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8. MAGIC AS A POLITICAL INSTRUMENT
Since his flight from Tibet (in 1959),
the Fourteenth Dalai Lama has negotiated the international political and
cultural stage like a sensitive democrat and enlightened man of the world.
As a matter of course he lays claim to all the western “virtues” of
humanism, freedom of opinion, rational argument, belief in technical and
scientific progress, etc. One gains the impression that he is an
open-minded and modern president of a modern nation, who masterfully
combines his cosmopolitanism with an elevated, spiritually based, ethical
system. But this practical, reasoning facade is deceptive. Behind it is
hidden a deeply rooted belief in supernatural powers and magic practices
which are supposed to exercise a decisive influence upon social and
political events.
Invocation of demons
Since time immemorial ritual magic and
politics have been one in Tibet. A large proportion of these magic
practices are devoted to the annihilation of enemies, and especially to the
neutralizing of political opponents. The help of demons was necessary for such
ends. And they could be found everywhere — the Land of Snows all but
overflowed with terror gods, fateful spirits, vampires, ghouls, vengeful
goddesses, devils, messengers of death and similar entities, who, in the
words of Matthias Hermanns, “completely overgrow the mild and goodly
elements [of Buddhism] and hardly let them reveal their advantages”
(Hermanns, 1965, p. 401).
For this reason, invocations of demons
were not at all rare occurrences nor were they restricted to the spheres of
personal and family life. They were in general among the most preferred
functions of the lamas. Hence, “demonology” was a high science taught at
the monastic universities, and ritual dealings with malevolent spirits were
— as we shall see in a moment — an important function of the lamaist state.
[1]
For the demons to appear they have to
be offered the appropriate objects of their lust as a sacrifice, each class
of devil having its own particular taste. René von Nebesky-Wojkowitz
describes a number of culinary specialties from the Lamaist “demon recipe
books”: cakes made of dark flour and blood; five different sorts of meat,
including human flesh; the skull of the child of an incestuous relationship
filled with blood and mustard seeds; the skin of a boy; bowls of blood and
brain; a lamp filled with human fat with a wick made of human hair; and a
dough like mixture of gall, brain, blood and human entrails
(Nebesky-Wojkowitz, 1955, p. 261).
Once the gods had accepted the
sacrifice they stood at the ritual master’s disposal. The four-armed
protective deity, Mahakala, was
considered a particularly active assistant when it came to the destruction
of enemies. In national matters his bloodthirsty emanation, the six-handed Kschetrapala, was called upon. The
magician in charge wrote the war god’s mantra on a piece of paper in gold
ink or blood from the blade of a sword together with the wishes he hoped to
have granted, and began the invocation.
Towards the end of the forties the
Gelugpa lamas sent Kschetrapala
into battle against the Chinese. He was cast into a roughly three-yard high
sacrificial cake (or torma). This
was then set alight outside Lhasa, and whilst the priests lowered their
victory banner the demon freed himself and flew in the direction of the
threatened border with his army. A real battle of the spirits took place
here, as a “nine-headed Chinese demon”, who was assumed to have assisted
the Communists in all matters concerning Tibet, appeared on the
battlefield. Both spirit princes (the Tibetan and the Chinese) have been
mortal enemies for centuries. Obviously the nine-headed emerged from this
final battle of the demons as the victor.
The Chinese claim that 21 individuals
were killed in this enemy ritual so that their organs could be used to
construct the huge torma.
Relatives of the victims are supposed to have testified to this (Grunfeld,
1996, p. 29).Now, one could with good reason doubt the Chinese accusations
because of the political situation between the “Middle Kingdom” and the
“Roof of the World”, but not because they contradict the logic of Tibetan
rites of war — these have been recorded in numerous tantric texts.
Likewise in the middle of last century,
the Yellow Hats from the Samye monastery were commissioned by the Tibetan
government with the task of capturing the army of the red tsan demons in four huge
“cross-hairs” in order to then send them off against the enemies of the
Land of Snows. This magic instrument, a right-angled net of many-colored
threads, stood upon a multistage base, each of which was filled with such
tantric substances as soil form charnel fields, human skulls, murder
weapons, the tips of the noses, hearts, and lips of men who died an
unnatural death, poisonous plants, and similar things. The repulsive
mixture was supposed to attract the tsan
like a moth to a candle, so that they would become inescapably caught in
the spells said over the spirit trap (Nebesky-Wojkowitz, 1955, p. 258).
