Al: "Thanks for breaking our campaign laws.
That sheet makes you look so fat . . I can't even look".
Posted on 05/28/2002 8:14:51 AM PDT by dead
Curious, even disturbing, is the way so many non-Buddhist Australians blur the lines between respect, reverence and worship in their attitudes toward the Dalai Lama. Critical reflection on the man and his message hardly seems to figure in their estimation of him.
This is not entirely the fault of the Dalai Lama. His visit to Australia last week was not a promotional tour and he is adamant that he is not in the business of seeking converts. Indeed, the Dalai Lama consistently cautions people against switching from their religion to his or believing that they can fully understand even the meditative traditions of Buddhism without a strong background in Buddhist practice and theory.
But you don't have to become a devotee to nonetheless be taken in.
The Dalai Lama seeks to excite the "innate spiritual nature" of people so that they might choose kindness and affection in their relations to others rather than anger, hatred or the temptation to exploit.
Christian church leaders promote the same message, but when they do they tend to be ignored or scorned, whereas the Dalai Lama is regarded as a welcome breath of fresh air.
This is partly because his approach is intuitive rather than discursive, inclusive rather than exclusive, gently encouraging rather than reproachful or overly instructive. With the Dalai Lama one seems to be getting the essence of religious insight without the froth and bubble of dogma and doctrine or the hard and fast rules of moral behaviour.
The trouble is that when religion is leeched in this fashion of too much content, all that is left is platitudes - or worse, banalities.
Take the Dalai Lama's answer to a question put to him at the National Press Club in Canberra on Friday about his views on euthanasia.
Like abortion, he said through an interpreter (thus choosing his words carefully), "these are very complex issues on which it is very difficult to make generalised statements because the individuality of each context would be so different that it is something that needs to be judged - the merits of its decision - based upon context by context".
You would get more enlightenment than this listening to Lisa tackle a moral dilemma in an episode of The Simpsons.
In fact many of the Dalai Lama's comments on international problems and their solutions - the sort of complex issues on which he is prepared to make generalised statements - tend towards the naivety of a primary school pupil at an end-of-year speech night. When children talk about the need for more caring and sharing in the world, adults smile knowingly - which is to say that we, unlike they, appreciate life's complexities. Ironically, when the Dalai Lama says the same thing, we call it wisdom and applaud.
The other part of the Dalai Lama's appeal is his exoticness. He is unusual, as well as untypical, which is interesting in itself but also means he represents something people can dabble in without understanding too much about it and thus having to be fully challenged, engaged or, dare one say, committed.
The Dalai Lama, of course, plays down his distinctiveness and for this he can and should be criticised. He claims to be just another ordinary human being but nothing could be further from the truth.
How many ordinary human beings are believed by millions of people to be the living emanation of the Buddha of compassion? How many have won a Nobel Peace Prize (as the Dalai Lama did in 1989)? How many ordinary human beings are global celebrities with a global network of powerful and influential friends? How many hob-nob it with movie stars or have had Hollywood genuflect before them as the Dalai Lama did when Martin Scorsese made Kundun in 1997 - a film that was virtually an authorised biography of the Tibetan leader?
The Dalai Lama's popularity in the West says much about its need for heroes, its search for meaning, its longing for those things (holiness, integrity) that seem to be missing from many of its institutions. And yet Western culture stands for just about everything a Buddhist is supposed to renounce.
The relationship, in other words, is intriguing and as it develops it may benefit both sides in ways that can't now be imagined. But nobody is going to get too far unless each party is frank with the other and dismissive of mere pap.
Chris McGillion, the Herald's religious affairs columnist, teaches in the school of communication at Charles Sturt University.
This is like judging the Catholic Church on a few speech by the Pope. The writer has no knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism at all.
"Don't give in to hate - that leads to the dark side."That's a good quote, Tank. Is it yours? If not, do you have a reference for it? --SB
Neither of them seem to regard anything beyond the most basic understanding of the religion as necessary.
Applies equally as well to most adherents of western religions.
Ah, Zen Freeping! Very appropriate! ;-)
Maybe. But the author isn't making grand statements about Buddhism, he's writing about specific sayings of Dalai Lama and the reactions to these sayings in the West. Chauncey Gardiner in Jerzy Kosinski's Being There (played by Peter Sellers in the movie of the same name) comes again to mind. Idiot savant as guru!
He's mocking the Forrest Gumping of the Dali Lama.
Bleah.
The Hindu/ Buddhist pantheistic mist evaporates under a couple of internal contradictions:
• If truth is oneness and "the word of truth is One and the word of two is error," then "true" and "false" cannot exist. Yet this statement is a truth claim.
• If the world is "Maya" (illusion) and everything is really One, then where did the illusion come from? Is there really an illusion and a hidden reality or is everything One?
Yawn..... yep, they both put me to sleep.
