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His Material Highness

FAR FROM HIS HOLIER-THAN-ALL IMAGE, THE DALAI LAMA SUPPORTS SUCH QUESTIONABLE CAUSES AS INDIA'S NUCLEAR TESTING, SEX WITH PROSTITUTES AND ACCEPTING DONATIONS FROM A JAPANESE TERRORIST CULT.

BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS | The Dalai Lama has come out in support of the thermonuclear tests recently conducted by the Indian state, and has done so in the very language of the chauvinist parties who now control that state's affairs. The "developed" countries, he says, must realize that India is a major contender and should not concern themselves with its internal affairs. This is a perfectly realpolitik statement, so crass and banal and opportunist that it would not deserve any comment if it came from another source.

"Think different," says the ungrammatical Apple Computer advertisement that features the serene visage of His Holiness. Among the untested assumptions of this billboard campaign is the widely and lazily held belief that "Oriental" religion is different from other faiths: less dogmatic, more contemplative, more ... transcendental. This blissful, thoughtless exceptionalism has been conveyed to the West through a succession of mediums and narratives, ranging from the pulp novel "Lost Horizon," by James Hilton (creator of Mr. Chips as well as Shangri-La), to the memoir "Seven Years in Tibet," by SS veteran Heinrich Harrer, prettified for the screen by Brad Pitt. China's foul conduct in an occupied land, combined with a Hollywood cult that almost exceeds the power of Scientology, has fused with weightless Maharishi and Bhagwan-type babble to create an image of an idealized Tibet and of a saintly god-king. So perhaps the Apple injunction to think differently is worth heeding.

The greatest triumph that modern PR can offer is the transcendent success of having your words and actions judged by your reputation, rather than the other way about. The "spiritual leader" of Tibet has enjoyed this unassailable status for some time now, becoming a byword and synonym for saintly and ethereal values. Why this doesn't put people on their guard I'll never know. But here are some other facts about the serene leader that, dwarfed as they are by his endorsement of nuclear weapons, are still worth knowing and still generally unknown.

Shoko Asahara, leader of the Supreme Truth cult in Japan and spreader of sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo subway, donated 45 million rupees, or about 170 million yen (about $1.2 million), to the Dalai Lama and was rewarded for his efforts by several high-level meetings with the divine one.

Steven Seagal, the robotic and moronic "actor" who gave us "Hard to Kill" and "Under Siege," has been proclaimed a reincarnated lama and a sacred vessel or "tulku" of Tibetan Buddhism. This decision, ratified by Penor Rinpoche, supreme head of the Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism, was initially received with incredulity by Richard Gere, who had hitherto believed himself to be the superstar most favored. "If someone's a tulku, that's great," he was quoted as saying. "But no one knows if that's true." How insightful, if only accidentally. At a subsequent Los Angeles appearance by the Dalai Lama, Seagal was seated in the front row and Gere two rows back, thus giving the latter's humility and submissiveness a day at the races. Suggestions that Seagal's fortune helped elevate him to the Himalayan status of tulku are not completely discounted even by some adepts and initiates.

Supporters of the Dorge Shugden deity -- a "Dharma protector" and an ancient object of worship and propitiation in Tibet -- have been threatened with violence and ostracism and even death following the Dalai Lama's abrupt prohibition of this once-venerated godhead. A Swiss television documentary graphically intercuts footage of His Holiness, denying all knowledge of menace and intimidation, with scenes of his followers' enthusiastically promulgating "Wanted" posters and other paraphernalia of excommunication and persecution.

While he denies being a Buddhist "Pope," the Dalai Lama is never happier than when brooding in a celibate manner on the sex lives of people he has never met. "Sexual misconduct for men and women consists of oral and anal sex," he has repeatedly said in promoting his book on these matters. "Using one's hand, that is sexual misconduct." But, as ever with religious stipulations, there is a nutty escape clause. "To have sexual relations with a prostitute paid by you and not by a third person does not constitute improper behavior." Not all of this can have been said just to placate Richard Gere, or to attract the royalties from "Pretty Woman."

