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

The Panchen Lama, Mao Zedong, the Dalai Lama
Before he had to flee, the young Dalai Lama had a number of meetings with the “Great Chairman”
and was very impressed by him. As he shook Mao Zedong by the hand for the first time, the Kundun
in his own words felt he was “in the presence of a strong magnetic force” (Craig, 1997, p. 178). Mao
too felt the need to make a metaphysical assessment of the god-king: “The Dalai Lama is a god, not a
man”, he said and then qualified this by adding, “In any case he is seen that way by the majority of
the Tibetan population” (Tibetan Review, January 1995, p. 10). Mao chatted with the god-king about
religion and politics a number of times and is supposed to have expressed varying and contradictory
opinions during these conversations. On one occasion, religion was for him “opium for the people” in
the classic Marxist sense, on another he saw in the historical Buddha a precursor of the idea of
communism and declared the goddess Tara to be a “good woman”.
The twenty-year-old hierarch from Tibet looked up to the fatherly revolutionary from China with
admiration and even nurtured the wish to become a member of the Communist Party. He fell, as Mary
Craig puts it, under the spell of the red Emperor (Craig, 1997, p. 178). “I have heard chairman Mao
talk on different matters”, the Kundun enthused in 1955, “and I received instructions from him. I have
come to the firm conclusion that the brilliant prospects for the Chinese people as a whole are also the
prospects for us Tibetan people; the path of our entire country is our path and no other” (Grunfeld,
1996, p. 142)
Mao Zedong, who at that time was pursuing a gradualist politics, saw in the young Kundun a
powerful instrument through which to familiarize the feudal and religious elites of the Land of Snows
with his multi-ethnic communist state. In a 17-point program he had conceded the “ national regional
autonomy [of Tibet] under the leadership of the Central People's Government”, and assured that the
“existing political system”, especially the “status, functions and powers of the Dalai Lama”, would
remain untouched (Goldstein, 1997, p. 47).
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
After the flight of the Dalai Lama, the 17-point program was worthless and the gradualist politics of