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

y the rock demons. If I myself then die as a consequence of my deed, these living beings will be
plunged into hell. Think of me then, and have pity” (Hermanns, 1956, p. 32). With this she hit the
bullseye. “Sexual intercourse out of compassion and for the benefit of all suffering beings” was — as
we already know — a widespread “ethical” practice in Mahayana Buddhism. Despite this precept, the
monkey first turned to his emanation father, Amitabha, and asked him for advice. The “god of light
from the West” answered him with wise foresight: “Take the rock demoness as your consort. Your
children and grandchildren will multiply. When they have finally become humans, they will be a
support to the teaching” (Hermanns, 1956, p. 32).
Nevertheless, this Buddhist evolutionary account, reminiscent of Charles Darwin, did not just arise
from the compassionate gesture of a divine monkey; rather, it also contains a widely spread, elitist
value judgement by the clergy, which lets the Tibetans and their country be depicted as uncivilized,
underdeveloped and animal-like, at least as far as the negative influence of their primordial mother is
concerned. “From their father they are hardworking, kind, and attracted to religious activity; from
their mother they are quick-tempered, passionate, prone to jealousy and fond of play and meat”, an
old text says of the inhabitants of the Land of Snows (Samuel, 1993, p. 222).
Two forces thus stand opposed to one another, right from the Tibetan genesis: the disciplined,
restrained, culturally creative, spiritual world of the monks in the form of Avalokiteshvara and the
wild, destructive energy of the feminine in the figure of Srinmo.
In a further myth, non-Buddhist Tibet itself appears as the embodiment of Srinmo (Janet Gyatso,
1989, p. 44). The local demoness is said to have resisted the introduction of the true teaching by the
Buddhist missionaries from India with all means at her disposal, with weaponry and with magic, until
she was ultimately defeated by the great king of law, Songtsen Gampo (617-650), an incarnation of
Avalokiteshvara (and thus of the current Dalai Lama). “The lake in the Milk plane,” writes the Tibet
researcher Rolf A. Stein, “where the first Buddhist king built his temple (the Jokhang), represented
the heart of the demoness, who lay upon her back. The demoness is Tibet itself, which must first be
tamed before she can be inhabited and civilized. Her body still covers the full extent of Tibet in the
period of its greatest military expansion (eighth to ninth century C.E.). Her spread-eagled limbs
reached to the limits of Tibetan settlement ... In order to keep the limbs of the defeated demoness
under control, twelve nails of immobility were hammered into her” (Stein, 1993, p.34). A Buddhist
temple was raised at the location of each of these twelve nailings.
Mysterious stories circulate among the Tibetans which tell of a lake of blood under the Jokhang,
which is supposed to consist of Srinmo’s heart blood. Anyone who lays his ear to the ground in the
cathedral, the sacred center of the Land of Snows, can still — many claim — hear her faint heartbeat.
A comparison of this unfortunate female fate with the subjugation of the Greek dragon, Python, at
Delphi immediately suggests itself. Apollo, the god of light (Avalokiteshvara), let the earth-monster,
Python (Srinmo), live once he had defeated it so that it would prophesy for him, and built over the
mistreated body at Delphi the most famous oracle temple in Greece.
The earth demoness is nailed down with phurbas. These are ritual daggers with a three-sided blade
and a vajra handle. We know these already from the Kalachakra ritual, where they are likewise
employed to fixate the earth spirits and the earth mother. The authors who have examined the
symbolic significance of the magic weapon are unanimous in their assessment of the aggressive
phallic symbolism of the phurba.