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

tantric killing rites.
In one case this is completely obvious and he himself has confirmed this. Thus we may read in the
most recent edition of his autobiography of how he staged a rite connected to the Kalachakra Tantra
on the day of Mao Zedong’s death. „On the second the ceremony’s three days, Mao died. And the
third day, it rained all morning. But, in the afternoon, there appeared one of the most beautiful
rainbows I have ever seen. I was certain that it must be a good omen” we hear from the Dalai Lama’s
own mouth (Dalai Lama XIV, 1990, 222). The biographer of His Holiness, Claude B. Levenson,
reports of this ritual that it was a matter of “an extremely strict practice which demanded complete
seclusion lasting several weeks combined with a very special teaching of the Fifth Dalai
Lama” (Levenson, 1990, p. 242). Recalling the strange death of the Empress Dowager Ci Xi and her
imperial adoptive son described above, one may well ask whether this “strict practice” may not have
been a killing rite recorded in the Golden Manuscript of the “Great Fifth”. In Buddhist circles the
death of Mao Zedong is also celebrated as the victory of spiritual/magic forces over the raw violence
of materialism.
In such a context, and from a tantric/magic viewpoint, the visiting of Deng Xiaoping by Gyalo
Thondup, one of the Dalai Lama’s brothers and himself a tulku, to may also have a momentous
significance. Thondup negotiated with the Chinese party head over the question of Tibet. Deng died a
few days after this meeting, on February 12, 1997 (Playboy [German edition], March 1998, p. 44).
Mandala politics
In contrast, the Fourteenth Dalai constantly and quite publicly conducts a magic practice which is less
spectacular, but from a tantric point of view just as significant as the killing of a political opponent —
it is just that this is not recognized as a act of magic. We are talking about the construction of
mandalas, especially the Kalachakra sand mandala.
We have already reported in detail on the homologies between a tantric mandala, the body of a yogi,
the social environment, and the universe. Consistently thought through, this equivalence means that
the construction of a mandala must be regarded as a magic political act. Through a magic diagram, a
tantra master can “energetically” occupy and lay claim to the location of its construction and the
corresponding environs. People within range of the power of such a magic architectural construction
are influenced by the mandala’s energy and their consciousness is manipulated by it.
The Kalachakra sand mandala thus serves not only to initiate adepts but also likewise as a magic title
of possession, with which control over a particular territory can be legitimated. Accordingly, the
magic power of the diagram gives its constructors the chance to symbolically conquer new territories.
One builds a magic circle (a mandala) and “anchors” it in the region to be claimed. Then one
summonses the gods and supplicates them to take up residence in the “mandala palace”. (The mandala
is so to speak “energized” with divine forces.) After a particular territory has been occupied by a
mandala (or cosmogram), it is automatically transformed into a sacred center of Buddhist cosmology.
[4] Every construction of a mandala also implies — if one takes it seriously — the magic subjugation
of the inhabitants of the region in which the “magic circle” is constructed.
In the case of the Kalachakra sand mandala the places in which it has been built are transformed into
domains under the control of the Tibetan time gods. Accordingly, from a tantric viewpoint, the
Kalachakra mandala constructed at great expense in New York in 1991 would be a cosmological