Posted on 01/01/2007 12:13:37 AM PST by dennisw
What can be more astonishing between a saint confusing people and a rogue speaking the truth? Two such unexpected observations became media bytes recently. The Dalai Lama, on a month-long trip to the US and South America, said at San Francisco and Chicago that Islam is a religion of compassion which is being unfairly marginalised by few extremists. Ye Xiaowen, the Director of State Administration for Religious Affairs, recently said that Buddhism can reduce social divisions in China better than Islam and Christianity, adding Buddhism can help believers cope with fast-changing society plagued by wealth gap and social unrest.
In the past, the Dalai Lama has criticised both Christianity and Islam for their evangelisation and conversion programmes. Communist China has persecuted all religions including Buddhism. But now, faced with Christian evangelisation and Islamic resurgence, China wants to promote Buddhism, which is also in sync with the ageless Chinese ethos. Intriguingly, Buddhism can help cope with psychological problems amongst people of China, the country with highest execution and suicide rate.
I hold the Dalai Lama in the highest esteem. However, his certification of Islam left me bewildered. It might be true that only a minuscule section of Muslims is indulging in suicide bombing. But why is this section not inspired to work among the sick, poor, illiterate and lepers like Christians? The answer would seem to lie in the analysis of the lives of Jesus Christ and Mohammed, which adherents of the respective religions follow. Why is there a difference between Yasser Arafat and the Dalai Lama when both Palestine and Tibet are "occupied territories"?
I was going through the schedule of the Dalai Lama's forthcoming tours on his website. After visiting the US, he is going to Latin America, then Belgium before returning to India. He then goes to France and the US. Early this year, he visited Israel where he addressed an audience at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. But does he visit Islamic countries like Syria, Morocco, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Uzbekistan? Will he be heard in these countries the way he is in Europe and America? Israelis visit Dharamsala in droves. But do Arabs visit him? It is the same story with Hindu monks as well, who fly from India to England, France and the US (leaving the stretch between Pakistan and Morocco).
There can be no bitter irony than a Buddhist monk defending Islam as religion of compassion. Except for mountainous pockets like Ladakh, Tibet and the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), Buddhism disappeared from India under the sword of Islam. BR Ambedkar, who later embraced Buddhism along with his followers, writes in the essay, 'The Decline and Fall of Buddhism', "There can be no doubt that the fall of Buddhism in India was due to the invasions of the Musalmans. Islam came out as the enemy of the 'but'. The word 'but', as everybody knows, is an Arabic word and means an idol. Not many people, however, know what the derivation of the world 'but' is. 'But' is the Arabic corruption of Buddha. Thus the origin of the word indicates that in Moslem mind idol worship had come to be identified with the Religion of Buddha. To the Muslims, they were one and the same thing. The mission to break the idols thus became the mission to destroy Buddhism. Islam destroyed Buddhism not only in India but wherever it went. Before Islam came into being, Buddhism was the religion of Bactria, Parthia, Afghanistan, Gandhar and Chinese Turkestan, as it was of the whole of Asia. In all these countries Islam destroyed Buddhism... (Writings and Speeches, Vol 3, p 230)
He continues: "The Musalman invaders sacked the Buddhist Universities of Nalanda, Vikramsila, Jagaddala, Odantipur to name a few. They razed to the ground Buddhist monasteries with which the country was studded. The monks fled away in thousands to Nepal, Tibet and other places outside India. Muslim commanders killed a very large number outright. How the Buddhist priesthood perished by the sword of the Muslim invaders has been recorded by the Muslim historians themselves...".
Seen in this light the destruction of Bamiyan Buddha by the Taliban in February 2001 does not seem out of place. Smashing the head of Brahma in Thao Maha Brahma or Phra Phrom Erawan Shrine in Bangkok on March 21, the "mentally disturbed" Muslim youth who did it, proved there is a method in this madness. It reflects the atavistic iconoclastic behaviour of Islam. The tragedy of Chakmas (Buddhists) in CHT is also on predictable lines. It will be interesting to know whether the Buddhists of Ladakh and CHT too feel Islam as a religion of compassion.
Peace Campaign Group (PCG) is a New Delhi-based organisation run by Chakmas, who are Buddhist monks as well, but who fled Bangladesh due to Islamic persecution in the early 1990s. They later obtained Indian citizenships and now actively focus on human rights violation in CHT. PCG recently demanded a Darfur-like UN intervention in CHT, which has been a victim of Islamic demographic aggression, systematically carried out by Bangladesh. Bhante Bhikkhu Prajnalankar, general secretary of PCG, travels around the world on a shoestring budget, to highlight the plight of his people in Bangladesh. A monk, he has no inclination to teach the world Zen and Nirvana. Pursuing Nirvana, he says, will not help when the ground beneath your feet is taken away.
Buddhist Thailand is more aware. It has a no-nonsense approach towards the Islamic secessioism in the south - Narathiwat, Pattani, Songhkla and Yala. Buddhists civilians are frequent targets of Muslim attacks in Narathiwat province of Thailand. But the Thai Government's approach is as decisive as it could be in a democracy. On October 26, 2004, Thailand police entered a historic mosque in Pattani where recalcitrant elements had made a stronghold, and flushed them out. Seventy-eight detained Muslims perished, many of them crushed and suffocated, after hundreds of detainees were loaded in two trucks. Thailand rejected any UN probe into the massacre of Islamist militants in southern Thailand.
