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

Padmasambhava’s. Her current rise in prominence is exclusively a product of the contemporary
Zeitgeist, which needs to generate counterimages to an essentially androcentric Buddhism so as to
gain a foothold in the western world.
The mythological background to the Tibetan-Chinese conflict:
Avalokiteshvara versus Guanyin
We would now like to point out that, in the historical relationship between Tibet and China, the latter
played and continues to play the feminine part, as if the sky-high mountains of the Himalayas and the
Chinese river plains were a man and a woman in stand-off, as if a battle of the sexes had been being
waged for centuries between “masculine” Lhasa and “feminine” Beijing. This is not supposed to
imply that, in contrast to the patriarchal Land of Snows, a matriarchy has the say in China. We know
full well how the “Middle Kingdom” has from the outset pursued a fundamentally androcentric
politics and how nothing has changed in this regard up until the present. Hence, what we primarily
wish to say here is that from a Tibetan viewpoint the conflict between the two countries is interpreted
as a gender conflict. We hope to demonstrate in this chapter that the Dalai Lama is opposed by the
threatening and ravenous “Great Female”, the terror dakini which is China and which he must
conquer and subjugate along tantric lines.
The reverse cannot be so simply stated: the Chinese Emperor admittedly saw the rulers of Potala as
powerful spiritual opponents, but understood himself thus only in a very few cases to be the
representative of a “womanly power”. Yet such historical exceptions do exist and we would like to
consider these in more detail. There is also the fact that China’s androcentric culture has been
repeatedly limited and relativized by strong female elements. Real feminine influences can be
recognized in Chinese mythology, in particular national philosophies (especially Taoism), and
sometimes also in the politics, far more than was ever the case in the masculine Tibetan monastic
empire. For example, Lao-tzu, the great proclaimer of the Dao De Jing, clearly stresses the feminine
factor ( or rather what one understood this to be at the time) in his practical “theory of power”:
Nothing is weaker than water,
But when it attacks something hard
Or resistant, then nothing withstands it,
And nothing will alter its way.
[...] weakness prevails
Over strength and [...] gentleness conquers
The adamant [...]
it says in the 78 th chapter of the Dao De Jing. Among Chinese Buddhists the greatest reverence is up
until the present day reserved for a goddess (Guanyin), a female Buddha and no god. China’s few yet
famous/notorious female rulers in particular showed a unique tension in dealings with the kings and
hierarchs of the Tibetan “Land of Snows”. For this reason we shall consider these in somewhat more
detail. But let us first turn to the Chinese goddess, Guanyin.
China (Guanyin) and Tibet (Avalokiteshvara)
How easily the ambivalent gender role of the male androgyne Avalokiteshvara could tip over into the
feminine is demonstrated by “his” transformation into Guanyin, the “goddess of mercy”, who is still
highly revered in China and Japan. Originally, Guanyin had no independent existence, but was solely
considered to be a feminine guise of the Bodhisattva (Avalokiteshvara). In memory of her male past