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

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 “reenactment”
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