The Tibetan Administration has instituted a nine-member Special Committee to look into allegations of religious persecution against the devotees of a particular spirit, known as Dholgyal (Dorje Shugden).
The Tibetan Administration’s basic policy on the issue of Dholgyal propitiation was spelled out in the unanimous resolution passed on 6 June 1996 by the Assembly of Tibetan People’s Deputies. The resolution stated that the government departments and their subsidiaries, as well as monastic institutions functioning under the administrative control of the Central Tibetan Administration, should be strictly forbidden from propitiating this spirit. Individual Tibetans, it said, must be informed of the demerits of propitiating this spirit, but be given freedom “to decide as they like.” The resolution, however, requested the propitiators of this spirit not to receive vajrayana teachings from His Holiness the Dalai Lama.25
Monks of the six major Geluk monasteries in the refugee community were asked to sign a statement supporting a ban on “dubious deities.” The Tibetan government-in-exile requested that the abbot of Sera monastery, a traditional center of Shugden devotion, report the names of those monks who continued to worship Shugden. The Holder of the Throne of Ganden (dGa’ Idan khri pa), the titular head of the Geluk sect, issued a remarkable statement denouncing the worship of Shugden, explaining that when he was worshipped in the past by great masters, they understood the union of the peaceful and the wrathful, something that the deluded worshippers of today cannot comprehend. He accused those monks who have criticized the Dalai Lama for his proscription of Shugden of “devoting time in framing detrimental plots and committing degrading acts, which seems no different from the act of attacking monasteries wielding swords and spears and drenching the holy robes of the Buddha with blood.”26
One of the monks who denounced the Dalai Lama’s decree was Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, a Sera monk who had established himself in England as the head of the New Kadampa Tradition. The Kadampa (bka’ gdams pa, which is traditionally etymologized as “those who take all of the Buddha’s words as instructions”) was the first Tibetan Buddhist monastic sect, founded in the eleventh century by the followers of Atiśa. Tsong kha pa is said to have called his followers the “new Kadampa,” implying a connection to this original sect, noted for its monastic purity. The name Geluk (dge lugs, “system of virtue”) came into use only after Tsong kha pa’s death. For Kelsang Gyatso to call his group the New Kadampa Tradition, therefore, is ideologically charged, implying as it does that he and his followers represent the tradition of the founder, Tsong kha pa, more authentically than the Geluk establishment and the Dalai Lama himself. Like so many other Geluk monks in the refugee community, Kelsang Gyatso is himself a devotee of Shugden, and his uncle has served as a medium for the deity in one of the Tibetan refugee communities in south India. Unlike some other Geluk teachers who may have themselves been devotees, however, Kelsang Gyatso instructed his English disciples to make the worship of the deity a central part of their practice. Thus, after the Dalai Lama increased his opposition to devotion to Shugden in 1996, the disciples of Kelsang Gyatso denounced the Dalai Lama for impinging on their religious freedom, actually picketing against him during his visit to Britain in the summer of 1996, accusing him of intolerance.
The following article by Madeline Bunting appeared in the Guardian of London on July 6, 1996, under the headline “Smear campaign sparks fears over Dalai Lama’s UK visit.”
Members of a British-based Buddhist sect are behind an aggressive international smear campaign to undermine the Dalai Lama—one of the world’s most revered religious figures and political leader of Tibet—ahead of his visit to the UK this month.
The Dalai Lama is accused of being a “ruthless dictator” and an “oppressor of religious freedom” in direct contradiction to his message of religious tolerance, according to a spokesman for an organisation called the Shugden Supporters Community, based in Pocklington, Yorkshire, which has been distributing press releases to 400 worldwide news outlets.
Members of the Shugden Supporters Community (SSC) belong to one of the fastest-growing and richest sects in the UK called the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT) whose headquarters are in Ulverston, Cumbria.