I have talked to a few Dorge Shugden adherents, who seem sincere enough and who certainly seem frightened enough, but I can't go along with their insistence on the "irony" of all this. Buddhism can be as hysterical and sanguinary as any other system that relies on faith and tribe. Lon Nol's Cambodian army was Buddhist at least in name. Solomon Bandaranaike, first elected leader of independent Sri Lanka, was assassinated by a Buddhist militant. It was Buddhist-led pogroms against the Tamils that opened the long and disastrous communal war that ruins Sri Lanka to this day. The gorgeously named SLORC, the military fascism that runs Burma, does so nominally as a Buddhist junta. I have even heard it whispered that in old Tibet, that pristine and contemplative land, the lamas were the allies of feudalism and unsmilingly inflicted medieval punishments such as blinding and flogging unto death.

Yet the entire Western mass media is uncritically at the service of a mere mortal who, at the very least, proclaims the utter nonsense of reincarnation and who affirms the sinister if not indeed crazy belief that death is but a stage in a grand cycle of what appears to be futility and subjection. What need, then, to worry about nuclear weaponry, or sectarian frenzy, or the sale of indulgences to men of the stamp of Steven Seagal? "Harmony" will doubtless kick in. During his visit to Beijing, our sentimental Baptist hypocrite of a president turned to his dictator host, recommended that he meet with the Dalai Lama and assured him that the two of them would get on well. That might easily turn out to be the case. Both are very much creatures of the material world.
SALON | July 13, 1998

Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair, is a regular contributor to Salon.

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I learned about Shugden from this guy and mentioned it to my teacher who said to forget about the Dalai Lama, and he also said that one should never put down any lama or guru because it was bad karma since you could not really know whether you were doing it out of resentment or helping others.

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This is why the Buddha adopted dana (generosity)as the context for practicing and teaching the Dhamma. But — to maintain the twin principles of freedom and fruitfulness in giving — he created a culture of dana that embodied particularly Buddhist ideals. To begin with, he defined dana not simply as material gifts. The practice of the precepts, he said, was also a type of dana — the gift of universal safety, protecting all beings from the harm of one's unskillful actions — as was the act of teaching the Dhamma.

This meant that lavish giving was not just the prerogative of the rich.

Secondly, he formulated a code of conduct to produce an attitude toward giving that would benefit both the donors and the recipients, keeping the practice of giving both fruitful and free.

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We tend not to associate codes of conduct with the word “freedom,” but that's because we forget that freedom, too, needs protection, especially from the attitude that wants to be free in its choices but feels insecure when others are free in theirs. The Buddha's codes of conduct are voluntary — he never coerced anyone into practicing his teachings — but once they are adopted, they require the cooperation of both sides to keep them effective and strong.

These codes are best understood in terms of the six factors that the Buddha said exemplified the ideal gift:

“The donor, before giving, is glad; while giving, his/her mind is inspired; and after giving, is gratified. These are the three factors of the donor…

“The recipients are free of passion or are practicing for the subduing of passion; free of aversion or practicing for the subduing of aversion; and free of delusion or practicing for the subduing of delusion. These are the three factors of the recipients.”

— AN 6.37

Although this passage seems to suggest that each side is responsible only for the factors on its side, the Buddha's larger etiquette for generosity shows that the responsibility for all six factors — and in particular, the three factors of the donor — is shared. And this shared responsibility flourishes best in an atmosphere of mutual trust.

Finally, remember again that when dying, according to the earlier teachings, Buddha stated he had taught all that was needed for people to become free from suffering. He had not held back any secret or esoteric teachings.

He had given freely in his lifetime, holding nothing back.

One way to continue to practice as he practiced is to keep all Buddhist practice paths free from secretiveness.

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The responsibilities of the recipients, however, are even more stringent. To ensure that the donor feels glad before giving, monks and nuns are forbidden from pressuring the donor in any way. Except when ill or in situations where the donor has invited them to ask, they cannot ask for anything beyond the barest emergency necessities. They are not even allowed to give hints about what they'd like to receive. When asked where a prospective gift should be given, they are told to follow the Buddha's example and say, “Give wherever your gift would be used, or would be well-cared for, or would last long, or wherever your mind feels inspired.” This conveys a sense of trust in the donor's discernment — which in itself is a gift that gladdens the donor's mind.

To ensure that a donor feels inspired while giving a gift, the monks and nuns are enjoined to receive gifts attentively and with an attitude of respect.

To ensure that the donor feels gratified afterward, they should live frugally, care for the gift, and make sure it is used in an appropriate way. In other words, they should show that the donor's trust in them is well placed.

*And of course they must work on subduing their greed, anger, and delusion. In fact, this is a primary motivation for trying to attain arahantship: so that the gifts given to one will bear the donors great fruit.

