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

found in the Bavarian State Library in Munich. Important parts of the Sri Kalachakra have been
translated into English by John Roland Newman, along with a famous commentary on these parts by
Pundarika known as the Vimalaphraba. (John Ronald Newman - The outer wheel of time: Vajrayana
buddhist cosmology in the Kalacakra Tantra – Vimalaprabhā - nāmamūlatantrānusāriņīdvādaśasāhasrikālagukālacakratantrarājaţīkā
) Madison 1987)
The Sri Kalachakra (Laghukalachakratantra) is supposed to be the abridgement of a far more
comprehensive original text by the name of Sekoddesha. The complete text has been lost — but some
important passages from it have been preserved and have been commented upon by the renowned
scholar Naropa (10th century). An Italian translation of the commentary by Ranieri Gnoli and
Giacomella Orofino is available. Further to this, we have studied every other work on the Kalachakra
Tantra which we have been able to find in a Western language. We were thuis in a position to be able
to adequately reconstruct the contents of the “Time Tantra” from the numerous translated
commentaries and sources for a cultural historical (and not a philological) assessment of the tantra.
This extensive literature is listed at the end of the book. In order to make the intentions and methods
of this religious system comprehensible for a Western audience, a comparision with other tantras and
with parallels in European culture is of greater importance than a meticulous linguistic knowledge of
every line in the Sanskrit or Tibetan original.
In the interests of readability, we have transliterated Tibetan and Sanskrit names without diacritical
marks and in this have primarily oriented ourselves to Anglo-Saxon usages.
Footnotes:
[1] In the opinion of the Tibet researcher, Peter Bishop, the head of the Lamaist “church” satisfies a
“reawakened appreciation of the Divine Father” for many people from the West (Bishop 1993, p. 130). For
Bishop, His Holiness stands out as a fatherly savior figure against the insecurities and fears produced by modern
society, against the criticisms levelled at monotheistic religions, and against the rubble of the decline of the
European system of values.
[2] Through this contradictory effect the Dalai Lama is able to strengthen his superhuman stature with the most
banal of words and deeds. Many of His Holiness’s Western visitors, for example, are amazed after an audience
that a “god-king” constantly rubs his nose and scratches his head “like an ape”. Yet, writes the Tibet researcher
Christiaan Klieger, “such expressions of the body natural do not detract from the status of the Dalai Lama – far
from it, as it adds to his personal charisma. It maintains that incongruous image of a divine form in a human
body” (Klieger 1991, p 79).
[3] The Kalachakra initiations are the most significant rituals which the Dalai Lama conducts, partly in public
and in part in secret. By now the public events take place in the presence of hundreds of thousands. Analyses
and interpretations of the Kalachakra initiations lie at the center of the current study.
[4] Up until 1996 the West needed to be divided into two factions — with the eloquent advocates of Tibetan
Buddhism on the one hand, and those who were completely ignorant of the issue and remained silent on the
other. In contrast, modern or “postmodern” cultural criticisms of the Buddhist teachings and critical
examinations of the Tibetan clergy and the Tibetan state structure were extremely rare (completely the opposite
of the case of the literature which addresses the Pope and the Catholic Church). Noncommitted and unfalsified
analyses and interpretations of Buddhist or Tibetan history, in brief open and truth-seeking confrontations with
the shady side of the “true faith” and its history, have to be sought out like needles in a haystack of ideological
glorifications and deliberately constructed myths of history. For this reason those who attempted to discover and
reveal the hidden background have had to battle to swim against a massive current of resistance based on preformed
opinions and deliberate manipulation. This situation has changed in the period since 1996.
[5] The fact that Nietzsche’s aphorism about the shadow is number 108 offers numerolgists fertile grounds for
occult speculation, as 108 is one of the most significant holy numbers in Tibetan Buddhism. Given the status of