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

Newtonian) paradigm deliver an updated and more convincing scientific proof or a rational
explanation, rather, it is sufficient for the new world view to appear better in total than the old one.
To put it bluntly, this means that it is the most powerful and not necessarily the most reasonable
paradigm that after its cultural establishment becomes the best and is thus accepted as the basis of a
new culture.
Hence every paradigm change is always preceded by a deadly power struggle between various world
views. Deadly because once established, the victorious paradigm completely disables its opponents, i.
e., denies them any paradigmatic (or reality-explaining) significance. Ptolemy’s cosmological
paradigm ("the sun rotates around the earth”) no longer has, after Copernicus ("the earth orbits the
sun”), any reality-generating meaning. Thus, in the Copernican era the Ptolemaic views are at best
considered to still be imaginary truths but are no longer capable of explaining reality. To take another
example — for a Tibetan lama, what a positivist scientist refers to as reality is purely illusory
(samsara), whilst the other way around, the religious world of the lama is a fantastic, if not outright
pathological illusion for the scientist.
The crisis of western modernity (the rational age) and the occidental discussions about a paradigm
shift primarily have nothing to do with Buddhism, they are a cultural event that arose at the beginning
of the twentieth century in scientific circles in Europe and North America and a result of the critical
self-reflection of western science itself. It was primarily prominent representatives from nuclear
physics who were involved in this process. (We shall return to this point shortly.) Atavistic religious
systems with their questionable wisdoms are now pouring into the “empty” and “paradigmless” space
created by the self-doubt and the “loss of meaning “ of the modern western age, so as to offer
themselves as new paradigms and prevail. In recent decades they have been offering their dogmas
(which were abandoned during the Enlightenment or “age of reason”) with an unprecedented carefree
freshness and freedom, albeit often in a new, contemporary packaging.
The Fourteenth Dalai Lama is just one of many (coming from the East) who present themselves and
their spiritual meaning to the West as its savior in great need, but he is particularly adroit at this. Of
course, neither the sexual magic doctrines of the Kalachakra Tantra nor the military ideology of the
Shambhala myth are to be found in his public teachings (about the new paradigm), just the
epistemological discourse of the two most important Buddhist philosophical schools (Madhyamika
and Yogachara) and the compassionate, touching ethic of Mahayana Buddhism.
One must, however, admit without reservation that the Buddhist epistemological doctrine makes its
entry into the western paradigm discussion especially easy. No matter which school, they all assume
that an object is only manifest with the perception of the object. Objectivity (reality) and subjective
perception are thus inseparable, they are in the final instance identical. This radical subjectivism
necessarily leads to the philosophical premise that all appearances in the exterior world have no
“inherent existence” but are either produced by an awareness (in the Yogachara school) or have to be
described as “empty” (as in the Madhyamika school).
We are dealing here with two epistemological schools of opinion which are also not unknown in the
West. The Buddhist Madhyamika philosophy, which assumes the “emptiness” (shunyata) of all being,
could thus win for itself a substantial voice in the Euro-American philosophical debate. For example,
the thesis of the modern logician, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), that all talk of “God” and the
“emptiness” is nothing more than “word play”, has been compared with the radical statement of the