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

Act like animals
Racing toward female forms
Like hogs toward mud
……………….
Because of their ignorance
They re bewildered by women, who
Like profit seekers in the marketplace
Deceive those who come near
(quoted by D. Paul, 1985, p. 9)
Buddha’s favorite disciple, Ananda, more than once tried to put to his Teacher the explicit desire by
women for their own spiritual experience, but the Master’s answers were mostly negative. Ananda
was much confused by this refractoriness, indeed it contradicted the stated view of his Master that all
forms of life, even insects, could achieve Buddhahood. “Lord, how should we behave towards
women?”, he asked the Sublimity — “Not look at them!” — “But what if we must look at them?” —
“Not speak to them” — “But what if we must speak to them?” — “Keep wide awake!” (quoted by
Stevens, 1990, p. 45)
This disparaging attitude toward everything female is all the more astounding in that the historical
Buddha was helped by women at decisive moments along his spiritual journey: following an almost
fatal ascetic exercise his life was saved by a girl with a saucer of milk, who taught him through this
gesture that the middle way between abstinence and joie de vivre was the right path to enlightenment,
not the dead end of asceticism as preached by the Indian yogis. And again it was women, rich lay
women, who supported his religious order (sangha) with generous donations, thereby making possible
the rapid spread of his teachings.
The meditative dismemberment of woman: Hinayana Buddhism
At the center of Theravada, or Hinayana, Buddhism — in which Shakyamuni’s teachings are
preserved and only negligibly further developed following his death — stands the enlightenment of
the individual, and, connected to this, his deliberate retreat from the real world. The religious hero of
the Hinayana is the “holy man” or Arhat. Only he who has overcome his individual — and thus
inferior — ego, and, after successfully traversing a initiation path rich in exercises, achieves
Buddhahood, i.e., freedom from all illusion, may call himself an Arhat. He then enters a higher state
of consciousness, which the Buddhists call nirvana (not-being). In order to reach this final stage, a
Hinayana monk concerns himself exclusively with his inner spiritual perfection and seeks no contact
to any kind of public.
The Hinayana believers’ general fear of contact is both confirmed and extended by their fear of and
flight from the feminine. Completely in accord with the Master, for the followers of Hinayana the
profane and illusionary world (samsara) was identical with the female universe and the network of
Maya. In all her forms — from the virgin to the mother to the prostitute and the ugly crone — woman
stood in the way of the spiritual development of the monk. Upon entering the sangha (Buddhist order)
a novice had to abandon his wife and children, just as the founder of the order himself had once done.
Marriage was seen as a constant threat to the necessary celibacy. It was feared as a powerful
competitor which withheld men from the order, and which weakened it as a whole.
Taking Buddha’s Mara experience as their starting point, his successors were constantly challenged