It was an eye-opener for me. Or mind-opener. A story in TIME magazine about what will happen after the Dalai Lama dies, how he became the Dalai Lama, and other details about his brand of Buddhism.
I’ve had the impression that the Dalai Lama was a scientifically oriented person who didn’t buy into the supernatural side of Buddhism. But I readily admit that this was based on my fairly cursory knowledge of books and talks by the Dalai Lama aimed at Western audiences.
The TIME story by Charlie Campbell seemed like it was written by a devotee of Tibetan Buddhism. Maybe Campbell is, or maybe Campbell chose to take an uncritical view of his subject to give the reader a feel for how believers perceive the Dalai Lama.
While I’m no expert on Buddhism, this passage seemed off-base to me, since I doubt that all, or even most, Buddhists consider the Dalai Lama to be their spiritual leader.
For the spiritual succession is not merely a religious event, but a critical flash point amid a struggle for influence over a faith practiced by almost 500 million people worldwide.
I realize that lots of Buddhists embrace the supernatural teachings of Buddhism, which strike me as being as crazy and unmoored from reality as the teachings of any other religion. This story just revealed weird aspects of Tibetan Buddhism that either I’d forgotten, or never knew.
The basic notion of how a Dalai Lama traditionally was chosen was familiar to me. After a Dalai Lama dies, a search ensues for a young child who is considered to be the reincarnated successor. I learned that clues pointed toward the current Dalai Lama after the 13th Dalai Lama died in 1933.
Monks noticed the late leader’s head tilted toward the northeast, while an unusual fungus sprouted on the same side of his shrine. Then came the visions: a mystical lake, a specific house with peculiar eaves, and the Tibetan letter A.
In my decidedly skeptical opinion, the chance that the current Dalai Lama actually was found by supernatural means seems exceedingly slim to none. The Chinese Communist Party approach to choosing the next Dalai Lama seems more reasonable.
Soon there will likely be two Dalai Lamas: one sanctioned by the CCP and another by the Office of His Holiness. Following the fate of the Panchen Lama, His Holiness decreed that he will be reborn in a “free” country and that his successor may even break precedent by being female. However, China insists a state-sanctioned short list of Chinese candidates will be placed inside a golden urn gifted to Tibet by the Qing Dynasty court, with the single name then withdrawn as the true reincarnation.
Supposedly the current Dalai Lama was discovered as a 2-year-old child after a Buddhist search team heard of him. Again, the chance that this actually happened is virtually zero. But every religion wants to feel that its leader is special, so fantasies are put forward as reality.
Inside the modest home, legend has it, the toddler marched straight up to the lead monk, eyed a set of prayer beads belonging to the late Dalai Lama, and despite speaking only a local Chinese dialect demanded in perfect central Tibetan: “Give me my beads.”
The following passage really helped demolish my conception that the current Dalai Lama wants to present Buddhism as a rational, quasi-scientific means of finding peace and happiness.
The paradox of Tibetan Buddhism is this blending of secular wisdom and mystical rite. Several times each year, His Holiness requests guidance from Kuten La, who in his role as State Oracle serves as mouthpiece for Nechung, an ancient deity and Tibet’s spiritual protector. The air inside his temple in Dharamshala thickens with the sharp, medicinal sting of burning juniper and the low, rhythmic thrum of drums and horns. In the center sits Kuten La, whom attendants drape with 80 pounds of ceremonial armor, before crowning him with a towering headdress of gold and mirrors, and securing a silk cord tightly around his throat.
Kuten La’s limbs twitch. His breathing shifts to an unnatural cadence. The physical strain is immense—his face flushes crimson under the regalia—but his consciousness is no longer entirely his own. As he passes the delicate threshold into the trance state, the oracle begins to dance with an otherworldly vigor. He hisses commands, bends iron swords with bare hands, and speaks in a high-pitched, archaic dialect: cryptic divinations sent to aid Tibet’s people and those who lead them. “When Nechung enters me it’s just a feeling of equanimity,” Kuten La says. “But when he’s gone, there’s a bit of discomfort in my heart, or maybe my muscles and joints.”
Well, I’ll stick with enjoying non-supernatural Buddhism centered on mindfulness and such. I find it bizarre that the current Dalai Lama, a.k.a. HIs Holiness, requests guidance from a guy who goes into a trance where he supposedly bends iron swords with his bare hands and issues cryptic divinations.