By sharing these responsibilities in an atmosphere of trust, both sides protect the freedom of the donor. They also foster the conditions that will enable not only the practice of generosity but also the entire practice of Dhamma to flourish and grow.

The principles of freedom and fruitfulness also govern the code the Buddha formulated specifically for protecting the gift of Dhamma.

Here again, the responsibilities are shared.

To ensure that the teacher is glad, inspired, and gratified in teaching, the listeners are advised to listen with respect, to try to understand the teaching, and — once they're convinced that it's genuinely wise — to sincerely put it into practice so as to gain the desired results. Like a monk or nun receiving a material gift, the recipient of the gift of Dhamma has the simple responsibility of treating the gift well.

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All of these principles assume a high level of nobility and restraint on both sides of the equation, which is why people tried to find ways around them even while the Buddha was alive. The origin stories to the monastic discipline — the tales portraying the misbehavior that led the Buddha to formulate rules for the monks and nuns — often tell of monastics whose gift of Dhamma came with strings attached, and of lay people who gladly pulled those strings to get what they wanted out of the monastics: personal favors served with an ingratiating smile. The Buddha's steady persistence in formulating rules to cut these strings shows how determined he was that the principle of Dhamma as a genuinely free gift not be an idle ideal. He wanted it to influence the way people actually behaved.

He never gave an extended explanation of why the act of teaching should always be a gift, but he did state in general terms that when his code of conduct became corrupt over time, that would corrupt the Dhamma as well. And in the case of the etiquette of generosity, this principle has been borne out frequently throughout Buddhist history.

A primary example is recorded in the Apadanas, which scholars believe were added to the Canon after King Asoka's time. The Apadanas discuss the rewards of giving in a way that shows how eager the monks composing them were to receive lavish gifts. They promise that even a small gift will bear fruit as guaranteed arahantship many eons in the future, and that the path from now to then will always be filled with pleasure and prestige. Attainments of special distinction, though, require special donations. Some of these donations bear a symbolic resemblance to the desired distinction — a gift of lighted lamps, for instance, presages clairvoyance — but the preferred gift of distinction was a week's worth of lavish meals for an entire monastery, or at least for the monks who teach.

It's obvious that the monks who composed the Apadanas were giving free rein to their greed, and were eager to tell their listeners what their listeners wanted to hear.

The fact that these texts were recorded for posterity shows that the listeners, in fact, were pleased.

Thus the teachers and their students, acting in collusion, skewed the culture of dana in the direction of their defilements. In so doing they distorted the Dhamma as well.

If gift-giving guarantees Awakening, it supplants the noble eightfold path with the one-fold path of the gift.

If the road to Awakening is always prestigious and joyful, the concept of right effort disappears.

Yet once these ideas were introduced into the Buddhist tradition, they gained the stamp of authority and have affected Buddhist practice ever since.

Throughout Buddhist Asia, people tend to give gifts with an eye to their symbolic promise of future reward; and the list of gifts extolled in the Apadanas reads like a catalog of the gifts placed on altars throughout Buddhist Asia even today.

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grainne uaile
. Now I am busy trying to get it back on my blog that I reopened after closing it because he [my teacher] felt "it could be resentment and bad karma." I am busy trying to research TB because people are getting hurt. Who cares if it is resentment and bad karma? I will take the chance if I can reach anyone and stop them from being hurt.

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and it's still scandalous now that the monastic and spiritual elite has the nerve to try to play the same tricks and power games on Westerners.

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If anyone wants perspective on Vajrayana Buddhism, Stephen Butterfield, now deceased, gave a detailed account of his own training in Vajrayana via Chogyam Trungpa and Ozel Tendsin. The title of Butterfield's memoir is The Double Mirror .

I feel obligated to warn that though he appreciated the benefits he received from the Dharma practices he learned via Trungpa, Butterfield gave the impression that the problems did not stem from a dysfunctional teacher, but that much of the trouble originated in the organizational structure and doctrines of vajrayana itself, even when authentic, even when reliably transmitted. Those trying to cling to hopes that the tradition itself is trouble free and that only a bad apple teacher is the cause of the trouble are not going to enjoy this book.

But if you want to understand the context--namely causes and conditions--and are willing to tolerate the anxiety of asking some hard questions of a tradition you love--this book is well worth it.

