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

of the rights of the individual to the community, and the supremacy of the state over the individual,
but also the “avoidance of confrontations”, that is, wars as well.
We must nevertheless not forget that in the course of its history China has never been free from
external ideological influences. Buddhism in its various forms, as well as Christianity and
communism are cultural imports and have at times had a decisive influence on the politics of the
country. In the 14th chapter of Part II of our study we thus posed the question of whether the Chinese
might not also be susceptible to the Shambhala myth’s global visions of power. The “Middle
Kingdom” has always had spiritually and mythically based claims to world domination. Even if it has
not tried to impose these militarily, the Chinese Emperor is nonetheless revered as a world king (a
Chakravartin). As we have demonstrated in our detailed portrait of Mao Zedong, such a claim
survived even under communism. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama is most aware of this. For a good five
years now his missionary work has been concentrated on Taiwan (Nationalist China). We have quoted
several prophecies from his own lips which foretell a decisive codetermining role for Lamaism in
shaping the Chinese future. Taiwan, which — according to all prognoses — will sooner or later
return to the mother country, can be considered the springboard from which the Tibetan monks and
the new Nationalist Chinese recruits ordained by them could infiltrate the Chinese cultural fabric.
Return to rationalism?
Why is the West so helpless when it encounters the “battle of cultures”, and why is it surprised every
time violent eruptions of fundamentalist religious systems (as in Islam for instance) occur? We
believe that the reasons for this must be of a primarily epistemological nature: Since the time of the
Enlightenment, the occidental culture has drawn a clear dividing line between the church and the
state, science and religion, technology and magic, politics and myth, art and mysticism. This division
led to the assessment of all state, scientific, technical, political, and artistic phenomena purely
according to the criteria of reason or the aesthetics. Rationalism unconditionally required that the
church, religion, magic, myth, and mysticism have no influence on the “scientific culture of the
Enlightenment”. Naïvely, it also projects such conceptions onto non-Western cultural spheres. In the
issue of Tibet, for example, the West neatly separates Tantric Buddhism and its mysteries (about
which it knows as good as nothing) from the political questions of human rights, the concept of
democracy, the national interests of the Tibetan people. But for the Dalai Lama and his system,
politics and religion have been united for centuries. For him and for Lamaism, power-political
decisions — of whatever kind — are tactical and strategic elements in the plan for world conquest
recorded in the Kalachakra Tantra and Shambhala myth.
Since rationalism does not take the power-political effectiveness of myths and religions seriously
enough, it refrains from the outset from examining the central contents of religious cults (such as the
Kalachakra Tantra for example). The mysteries of the various religious orientations have never been
more hidden and mysterious than in the Age of Reason, for the simple reason that this has never
examined them.
To be successful, however, a critical analysis and evaluation of an ancient world view must fulfill
three conditions:
1. First of all it must be able to immerse itself in the world view of the particular religion, that
is, it must be capable of perceiving the world and the universe through the eyes and filters of the
religious dogmata to be examined. Otherwise it will never learn what it is all about. In the specific