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

From the Buddhist perspective, one cannot say that this isn’t possible, he assured me: 'If there is a
person who says definitely no, the Madonna is not an emanation of Tara, then that person has not
understood the teaching of Buddha'. Christ could be an emanation of Buddha” (Galland, 1990, p. 311).
What lies behind this flowery quotation and Galland’s eccentric Mary-worship can also be referred to
as the incorporation of a non-Buddhist cult by Vajrayana. Then Mary and Tara are both so culturespecific
that a comparison of the two “goddesses” only makes sense at an extremely general level.
Neither does Tara give birth to a messiah, nor may we imagine a Mary who enters sexual magic
union with a Christian monk. Despite such blatant differences, Tantrism's doctrine of emanation
allows the absorption of foreign gods without hesitation, yet only under the condition that the Tibetan
deity take the original place and the non-Buddhist one be derived from it. In this connection, the
report of a Catholic (Benedictine) nun who participated in the Kalachakra initiation in Bloomington
(1999). For her, the rite set off a Christian experience: “I’m Christian. Never before has that meant so
much. This past month I sat at the Kalachakra Initiation Rite in Bloomington with HH the Dalai Lama
as the master teacher, a tantric gure. I have never felt so Christian. […] I was sitting in the VIP section
on the stage very near the Dalai Lama. The Buddhist audience seemd like advanced practitioners. The
audience was nearly 5,000 people under this one huge tent. When dharma students would know that I
was a nun they’d ask me what was in my mind as the ritual progressed through the Buddhist texts,
recitations, deity visualizations and gestures. At the time, I must confess, I sat with as much respect,
openness and emptiness as possible. My Christain heart was simply at rest being there with ‘others’.
[…] There’s no one to one correspondence with Buddhist’s rituals especially one as complex and
esoteric as the Kalachakra, but there is a way that we live tha creates the same feel, the same attitude
and dispositions. (Funk,. HPI 001) The literature in which Buddhist authors present Christ as a
Bodhisattva and as an emanation of Avalokiteshvara grows from year to year. We shall come to speak
about this in the chapter on the ecumenical politics of the Dalai Lama.
The lament of Yeshe Tshogyal
The tantric partner of Padmasambhava, the founding father of Tibetan Buddhism, is frequently
offered as the historical example of a female figure who is supposed to have integrated all the
contradictory powers of the feminine within herself. She goes by the name of Yeshe Tshogyal and is
said to have achieved an independence unique in the history of female yoginis. Some authors even say
(contrary to all doctrines) that she attained the highest goal of full Buddhahood. For this reason she
has currently become one of the rare icons for those, primarily western, believers who keep a lookout
for emancipated female figures within Tantric Buddhism.
The legend reports that Yeshe Tshogyal married the Tibetan king Trisong Detsen (742–803) at the
age of thirteen. Three years later, he gave her to Padmasambhava as his karma mudra. Such generous
gifts of women to gurus were, as we know, normal in Tantrism and taken for granted.
Yeshe Tshogyal became her master’s most outstanding pupil. When she was twenty years old, he
initiated her in a flame ritual. During the ceremony the guru, in the form of a terror deity „took
command of her lotus throne [the vagina] with his flaming diamond stalk [the penis]“ (quoted by
Stevens, 1990, p. 70). This showed that she had to suffer the fate of a classic wisdom consort; she was
symbolically burnt up.
Later she practiced Vajrayana with other men and subsequently underwent a long ascetic period as an
“ice virgin” in the coldest mountains of Tibet. Like the historical Buddha she was also tempted by