contented and tranquil symbiosis with their monastic and secular lords. Rich lamas and poor monks, wealthy landlords and impoverished serfs were all bonded together, mutually sustained by the comforting balm of a deeply spiritual and pacific culture.

One is reminded of the idealized image of feudal Europe presented by latter-day conservative Catholics such as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. For them, medieval Christendom was a world of contented peasants living in the secure embrace of their Church, under the more or less benign protection of their lords.55 Again we are invited to accept a particular culture in its idealized form divorced from its murky material history. This means accepting it as presented by its favored class, by those who profited most from it. The Shangri-La image of Tibet bears no more resemblance to historic actuality than does the pastoral image of medieval Europe.

Seen in all its grim realities, old Tibet confirms the view I expressed in an earlier book, namely that culture is anything but neutral. Culture can operate as a legitimating cover for a host of grave injustices, benefiting a privileged portion of society at great cost to the rest.56 In theocratic feudal Tibet, ruling interests manipulated the traditional culture to fortify their own wealth and power. The theocracy equated rebellious thought and action with satanic influence. It propagated the general presumption of landlord superiority and peasant unworthiness. The rich were represented as deserving their good life, and the lowly poor as deserving their mean existence, all codified in teachings about the karmic residue of virtue and vice accumulated from past lives, presented as part of God’s will.

Were the more affluent lamas just hypocrites who preached one thing and secretly believed another? More likely they were genuinely attached to those beliefs that brought such good results for them. That their theology so perfectly supported their material privileges only strengthened the sincerity with which it was embraced.

It might be said that we denizens of the modern secular world cannot grasp the equations of happiness and pain, contentment and custom, that characterize more traditionally spiritual societies. This is probably true, and it may explain why some of us idealize such societies. But still, a gouged eye is a gouged eye; a flogging is a flogging; and the grinding exploitation of serfs and slaves is a brutal class injustice whatever its cultural wrapping. There is a difference between a spiritual bond and human bondage, even when both exist side by side

Many ordinary Tibetans want the Dalai Lama back in their country, but it appears that relatively few want a return to the social order he represented. A 1999 story in the Washington Post notes that the Dalai Lama continues to be revered in Tibet, but

. . . few Tibetans would welcome a return of the corrupt aristocratic clans that fled with him in 1959 and that comprise the bulk of his advisers. Many Tibetan farmers, for example, have no interest in surrendering the land they gained during China’s land reform to the clans. Tibet’s former slaves say they, too, don’t want their former masters to return to power. “I’ve already lived that life once before,” said Wangchuk, a 67-year-old former slave who was wearing his best clothes for his yearly pilgrimage to Shigatse, one of the holiest sites of Tibetan Buddhism. He said he worshipped the Dalai Lama, but added, “I may not be free under Chinese communism, but I am better off than when I was a slave.”57

It should be noted that the Dalai Lama is not the only highly placed lama chosen in childhood as a reincarnation. One or another reincarnate lama or tulku--a spiritual teacher of special purity elected to be reborn again and again--can be found presiding over most major monasteries. The tulku system is unique to Tibetan Buddhism. Scores of Tibetan lamas claim to be reincarnate tulkus.

The very first tulku was a lama known as the Karmapa who appeared nearly three centuries before the first Dalai Lama. The Karmapa is leader of a Tibetan Buddhist tradition known as the Karma Kagyu. The rise of the Gelugpa sect headed by the Dalai Lama led to a politico-religious rivalry with the Kagyu that has lasted five hundred years and continues to play itself out within the Tibetan exile community today. That the Kagyu sect has grown famously, opening some six hundred new centers around the world in the last thirty-five years, has not helped the situation.

The search for a tulku, Erik Curren reminds us, has not always been conducted in that purely spiritual mode portrayed in certain Hollywood films. “Sometimes monastic officials wanted a child from a powerful local noble family to give the cloister more political clout. Other times they wanted a child from a lower-class family who would have little leverage to influence the child’s upbringing.” On other occasions “a local warlord, the Chinese emperor or even the Dalai Lama’s government in Lhasa might [have tried] to impose its choice of tulku on a monastery for political reasons.”58

Such may have been the case in the selection of the 17th Karmapa, whose monastery-in-exile is situated in Rumtek, in the Indian state of Sikkim. In 1993 the monks of the Karma Kagyu tradition had a candidate of their own choice. The Dalai Lama, along with several dissenting Karma Kagyu leaders (and with the support of the Chinese government!) backed a different boy. The Kagyu monks charged that the Dalai Lama had overstepped his authority in attempting to select a leader for their sect. “Neither his political role nor his position as a lama in his own Gelugpa tradition entitled him to choose the Karmapa, who is a leader of a different tradition…”59 As one of the Kagyu leaders insisted, “Dharma is about thinking for yourself. It is not about automatically following a teacher in all things, no matter how respected that teacher may be. More than anyone else, Buddhists should respect other people’s rights—their human rights and their religious freedom.”60

What followed was a dozen years of conflict in the Tibetan exile community, punctuated by intermittent riots, intimidation, physical attacks, blacklisting, police harassment, litigation, official corruption, and the looting and undermining of the Karmapa’s monastery in Rumtek by supporters of the Gelugpa faction. All this has caused at least one western devotee to wonder if the years of exile were not hastening the moral corrosion of Tibetan Buddhism.61

What is clear is that not all Tibetan Buddhists accept the Dalai Lama as their theological and spiritual mentor. Though he is referred to as the “spiritual leader of Tibet,” many see this title as little more than a formality. It does not give him authority over the four religious schools of Tibet other than his own, “just as calling the U.S. president the ‘leader of the free world’ gives him no role in governing France or Germany.”62

