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

never eventuated.
Bolshevik Buddhism
One would think that Dorjiev had a compassionate heart for the tragic fate of the Tsarist family. At
least, Nicholas II had supported him and the Thirteenth Dalai Lama had even declared the Russian
heir to the throne to be a Bodhisattva because a number of attempts to give him a Christian baptism
mysteriously failed. At Dorjiev’s behest, pictures of the Romanovs adorned the Buddhist temple in St.
Petersburg.
Hence, it is extremely surprising that the Buriat greeted the Russian October Revolution and the
seizure of power by the Bolsheviks with great emotion. What stood behind this about-face, a change
of attitude or understandable opportunism? More likely the former, then at the outset of the twenties
Dorjiev, along with many famous Russian orientalists, was convinced that Communism and
Buddhism were compatible. He publicly proclaimed that the teaching of Shakyamuni was an
“atheistic religion” and that it would be wrong to describe it as “unscientific”. Men in his immediate
neighborhood even went so far as to celebrate the historical Buddha as the original founder of
Communism and to glorify Lenin as an incarnation of the Enlightened One. There are reliable rumors
that Dorjiev and Lenin had met.
Initially the Bolsheviks appreciated such currying of favor and made use of it to win Buddhist
Russians over to their ideas. Already in 1919, the second year of the Revolution, an exhibition of
Buddhist art was permitted and encouraged amidst extreme social turmoil. The teachings of
Shakyamuni lived through a golden era, lectures about the Sutras were held, numerous Buddhist
books were published, contacts were established with Mongolian and Tibetan scholars. Even the ideas
of pan-Mongolism were reawakened and people began to dream of blood-filled scenes. In the same
year, in his famous poem of hate Die Skythen [The Scythians], Alexander Block prophesied the fall of
Europe through the combined assault of the Russians and the Mongolians. In it we can read that
We shall see through the slits of our eyes
How the Huns fight over your flesh,
How your cities collapse
And your horses graze between the ruins.
(Block, n.d., p. 249)
Even the Soviet Union’s highest-ranking cultural official of the time, Anatoli Vassilievich
Lunacharski, praised Asia as a pure source of inexhaustible reserves of strength: “We need the
Revolution to toss aside the power of the bourgeoisie and the power of rationality at the same time so
as to regain the great power of elementary life, so as to dissolve the world in the real music of intense
being. We respect and honor Asia as an area which until now draws its life energy from exactly these
right sources and which is not poisoned by European reason” (Trotzkij, 1968, p. 55).
Yet the Buddhist, pan-Asian El Dorado of Leningrad transformed itself in 1929 into a hell, as the
Stalinist secret service began with a campaign to eradicate all religious currents. Some years later
Dorjiev was arrested as a counterrevolutionary and then put on trial for treason and terrorism. On
January 29, 1938 the “friend of the Dalai Lama” died in a prison hospital.
The Kalachakra temple in St. Petersburg