Following the seven-day deep meditation of a high lama it was ready and the
demons could be given the command to set out against the enemy.
Such a ritual is also said to have
summoned up a terrible earthquake and great panic in Nepal in earlier
times, when Tibet was at war with the Nepalese. Experience had shown,
however, that it sometimes takes a long time before the effects of such
harmful rites are felt. It took two decades after the successful occupation
of Tibet by the English (in 1904) before there was an earthquake in the
Indian province of Bihar in which a number of British soldiers lost their
lives. The Tibetans also traced this natural disaster back to magical
activities which they had conducted prior to the invasion.
“Voodoo magic”
The practice widely known from the
Haitian voodoo religion of making a likeness of an enemy or a doll and
torturing or destroying this in their place is also widespread in Tibetan
Buddhism. Usually, some substance belonging to the opponent, be it a hair
or a swatch from their clothing, has to be incorporated into the
substitute. It is, however, sufficient to note their name on a piece of
paper. Even so, sometimes hard-to-find ingredients are necessary for an
effective destructive ritual, as shown by the following Buddhist ritual:
“Draw a red magic diagram in the form of a half-moon, then write the name
and lineage of the victim on a piece of cotton which has been used to cover
the corpse of a plague victim. As ink, use the blood of a dark-skinned
Brahmin girl. Call upon the protective deities and hold the piece of
material in black smoke. Then lay it in the magic diagram. Swinging a magic
dagger made from the bones of a plague victim, recite the appropriate
incantation a hundred thousand times. Then place the piece of material
there where the victim makes his nightly camp” (Nebesky-Wojkowitz, 1955,
p.260). This induces the death of the person. [2]
The same ritual text includes a recipe
for the inducement of madness: “draw a white magic circle on the summit of
a mountain and place the figure of the victim in it which you have to
prepare from the deadly leaves of a poisonous tree. Then write the name and
lineage of the victims on this figure with white sandalwood resin. Hold it
in the smoke from burnt human fat. Whilst you recite the appropriate spell,
take a demon dagger made of bone in your right hand and touch the head of the
figure with it. Finally, leave it behind in a place where mamo demonesses are in the habit of
congregating” (Nebesky-Wojkowitz, 1955, p. 261).
Such “voodoo practices” were no rare
and unhealthy products of the Nyingmapa sect or the despised pre-Buddhist
Bonpos. Under the Fifth Dalai Lama they became part of the elevated
politics of state. The “Great Fifth” had a terrible “recipe book” (the Golden Manuscript) recorded on black
thangkas which was exclusively concerned with magical techniques for
destroying an enemy. In it there a number of variations upon the so-called gan tad ritual are also described: a
man or a woman depicting the victim are drawn in the center of a circle.
They are shackled with heavy chains around their hands and feet. Around the
figures the tantra master has written harmful sayings like the following.
“the life be cut, the heart be cut, the body be cut, the power be cut, the
descent be cut” (Nebesky-Wojkowitz, 1993, p. 483). The latter means that
the victim’s relatives should also be destroyed. Now the menstrual blood of
a prostitute must be dripped onto the spells, the drawings are given hair
and nails. According to some texts a little dirt scraped from a shoe, or
some plaster from the victim’s house are sufficient. Then the ritual master
folds the paper up in a piece of cloth. The whole thing is stuffed into a
yak’s horn with further horrible ingredients which we would rather not have
to list. Gloves have to be worn when conducting the ritual, since the
substances can have most harmful effects upon the magician if he comes into
contact with them. In a cemetery he entreats an army of demons to descend
upon the horn and impregnate it with their destructive energy. Then it is
buried on the land of the enemy, who dies soon afterwards.