The sect has expanded dramatically since it was founded in 1991, and is now the biggest Buddhist organisation in the UK with more than 200 affiliated centres at home and more than 50 abroad. Membership is put at about 3,000. The founder of the NKT is a Tibetan monk, Geshe Kelsang, who has lived in Britain since the late seventies. NKT members believe they must obey, worship and pray to Kelsang because he is the Third Buddha.
Kelsang is in almost permanent semi-retreat in Cumbria and speaks little English, although he is the author of 16 books on Buddhism, two of which have reached the UK bestseller lists.
Former members maintain that the Department of Social Security has unknowingly played a critical part in funding the NKT’s rapid expansion. NKT associates have acquired at least five large properties in the last year and a significant proportion of the 300-odd residents of their centres claim housing benefit of up to £360 a week.
The benefit is paid as rent and used to service the large mortgages on properties. Among the properties acquired recently is Ashe Hall in Derbyshire, a neo-Jacobean mansion in 38 acres.
Organisers are concerned for the safety of the Dalai Lama during his week-long visit to the UK, starting on July 15. There have been threats from the SSC of demonstrations in London and Manchester where he is scheduled to speak before large audiences. At a demonstration last month outside the Office of Tibet in London, hundreds chanted anti-Dalai Lama slogans and carried placards saying “Your smiles charm, your actions harm.”
The SSC maintains that the Dalai Lama has banned a centuries old Buddhist practise and claims that Tibetans in India have been dismissed from their jobs, monks expelled from their monasteries, houses searched and statues destroyed. The Tibetan government-in-exile’s London representatives at the Office of Tibet vigorously deny the allegations. Amnesty International says the SSC has yet to substantiate its allegations.
At dispute between Kelsang and the Dalai Lama—the latter has the backing of the majority of the Tibetan religious and political establishment—is the spiritual practice of worshipping a deity called Dorje Shugden.
To supporters of the Dalai Lama, this practice can become demonic. The Dalai Lama has warned his students against it and says this spiritual practice threatens his life and the future of the Tibetan people. The NKT and SSC maintain Dorje Shugden is a Buddha.
In the last few weeks, the SSC has launched a letter writing campaign to the Home Secretary asking for the Dalai Lama’s visa to be stopped; draft letters have been distributed by NKT trained teachers to their students, claiming that his visit will “do nothing other than harm” and accusing him of “persecuting his own people.”
The concern among British supporters of Tibet is that the SSC campaign will play directly into Chinese hands. As a Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Dalai Lama has had enormous success in raising the profile of the cause of Tibet—the country has been occupied by the Chinese since 1950. The Chinese see undermining of his reputation as a world religious leader as an effective way to weaken support for Tibet.
The UK’s Tibet Society, one of the hosts for the Dalai Lama’s visit along with 27 Buddhist organisations, accuses the SSC of being sectarian and of “going directly against the basic premise of Buddhism, which is compassion and benefit of others.”
A special report in the same issue of the Guardian portrayed the NKT as a cult, documenting its financial improprieties and intimidation tactics while portraying its support of Shugden as a remnant of Tibet’s shamanistic past. An article by Andrew Brown in the Independent of July 15, 1996, entitled “The Battle of the Buddhists” described a member of the NKT as having “the catechetical manner you find among Scientologists or Trotskyists” before concluding that, as if in testimony to the Dalai Lama’s success in representing his religion as a variation on Buddhist mod
ernism, “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 be damaged.”27 On August 22, 1996, the monks of Sera Je Monastery in India, the monastery of Kelsang Gyatso, issued a formal “Declaration of Expulsion,” which stated, in part, “This demon with broken commitments, Kelsang Gyatso, burns with the flame of unbearable spite towards the unsurpassed omniscient 14th Dalai Lama, the only staff of life of religious people in Tibet, whose activities and kindness equal the sky.”28 On February 4, 1997, the highly respected scholar and principal of the Buddhist School of Dialectics in Dharamsala, Geshe Losang Gyatso (age 70), who had long supported the Dalai Lama’s position on Shugden, was stabbed to death along with two of his students, apparently by Tibetan supporters of Shugden.29
Unlike buddhas and bodhisattvas, who are of Indian origin, the class of deities such as Shugden, known as protectors (chos skyong or srung ma), are often of Tibetan origin. They are the regional deities of Tibet, some of whom date from pre-Buddhist times, said to have been defeated in magical battle by Indian masters such as Padmasambhava and then converted to Buddhism; rather than be killed by a Buddhist master they agreed to defend Buddhism. Thus these protectors, some of whom are quite ancient, are native Tibetan deities (not from India) and have traditionally enjoyed great devotion as ancestral guardians of a clan, a mountain range, or a region. Shugden, a kind of clan deity for the Geluk sect and for a region of Eastern Tibet, having been carried into exile, thus must himself be declared obsolete and be exiled by the Dalai Lama so that Tibetans in exile may develop a national, rather than clan, identity. This national identity is required only now, after they have fled the land that they regard as the site of the nation of Tibet. Tibetan culture becomes the same culture for all Tibetans only in retrospect.
