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

impurity” in the final instance represents the Dalai Lama himself, who indeed became the
“illegitimate” successor of the killed regent as the worldly ruler of Tibet. “The victim in older times
was certainly the king himself,” Bleichsteiner informs us, “who was offered up at the beginning of a
new epoch as atonement and guarantee for the well-being of the people. Hence the lamaist priestkings
were also considered to be the atoning sacrifice of the New Year ... “ (Bleichsteiner, 1937, p.
213). It also speaks in favor of this thesis that in early performances of the rite the substitute was
required to be of the same age as the god-king and that during the ceremony a doll which represents
the Dalai Lama is carried along (Richardson, 1993, p. 64). The evil, dark, despotic, and unfortunate
shadow of the hierarch would then be concentrated in the scapegoat, upon whom the populace and the
hordes of monks let loose could let out their rage.
Then, once the “Great Fifth” had institutionalized the celebrations, anarchy reigned in Lhasa during
the period of the New Year’s festivities: 20,000 monks from the most varied monasteries had cart
blanche. Everything which was normally forbidden was now permitted. In bawling and wildly
gesticulating groups the “holy” men roamed the streets. Some prayed, others cursed, yet others gave
vent to wild cries. They pushed each other around, they argued with one another, they hit each other.
There were bloody noses, black eyes, battered heads and torn clothes. Meditative absorption and
furious rage could each become the other in an instant. Heinrich Harrer, who experienced several
feasts at the end of the forties, describes one of them in the following words: “As if awakened from a
hypnosis, in this instant the tens of thousands plunge order into chaos. The transition is so sudden that
one is stunned. Shouting, wild gesticulation ... they trample one another to the ground, almost murder
each other. The praying [monks], still weeping and ecstatically absorbed, become enraged madmen.
The monastic soldiers begin their work! Huge blokes with padded shoulders and blackened faces —
so that the deterrent effect is further enhanced. They ruthlessly lay into the crowd with their staffs. ...
Howling, they take the blows, but even the beaten return again. As if they were possessed by
demons” (Harrer, 1984, p. 142).
The Tibetan feast of Monlam is thus a variant upon the paradoxes we have already examined, in
which, in accordance with the tantric law of inversion, anarchy and disorder are deliberately evoked
so as to stabilize the Buddhocracy in total. During these days, the bottled- up anti-state aggressions of
the subjects can be completely discharged, even if only for a limited time and beneath the blows of
the monastic soldiers’ clubs.
It was once again the “Great Fifth” who recognized the high state-political value of the scapegoat play
and thus made the New Year’s festival in the year 1652 into a special state occasion. From the Potala,
the “seat of the gods”, the incarnation of Avalokiteshvara could look down smiling and
compassionately at the delirium in the streets of Lhasa and at the sad fate of his disgraceful
doppelganger (the scapegoat).
The scapegoat mechanism can be considered part of the cultural heritage of all humanity. It is
astonishingly congruent with the tantric pattern in which the yogi deliberately produces an aggressive,
malicious fundamental attitude in order to subsequently transform it into its opposite via the “law of
inversion”: the poison becomes the antidote, the evil the cure. We have indicated often enough that
this does not at all work out to plan, and that rather, after practicing the ritual the “healing priests”
themselves can become the demons they ostensibly want to drive out.
Summarizing, we can thus say that, over and above the “tantric female sacrifice”, Tibetan Buddhism