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

against the inhabitants of the Land of Snows.
The “Great Fifth”: Absolute Sun King of Tibet
Historians are unanimous in maintaining that the Tibetan state was the ingenious construction of a
single individual. The golden age of Lamaism begins with Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso, the Fifth Dalai
Lama (1617–1682) and also ends with him. The saying of the famous historian, Thomas Carlyle, that
the history of the world is nothing other than the biography of great men may be especially true of
him. None of his successors have ever achieved the same power and visionary force as the “Great
Fifth”. They are in fact just the weak transmission of a very special energy which was gathered
together in his person in the seventeenth century. The spiritual and material foundations which he laid
have shaped the image of Tibet in both East and West up until the present day. But his practical
political power, limited firstly by various Buddhist school and then also by the Mongolians and
Chinese, was not at all so huge. Rather, he achieved his transtemporal authority through the adroit
accumulation of all spiritual resources and energies, which he put to service with an admirable lack of
inhibition and an unbounded inventiveness. With cunning and with violence, kindness and brutality,
with an enthusiasm for ostentatious magnificence, and with magic he organized all the significant
religious forms of expression of his country about himself as the shining center. Unscrupulous and
flexible, domineering and adroit, intolerant and diplomatic, he carried through his goals. He was
statesman, priest, historian, grammarian, poet, painter, architect, lover, prophet, and black magician in
one — and all of this together in an outstanding and extremely effective manner.
The grand siècle of the “Great Fifth” shone out at the same period in time as that of Louis XIV (1638–
1715), the French sun king, and the two monarchs have often been compared to one another. They are
united in their iron will to centralize, their fascination for courtly ritual, their constant exchange with
the myths, and much more besides. The Fifth Dalai Lama and Louis XIV thought and acted as
expressions of the same temporal current and in this lay the secret of their success, which far
exceeded their practical political victories. If it was the concept of the seventeenth century to
concentrate the state in a single person, then for both potentates the saying rings true: l'état c'est moi
("I am the state”). Both lived from the same divine energy, the all-powerful sun. The “king” from
Lhasa also saw himself as a solar “fire god”, as the lord of his era, an incarnation of Avalokiteshvara.
The year of his birth (1617) is assigned to the “fire serpent” in the Tibetan calendar. Was this perhaps
a cosmic indicator that he would become a master of high tantric practices, who governed his empire
with the help of the kundalini ("fire serpent”)?
In the numerous visions of the potentate in which the most important gods and goddesses of
Vajrayana appeared before him, tantric unions constantly took place. For him, the transformation of
sexuality into spiritual and worldly power was an outright element of his political program. Texts
which he himself wrote describe how he, absorbed by one such exercise by a divine couple, slipped
into the vagina of his wisdom consort, bathed there “in the red and white bodhicitta” and afterwards
returned to his old body blissful and regenerated (Karmay, 1988, p. 49).
Contemporary documents revere him as the “sun and moon” in one person. (Yumiko, 1993, p. 41). He
had mastered a great number of tantric techniques and even practiced his ritual self-destruction (chod)
without batting an eyelid. Once he saw how a gigantic scorpion penetrated into his body and devoured
all his internal organs. Then the creature burst into flames which consumed the remainder of his body
(Karmay, 1988, p. 52). He exhibited an especial predilection for the most varied terror deities who
supported him in executing his power politics.