The “Great Fifth” is supposed to have
performed a “voodoo” ritual for the defeat of the Kagyupa and the Tsang
clan in the Ganden monastery temple. He regarded them, “whose spirit has
been clouded by Mara and their
devotion to the Karmapa”, as enemies of the faith (Ahmad, 1970, p. 103). In
the ritual, a likeness of the Prince of Tsang in the form of a torma (dough cake) was employed.
Incorporated into the dough figure were the blood of a boy fallen in the
battles, human flesh, beer, poison, and so on. 200 years later, when the
Tibetans went to war with the Nepalese, the lamas had a substitute made of
the commander of the Nepalese army and conducted a destructive ritual with
this. The commander died soon after and the enemy army’s plans for invasion
had to be abandoned (Nebesky-Wojkowitz, 1993, p. 495).
Among other things, Tibetan magic is
premised upon the existence of a force or energy possessed by every living
creature and which is known as la.
However, this life energy does not need to be stored within a person, it
can be found completely outside of them, in a lake, a mountain, a tree, or
an animal for instance. A person can also possess several las. If one of his energy centers is
attacked or destroyed he is able to regenerate himself out of the others.
Among aristocrats and high lamas we may find the la in “royal” animals like the snow lion, bears, tigers, or
elephants. For the “middle class” of society we have animals like the ox,
horse, yak, sheep, or mule, and for the lower classes the rat, dog, and
scorpion. The la can also keep
alive a family, a tribe, or a whole people. For example, Lake Yamdrok is
said to contain the life energy of the Tibetan nation and there is a saying
that the whole people would die out if it went dry. There is in fact a
rumor among the Tibetans in exile that the Chinese planned to drain the
entire lake (Tibetan Review,
January 1992, p. 4).
If a tantra master wants to put an
enemy out of action through magic, then he must find his la and launch a ritual attack upon
it. This is of course also true for political opponents. If the life energy
of an enemy is hidden in a tree, for instance, then it makes sense to fell
it. The opponent would instantly collapse. Every lama is supposed on
principle to be capable of locating the la of a person via astrology and
clairvoyance.
Magic wonder weapons
In the armories of the Kalachakra Tantra and of the “Great
Fifth”, we find the “magic wheel with the sword spokes”, described by a
contemporary lama in the following words: “It is a magic weapon of fearsome
efficacy, a great wheel with eight razor-edge sharpened swords as spokes.
Our magicians employed it a long time ago in the battle against foreign
intruders. The wheel was charged with magic forces and then loosed upon the
enemy. It flew spinning through the air at the enemy troops and its rapidly
rotating spikes mowed the soldiers down in their hundreds. The devastation
wrought by this weapon was so terrible that the government forbade that it
ever be used again. The authorities even ordered that all plans for its
construction be destroyed” (Nebesky-Wojkowitz, 1955, p. 257).
A further magic appliance, which was,
albeit without success, still put to use under the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,
was to be found in a Yellow Hat monastery near Lhasa (Kardo Gompa). It was
referred to as the “mill of the death demons” and consisted of two small
round stones resting upon each other, the upper one of which could be
rotated. René von Nebesky-Wojkowitz reports how the lamas started up this
killing machine in 1950 at the beginning of the conflict with China: “The
'Mill of the Death Demons' was employed by the Tibetan government to kill
the leaders of the opposing party. A priest who was especially experienced
in the arts of black magic was appointed by the authorities to operate the
instrument. In meditations extending over weeks he had to try to transfer
the life energy (la) of the
people he was supposed to kill into a number of mustard seeds. If he
noticed from curtains indications that he had succeeded, then he laid the
seeds between the stones and crushed them. .... The exterminating force
which emanated from this magic appliance is supposed to even have had its
effect upon the magician who operated it. Some of them, it is said, died
after turning the 'Mill of the Death Demons'" (Nebesky-Wojkowitz,
1955, pp. 257-258).
The “Great Fifth” as magician and the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
The Fifth Dalai Lama was a enthusiast
and a master of magic ritual politics. A distinction was drawn in the
ceremonies he conducted between continuous, annually repeated state events,
and special, mostly enemy-combating events. His “rituals [were] concerned with power; spiritual and
political”, writes Samten Karmay, “... we stand in the arena of the dawn of
modern Tibetan history” (Karmay, 1988, p. 26).
