Kritik am Buch „The Shadow Of The Dalai Lama ... - Neues von Shi De

Tantra prescribes a Guruyoga liturgy, which is to be recited by the initiand at least three times a day
and three times per night. Several of these liturgies are hundreds of pages long (Mullin, 1991, p. 109).
But in all of them words to the following effect can be found, with which the lama demands the
pupil’s (sadhaka) absolute obedience: “From henceforth I am your [deity] Vajrapani. You must do
what I tell you to do. You should not deride me, and if you do, ... the time of death will come, and you
will fall into hell” (Dalai Lama XIV, 1985, p. 242).
Since it is the goal of every tantric initiation that the sadhaka himself achieve a transhuman status,
right from the outset of the initiatory path he develops a “divine pride” and, as the First Dalai Lama
informs us, is transformed into a “vessel” in which the supernatural energies collect (Mullin, 1991, p.
102). This is also true for the Kalachakra Tantra.
The self-sacrifice of the pupil
But doesn’t a metaphysical contest now arise between the deity which stands behind the guru and the
newly created pupil deity? This is not the case for two reasons. On the one hand, the divine being
behind master and pupil forms a unity. One could even consider it characteristic of divine entities that
they are simultaneously able to appear in various forms. On the other, it is not the pupil (sadhaka)
who produces the deity; in contrast, he absolutely and completely loses his human individuality and
transforms himself into “pure emptiness”, without having to surrender his perceivable body in the
process. This empty body of the sadhaka is then in the course of the initiation occupied by the deity or
the lama respectively. Chögyam Trungpa has expressed this in unmistakable terms: “If we surrender
our body to the guru we are surrendering our primal reference point. Our body becomes the
possession of the lineage; it is not ours any more. ... I mean that surrendering our body,
psychologically our dear life is turned over to someone else. We do not have our dear life to hold any
more” (June Campbell, 1996, p. 161). The pupil has completely ceased to exist as an individual soul
and mind. Only his body, filled by a god or respectively by his guru, visibly wanders through the
world of appearances.
The Kalachakra Tantra describes this process as an “act of swallowing” which the lama performs
upon the initiand. In a central drama of the Time Tantra which is repeated several times, the oral
destruction of the sadhaka is graphically demonstrated, even if the procedure does only take place in
the imagination of the cult participants. The following scene is played out: the guru, as the
Kalachakra deity, swallows the pupil once he has been melted down to the size of a droplet. As a
drop the initiand then wanders through the body of his masters until he reaches the tip of his penis.
From there the guru thrusts him out into the vagina and womb of Vishvamata, the wisdom consort of
Kalachakra. Within Vishvamata’s body the pupil as drop is then dissolved into “nothingness”. The
rebirth of the sadhaka as a Buddhist deity takes place only after this vaginal destruction. Since the
androgyne vajra master simultaneously represents Kalachakra and Vishvamata within one individual
and must be imagined by the adept as “father–mother” during the entire initiation process, he as man
takes over all the sex-specific stages of the birth process — beginning with the ejaculation, then the
conception, the pregnancy, up to the act of birth itself. [1]
In a certain sense, through the use of his pupil’s body the guru , or at least his superhuman
consciousness, achieves immortality. So long the master is still alive he has, so to speak, created a
double of himself in the form of the sadhaka; if he dies then his spirit continues to exist in the body of
his pupil. He can thus reproduce himself in the world of samsara for as long as there are people who
are prepared for his sake to sacrifice their individuality and to surrender him their bodies as a home.