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

the Dalai Lama and belittles the Tibetan Exile Government” (Burns, Newsgroup 1). This is
“extremely dangerous” and in the principal monasteries there was open talk of a schism. During the
parliamentary session the government was strongly criticized for not having done anything to treat the
Shugden affair as a internal Tibetan matter, but rather to have told the whole world about it, thus
bringing it to the attention of an international public. We have to conclude from the committed
discussions of the parliamentary members that the power and potential influence of the Shugden
followers are actually more significant than one would have thought from the previous official
statements out of Dharamsala.
On the third day of the session the situation in parliament had reached such a dead end that there
seemed to be nothing more to say. What do the representatives of Tibetans in exile do in such a
situation? — They consult the state oracle! It is not the members of parliament as the representatives
of the people’s will but rather the oracle god Pehar who decides which course the government is to
steer in the controversy surrounding the recalcitrant Dorje Shugden. The grotesqueness of the
situation can hardly be topped, since Pehar and Shugden — as we learn from the writings of both
parties — are the most bitter of enemies. How, then, is the Mongolian god (Pehar) supposed to
provide an objective judgment about his arch-enemy (Shugden)? Indeed, it was Pehar, who in 1996
prophesied for the Dalai Lama that his life and hence the fate of Tibet wee endangered by the
Shugden cult. In contrast , the Shugden oracle announced that the Kundun has been falsely advised by
Pehar for years. Hence what the state oracle consulted by parliament would say was clear in advance.
The advice was to combat the Shugden followers with uncompromising keenness.
This interesting case is thus a matter of a war between two oracle gods who seek control over the
politics of Tibet. No other example since the flight of the Dalai Lama (in 1959) has so clearly
revealed to the public that “gods” are at work behind the Tibetan state, the realpolitik of the Kundun,
and the power groupings of the society of Tibetans in exile. One may well be completely skeptical
about such entities, but one cannot avoid acknowledging that the ruling elite and the subjects of the
Lamaist state are guided by just such an ancient world view. How these occult struggles are to be
reconciled with the untiringly repeated professions of belief in democracy is difficult to comprehend
from a western-oriented way of thinking.
Dharamsala is completely aware that antidemocratic methods must arouse disquiet in the West. For
example, in contrast to before, since the mid-eighties reports about the pronouncements of oracles no
longer play a large role in the Tibetan Review (the exile Tibetans’ most important foreign-language
organ of the press). Only since the “Shugden affair” (1996) has the excessive use of oracle mediums
in the politics of the Tibetans in exile been rediscovered and become known worldwide. In monastic
circles it is openly joked that the Kundun employs more oracles than ministers. “Favorites and
sorcerers manipulate the sovereign”, it says in a Spanish magazine, with “demons and deities fighting
to control people's minds ...” (Más Allá de la Ciencia, No. 103, 1997).
Nevertheless, the Kundun has succeeded amazingly well in marginalizing the Shugden cult
internationally and branding it as medieval superstition. For example, the German news magazine,
Der Spiegel, which normally takes an extremely critical stance towards religious matters, was
prepared to blindly take up the official version of the Shugden story from Dharamsala: the Shugden
followers, Der Spiegel reported, were responsible for two (!) murders and their flight could be traced
to China and the Chinese secret service (Spiegel, 16/1998, p. 119). Nearly all western media
stereotypically repeat that the ritual murderers came from the ranks of the protective god (for