From the Dalai Lama's autobiography:
One, who must remain nameless for fear of reprisals against his family, described to human rights investigators how he was kept naked and handcuffed in his cell for prolonged periods, during which he was abused physically....On occasions, drunken guards came into his cell and beat him. One night his head was repeatedly struck against the wall until his nose bled..He also described being used as a target of martial arts practice by guards smelling of alcohol. ..and described how he was subjected to the so-called 'hanging airplane' method of torture:
I was picked up from the ground and two soldiers began to bind a rope around my arms. This long rope had a metal ring in the middle which was positioned behind my neck. Both ends were then passed in front of my shoulders and wound in a spiral tightly around my arms, finally trapping my fingers. One soldier then drew the two rope ends back through the metal ring, forcing my arms up between the shouder blades. Holding on to the rope he kneed me hard in the small of the back which caused a sharp pain in the chest. The rope was then placed over a hook in the ceiling and pulled downwards so that I was suspended with my toes just touching the ground, I quickly lost consciousness. I don't know how long I blacked out for, but I woke up back in my cell, naked except for handcuffs, and shackled around my ankles.
Four days later he was again led naked from his cell...One soldier took a thick piece of rope and tied me to a tree. The rope was wound around my body from the neck down to the knees. The soldier then stood behind the tree and put his foot against it, pulling the rope tight. Chinese soldiers were sitting around the tree having lunch. One stood up and threw the remains of his bowl of vegetables and chillies in my face. The chillies burned my eyes and I still suffer a little. I was then untied and taken back to my cell, but I stumbled often as I still found it difficult to walk and I was beaten every time I fell.
Ex-detainees have related how they were repeatedly given shocks from electric cattle prods that police used whilst the demonstrations were actually taking place. A young man had one forced into his mouth, causing severe swelling, and a nun told investigators of how she had this instrument of torture forced into both her anus and vagina.
While it is tempting to take this sort of information as definitive of the Chinese people as a whole, I know it would be wrong to do so. But equally, such depravity cannot be dismissed. So, although I have now spent the greater part of my life in exile and although I have naturally taken a keen interest in China's affairs throughout that time as a result of which I have some experience as a "China watcher", still I must admit that I do not fully understand the Chinese mind.
When I visited China in the early 1950s, I could see that a lot of people had given up everything in order to help bring about a transformation in society. Many people bore physical scars from the struggle and most were men of the highest principle who genuinely sought to bring about real benefits for every person in their vast country. To do this, they constructed a party system which enabled them to know every last detail about one another, right down to the number or hours' sleep each one needed. They were so passionate about their ideals that they would stop at nothing to achieve them. And in their leader, Mao Tse-tung, they had a man of great vision and imagination, someone who realized the value of constructive criticism and frequently encouraged it.
Yet in no time at all, the new administration became paralysed by petty in-fighting and squabbling. I saw it happen in front of my own eyes. Soon, they began to exchange fact for fable, to tell falsehoods whenever it was necessary to show themselves in a good light. When I met Chou En-lai in India on that occasion in 1956 and told him of my fears, he replied by telling me not to worry. All would be well. In reality, things only changed for the worse.
When I returned to Tibet in 1957, I found the Chinese authorities openly persecuting my people, though simultaneously I was constantly assured there would be no interference. They lied without hesitation, just as they have ever since. Worse, it seemed that the vast majority of the outside world was prepared to believe this fiction. Then, during the 1970s, a number of prominent western politicians were taken to Tibet and came back saying that all was well there.
The truth remains that, since the Chinese invasion, over a million Tibetans have died as a direct result of Peking's policies. When adopting its resolution on Tibet in 1965, the United Nations stated plainly that China's occupation of my homeland has been characterised by 'acts of murder, rape and arbitrary imprisonment; torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of Tibetans on a large scale.'
I remain at a loss to explain how this happened, how the noble ideals of so many good men and women became transformed into senseless barbarity. Nor can I understand what motivated those people within the Chinese leadership who actively counselled the total destruction of the Tibetan race. It seems that China is a country which has lost its faith, as a result of which the Chinese people have themselves endured unspeakable misery for the past 41 years--all in the name of Communism.
Yet the pursuit of Communism has been one of the greatest human experiments of all time, and I do not deny that I myself was very impressed with its ideology at first. The trouble was, as I soon discovered, that although Commmunism claims to serve 'the people'--for whom there are 'people's hotels', 'people's hospitals,', 'people's armies' and so on--'the people' does not mean everyone, only those who hold views that are held by a minority to be 'the people's views'.
Some of the responsibility for the excesses of Communism rests squarely on the West. The hostility with which it greeted the first Marxist Goverments accounts in part for the often ludicrous precautions they took to protect themselves. They became suspicious of everything and everyone, and suspicion causes terrible unhappiness because it goes against a fundamental human trait--namely one's person's desire to trust another person. In this connection, I remember, for example, the absurd situation of my visit to Lenin's room in the Kremlin during my visit to Moscow in 1982. I was watched over by an unsmiling plain-clothes security man who was clearly ready to shoot in an instant, while a woman guide mechanically explained the official history of the Russian Revolution.
However, in as much as I have any political allegiance, I suppose I am still half Marxist. I have no argument with capitalism, so long as it is practiced in a humanitarian fashion, but my religious beliefs dispose me far more towards Socialism and Internationalism, which are more in line with Buddhist principles. The other attractive thing about Marxism for me is its assertion that man is ultimately responsible for his own destiny. This reflects Buddhist thought exactly.
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