It wouldn’t break my heart if the whole Dalai Lama thing falls by the wayside after the current one dies and two Dalai Lamas battle for control, one picked by the Chinese Communist Party and the other picked in the traditional “find the reincarnated child” approach. The less superstition there is in the world, the better off we’ll be.
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Brian
It’s just another culture, with their rituals and beliefs.
They believe because they want to believe in something greater. Then every event, even how a baby eats their porridge, becomes a sacred event.
Behind such beliefs, strange to others outside that tradition, is the understanding that these symbols must be interpreted and they can be interpreted wrong becuse of the limitations of the human mind.
They carry power to inspire us to believe in something better, and that has lead scientists to keep going, and survivors to keep going.
These are allegorical stories for the fact that every single moment of life is sacred and has purpose if we believe AND are willing to search honestly for ourselves, to discover what is holy in our own lives.
Of course this can become political, and since power corrupts, is almost certainly political. But it would cease to exist if it didn’t have some personal relevance that had nothing to do with politics; to help each person find what is holy in their own life, in their own self.
Instead of laughing at the obsurdity, from our culture’s perspective, please try to see the functional meaning, and how, because it is meaning in the supernatural, makes it entirely transferable and personal.
Of course, all this just points to the individual, and the necessity to find their own truth within themselves. The supernatural is an allegorical device for a deeper psychological truth.
Instead of pointing the finger of stupidity at other people and their culture, certainly we can do that in the mirror, and with greater success. Our own scientific and freedom based culture, magnificent as it is, has its own circus too.
Brian Ji
Let me make this more succinct.
Believing in someone else when we cannot believe in ourselves is a path back to believing in ourselves.
You cannot tell me that your conviction and confidence in your current beliefs does not gain incredible strength and credibility due largely to the decades you spent in absolute devotion to Maharaji.
The path is a path back to ourselves, even when we start entirely unable to belive in or trust ourselves.
These things have purpose, and we gain much going through them with full belief.
I would suggest we honor them for their strengths, which we ourselves have gained by such belief, and by moving through that belief back to s deeper understanding and confidence in ourselves.
Now we are in a stronger position to be of use.
In reality, spiritual successions don’t happen on this level of existence anywhere at all. Even Charan Singh tried to tell us of the upcoming disaster guru before he died by over and over explaining that at the level that we’re at now we can’t understand these things. He said that, using the queen’s language ” we” as if he had a frog in his pocket. And Katherine Watson believed that he did and thought Charan was very happy to see her , like Sheena did Gurinder . Except Charan had balls and loved people more than he loved money. The same can’t be said for the pissant treasure he left behind. Some Masters initiate and some don’t. Anyone wanting to be a master has no qualifications to be one much less deserve a title. I know that you can’t understand me at the level you’re at now , everyone.
It says and insinuates in every religion that Masters are sent, not self-made. It also is presumed by true seekers that all religions and gurus started with the real deal and digressed. But rssb has digressed into an international political retreat for Indian migrant workers.
It’s been a while since I enquired into Tibetan Buddhism; much of what I read came from Stephen Batchelor. I recall that the unique flavour of Tibetan Buddhism emerged within the indigenous Bon religion. As history shows, whenever a religion enters another country, it becomes flavoured with their cultural beliefs and practices. When Buddhism entered China (as most Chan Buddhists know), it absorbed much of the local Taoist religion, which probably makes Chan and Zen so accessible to Western acceptance.
I wonder though, how much the Dalai Lama invests in believing the mystical hype that surrounds him. After all, I do wonder if he is also a shrewd politician, and he is said to have a working knowledge of neuroscience, physics and cosmology.
Many, if not most, of the original religions and belief systems in the ancient world seem to have originated from the need to answer questions about events and happenings that puzzled and even frightened. To have an answer to such questions was (and still is) to have some measure of control over them. Gods, spirits, demons and other supernatural phenomena answered the dilemmas.
In much of the Western world, supplanting the old Norse, Greek, Egyptian, and Roman Gods with one God gave adherents a modicum of clarity, unity, and focus, and seemed able to answer many more questions than multiple Gods and cultural beliefs. They were ‘of their time’, and, like religions today, serve a purpose while they flourish.