Buddhism is a compassionate religion; with its stress on non-violence, it was ill-prepared to meet Islam militarily. The Dalai Lama's comments reminds me of Gandhi, whose message of compassion found no takers amongst Muslims. Speaking about Gandhi's tour of England during Second Round Table Conference, Subhas Chandra Bose said, "During his stay in England, he had to play two roles in one person, the role of a political leader and that of a world-teacher. Sometimes he conducted himself not as a political leader who had come to negotiate with the enemy, but as a master who had come to preach a new faith - that of non-violence and world-peace." (The Indian Struggle 1920-1942, p 252). The Dalai Lama is playing world teacher, more than Tibetan supreme leader, and this time he has gone overboard.
"Nazism is a compassionate political philosophy which is being unfairly marginalised by a few extrememists."
L
Buddhism has always struck me as the root of all New Age/PC feeling. It's the ultimate religion for those with the victim mentality.
"I hold the Dalai Lama in the highest esteem"
I don't, 10 or 15 years ago the Lama and all the other religions had one of those international gatherings where they discussed how perfect life is and can be etc., the only negative note by the Lama, was a gentle mention of the "extremist Christians".
Here is an interesting article about Ghandi from Commentary magazine.
http://history.eserver.org/ghandi-nobody-knows.txt
Islam is a political philosophy too. And the koran is very clear about the concept of "Islamic territories".
It's a lot like the Soviet Politburo viewed Europe. "What's ours is ours. What's yours is negotiable."
L
I think so. Karma and reincarnation are ideas which are more
conducive to passivity. If you have to worry about eternal hellfire your outlook is different.
And the Dalai Lama knows well enough not to bite the hand that feeds him.
The traditional Tibetan view of Islam is set out in the Myth of Shambhala and Gesar of Ling. The Kulika King , the last Chakrivartin of Shambhala will ride forth and defeat Islam's attempt to put its yoke on the world. A pity the Dalai Lama will not ride with him.
A summary of Shambhala mytholgy can be perused at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shambhala
The Dali Lama is nothing but a giggling goofball. Obviously he still can't read, and has no knowlage of history whatsoever for him to make such a PC comment on Islam.
I saw that discussion he had with a Muslim and Christian. The guy is a hopeless idiot. all three were nothing but apologists for Islam.
Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War that to know both oneself and one's enemy is to be unbeatable in battle. To defeat the jihadists, one must understand their conception of themselves and also their conception of us. In their minds, Muslim warriors are chivalrous heroes, while those who oppose them are devious miscreants. In the West, we are heavily focused on evidence and reason, whereas a mythological type of thinking still dominates in the Islamic world. It is plain to us, when we read the Qur'an and the Hadiths and other early textual sources of Islam, that the early Muslims were not especially virtuous people. The Muslim mind begins with the myth that the first generation of Muslims were the most virtuous heroes in history, and proceeds from there. The Muslim mind adores chivalrous heroes. That is why Saladin is so popular, and why tyrants like Saddam Hussein have followings the sizes of which are in direct proportion to their abilities to cast themselves into the heroic mold.
The mismatch between the actual behaviour of jihadists — murdering innocent civilians and so forth — and this mental ideal causes a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance in the Muslim mind. That's why Muslims are always looking for ways to validate their beliefs about Muslim superiority and the inferiority of non-Muslims. That's why all sorts of grievances which are irrational to us are so appealing to them. If Muslims aren't outperforming non-Muslims, it must be because Muslims are being held back or suppressed in some way by non-Muslims. That's why images of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay are so popular among Muslims, because it allows them to call us hypocrites for claiming to champion human rights, which eases the cognitive dissonance by deflecting the focus off themselves. It's also why the West cannot purchase the goodwill of the Islamic world with goods or foreign aid, because any attempt to do so is immediately interpreted as subservience and subterfuge, which is answered with contempt.
To call for Muslims to be treated oppressively, in addition to being wrong and contrary to the best of our culture, also plays right into the hands of Islamist leaders who their control their flocks by convincing them that non-Muslims are out to get them. Long lists of historical Muslim atrocities such as posted by godfreyofbouillon may be daming evidence against Islam to our way of thinking. But what happens when you present such as list to a Muslim? He counters with a list of atrocities committed by Christians, even though the events may have happened hundreds of years ago or the Christians in question were clearly violating the tenets of Christianity. How many times have you seen this happen? To us, it doesn't make any sense; rationally, we can think of a thousand reasons why the Muslim's response is fallacious. But the Muslim mind is not thinking in terms of evidence for or against Islam, but is rather seeking a way to ease the cognitive dissonance and maintain its belief in Islamic superiority.
He is irrelevant.
Did I say he is irrelevant?
It kind of makes you feel sorry for Tibet. They wait around all that time for a rare form of mental retardation to appear, then they worship the ground he drools on for as long as he lives.
Then they wait years for him to say something profound, which is really just an attempt to say something at all.
He's no Gandhi.
That's for sure.
And Gahdi was pretty darn low to the ground as far as idiots go as well.
Evidenced, of course, by all the orphanages, hospitals, and food distribution programs undertaken worldwide in the name of Mohammed.
Oh, wait, that is Jesus Christ.
dhimi lama
Only one other world leader consistently says this. President George W. Bush.
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