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

There is more or less accord among orientalists that Guanyin is a syncretic figure, formed by the
integration into the Buddhist system imported from India of formerly more powerful native Chinese
goddesses. A legend recounts that Guanyin originally dwelled among the mortals as the king’s
daughter, Miao Shan, and that out of boundless goodness she sacrificed herself for her father. This
pious tale is, however, somewhat lacking in vibrancy as the genesis of such an influential religious
lady as Guanyin, but nonetheless interesting in that it once more offers us a report of a female
sacrifice in the interests of a patriarch.
We find the suggestion often put forward by the Tibetan side, that the worship of Guanyin is a
Chinese variant of the Tibetan Tara cult, similarly unconvincing, since the latter was first introduced
into Tibet in the eleventh century, 400 years after the transformation of Avalokiteshvara into a
goddess. In view of the exceptional power which the goddess enjoys in China it seems much more
reasonable to see in her a descendant of the great Taoist matriarchs: the primordial mother Niang
Niang, or the great goddess Xi Wangmu, or Tianhou Shengmu, who is worshipped as the “sea star”.
If Avalokiteshvara represents a “fire deity”, then Guanyin is clearly a “water goddess”. She is often
pictured upon a rock in the sea with a water jug or a lotus flower in her hand. The “goddess on the
water lily”, who sometimes holds a child in her arms and then resembles the Christian Madonna,
fascinated the royal courts of Europe in the seventeenth century already, and the first European
porcelain manufacturers copied her statues. Her epithets, “Empress of Heaven”, “Holy Mother”,
“Mother of Mercy”, also drew her close to the cult of Mary for the West. Like Mary then, Guanyin is
also called upon as the female savior from the hardships and fears of a wretched world. When worries
and suffering make one unhappy, then one turns to her.
The transformation of Avalokiteshvara into a Chinese goddess is a mythic event which has deeply
shaped the metapolitical relationship between China and Tibet. Historical relations of both nations
with one another, although they both exhibit patriarchal structures, may thus be described through the
symbolism of a battle of the sexes between the fire god Chenrezi and the water goddess Guanyin.
What is played out between the gods also has — the tantras believe — its correspondences among
mortals. Via the fate of the three most powerful female figures from China’s past, we shall examine
whether the tantric pattern can be convincingly applied to the historical conflicts between the two
countries (Tibet and China).
Wu Zetian (Guanyin) and Songtsen Gampo (Avalokiteshvara)
Following the collapse of the Han kingdom in the third century C.E., Mahayana Buddhism spread
through China and blossomed in the early Tang period (618–c. 750). After this a renaissance of
Confucianism begins which leads from the mid-ninth century to a persecution of the Buddhists. In the
Hua-yen Buddhism of the seventh century (a Chinese form of Mahayana with some tantric elements),
especially in the writings of Fa-Tsang, the cosmic “Sun Buddha”, Vairocana, is revered as the highest
instance.
At the end of the seventh century, as the Guanyin cult was forming in China, a powerful woman and
Buddhist reigned in the “Middle Kingdom”, the Empress Wu Zetian (c. 625–c. 705). Formerly a
concubine of two Emperors, father and son — after their deaths Wu Zetian took, step by step and with
great skill, the “Dragon Throne” in the year 683. She conducted a radical shake-up of the country’s
power elite. The ruling Li family was systematically and brutally replaced by members of her own
Wu lineage. Nonetheless, the matriarch did not recoil from banishing her own son even on the basis