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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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