This raises, of course, the contested question of Tibetan nationalism. Prior to the Chinese annexation of Tibet, there was a political entity referred to in the West as “Tibet” and imagined to be ruled by the Dalai Lama, a state with which the European powers sought trading privileges (exacted by force by the Younghusband expedition, for example) and to which delegations were sent (such as the 1942 mission of the OSS officers Tolstoy and Dolan, who were not granted permission to transport war material through Tibet during World War II).
In most senses of the term, it would seem that Tibet was a nation.30 There are narratives of the nation of Tibet, although often contained within accounts of the arising of the dharma (chos ’byung), that is, histories of Buddhism. There is an emphasis on the origins, continuity, and timelessness of the Tibetan people, the lineages of kings that are traced to prehistoric times. What is noteworthy is that Tibetan traditions are usually depicted as originating outside Tibet: Tibetan identity is acquired through contrast with surrounding cultures, but those cultures are often depicted as the source of the constituents of Tibetan identity. Thus, Buddhism came from India, but it was preserved in its fullness only in Tibet. Tibet is often depicted as a benighted place populated by a (proudly) uncivilized people, into which culture is introduced. Thus, in Bon accounts, the priests responsible for instituting the royal funerary cult must be called in from outside (from Zhang Zhung); in Buddhist accounts, the first king (from the clan of the Buddha) arrives across the mountains from India; the most sacred image of the Buddha in Lhasa was brought to Tibet by Songtsen Gampo’s Chinese bride; Padmasambhava came from India to tame the demons of Tibet and establish the first monastery.
Like those of other nations, the traditions of Tibet are invented, of more recent origin than they are represented as being. Many date from the fourteenth century and the reign of Jangchup Gyaltsen (Byang chub rgyal mtshan), others from the seventeenth century and the reign of the fifth Dalai Lama. Like other nations, Tibetans have a foundational myth about the origin of their race and their unique national character, born not from a divine pair but through miscegenation, the offspring of a monkey and a demoness (although the monkey was an incarnation of Avalokiteśvara).31 Still, these are Buddhist myths, excluding the non-Buddhists who are also Tibetans, notably, the Bönpo, suggesting that Renan was correct when he remarked that “Forgetting . . . is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.”32
When asked what their fatherland (pha yul) is, Tibetans will usually respond with the name of a region. There was strong identification with local mountains and valleys and their deities, with local lamas, monasteries, and chieftains, with local (and mutually unintelligible) dialects. (There is a Tibetan saying: “Each valley a different language, each lama a different dharma system.”) Tibetans from the regions of Kham and Amdo would often describe going to the central provinces or to Lhasa as “going to Tibet.” The term translated as “Tibetan,” bod pa, was used by nomads of the northern plains (located in the central provinces) to refer to inhabitants of the Lhasa Valley, not to themselves. (In the refugee community, the meaning of the term “Tibetan” has been extended to include the populations of Kham and Amdo under Chinese control, but not the Tibetan-speaking peoples of Ladakh, Sikkim, and Bhutan.)33 During long periods of Tibetan history the rule of the government of the Dalai Lama extended only through the provinces of U and Tsang (where there were sometimes disputes with the Panchen Lama over jurisdiction and taxation);34 the inhabitants of Kham and Amdo were often fiercely contemptuous of its rule.35 For the monks who constituted as much as 15 percent of the male population, the monastery or college (grva tshang) was often the chief unit of allegiance and community of identity. And because Tibet was not a colony during the nineteenth century, it did not develop those institutions that some see as key to the development of a national consciousness, institutions such as print capitalism, the census, the map, and the museum.36 Thus it would seem that Tibet was a nation in the sense of a natio, a community or condition of belonging, rather than a nation-state in the modern sense of the term, with its attendant secular state and polity, notions of citizenship, a global capitalist economy,37 membership in an international system of states enjoying diplomatic relations, an advanced social division of labor, industrialism, and the dominance of secular cultural values.38
