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

person died, said the monks, then his soul would have to slip through a narrow hole into this room and
would be cut to pieces there upon a chopping block. Of a night the cries and groans of the maltreated
souls could be heard and a revolting stench of blood spread through the whole building. The block
was replaced every year since it had been worn away by the many blows.
Guru Rinpoche, the former incarnation of the Dalai Lama, was a explosive mixture of strict ascetic
and sorcerer, apostle and adventurer, monk and vagabond, founder of a culture and criminal, mystic
and eroticist, lawmaker and mountebank, politician and exorcist. He had such success because he
resolved the tension between civilization and wildness, divinity and the daemonic within his own
person. For, according to tantric logic, he could only defeat the demons by himself becoming a
demon. For this reason Fokke Sierksma also characterizes him as an uninhibited usurper: “He was a
conqueror, obsessed by lust of power and concupiscence, only this conqueror did not choose the way
of physical, but that of spiritual violence, in accordance with the Indian tradition that the Yogin's
concentration of energy subdues matter, the world and gods” (Sierksma, 1966, p. 111).
The orthodox Gelugpas also pull the arch magician to pieces in general. For example, one document
accuses him of having devoted himself to the pursuit of women of a night clothed in black, and to
drink of a day, and to have described this decadent practice as “the sacrifice of the ten
days” (Hoffmann, 1956, p. 55).
It was different with the Fifth Dalai Lama — for him Guru Rinpoche was the force which tamed the
wilds of the Land of Snows with his magic arts, as had no other before him and none who came after.
As magic was likewise for the “Great Fifth” the preferred style of weapon, he could justifiably call
upon Padmasambhava as his predecessor and master. The various guises of the guru which appeared
before the ruler of the Potala in his visions are thus also numerous and of great intensity. In them
Padmasambhava touched his royal pupil upon the forehead a number of times with a jewel and thus
transferred his power to him. Guru Rinpoche became the “house prophet” of the “Great Fifth” — he
advised the hierarch, foretold the future for him, and intervened in the practical politics from beyond,
which fundamentally transformed the history of Tibet (through the establishment of the Buddhist
state) almost 900 years after his death.
The “Emperor” Songtsen Gampo and the “Magician-Priest” Padmasambhava, the principal early
heroes of the Land of Snows, carried within them the germ of all the future events which would
determine the fate of the Tibetans. Centuries after their earthly existence, both characters were welded
together into the towering figure of the Fifth Dalai Lama. The one represented worldly power, the
other the spiritual. As an incarnation of both the one and the other, the Dalai Lama was also entitled
and able to exercise both forms of power. Just how close a relationship he brought the two into is
revealed by one of his visions in which Guru Rinpoche and King Songtsen Gampo swapped their
appearances with lightning speed and thus became a single person. A consequence of the Dalai
Lama’s strong identification with the arch-magician was that his chief yogini, Yeshe Tshogyal, also
appeared all the more often in his envisionings. She became the preferred inana mudra of the “Great
Fifth”.
Under the rule of Trisong Detsen (who fetched Padmasambhava into Tibet) the famous Council of
Lhasa also took place. The king ordered the staging of a large-scale debate between two Buddhist
schools of opinion: the teachings of the Indian, Kamalashila, which said that the way to enlightenment
was a graded progression and the Chinese position, which demanded the immediate, spontaneous