Heh, yes, the Dalai Lama story, the whole reincarnation thing, people looking for the next version of the recently deceased grand panjandrum: that’s all pretty much “far out”, as you might have said back in the sixties or whenever, Brian!
And, haha, I enjoyed how you depart from your usual measured gentle style, and clearly call this particular shovel a spade that is crazy, and unhinged, and unmoored from reality, and bizarre, and other similar. I like! And agree fully!
…You’ll know this, I’m sure, but since you directly say this, not all of Buddhism will look up to the Dalai Lama as their spiritual …ah, rinpoche, or in this case I guess the uber-Rinpoche. Just the Tibetan variety, the Vajrayanists. (Actually, the details are fuzzy in my memory, but I think Vajrayanists are of two or three separate schools, and historically just one of those actually looked on the Dalai Lama as the Big Guy. That the Dalai Lama ended up becoming the head of all of Tibet has something to do with politics, I think, pre-Chinese-occupation politics I mean to say. …But, like I said, I don’t remember the details of that clearly.)
“In much of the Western world, supplanting the old Norse, Greek, Egyptian, and Roman Gods with one God gave adherents a modicum of clarity, unity, and focus, and seemed able to answer many more questions than multiple Gods and cultural beliefs.”
Just a small incidental part of your comment, Ron: but I’m afraid I disagree completely with that.
The one God is no more coherent, and not the slightest bit more sane, than the many-gods polytheism that it supplanted.
That supplanting had nothing to do with evolution of thought, and everything to do with historical happenstance, to wit Constantine’s adopting it and forcing it down his subjects’ collective throats.
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Sorry, that was just an incidental tangent in your comment, I know. Just, that’s a common misconception, a common mistake, that looking on monotheism as somehow more evolved or more …ah, sane, or morally any more sound, than the gods atop Olympus. That’s simply not the case, IMVSHV, like I said it’s no more than plain simple accident of history, again IMVSHV. (Heh, In My Very Strongly Held View!) (Certainly if you consider the insane God and Son and Holy Spirit Trinity thingie, but even leaving that specific aside, and looking on monotheism generally.)
Alibaba and the 40 thieves plagiarized and stole from every religion imaginable and the Sikhs don’t appreciate it. And the Catholics are starting to not appreciate it either. Because Babaji is a professional con artist and we were warned against those too by Charan. Charan ended by saying whatever happens after he dies is not his problem , and by extension not ours either.
There were two major problems for Buddha.
1) Leaving his wife midnight
2) not much emphasis on Love and in extension that in need for God
in His Kingdom there are only two ways
Devotion and Love
Hi AR. Can’t argue with you saying that: – “The one God is no more coherent, and not the slightest bit more sane, than the many-gods polytheism that it supplanted.” I agree; no saner indeed; I wouldn’t disagree about that. My comment actually was to point out that, like the old Bon religion of Tibet, religions come and go, reject or modify in some way in response to the prevailing zeitgeist of the time.
For example, were the beliefs in many Gods and demons to explain natural happenings, etc., becoming obsolete in the wave of the belief in ‘One God’ – which was not so easy to disprove? Hence the “success” (yes, debatable) of monotheism – in the sense that it adapts to evidence that disproves certain of its tenets by saying scriptures are metaphors and separating spiritual principles from scientific facts, etc.
Although the monotheistic religions of Islam and Christianity did see the rise of universities, of science and learning, that is not to say such advances were down to the adoption of ‘one God ‘; it could very well have happened under polytheism. There is, as always in academic circles, ongoing debate about that.
“It wouldn’t break my heart if the whole Dalai Lama thing falls by the wayside after the current one dies and two Dalai Lamas battle for control, one picked by the Chinese Communist Party and the other picked in the traditional “find the reincarnated child” approach. The less superstition there is in the world, the better off we’ll be.”
The Chinese killed hundreds of thousands of Tibetans in the (that is, your) cause of eliminating superstition.
Also, the reason why the Chinese appoint their own toady Tibetan Buddhist tulkus is actually a secondary strategy to their policy of kidnapping or murdering the authentically appointed. The best example of this is the Chinese government’s kidnapping of the Panchen Lama in 1995, 3 days after he was appointed by the Dalai Lama. The Panchen Lama was 6 years old at the time, and he hasn’t been seen since.
