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

the atavistic Kalachakra doctrine (the textbook for his tantric conquest of the world) as the paradigm
for the new millennium.
The issue with such outwardly harmless conclusions by the Kundun ("The Kalachakra Tantra already
knew about particle physics”) is that they are thus part of a sublime power strategy on a spiritual
level, not necessarily whether or not they are true. (We recall once more Kuhn’s thesis that a
paradigm need not be rationally proven, but rather solely that it must have the power to prevail over
its opponents).
And the Dalai Lama has success with his statements! It surprises ones afresh every time with what
self-assurance he and his lamas intervene in the current crisis in western thought with their
epistemological models and ethical (Mahayana) principles and know how to sell all this as originality.
In this way the great Tibetan scholars of past centuries are evaluated by the Dalai Lama’s American
“mouthpiece”, Robert Thurman, as more important and wide-reaching than their European
“colleagues”. They were “Hero Scientists: they have been the quintessential scientists of that non
materialistic civilization [of Tibet]" (quoted by Lopez, 1998, p. 81). As “psychonauts”, in contrast to
the western “astronauts”, they conquered inner space (quoted by Lopez, 1998, p. 81). But the “guiding
lights” of modern European philosophy like Hume and Kant, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, Hegel and
Heidegger — Thurman goes on to speculate — will prove in a later age to have been the line holders
and emanations of the Bodhisattva of science, Manjushri (Lopez 1998, p. 264). Ex oriente lux is now
also true for the science of the occident.
In this, it is all too often overlooked from a western side that alongside the dominant materialist and
mechanistic world view (of Newton and Descartes) there is an accompanying and unbroken
metaphysical tradition in Europe which has been constantly further developed, as in German Idealism
with all its variations. The classic European question of whether our world consists of mind and
subjectivity rather than of matter and extended bodies has today been skillfully linked by Easternoriented
philosophers to the question of whether the world conforms to the Buddhist epistemological
paradigm or not.
The paradigmatic power struggle of the lamas is not visible from the outside but is rather disguised as
interdisciplinary dialog, as in the annual “Mind and Life” symposia, in which the Dalai Lama
participates with well-known western scientists. But is this really a matter of, as is constantly claimed,
a “fruitful conversation” between Buddhism and contemporary science? Can Tibetan culture really, as
is claimed in the Tibetan Review, offer answers to the questions of “western epistemologists,
neurologists, physicists, psychoanalysts and other scientists”? (Tibetan Review, August 1990, p. 10).
We are prepared to undeservedly claim that a “rational” and “honest” discourse between the two
cultures does not nor ever has taken place, since in such encounters the magic, the sexual magic
practices, the mythology (of the gods), the history, the cosmology, and the political “theology” of
Buddhist Tantrism remain completely omitted as topics. But together they all constitute the reality of
Tibetan culture, far more than the epistemological theories of Yogachara or the Madhyamika
philosophy, or the constant professions of love of Mahayana Buddhism do. That which awaits
humanity if it were to adopt the paradigm of Vajrayana, would be the gods and demons of the Tibetan
pantheon and eschatology and cosmogony laid out in the Kalachakra Tantra and the Shambhala myth.
Buddhist cosmogony and the postmodern world view