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

a previously unseen size is worshipped throughout all of Tibet . It shows him in full armor and
flanked by his two chief wives. According to legend, the Chinese woman, Wen Cheng, and the
Nepalese, Bhrikuti, were embodiments of the white and the green Tara. Both are supposed to have
brought Buddhism to the “Land of Snows”. [1]
History confirms that the imperial princess, Wen Cheng, was accompanied by cultural goods from
China that revolutionized the whole of Tibetan community life. The cultivation of cereals and fruits,
irrigation, metallurgy, calendrics, a school system, weights and measures, manners and clothing —
with great open-mindedness the king allowed these and similar blandishments of civilization to be
imported from the “Middle Kingdom”. Young men from the Tibetan nobility were sent to study in
China and India. Songtsen Gampo also made cultural loans from the other neighboring states of the
highlands.
These Chinese acts of peace and cultural creativity were, however, preceded on the Tibetan side by a
most aggressive and imperialist policy of conquest. The king was said to have commanded an army of
200,000 men. The art of war practiced by this incarnation of the “compassionate” Bodhisattva,
Avalokiteshvara, was considered extremely barbaric and the “red faces”, as the Tibetans were called,
spread fear and horror through all of Central Asia. The size to which Songtsen Gampo was able to
expand his empire corresponds roughly to that of the territory currently claimed by the Tibetans in
exile as their area of control.
Since that time the intensive exchange between the two countries has never dried up. Nearly all the
regents of the Manchu dynasty (1644–1912) right up to the Empress Dowager Ci Xi felt bound to
Lamaism on the basis of their Mongolian origins, although they publicly espoused ideas that were
mostly Confucian. Their belief led them to have magnificent Lamaist temples built in Beijing. There
have been a total of 28 significant Lama shrines built in the imperial city since the 18th century.
Beyond the Great Wall, in the Manchurian — Mongolian border region, the imperial families erected
their summer palace. They had an imposing Buddhist monastery built in the immediate vicinity and
called it the “Potala” just like the seat of the Dalai Lama. In her biography, the imperial princess, The
Ling, reports that tantric rituals were still being held in the Forbidden City at the start of the twentieth
century (quoted by Klieger, 1991, p. 55). [2]
If a Dalai Lama journeyed to China then this was always conducted with great pomp. There was
constant and debilitating squabbling about etiquette, the symbolic yardstick for the rank of the rulers
meeting one another. Who first greeted whom, who was to sit where, with what title was one
addressed — such questions were far more important than discussions about borders. They reflect the
most subtle shadings of the relative positions within a complete cosmological scheme. As the “Great
Fifth” entered Beijing in 1652, he was indeed received like a regnant prince, since the ruling Manchu
Emperor, Shun Chi, was much drawn to the Buddhist doctrine. In farewelling the hierarch he
showered him with valuable gifts and honored him as the “self-creating Buddha and head of the
valuable doctrine and community, Vajradhara Dalai Lama” (Schulemann, 1958, p. 247), but in secret
he played him off against the Panchen Lama.
The cosmological chess game went on for centuries without clarity ever being achieved, and hence for
both countries the majority of state political questions remained unanswered. For example, Lhasa was
obliged to send gifts to Beijing every year. This was naturally regarded by the Chinese as a kind of
tribute which demonstrated the dependence of the Land of Snows. But since these gifts were