Butterfield makes a very convincing case that Trunpa especially, ran his organization in such a way that it massaged ego by inflaming ambition while constantly debunking ego.

Butterfield calls that 'the double message'--others would call it crazy making. He made it clear in this book that he loved Buddhist practice and that a severe lung problem he had actually improved when he dedicated himself to meditation practice. But the power abuses he observed within Vajradatu troubled him, and he bitterly regretted how he himself had failed to speak up on crucial issues.

Butterfield has a detailed descripton of the meditation practices used not only by beginning students but the more advanced practicds used to prepare oneself to receive and then practice the higher level tantric teachings (ngondro). He gives precise descriptions of how these affect the mind and how organizational features of Vajradhatu made it hard to take an adult autonomous stance. People who persisted in this tended to leave or were forced out.


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Neverheless, the Vajradhatu version of Mahayana (Trungpa's version)may be at risk of converting the "great vehicle" into a self serving mechanism for supporting Vajradhatu,' Butterfield writes. Such risk is inherant in meditation itself, and in the anture of organizations, but it is aggravated by the guru principle.' (which was central to the tradition in which Chogyam Trunpa and his successors taught--and teach

Buttefield again: "Political engagement, for the most part is left up to the individual (Buddhist practitioner). At times it has been overtly discouraged. Even on the pressing iBuddhist issue of opposing the Chinese destruction of Tibet, the Vajradhatu press was late to speak out or take a position, although its coverage of Budhists in Asian countries improved in the late 1980s. Ozel Tendzin (Chogyam Trungpas successor, chosen by Trunpa himself)was scornful of the "liberal conscience" of American Buddhists who opposed teh corrupt, shortsighted policies of the Reagan Administration in Central America. And Trungpa in his Seminary talks from the 1970s, often referred perjoratively to political demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience, using them as examples of a false, aggressive heroism whose purpose was more to affirm the ego of the demonstrator than to do anything constructive abou tthe problem.

Speaking of Trungpa, Butterfield continues: 'While he may have been right in some cases, his views always reflected his dislike of democracy' Butterfield noted. 'Proposals for membership control of his own organization were squashed; he once referred to them as "democratic farts" and walked out of a meeting in disgust when a student suggested that the audience vote on how late he could keep them up."

Butterfield, page 77.


And though Trunpa had the nerve and gall to express contempt for democracy, he was quite willing to exploit Americas generous immigration policies, of which his own sorry ass was a beneficiary. He also benefitted from US laws giving tax exemption to religious projects.

And though Trungpa criticised ego when it took the form of protesting unjust US policies in Central America, he set matters up at Vajradhatu so that ego was stimulated to climb the ladder and win his favor.


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'The curriculum is presented through a hierarchy of forms that intensifies the mixed message behind seeking what you already have: enlighenment credentials are meaningless, said Trungpa, but you should definitely respect mine and here is a graded process for acquiring them. Although he deflated and his students scorned, the ego's desire for a higher, more spiritual more transcendental life, the whole Tibetan style lured me on with a promise of a higher more spiritual, more transcendental life.
'The system of the three yanas has an inherently elitist appeal. It triggers our desire to join the big shots, do the secret rituals, and find out what the masters really know. In my first contact with him, Trunpa undercut this elitism, he presented enlightenment as something anyone can have, right now. His message was too simple for intellectual analysis, you can do it, dont be a coward, cheer up.

Any sensible country school girl could have said the same thing.

'Yet he wore expensive suits and jewels, rode in a chauffered Mercedes, had servants, designed and awarded pins to symbolize levels of attainment in his programs, and was known to offer secret tantric instruction to selected disciples.

'Since he was telling me the truth about my own motives, I believed that if he did offer something transcendental, it would be real thing, not a plastic manipulation.

'But the ego, which supposedly did not exist, was both deflated and fully engaged. Teh impetus behind the journey came as much from the desire to earn one of his pins and hold a title in his organization as from a genuine longing to wake up, or an altruistic wish to benefit sentient beings.

'

The Double Mirror, Stephen Butterfield, page 43

It turns out that Stephen Butterfield not only got involved with, and then wrote an expose on Trungpa's rendition of Buddhism, but he had earlier become involved with Amway, did well at it, and then had misgivings and wrote an exposure about it as well!

This was a man able to admit he had made mistakes and then was generous enough to put himself on the line and write material to keep other people from falling into the traps he'd walked so trustfully into.