The god-king was firmly convinced that
he owed his political victories primarily to “the profound potency of the
tantric rites” and only secondarily to the intervention of the Mongolians
(Ahmad, 1970, p. 134). According to a Kagyupa document, the Mongolian
occupation of the Land of Snows was the work of nine terror gods who were
freed by the Gelugpas under the condition that they fetch the Mongolian
hordes into Tibet to protect their order. “But in the process they brought much
suffering on our land”, we read at the close of the document (Bell, 1994,
p. 98).
The visions and practices of the magic
obsessed Fifth Dalai Lama are -as we have already mentioned — recorded in
two volumes he wrote: firstly the Sealed
and Secret Biography and then the Golden
Manuscript. This abundantly illustrated book of rituals, which
resembles the notorious grimoires
(books of magic) of the European Middle Ages, was, in the master’s own
words, written “for all those who wish to do drawings and paintings of the
heavens and the deities” (Karmay, 1988, p. 19). [3]
Magic drawing from the Golden Manuscript of the Fifth Dalai Lama
We have no direct knowledge of any
modern “voodoo practices” performed by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, who has
chosen the magician prince from the 17th century, the “Great Fifth”, as his
most important model. Here, the Kundun
has just as skillfully succeeded in laying a veil over the shadowy world of
his occult ritual life as with the sexual magic initiations of Tantrism.
But there are rumors and insinuations which allow one to suspect that he
too deliberately conducts or has conducted such tantric killing rites.
In one case this is completely obvious
and he himself has confirmed this. Thus we may read in the most recent
edition of his autobiography of how he staged a rite connected to the Kalachakra Tantra on the day of Mao
Zedong’s death. „On the second the ceremony’s three days, Mao died. And the third
day, it rained all morning. But, in the afternoon, there appeared one of
the most beautiful rainbows I have ever seen. I was certain that it must be a good omen” we hear from the Dalai Lama’s own mouth (Dalai Lama
XIV, 1990, 222).
The
biographer of His Holiness, Claude B. Levenson, reports of this ritual that
it was a matter of “an extremely strict practice which demanded complete
seclusion lasting several weeks combined with a very special teaching of
the Fifth Dalai Lama” (Levenson, 1990, p. 242). Recalling the strange death
of the Empress Dowager Ci Xi and her imperial adoptive son described above,
one may well ask whether this “strict practice” may not have been a killing
rite recorded in the Golden
Manuscript of the “Great Fifth”. In Buddhist circles the death of Mao
Zedong is also celebrated as the victory of spiritual/magic forces over the
raw violence of materialism.
In such a context, and from a
tantric/magic viewpoint, the visiting of Deng Xiaoping by Gyalo Thondup,
one of the Dalai Lama’s brothers and himself a tulku, to may also have a
momentous significance. Thondup negotiated with the Chinese party head over
the question of Tibet. Deng died a few days after this meeting, on February
12, 1997 (Playboy [German
edition], March 1998, p. 44).
Mandala politics
In contrast, the Fourteenth Dalai
constantly and quite publicly conducts a magic practice which is less
spectacular, but from a tantric point of view just as significant as the
killing of a political opponent — it is just that this is not recognized as
a act of magic. We are talking about the construction of mandalas,
especially the Kalachakra sand
mandala.
We have already reported in detail on
the homologies between a tantric mandala, the body of a yogi, the social
environment, and the universe. Consistently thought through, this
equivalence means that the construction of a mandala must be regarded as a
magic political act. Through a magic diagram, a tantra master can
“energetically” occupy and lay claim to the location of its construction
and the corresponding environs. People within range of the power of such a
magic architectural construction are influenced by the mandala’s energy and
their consciousness is manipulated by it.
The Kalachakra
sand mandala thus serves not only to initiate adepts but also likewise as a
magic title of possession, with which control over a particular territory
can be legitimated. Accordingly, the magic power of the diagram gives its
constructors the chance to symbolically conquer new territories. One builds
a magic circle (a mandala) and “anchors” it in the region to be claimed.
