[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]

BUDDHA: Acutal Buddhist News


Delete if disinterested...

Anyone watching Tibet over the last months is probably aware that the Dalai 
Lama has recently banned the worship of Shugden from his immediate followers 
and act only noteworthy because a British "Buddhist" group have hopped up and 
down and condemned him as a Chinese collaborator for doing so.

What follows is a reprint from the British Independent. Read an alternate view:

- ------------------------   World Tibet Network News   ----------------------
   Subscriptions to: listserv@vm1.mcgill.ca
                     - to join, message should be: SUB WTN-L [your name]
   WTN News is archived at http://www.omtanken.se/sve_tib/wtnn.htm

Issue ID: 96/07/17  22:00 GMT  
[...]
2. The Battle of the Buddhists

- -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Dalai Lama arrives in Britain today as a sect based in Yorkshire
criticises him for persecuting them and assisting the Chinese oppressors.
Can they possibly be right?

The Independent
15 July 1996
By Andrew Brown

Ruth Lister drove her shining 7-series BMW with aplomb down one of the worst
roads I have ever seen. It was so badly potholed and steep that we might have
been in Tibet. And so, in a sense, we were. For though physically we were in
the small West Yorkshire town of Hebden Bridge, making light conversation
about the iniquities of the council roads department, we had come to discuss
the oracles and demons of ancient Tibet. Ruth and her husband Ron are central
figures in an unprecedented attack on the Dalai Lama and are among the
organisers of demonstrations against him planned for his visit to this
country, which begins today and culminates in an appearance at the Alexandra
Palace in north London on Saturday. They even have their own alternative
spiritual leader.

I had come to talk to them about the Shugden Supporters Community, the
shadowy group they founded which has been bombarding the English media and
the worldwide Internet with accusations that the Dalai Lama is "persecuting
his own people" by discouraging or even forbidding the worship of a deity
named Dorje Shugden - originally the ghost of a disgruntled 17th-century
abbot - in the monasteries under his control. Such worship is causing
disharmony among Tibet's protector deities, the Dalai Lama says - he is a
harmful spirit whose veneration may even be assisting the Chinese oppressors.

No one had heard of the Shugden Supporters, or the still more mysterious
Freedom Foundation, until the spring, when they both started to issue press
releases. Ringing the number given by one of these organisations, I got
through to a Buddhist centre run by a rich, fast-growing and secretive
Buddhist sect called the NKT [New Kadampa Tradition]. It was in Hebden
Bridge, in Ruth Lister's house, that Steven Lane a plump young man in his
twenties with monkishly cropped hair, arranged to tell me the story of the
Shugden Supporters Community.

Steven Lane talked for nearly an hour, hardly drawing breath, without notes.
He had the catechetical manner you find among Scientologists or Trotskyists:
people who not only know all the answers, but all the questions, too. If the
wrong question came up, he simply steamed on and ignored it.

The view from inside the Shugden Supporters' Community was almost a
photographic negative of everything the outside world believes about Tibet
and the Dalai Lama. The worship of Dorje Shugden, Lane said, could not
possibly be taken as threatening. It was a harmless spiritual practice,
comparable to the worship of St Francis in Christianity; and four mil-lion
people followed the deity. A long and damning report on the NKT which had
appeared in the, Guardian could be explained because its author was a member
of a rival Buddhist organisation. The Dalai Lama, he said, was not a
spiritual leader; not even a member of the Gelugpa tradition [the dominant
Buddhist tradition in Tibet]. In fact, the Dalai Lama was not really
struggling for Tibetan freedom at all, and his actions against Shugden were
motivated by political desires. It was as if Lane were asserting that Nelson
Mandela was a secret agent of apartheid with no moral stature at all.

It was a powerful indictment, flawed only by the fact that almost everything
I was told in the Lister's house was untrue. The figure of four million
worshippers for Dorje Shugden is preposterous. There are only about six
million Tibetans in the world at most. of whom less than half are members of
the Gelugpa order (Steven Lane estimated 30  per cent), where the veneration
of Shugden is concentrated. Even among the Gelugpa, only monks can be
initiated into the cult of Shugden, and only a minority of those actually
are. Most of the experts I talked to thought that about 100,000 people it
most could be affected by the Dalai Lama's ban.

The Dalai Lama is venerated as a spiritual as well as a political leader by
all Tibetans, especially those in the Gelugpa order, to which he belongs.
Only within the NKT centres are his photographs not displayed: in fact they
arc banned, as is all mention of his name. As for not struggling for Tibetan
freedom, was awarded a Nobel prize for his efforts, and caused a major
diplomatic reaction between Germany and China earlier this summer after the
German parliament passed a resolution in his honour.

Shugden himself is not necessarily the compassionate figure portrayed by the
NKT. In one rite, reprinted in a Western study, his followers are asked to
consider him "living in a palace in a lake of boiling blood, wearing a
necklace of skulls and human body parts, in a terrible stench of human
flesh". Not quite the home life of St Francis of Assisi. Such shamanistic
beings do have a role in Tibetan Buddhism: they are considered to have been
tamed and bound by the exceptional sanctity of the greatest lamas. But they
are considered by most students to represent marginal aspects of Tibetan
culture, hold-overs from shamanism rather than central to the Buddhist
message.

