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

announced emotionally. (www.tibet.com/Eco/dleco4.html)
Since the late eighties it has become normal at international environmental meetings all around the
world to describe the Tibet of old as an ecological paradise, where wild gazelles and “snow lions” eat
from the monks’ hands, as the Dalai Lama’s brother (Thubten Jigme Norbu) put it at a Tibet
conference in Bonn (in 1996). For thousands of years, it says in edifying writings, the Tibetans have
revered plants and animals as their equals. “Historical” idylls such as the following are taken literally
by innocently trusting Westerners: „The Tibetan traditional heritage, which is known to be over three
thousand years old[!], can be distinguished as one of [the] foremost traditions of the world in which
… humankind and its natural environment have persistently remained in perfect harmony” (Huber,
2001, p. 360).
What glowed in the past should also shine in the future. Accordingly many western followers of the
Kundun imagine how the once flourishing garden will bloom again after his return to the Land of
Snows. His Holiness is also generously accommodating towards this image of desire and promises to
found the first ecological state on earth in a “liberated” Tibet — for many “Greens” a glimmer of
hope in a world that constantly neglects its environmental responsibilities.
Today, among many committed members of the international “ecological scene”, being green,
environmentally friendly, nature-loving, vegetarian, and Tibetan Buddhist, are all but identical. But is
there any truth in such an equivalence? Was the Tibet of old really an “earthly garden of paradise”? Is
the essence of Tantric Buddhism pro-nature and animal-loving?
Tibetan Buddhism’s hostility towards nature
No complicated research is required to establish that the inhabitants of the Tibet of old, like all
highlands peoples, had an ambivalent relationship with nature, in which fear and horror in the face of
constant catastrophes (turns in the weather, cold, famines, accidents, illnesses) predominated. Nature,
which was (and often still is) in fact experienced animistically as being inhabited by spirits, was only
rarely a friend and partner; instead, most of the time it was a malevolent and destructive force, in
many instances a terrifying demoness. We have presented some of these anti-human nature spirits in
our chapter on Anarchy and Buddhism. Using violence, trickery, and magic they have to be
compelled, tamed, and not unrarely killed.
In a comprehensive study (Civilized Shamans), the Tibet researcher Geoffrey Samuel has
demonstrated that the violent subjugation of a wild nature is a drama constantly repeated within the
Tibetan monastic civilization: beginning with the nailing down of the Tibetan primeval earth mother,
Srinmo, by King Songtsen Gampo so as to erect the central shrines of the Land of Snows over her
wounds, the construction of every Lamaist temple (no matter where in the world) was and is prefaced
by a ritual that refreshes the dreadful stigmatization of the “earth mother”. Srinmo is undoubtedly the
(Tibetan) emanation of “Mother Earth” or “Mother Nature” whom the Dalai Lama so emotionally
pleads to rescue at international ecology congresses ("the earth acts like a mother to all”). It was the
Kundun himself — if we take his doctrine of incarnation literally — who in the form of Songtsen
Gampo many centuries ago nailed down “Mother Earth” (Srinmo). He himself laid the bloody
foundations (the maltreated body of Srinmo) upon which his clerical and andocentric system rests. It
is he himself who repeats this aggressive “taming act” at every public performance of the Kalachakra
ritual: before a sand mandala is created, the local nature spirits (some interpreters say the earth mother
Srinmo) are nailed to the ground with phurbas (ritual daggers).