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

dawning of a new, bold undertaking, through which a better world would arise: it was”, the author
says, “a kind of cultic action” which he “... completed with an almost ritual necessity on the eve of the
'Cultural Revolution'" (Bauer, 1989, p. 566).
One of the most popular images of this period was of Mao as the “Great Helmsman” who unerringly
steered the masses through the waves of the revolutionary ocean. With printruns in the billions (!),
poems such as the following were distributed among the people:
Traveling upon the high seas we trust in the helmsman
As the ten thousand creatures in growing trust the sun.
If rain and dew moisten them, the sprouts become strong.
So we trust, when we push on with the revolution,
in the thoughts of Mao Zedong.
Fish cannot live away from water,
Melons do not grow outside their bed.
The revolutionary masses cannot stay apart
From the Communist Party.
The thoughts of Mao Zedong are their never-setting sun.
(quoted by Bauer, 1989, p. 567)
In this song we encounter the second symbol of power in the Mao cult alongside water: the “red sun”
or the “great eastern sun”, a metaphor which — as we have already reported — later reemerges in
connection with the Tibetan “Shambhala warrior”, Chögyam Trungpa. „Long life to Chairman Mao,
our supreme commander and the most reddest red sun in our hearts”, sang the cultural revolutionaries
(Avedon, 1985, p. 349). The “thoughts of Mao Zedong” were also “equated with a red sun that rose
over a red age as it were, a veneration that found expression in countless likenesses of Mao’s features
surrounded by red rays” (Bauer, 1989, p. 568). In this heliolatry, the Sinologist Wolfgang Bauer sees
a religious influence that originated not in China but in the western Asian religions of light like
Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism that entered the Middle Kingdom during the Tang period and had
become connected with Buddhist ideas there (Bauer, 1989, p. 567). Indeed, the same origin is
ascribed to the Kalachakra Tantra by several scholars.