Not all Tibetan exiles are enamoured of the old Shangri-La theocracy. Kim Lewis, who studied healing methods with a Buddhist monk in Berkeley, California, had occasion to talk at length with more than a dozen Tibetan women who lived in the monk’s building. When she asked how they felt about returning to their homeland, the sentiment was unanimously negative. At first, Lewis assumed that their reluctance had to do with the Chinese occupation, but they quickly informed her otherwise. They said they were extremely grateful “not to have to marry 4 or 5 men, be pregnant almost all the time,” or deal with sexually transmitted diseases contacted from a straying husband. The younger women “were delighted to be getting an education, wanted absolutely nothing to do with any religion, and wondered why Americans were so naïve [about Tibet].”63

The women interviewed by Lewis recounted stories of their grandmothers’ ordeals with monks who used them as “wisdom consorts.” By sleeping with the monks, the grandmothers were told, they gained “the means to enlightenment” -- after all, the Buddha himself had to be with a woman to reach enlightenment.

The women also mentioned the “rampant” sex that the supposedly spiritual and abstemious monks practiced with each other in the Gelugpa sect. The women who were mothers spoke bitterly about the monastery’s confiscation of their young boys in Tibet. They claimed that when a boy cried for his mother, he would be told “Why do you cry for her, she gave you up--she's just a woman.”


The monks who were granted political asylum in California applied for public assistance. Lewis, herself a devotee for a time, assisted with the paperwork. She observes that they continue to receive government checks amounting to $550 to $700 per month along with Medicare. In addition, the monks reside rent free in nicely furnished apartments. “They pay no utilities, have free access to the Internet on computers provided for them, along with fax machines, free cell and home phones and cable TV.”

They also receive a monthly payment from their order, along with contributions and dues from their American followers. Some devotees eagerly carry out chores for the monks, including grocery shopping and cleaning their apartments and toilets. These same holy men, Lewis remarks, “have no problem criticizing Americans for their ‘obsession with material things.’”64

To welcome the end of the old feudal theocracy in Tibet is not to applaud everything about Chinese rule in that country. This point is seldom understood by today’s Shangri-La believers in the West. The converse is also true: To denounce the Chinese occupation does not mean we have to romanticize the former feudal régime. Tibetans deserve to be perceived as actual people, not perfected spiritualists or innocent political symbols. “To idealize them,” notes Ma Jian, a dissident Chinese traveler to Tibet (now living in Britain), “is to deny them their humanity.”65

One common complaint among Buddhist followers in the West is that Tibet’s religious culture is being undermined by the Chinese occupation. To some extent this seems to be the case. Many of the monasteries are closed, and much of the theocracy seems to have passed into history. Whether Chinese rule has brought betterment or disaster is not the central issue here. The question is what kind of country was old Tibet. What I am disputing is the supposedly pristine spiritual nature of that pre-invasion culture. We can advocate religious freedom and independence for a new Tibet without having to embrace the mythology about old Tibet. Tibetan feudalism was cloaked in Buddhism, but the two are not to be equated. In reality, old Tibet was not a Paradise Lost. It was a retrograde repressive theocracy of extreme privilege and poverty, a long way from Shangri-La.

Finally, let it be said that if Tibet’s future is to be positioned somewhere within China’s emerging free-market paradise, then this does not bode well for the Tibetans. China boasts a dazzling 8 percent economic growth rate and is emerging as one of the world’s greatest industrial powers. But with economic growth has come an ever deepening gulf between rich and poor. Most Chinese live close to the poverty level or well under it, while a small group of newly brooded capitalists profit hugely in collusion with shady officials. Regional bureaucrats milk the country dry, extorting graft from the populace and looting local treasuries. Land grabbing in cities and countryside by avaricious developers and corrupt officials at the expense of the populace are almost everyday occurrences. Tens of thousands of grassroot protests and disturbances have erupted across the country, usually to be met with unforgiving police force. Corruption is so prevalent, reaching into so many places, that even the normally complacent national leadership was forced to take notice and began moving against it in late 2006.

Workers in China who try to organize labor unions in the corporate dominated “business zones” risk losing their jobs or getting beaten and imprisoned. Millions of business zone workers toil twelve-hour days at subsistence wages. With the health care system now being privatized, free or affordable medical treatment is no longer available for millions. Men have tramped into the cities in search of work, leaving an increasingly impoverished countryside populated by women, children, and the elderly. The suicide rate has increased dramatically, especially among women.66

China’s natural environment is sadly polluted. Most of its fabled rivers and many lakes are dead, producing massive fish die-offs from the billions of tons of industrial emissions and untreated human waste dumped into them. Toxic effluents, including pesticides and herbicides, seep into ground water or directly into irrigation canals. Cancer rates in villages situated along waterways have skyrocketed a thousand-fold. Hundreds of millions of urban residents breathe air rated as dangerously unhealthy, contaminated by industrial growth and the recent addition of millions of automobiles. An estimated 400,000 die prematurely every year from air pollution. Government environmental agencies have no enforcement power to stop polluters, and generally the government ignores or denies such problems, concentrating instead on industrial growth.67

China’s own scientific establishment reports that unless greenhouse gases are curbed, the nation will face massive crop failures along with catastrophic food and water shortages in the years ahead. In 2006-2007 severe drought was already afflicting southwest China.68

If China is the great success story of speedy free market development, and is to be the model and inspiration for Tibet’s future, then old feudal Tibet indeed may start looking a lot better than it actually was.
"When IT reigns, I’m poor.” Mario
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Re: New Book—Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sat Apr 28, 2018 4:58 pm

China's Chosen Lama Visits Monastery Town

Andrew Jacobs August 11, 2011

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/world/asia/12lama.html
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