To be initiated into the cult of Shugden involves a contractual relationship
with this terrifying deity: the initiate promises to meditate on him and pray
to him every day for the rest of his life. One can see why Tibetans could be
reluctant to offend Shugden; and in the Dalai Lama's speeches to Tibetans
against the practice, he has suggested prayers to protect them from the
spirit's vengeance. But why should English Buddhists in West Yorkshire be
getting-so worked up?

Let us start with the allegiances of the people involved. Ron Lister and his
wife claimed to not to be members of the NKT, but merely "concerned
Buddhists". However, when I went to use the telephone in the hall, I noticed
that the first number on their speed dial was for "Geshe-la", as the devotees
of Geshe Kelsang Gyatso call their guru; later I discovered that Ron and Ruth
Lister had edited the first of Geshe Kelsang's books to be published in
English, and Geshe Kelsang himself told me that he had accompanied Ron Lister
on his "fact-finding" tour round India to find evidence of the Dalai Lama's
alleged persecutions.

The more one digs into this story, the more every-thing comes back to the NKT
a sect founded by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso in the late 1970s after he gained
control of the Buddhist centre at Coniston Priory in Cumbria from a rival
Buddhist organisation., Since then, the NKT has been enormously successful.
Unlike most Buddhist organisations. it actively makes converts and solicits
donations. Steven Lane - an NKT member for eight years - said: "I have met
Geshe Kelsang on numerous occasions. He never orders. Sometimes he suggests.
Sometimes he helps you to see different options."

This is a curious perspective. All the other evidence suggests an attitude of
slavish devotion on the part of his followers. The foreword to one of his
recent books says: "From the depths of our hearts we thank the author after
his inconceivable kindness in composing this book. Throughout the preparation
of this book, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso has demonstrated compassion, wisdom, and
inexhaustible patience there can be no greater proof of the immense value of
the Boddhisattva's way of life than the living example of such a realised
Master."

Within the NKT Geshe Kelsang is now regarded as the "third Buddha", who will
bring Buddhism to the Western world. When I asked the guru himself about
this, he replied: "Some people believe I am the third Buddha, but this is
people's choice. From me, never. I have never pretended I am special."

The chance to meet him came unexpectedly. The day after I had returned from
Hebden Bridge, two saffron-clad, shaven-headed NKT monks appeared in the
reception of the Independent, accompanying a rather confused Tibetan devotee
of Dorje Shugden. This party had made its way round several broadsheet
newspapers to offer interviews with Geshe Kelsang.

I found him in the attic bedroom of a house in Golders Green. It was painted
entirely white, except for a sort of shrine behind him. Two English NKT
members sat on each side of me, ready to interpret, for the guru's English is
poor and his pronunciation difficult to understand.

Much of what he said to me was already entirely familiar the claim of four
million supporters; the idea that the Dalai Lama was planning to return to
China as a Communist puppet ruler; the preposterous assertion, made with
great force, that the Guardian's religious affairs correspondent (a devout
Catholic) was "working for" a rival Buddhist organisation.

I asked him something that puzzles me about this story: what business was it
of his what the Dalai Lama does in his own monasteries? The NKT clams to have
nothing to do with the Dalai Lama. It certainly doesn't recognise his
authority over its centres. Yet if the two streams of Buddhism are so
separate, why does the NKT care what the Dalai Lama does?

His reply was illuminating in its passion if not its logic. There was a sense
of sacrilege when he described the Dalai Lama's actions which made many
things clear. "The practice of Dorje Shugden came from generation to
generation," he said. "There is so much joy in the daily practice; and the
Dalai Lama suddenly says this is bad, this is harmful. The Dalai Lama is not
an ordinary being, and when he said this, everybody shocked. They experienced
mental pain."

Here he pressed one fist against his heart, in a gesture to ensure I
understood what he meant by mental pain.

"If Dalai Lama right, then up to now, this practice we have done for 20
years, everything wasted: time lost, money lost, everything lost. That is the
big issue.

And maybe it is. Within traditional Tibetan politics, these theological
disputes always have a political pay-off. Gods such as Shugden, or Nechung,
the traditional protector deity of all Tibet, make their wishes known through
trance-oracles, on which all the major decisions of state are based. In the
confused and troubled times of the 1940s, before the Chinese invasion, the
cult of Shugden was linked to narrow Gelugpa factionalism, and to a policy
that exalted the interests of Central Tibet over the cast. In arguing against
the cult, and trying to suppress it within his monasteries, the Dalai Lama is
not just making a theological point, but a political one: that the Tibetan
state he wants would not favour one form of Buddhism over another.

But the dispute over Dorjee Shugden makes no sense in terms of practical
politics in the West. It has already directed a great deal of media attention
on to the NKT and its elastic ways with truth. Some of the mud being flung at
the Dalai Lama will probably stick. The reputation of Tibetan Buddhism as a
uniquely clean and rational religion will certainly he damaged. The only
lasting winners from the now will be the Chinese, who have mounted a fresh
campaign of repression inside Tibet this spring. And Dorje Shugden himself
aching for worshippers inside is lake of boiling blood.

------- End of Forwarded Message
Little Tiny Buddha Picture Back to Buddha