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

But the truly radical and unique aspect to the killing of Langdarma is the fact that with him the sacred
kingship, and the divine order of Tibet associated with it, finally reached its end. Through his murder,
the sacrifice of secular rule in favor of clerical power was completed, both really and symbolically,
and the monks’ Buddhocracy thus took the place of the autocratic regent. Admittedly this alternative
was first fully developed 800 years later under the Fifth Dalai Lama, but in the interim not one
worldly ruler succeeded in seizing power over all of Tibet, which the great abbots of the various sects
had divided among one another.
Ritual regicide has always been a major topic in anthropology, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis. In
his comprehensive work, The Golden Bough, James George Frazer declared it to be the origin of all
religions. In his essay, Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud attempts to present the underhand and
collective killing of the omnipotent patriarchal father by the young males of a band of apes as the
founding act of human culture, and sees every historical regicide as a repetition of this misdeed. The
arguments of the psychoanalyst are not very convincing; nevertheless, his basic idea, which sees an
act of violence and its ritual repetition as a powerful cultural performance, has continued to occupy
modern researchers.
The immense significance of the regicide becomes clear immediately when it is recalled that the
ancient kings were in most cases equated with a deity. Thus what took place was not the killing of a
person but of a god, usually with the melodramatic intent that the ritually murdered being would be
resurrected or that another deity would take his place. Nonetheless, the deed always left deep
impressions of guilt and horror in the souls of the executors. Even if the real murder of a king only
took place on a single occasion, the event was ineradicably fixed in the awareness of a community. It
concentrated itself into a generative principle. By this, René Girard, in his study of The Violence and
the Sacred, means that a “founding murder” influences all the subsequent cultural and religious
developments in a society and that a collective compulsion to constantly repeat it arises, either
symbolically or for real. This compulsive repetition occurs for three reasons: firstly because of the
guilt of the murderers who believe that they will be able to exorcise the deed through repetition;
secondly, so as to refresh one’s own strengths through those which flow from the victim to his
murderers; thirdly as a demonstration of power. Hence a chain of religious violence is established,
which, however, be comes increasingly “symbolized” the further the community is removed from the
original criminal event. In place of human sacrifices, the burning of effigies now emerges.
The cham dance
The murder of King Langdarma was also later replaced by a symbolic repetition in Tibet. The lamas
repeat the crime in an annually performed dance mystery, the ham dance. There are particular
sequences which depend upon the location and time, and each sect has its own choreography. There
are always several historical and mythical events to be performed. But at the heart of this mystery
play there always stands the ritual sacrifice of an “enemy of the religion” for whom Langdarma
furnishes the archetype.
As it is a ritual, a cham performance can only be carried out by ordained monks. It is also referred to
as the “dance of the black hats” in remembrance of the black hat which the regicide, Palgyi Dorje,
wore when carrying out his crime and which are now worn by several of the players. Alongside the
Black Hat priests a considerable number of mostly zoomorphic-masked dancers take part. Animal
figures perform bizarre leaps: crows, owl, deer, yak, and wolf. Yama, the horned god of the dead,
plays the main role of the “Red Executioner”.