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

Shakyamuni’s mother. Her son had descended to earth because he wished to tear aside the veil of
illusion and to teach of the true reality behind the network of the phenomenal, because he had
experienced life and the spirit as forming an incompatible dualism and was convinced that this
contradiction could only be healed through the omnipotence of the spirit and the destruction of life.
Completely imprisoned within the mythical and philosophical traditions of his time, he sees life,
deceptive and sumptuous and behind which Death lurks grinning, as a woman. For him too — as for
the androcentric system of religion he found himself within — woman was the dark symbol of
transience; from this it follows that he who aspires to eternity must at least symbolically “destroy” the
world-woman. That the historical Buddha was spared the conscious execution of this “destructive act”
by the natural death of his mother makes no change to the fundamental statement: only through the
destruction of maya (illusion) can enlightenment be achieved!
Again and again, this overcoming of the feminine principle set off by the early passing of his mother
accompanies the historical Buddha on his path to salvation. He experiences both marriage and its
polar opposite, sexual dissolution, as two significant barriers blocking his spiritual development that
he must surmount. Shakyamuni thus without scruple abandons his family, his wife Yasodhara and his
son Rahula, and at the age of 29 becomes “homeless”. The final trigger for this radical decision to
give up his royal life was an orgiastic night in the arms of his many concubines. When he sees the
“decaying and revolting” faces of the still-sleeping women the next morning, he turns his back on his
palace forever. But even once he has found enlightenment he does not return to his own or re-enter
the pulsating flow of life. In contrast, he is able to convince Yasodhara and Rahula of the correctness
of his ascetic teachings, which he himself describes as a middle way between abstinence and joie de
vivre. Wife and son follow his example, leave house and home, and join the sangha, the Buddhist
mendicant order.
The equation of the female with evil, familiar from all patriarchal cultures, was also an unavoidable
fact for the historical Buddha. In a famous key dramatic scene, the “daughters of Mara” try to tempt
him with all manner of ingenious fleshly lures. Woman and her erotic love — the anecdote would
teach us — prevent spiritual fulfillment. Archetypally, Mara corresponds to the devil incarnate of
Euro-Christian mythology, and his female offspring are lecherous witches. But Shakyamuni remained
deaf to their obscene talk and was not impressed by their lascivious gestures. He pretended to see
through the beauty of the devil’s daughters as flimsy appearance by roaring at them like a lion, “This
[your] body is a swamp of garbage, an infectious heap of impurities. How can anybody take pleasure
in such wandering latrines?” (quoted by Faure, 1994, p. 29).
During his lifetime, the historical Buddha was plagued by a chronic misogyny; of this, in the face of
numerous documents, there can not be slightest doubt. His woman-scorning sayings are disrespectful,
caustic and wounding. “One would sooner chat with demons and murderers with drawn swords,
sooner touch poisonous snakes even when their bite is deadly, than chat with a woman alone” (quoted
by Bellinger, 1993, p. 246), he preached to his disciples, or even more aggressively, “It were better,
simpleton, that your sex enter the mouth of a poisonous snake than that it enter a woman. It were
better, simpleton, that your sex enter an oven than that it enter a woman” (quoted by Faure, 1994, p.
72). Enlightenment and intimate contact with a woman were not compatible for the Buddha. “But the
danger of the shark, ye monks, is a characteristic of woman”, he warned his followers (quoted by
Hermann-Pfand, 1992, p. 51). At another point, with abhorrence he composed the following:
Those are not wise