A traditional definition of what makes someone a Tibetan is based on ethnicity: someone who eats tsampa, a roasted barley flour generally found unpalatable by non-Tibetans (and who, therefore, are not Tibetans). This has largely been replaced in exile (where roasted barley flour is rarely eaten), especially in representations to non-Tibetans, by an exaggerated emphasis on the practice of Buddhism as that which is unique about Tibetan culture (although Buddhism and its role in rulership were key elements of Tibetan state identity prior to the Chinese invasion). The Dalai Lama has observed that young Tibetans in the refugee community have a renewed interest in Buddhism because “Europeans and Americans are showing genuine interest in Tibetan Buddhism.”39 But the Tibetan Buddhism of Europeans and Americans may differ from the Tibetan Buddhism of Tibetans. It is the Buddhism that interests Europeans and Americans that is represented as Tibet’s unique cultural legacy; it is this Buddhism, it is argued, that must not be allowed to be lost. This universal inheritance is Tibet’s gift to the world. Thus in an effort to maintain the link between the cause of Tibetan independence and the promotion of the universal good of Buddhist compassion, the Dalai Lama has described Tibet (to Western practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism) as certain Europeans described it in the nineteenth century, as a preserve of wisdom:
As Buddhist practitioners, you should understand the necessity of preserving Tibetan Buddhism. For this the land, the physical country of Tibet, is crucial. We have tried our best to preserve the Tibetan traditions outside Tibet for almost thirty years, and we have been comparatively successful. But eventually, after our time, there is a real danger that they will change, that they will not survive away from the protective nurture of our homeland. So, for the sake of preserving Tibetan Buddhism, which can be seen as a complete form of the Buddha Dharma, the sacred land of Tibet is vitally important. It is very un
likely that it can survive as a cultural and spiritual entity if its physical reality is smothered under Chinese occupation. So we cannot avoid taking responsibility in trying to improve its political situation. Clearly, in this light, active support for the Tibetan cause is not just a matter of politics. It is the work of Dharma.40
But the Dalai Lama himself, especially in statements enunciated for Western consumption, sometimes blurs the distinction, moving away from a call for Tibetan independence to a call for the preservation of Tibetan culture. By culture he does not mean the material culture of cuisine and crafts, or the social culture of kinship and clan; he does not seem to be evoking the ethnographic view of culture, what E. B. Tylor defined in 1871 as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of a society.”41 In this view religion is but one constituent of the complex whole that is culture, and, as such, is subject to change as a result of various social and historical conditions. The Dalai Lama, however, seems to have in mind something more universal and eternal, something closer to the view put forward by Matthew Arnold in 1869: culture as “a general humane spirit . . . the love of human perfection.”42 In an October 30, 1996, interview in Le Monde the Dalai Lama said, “A kind of cultural genocide is in progress in Tibet. And even if losing her independence is acceptable, then still the destruction of our spirituality, of Tibetan Buddhism, is unthinkable. Protecting the Tibetan heritage has become my primary occupation.”
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