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

him, there is a Franciscan side as well and a touch of the Jesuit” (Dalai Lama XIV, 1997, pp. 16–17).
The Kundun appeared to the predominantly Catholic participants at this interreligious meeting to be
more Christian than the Christians in many points.
Richard Gere: “Jesus is very much accepted by the Tibetans, even though they don’t believe in an
ultimate creator God. I was at a very moving event that His Holiness did in England where he lectured on
Jesus at a Jesuit seminary. When he spoke the words of Jesus, all of us there who had grown up
Christians and had often heard them before could not believe their power. It was ...” Gere suddenly
chokes with emotion. For a few moments he just stares into the makeup mirror, waiting to regain his
compusere. “When someone can fill such words with the depth meaning that they are intended to have,
it’s like hearing them for the first time.” (Schell, 2000, p. 57)
Although the Dalai Lama indignantly rejects any monopolization of other religions by Buddhism, this
is not at all true of his followers. In recent times an ever-expanding esoteric literature has emerged in
which the authors “prove” that Buddhism is the original source of all religions. In particular there are
attempts to portray Christianity as a variant of the “great vehicle” (Mahayana). Christ is proclaimed
as a Bodhisattva, an emanation of Avalokiteshvara who sacrificed himself out of compassion for all
living creatures (e.g., Gruber and Kersten, 1994).
From the Tibetan point of view, the point of ecumenical meetings is not encounters between several
religious orientations. [3] That would contradict the entire tantric ritual system. Rather, they are for
the infiltration of foreign religions with the goal (like Padmasambhava) of ultimately incorporating
them within its own system. On rare occasions the methods to be employed in such a policy of
appropriation are discussed, albeit most subtly. Two conferences held in the USA in 1987 and 1992
addressed the central topic of whether the Buddhist concept of upaya ("adroit means”) could provide
the instrument “for more relaxed dealings with the issue of truth in dialog (between Christians and
Buddhists)” (Brück and Lai, 1997, p. 281) “More relaxed dealings with the issue of truth” — that can
only mean that the cultic mystery of the sexual magic rites, the warlike Shambhala ideology, and the
“criminal history” of Lamaism is either not mentioned at all at such ecumenical meetings or is
presented falsely.
An 800-page work by the two theologists Michael von Brück and Whalen Lai (Buddhismus und
Christentum [Buddhism and Christianity]) is devoted to the topic of the encounter between Buddhism
and Christianity. In it there is no mention at all of the utmost significance of Vajrayana in the
Buddhist scene, as if this school did not even exist. We can read page after page of pious and
unhurried Mahayana statements by Tibetan lamas, but there is all but nothing said of their secret
tantric philosophy. The terms Shambhala and Kalachakra Tantra are not to be found in the index,
although they form the basis for the policy on religions of the Dalai Lama whom the authors praise at
great length as the real star of the ecumenical dialog. We can present this “theologically” highbrow
book as evidence of the subtle and covert manipulation through which the “totalistic paradigm” of
Tibetan Buddhism is to be anchored in the west.
Only at one single incriminating point, which we have already quoted earlier, do the two authors let
the cat out of the bag. In it they recommend that American intellectuals who feel attracted to Chinese
Hua-yen Buddhism should instead turn to the Kundun as the only figure in a position to be able to
establish a Buddhocracy: “Yet Hua-yen is no longer a living tradition. ... That does not mean that a
totalistic paradigm could not be repeated, but it seems more sensible to seek this in the Tibetan-
Buddhist tradition, since the Tibetan Buddhists have a living memory of a real 'Buddhocracy' and a