Likely hundreds to low thousands of tulkus/rinpoches affected across decades were subject to imprisonment, torture, and death. When will those stupid Tibetans renounce superstition and realize this was for their own good?
Fair, the Chinese tyranny angle, sant64.
Tibetan religious superstitions are a blight, and the people there would without doubt be better off without them. (The superstitions, the silly beliefs, as opposed to the core Tantric meditation techniques: those last, when taken distilled as it were, are a different category.)
Chinese tyranny, on the other hand, is an abomination. That’s a benighted land, long carrying a dictatorship on its back, that oppresses its own people, brainwashes them with its twisted agenda, and exports that tyranny to, in this case, Tibet, whose land they’ve illegally straddled. That cannot be excused, and must not be supported.
Two different things, two different issues, even though intertwined. Agreed, it is important not to conflate them. Agreed, it is important to take care not to end up supporting Chinese tyranny, when one looks to get rid of Tibetan Buddhistic superstitions.
Hey, Ron.
Yep, I do agree with your larger general point, about religions (and for that matter other ideas as well) changing and evolving over time, generally speaking.
Heh, like I said, I realize I was pursuing an incidental tangential throwaway in your comment there. But I wanted to correct a general misconception that many hold — clearly not you personally, Ron, as you say, but it is a fact that many do think this way, unfortunately — that the movement from polytheism to monotheism is somehow a form of evolution and progress. The fact is that it isn’t: it is simply replacement of one set of halfwittery with another set of equally halfwitted halfwittery, driven by forces of history, with the latter halfwittery (monotheism, that is to say) not one whit more coherent or sane or moral than its predecessor polytheistic nonsense.
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Not to beat this to death, particularly given that in any case we clearly agree about like 95% of what we’ve both said here in this thread: but still, I’ll ask you to allow me to dwell just a bit, and disagree just a little bit, with …ah, with a nuance in that last paragraph of yours.
It is a fact that many misguided souls claim that it is Christianity that birthed, or at any rate midwifed, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the rest of it. It is also true that, and as you rightly say, there’s ongoing “debate” over this.
My take on this is very clear. “Enlightenment”, in every sense of the word, thrived in the ancient world. Certainly in the Eastern civilizations of India and China and Egypt and so forth: but, for now, let’s leave those aside and focus just on the West, in order in order to compare like with like. Just look at the intellectual climate and progress in (ancient) Greece and Rome, both of whose faith was polytheistic. And compare that with the centuries of rot that followed that glorious ancient “enlightenment”, under the yoke of montheistic superstitions and tyranny. To suggest after all of this that, just maybe, monotheism played a role in birthing universities, that is …simply incoherent. Universities specifically had already been birthed long before that in the West; and Universities specifically had been birthed independently in many other parts of the world under polytheistic faiths.
My take on this is simple. And rather emphatic I’m afraid. There’s multiple historical forces at work in how the intellectual development of us humans happened across the centuries and millennia; and religion, whether polytheistic or monotheistic, did not, repeat, did NOT, play any especial, overwhelming role in either the glorious intellectual ascendancy in the ancient world, nor the centuries-long ignominious descent from there into abject ignorance and superstition and rot, and nor the subsequent Renessaince and Enlightenment. Religion was just incidental, is all.
I say religion (whether monotheistic or polytheistic) is just incidental, is all. But if we do insist on dragging the matter of religion into this, and somehow trying to correlate religion with the overall intellectual progress of civilization: well then, looking on Greece and Rome, followed by the long extended Dark Ages, as well as the thriving intellectual climate of India and China and Egypt et cetera, actually makes the case that monotheism is clearly the villain of the piece, that forced “us”, in the West, down into superstition and ignorance from a position of much wider knowledge and free enquiry. And that the Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe and in the Islamic world happened in spite of monotheism, and most emphatically not because of it.
(TLDR: Not so much “it could very well have happened under polytheism”, Ron, like you say; but rather, it did, in fact, actually happen, multiple times, and across time and geography, under polytheism. There can be no reasonable scope for doubt on that, given the history of the West, and even more so given the history of the larger world. We do NOT owe our present intellectual “progress” to monotheism specifically, or to religion more generally. On the contrary. If anything it’s not a case of “because of”, but of “despite that blight”.)