Then one summonses the gods and supplicates them to take up residence in
the “mandala palace”. (The mandala is so to speak “energized” with divine
forces.) After a particular territory has been occupied by a mandala (or
cosmogram), it is automatically transformed into a sacred center of
Buddhist cosmology.[4] Every construction of a mandala also implies — if
one takes it seriously — the magic subjugation of the inhabitants of the
region in which the “magic circle” is constructed.
In the case of the Kalachakra sand mandala the places in which it has been built
are transformed into domains under the control of the Tibetan time gods.
Accordingly, from a tantric viewpoint, the Kalachakra mandala constructed at great expense in New York in
1991 would be a cosmological demonstration of power which aimed to say that
the city now stood under the governing authority or at least spiritual
influence of Kalachakra and Vishvamata. Since in this case it
was the Fourteenth Dalai Lama who conducted the ritual as the supreme
tantra master, he would have to be regarded as the spiritual/magic
sovereign of the metropolis. Such fantastic speculations are a product of
the ancient logic of his own magic system, and are incompatible with our
ideas. We are nonetheless convinced that the laws of magic affect human
reality proportional to the degree to which people believe in them.
Further, there is no doubt that the
magic diagrams evoke an exceptional fascination in some observers. This is
confirmed, for example, by Malcolm Arth, art director of an American museum
in which Tibetan monks constructed a Kalachakra
sand mandala: “The average museum visitor spends about ten seconds before a
work of art, but for this exhibit, time is measured in minutes, sometime
hours. Even the youngsters, who come into the museum and run around as if
it were a playground — these same youngsters walk into this space, and
something happens to them. They're transformed” (Bryant, 1992, pp.
245-246). The American Buddhist, Barry Bryant, even talks of an “electric
kind of energy” which pervades the space in which the Kalachakra mandala is found (Bryant, 1992, p. 247).
However, what most people from the West
evaluate as a purely artistic pleasure, is experienced by the lamas and
their western followers as a numinous encounter with supernatural forces
and powers concentrated within a mandala. This idea can be extended so far
that modern exhibitions of Tibetan artworks can be conceived by their
Buddhist organizers as temples and initiation paths through which the
visitors knowingly or unknowingly proceed. Mircea Eliade has described the
progression through a holy place (a temple) in ancient times as follows:
“Every ritual procession is equivalent to a progression to the center, and
the entry into a temple repeats the entry into a mandala in an initiation
or the progress of the kundalini
through the chakras” (Eliade, 1985, p. 253).
The major Tibet exhibition “Weisheit
und Liebe” (Wisdom and Love), on view in Bonn in the summer of 1996 as well
as at a number locations around the world, was designed along precisely
these lines by Robert A. F. Thurman and Marylin M. Rhie. The conception
behind this exhibition, Thurman writes, “is symbolically significant. It
... draws its guiding principle from the mandala of the “wheel of time” [Kalachakra], the mystic site which
embodies the perfect history and cosmos of the Buddha. ... The arrangement
of the individual exhibits reflects the deliberate attempt to simulate the
environment of a Tibetan temple” (Thurman and Rhie, 1996, pp. 13–14).
At the entrance one passed a Kalachakra sand mandala. The visitor
then entered the various historical phases of Indian Buddhism arranged into
separate rooms, beginning with the legends from the life of Buddha, then Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana.
The simulated “initiatory path” led on to Tibet passing through the four
main schools in the following order: Nyingmapa, Sakyapa, Kagyupa, and then
Gelugpa. After the “visitor/initiand” had so to speak obtained the secret
teachings of the various sects, he or she stepped into the final “hall” of
the exhibition temple. This was again, like the start, dedicated to the Kalachakra Tantra.
Through the construction of this
exhibition the history of Buddhism and of Tibet was presented as a mystery
play played out over centuries. Every single epoch in the history of the
Buddhist doctrine counted as a kind of initiatory stage in the evolutionary
progression of humanity which was supposed to culminate in the
establishment of a global Shambhala
state. The same initiatory role was filled by the four Tibetan schools. They
all stood — in the interpretation of the exhibitor — in a hierarchic
relation to one another. Each step up was based on the one before it: the
Sakyapas on the Nyingmapas, the Kagyupas on the Sakyapas, and the Gelugpas
on the Kagyupas. The message was that the history of Buddhism, especially
in Tibet, had had to progress like a initiand through the individual
schools and sects step by step so as to further develop its awareness and
then reach its highest earthly goal in the person of the Dalai Lama.
