[Vision2020] The Entangled Web of Incarnational Politics

[Gier, Nicholas]

Greetings:

I'm posting my radio commentary/column early this week so that I can catch the end of the news cycle for Obama's visit with the Dalai Lama.  

I give the great lama an A+ for being such a gracious and savvy ambassador for Buddhism, but after reading what he says to Thomas Laird in his "The Story of Tibet," I have to give a failing grade in Buddhist theology.  Very, very disappointing in my mind.

The column is extracted from a much longer paper that I'm presenting at the regional American Academy of Religion at the U. of Victoria in May. The full version of the column is attached as a PDF file.

Nick Gier

The Entangled and Sometimes Violent)Web of Reincarnational Politics

After over a year’s delay President Obama finally met with the Dalai Lama last week.  On this occasion I would like to share some of my research on the relation between Tibetan Buddhism and religious violence.

History demonstrates that there have been very few examples of nonviolent rule by religious leaders. The millions who rightly admire the current Dalai Lama would offer him as a glowing exception, and many would make the assumption the Tibetan Buddhism has always produced such saints. 

Sadly, this is not the case. Historian Hugh Richardson comments that the “rivalry and bitter fighting” among the monasteries “is a blot on the Tibetan Middle Ages.” Each of the monasteries had a “private army commanded often by a reliable family member of the original religious founder.” 

The general justification for this use of violence was same that some Christians and Muslims use: it was God’s will as found in prophetic oracles and religious texts. 

Tibetan Buddhists believe that all fourteen Dalai Lamas have been incarnations of the Bodhisattva Chenrizi. As Chenrizi acts just like the Judeo-Christian deity, I will refer to him hereafter as God. The Dalai Lama firmly believes that there is a divine “master plan,” and that means that God directs everything that has happened, including all the violence and even the anti-Buddhist campaigns by some Tibetan rulers. The odd feature of this divine plan is that it was not fulfilled on a number of key occasions.

Starting with the Third Dalai Lama (1543-1588), the Yellow Hat sect forged an alliance with Mongolia. Altan Khan declared that all his people had to join the Yellow Hat sect on pain of death, and his crack troops played a central role in subduing and marginalizing the Red Hat sects. As a result the Yellow Hat sect has dominated Tibetan politics and religion for the last 300 years.

To his credit the Fifth Dalai Lama, sometimes called "The Great Fifth" for his many achievements, was sure that he was not the right reincarnated child, and he reluctantly gave into the use of military force that his advisors proposed. 
The Great Fifth actually practiced the sexual yoga of the Red Hat school, and he was tolerant of all the Buddhist schools. The claim that Sixth Dalai Lama, who was notorious for drinking and sexual excesses, was actually the Fifth’s son cannot be true because the Fifth was in China at the time. 

The ultimate failure of reincarnational politics is clearly seen in the current situation. In 1989 came death of the 10th Panchen Lama, considered second only to the Dalai Lama in spiritual significance. The current Dalai Lama commenced the traditional process to find the correct child reincarnation. 

When the selection was announced in May of 1995, the Beijing government arrested the young boy and placed him and his family under house arrest. Using a process that by which the nationalist Chinese government had confirmed the current Dalai Lama, the Communists proclaimed in November of 1992 that they had found the true 11th Panchen Lama in the young Gyeltsen Norbu. His parents had of course been carefully vetted by the Chinese Communist Party.

It is therefore inevitable that upon the death of Dalai Lama, the Communists will ask Gyeltsen Norbu, as it is the Panchen Lama’s duty, to search for and choose the new Dalai Lama. The Tibetans in exile will no doubt find their own child as the true heir of the Yellow Hats and the controversy will drag on indefinitely. 

The current Dalai Lama claims that it was God’s plan for the Sixth Dalai Lama to reject his monastic vows and start a royal line in order to provide Tibet with a more stable basis for succession.  This might have been a great idea, but why didn’t God choose a more promising candidate, and why didn’t this divine plan succeed? 

The Buddha himself was a strict humanist, holding that the gods did not control human behavior, and I’m sure that he would have been embarrassed by such an ill-begotten theology. Jesus would also have despaired if he had known what some Christians have done in his name.

Nick Gier taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years.




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