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

egins to lop off the victim’s limbs and slit open his chest with his sword. Now he tears out the
bloody heart and other internal organs which were earlier placed inside the lingam. In some versions
of the play he then eats the “flesh” and drinks the “blood” with a healthy appetite.
In others, the moment has arrived in which the animal demons (the masked dancers) fall upon the
already dismembered lingam and tear it apart for good. The pieces are flung in all directions.
Assistant devils collect the scattered fragments in human skulls and in a celebratory procession bring
them before Yama, seated upon a throne. With a noble gesture he takes one of the bloody pieces and
calmly consumes it before giving the rest free for general consumption with a hand signal. At once,
the other mystery players descend and try to catch hold of something. A wild free-for-all now results,
in which many pieces of the lingam are deliberately thrown into the crowded audience. Everybody
grabs a fragment which is then eaten.
In this clearly cannibalist scene the clerical cham dancers want to appropriate some of the life energy
of the royal victim. Here too, the ancient idea that an enemy’s powers are transferred to oneself
through killing and eating them is the barely concealed intention. Thus every cham performance
repeats on an “artistic” level the political appropriation of secular royal power by Lamaism. But we
must always keep in mind that the distinction between symbol and reality which we find normal does
not exist within a tantric culture. Therefore, King Langdarma is sacrificed together with his secular
authority at every cham dance performance. It is only all too understandable why the Fifth Dalai
Lama, in whose person the entire worldly power of the Tibetan kings was concentrated for the first
time, encouraged the cham dance so much.
Why is the victim and hence the “enemy of the religion” known as the lingam? As we know, this
Sanskrit word means “phallus”. Do the lamas want to put to service the royal procreative powers? The
psychoanalyst, Robert A. Paul, offers another interesting interpretation. He sees a “symbolic
castration” in the destruction of the lingam. Through it the monks demonstrate that the natural
reproductive process of birth from a woman represents an abortive human development. But when
applied to the royal sacrifice this symbolic castration has a further, power-political significance: it
symbolizes the replacement of the dynastic chain of inheritance — which follows the laws of
reproduction and presupposes the sexual act — by the incarnation system.
In his fieldwork, Robert A. Paul also observed how on the day following a cham performance the
abbot and his monks dressed as dakinis and appeared at the sacrificial site in order to collect up the
scattered remains and burn them in a fire together with other objects. Since the “male” lamas conduct
this final ritual act in the guise of (female) “sky walkers”, it seems likely that yet another tantric
female sacrifice is hidden behind the symbolic regicide.
The substitute sacrifice
The sacrifice of a lingam was a particular specialty of the Fifth Dalai Lama, which he had performed
not just during the cham dance but also used it, as we shall soon see, for the destruction of enemies.
We are dealing with a widely spread practice in Tibetan cultural life. On every conceivable occasion,
small pastry figurines (torma or bali) were created in order to be offered up to the gods or demons.
Made from tsampa or butter, they were often shaped into anthropomorphic figures. One text requires
that they be formed like the “breasts of Dakinis” (Beyer, 1978, p. 312). Blood and pieces of meat,
resins, poisons, and beer were often added. In the majority of cases substitutes were used for these.
Numerous Tibet researchers are agreed that the sacrifice of a torma involves the symbolic