The visitor entered the exhibition
through a room which contained a Kalachakra
sand mandala (the “time palace”). This was supposed to proclaim that from
now on he or she was moving through the dimension of (historical) time. In
accordance with the cyclical world view of Buddhism, however, the journey
through time ended there where it had begun. Thus at the end of the tour
the visitor left the exhibition via the same room through which he or she
had entered it, and once more passed by the sand mandala (the “time
palace”).
If the Tibet exhibition in Bonn was in
Thurman’s words supposed to have a symbolic significance, then the final
message was catastrophic for the visitor. The final (!) image in the
“temple exhibition” (before one re-entered the room containing the Kalachakra sand mandala) depicted
the apocalyptic Shambhala battle,
or (as the catalog literally referred to it) the “Buddhist Armageddon”.[5]
We would like to quote from the official, enthusiastically written
explanatory text which accompanied the thangka: “The forces of Good from
the kingdom of Shambhala fight
against the powers of Evil who hold the world in their control, centuries
in the future. Phalanxes of soldiers go into combat, great carts full of
soldiers, as small as Lilliputians are drawn into battle by huge white
elephants, laser-like (!) weapons loose their fire and fantastic
elephant-like animals mill together and struggle beneath the glowing sphere
of the kingdom” (Thurman and Rhie, 1996, p. 482). With this doomsday vision
before their eyes the visitors leave the “temple” and return to the Kalachakra sand mandala.
But who was the ruler of this time
palace, who is the time god (Kalachakra)
and the time goddess (Vishvamata)
in one? None other than the patron of the Tibet exhibition in Bonn, His
Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. He destroyed the Kalachakra sand mandala in Bonn in the ritual we have described
above and then absorbed its energies (the time gods residing in it). If we
pursue this tantric logic further, then after the absorption of the mandala
energies the Kundun assumed
control over the region which had been sealed by the magic diagram (the
sand mandala). In brief, he became the spiritual regent of Bonn! Let us
repeat, this is not our idea, it is rather the ancient logic of the tantric
system. That it however in this instance corresponded with reality is shown
by the enormous success His Holiness enjoyed in the German Bundestag (House
of Representatives) after visiting his “Kalachakra
Temple” in Bonn (in 1996). The Kohl government had to subsequently
endure its most severe political acid test in relations with China because
of the question of Tibet.
Scattered about the whole world in
parallel to his Kalachakra
initiations, sand mandalas have been constructed for the Fourteenth Dalai
Lama. What appears to a western observer to be a valuable traditional work
of art, is in its intentions a seal of power of the Tibetan gods and a
magic foundation for the striven-for world dominion of the ADI BUDDHA (in
the figure of the Kundun).
Footnotes:
[1] The discipline
is indebted to the Austrian, René de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, for the most
profound insight into Tibetan demonology, his great work, Oracles and Demons of Tibet. His
early death, and his wife’s suicide shortly afterwards are seen by the
Tantra researcher, John Blofeld ,as an act of revenge by the spirits whom
he described.
[3] The Golden Manuscript is considered the precursor of the black
thangkas, which otherwise first emerged in the 18th century.
They were especially developed for the evocation of tantric terror gods.
The background of the images is always of the darkest color; the
illustrations are sparsely drawn, often in gold ink — hence the name of the
Golden Manuscript. This technique
gives the images a mysterious, dangerous character. The deities “spring out
of the awful darkness of cosmic night, all aflame” comments Guiseppe Tucci
(Karmay, 1988, p. 22).
[5] The catalog
text did indeed use the Hebrew term armageddon,
just as the doomsday guru Shoko Asahara also spoke of “Armageddon”.
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Next Chapter:
9. THE WAR
GODS BEHIND THE MASK OF PEACE
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