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

as part of the official school curriculum. For a whole year, cultural policy was conducted under the
motto “N. K. Roerich — A cultural world citizen”, and she also organized several overseas
exhibitions including works by her spiritual model as well.
Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife also supported numerous Roerich initiatives. In Russia, the
renaissance of the visionary painter was heralded for years in advance in elaborate symposia and
exhibitions, in order to then fully blossom in the post-Communist era. In Alma Ata in October 1992, a
major ecumenical event was organized by the international Roerich groups under the patronage of the
president of Kazakhstan, at the geographical gateway, so to speak, behind which the land of
Shambhala is widely believed to have once lain. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama hesitated as to whether
he ought to visit the Congress before deciding for scheduling reasons to send a telegram of greeting
and a high-ranking representative.
The “Shambhala warrior” Chögyam Trungpa
In 1975 the Tibetan, Chögyam Trungpa (1940–1987), gathered several of his western pupils around
himself and began to initiate them into a special spiritual discipline which he referred to as
“Shambhala Training”. As a thirteen-month-old infant the Rinpoche from the Tibetan province of
Kham was recognized as the tenth reincarnation of the Trungpa and accepted into the Kagyupa order.
In 1959 he had to flee from the Chinese. In 1963 he traveled to England and studied western
philosophy and comparative religion at Oxford. Like no other Tibetan lama of his time, he understood
how to make his own contribution to western civilization and culture. As a brilliant rhetorician, poet,
and exotic free spirit he soon found numerous enthusiastic listeners and followers. In 1967 he founded
the first European tantric monastery in Scotland. He gave it the name and the ground-plan of Samye
Ling — in remembrance of the inaugural Tibetan shrine of the same name that Padmasambhava
erected at the end of the 8th century despite resistance from countless demons.
In the opinion of Trungpa’s followers the demonic resistance was enormous in Scotland too: In 1969
the young lama was the victim of a serious car accident which left him with a permanent limp. There
is an ambiguous anecdote about this unfortunate event. Trungpa had reached a fork in the road in his
car — to the right the road led in the direction of his monastery, the road to the left to the house in
which his future wife lived. But he continued to drive straight ahead, plowing right into a shop selling
magic and joke articles. Nevertheless, his meteoric rise had begun. In 1970 he went to the United
States.
Trungpa’s charming and initially anarchic manner, his humor and loyalty, his lack of respect and his
laugh magnetically attracted many young people from the sixties generation. They believed that here
the sweet but dangerous mixture of the exotic, social critique, free love, mind-expanding drugs,
spirituality, political activism and self-discovery, which they had tasted in the revolutionary years of
their youth, could be rediscovered. Trungpa’s friendship with the radical beatnik poet Allan Ginsberg
and other well-known American poets further enhanced his image as a “wild boy” from the roof of
world. Even the first monastery he founded, Samye Ling, was renowned for the permissive “spiritual”
parties which were held there and for the liberal sex and drug consumption.
But such excesses are only one side of things. Via the tantric law of inversion Trungpa intended to
ultimately transform all this abandon (his own and that of his pupils) into discipline, goodness, and
enlightened consciousness. The success of the guru was boundless. Many thousands cam to him as
pilgrims. All over America and Europe spiritual centers (dharmadhatus) were created. The Naropa