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

demonstration of power which aimed to say that the city now stood under the governing authority or
at least spiritual influence of Kalachakra and Vishvamata. Since in this case it was the Fourteenth
Dalai Lama who conducted the ritual as the supreme tantra master, he would have to be regarded as
the spiritual/magic sovereign of the metropolis. Such fantastic speculations are a product of the
ancient logic of his own magic system, and are incompatible with our ideas. We are nonetheless
convinced that the laws of magic affect human reality proportional to the degree to which people
believe in them.
Further, there is no doubt that the magic diagrams evoke an exceptional fascination in some
observers. This is confirmed, for example, by Malcolm Arth, art director of an American museum in
which Tibetan monks constructed a Kalachakra sand mandala: “The average museum visitor spends
about ten seconds before a work of art, but for this exhibit, time is measured in minutes, sometime
hours. Even the youngsters, who come into the museum and run around as if it were a playground —
these same youngsters walk into this space, and something happens to them. They're
transformed” (Bryant, 1992, pp. 245-246). The American Buddhist, Barry Bryant, even talks of an
“electric kind of energy” which pervades the space in which the Kalachakra mandala is found
(Bryant, 1992, p. 247).
However, what most people from the West evaluate as a purely artistic pleasure, is experienced by the
lamas and their western followers as a numinous encounter with supernatural forces and powers
concentrated within a mandala. This idea can be extended so far that modern exhibitions of Tibetan
artworks can be conceived by their Buddhist organizers as temples and initiation paths through which
the visitors knowingly or unknowingly proceed. Mircea Eliade has described the progression through
a holy place (a temple) in ancient times as follows: “Every ritual procession is equivalent to a
progression to the center, and the entry into a temple repeats the entry into a mandala in an initiation
or the progress of the kundalini through the chakras” (Eliade, 1985, p. 253).
The major Tibet exhibition “Weisheit und Liebe” (Wisdom and Love), on view in Bonn in the
summer of 1996 as well as at a number locations around the world, was designed along precisely
these lines by Robert A. F. Thurman and Marylin M. Rhie. The conception behind this exhibition,
Thurman writes, “is symbolically significant. It ... draws its guiding principle from the mandala of the
“wheel of time” [Kalachakra], the mystic site which embodies the perfect history and cosmos of the
Buddha. ... The arrangement of the individual exhibits reflects the deliberate attempt to simulate the
environment of a Tibetan temple” (Thurman and Rhie, 1996, pp. 13–14).
At the entrance one passed a Kalachakra sand mandala. The visitor then entered the various historical
phases of Indian Buddhism arranged into separate rooms, beginning with the legends from the life of
Buddha, then Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. The simulated “initiatory path” led on to Tibet
passing through the four main schools in the following order: Nyingmapa, Sakyapa, Kagyupa, and
then Gelugpa. After the “visitor/initiand” had so to speak obtained the secret teachings of the various
sects, he or she stepped into the final “hall” of the exhibition temple. This was again, like the start,
dedicated to the Kalachakra Tantra.
Through the construction of this exhibition the history of Buddhism and of Tibet was presented as a
mystery play played out over centuries. Every single epoch in the history of the Buddhist doctrine
counted as a kind of initiatory stage in the evolutionary progression of humanity which was supposed
to culminate in the establishment of a global Shambhala state. The same initiatory role was filled by