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

graphic example of how an anarchist, asocial world view can tip over into support for a “theocratic”
despotism. [1]
There was also a close connection between Buddhism and the American “Beat Generation”, who
helped decisively shape the youth revolts of the sixties. The poets Jack Kerouac, Alan Watts, Gary
Snyder, Allan Ginsberg, and others were, a decade earlier, already attracted by Eastern teachings of
wisdom, above all Japanese Zen. They too were particularly interested in the anarchic, ordinary-life
despising side of Buddhism and saw in it a fundamental and revolutionary critique of a mass society
that suppressed all individual freedom. “It is indeed puzzling”, the German news magazine Der
Spiegel wondered in connection with Tibetan Buddhism, “that many anti-authoritarian, anarchist and
feminist influenced former ‘68ers’ [members of the sixties protest movements] are so inspired by a
religion which preaches hierarchical structures, self-limiting monastic culture and the authority of the
teacher” (Spiegel, 16/1998, p. 121).
Alan Watts (1915-1973) was an Englishman who met the Japanese Zen master and philosopher,
Daietsu Teitaro Suzuki, in London. He began to popularize Suzuki’s philosophy and to reinterpret it
into an unconventional and anarchic “lifestyle” which directed itself against the American dream of
affluence.
Timothy Leary, who propagated the wonder drug LSD around the whole world and is regarded as a
guru of the hippie movement and American subculture, made the Tibetan Book of the Dead the basis
of his psychedelic experiments. [2]
Already at the start of the fifties Allen Ginsberg had begun experimenting with drugs (peyote,
mescaline, and later LSD) in which the wrathful tantric protective deities played a central role. He
included these in his “consciousness-expanding sessions”. When he visited the Dalai Lama in India in
1962, he was interested to know what His Holiness thought of LSD. The Kundun replied with a
counter-question, however, and wanted to find out whether Ginsberg could, under influence of the
drug, see what was in a briefcase that was in the room. The poet answered yes, the case was empty. It
was! (Shambhala Sun, July 1995).
The Tibetan Lama Dudjom Rinpoche, the then leader of the Nyingmapa, later explained the emptiness
of all things to him. When Ginsberg asked him for advice about how he should deal with his LSD
horror trips, the Rinpoche answered, “If you see something horrible, don't cling to it, and if you see
something beautiful, don't cling to it” (Shambhala Sun, July 1995). This statement became the lifemaxim
of the beat poets.
In Sikkim in 1962, Ginsberg participated in the Black Hat ceremony of the Karmapa and at that early
stage met the young Chögyam Trungpa. Ten years later (1972) he was quoting radical poems together
with him at spectacular events. At these “readings” both “Buddha poets” lived out their anarchist
feelings to the full, with Lama Trungpa usually being drunk.
It demonstrates his ingenious instinct for mental context that the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, when asked
whether he ever meditated by Ginsberg, who was in revolt against the state and every form of
compulsion, answered, “No, I don't have to” (Tricycle, vol. 5, no. 2, p. 6). In contrast, we have learned
from other interviews with His Holiness that he spends four hours meditating every morning, as is
proper for a good Buddhist monk. The Kundun thus has the appropriate answer ready for whatever the