On the Doctrinal Deviance of Tibetan Buddhism

Is this man a “Living Buddha”?

In welcoming a prominent Tibetan lama, Jamyang Losang Jigme Tubdain Qoigyi Nyima (嘉木样·洛桑久美·图丹却吉尼玛) , who has been widely ballyhooed as a “living Buddha，” and who showed up with an “inspection group” at Famen Temple in 2004, Xuecheng Fashi said this:

“The northern and southern traditions are from the same root and the same source as Tibetan Buddhism, one transmitted heart-beat. Only by equally going forward together, working together in solidarily, can this whole situation in Buddhism peacefully develop, and progressively expand. What we all believe in is our original teacher, Shakyamuni Buddha, and what we promote is all the Buddha’s peaceful doctrine of ‘compassion, wisdom, equality, and universal interpenetration,’ and our goal is to purify the human mind, benefit society, and protect world peace.”

Why was it necessary to read the basics of Buddhist ethics to this individual, in full view of the gaping masses assembled? Would a “living Buddha,” by definition, not already know this? Not necessarily. How could he hold that title, which implies that everyone else is *not* a living Buddha, if he understood basic Buddhist ethics? How can one be in a unity that has no other possible basis than Shakyamuni Lord Buddha, if one goes around allowing himself to be proclaimed as equal to or even greater than (since the Guru is considered greater than the Buddha in the Vajrayana) Shakyamuni Buddha?

The divergence of direction of the Tibetan tradition from the rest of the Broad Mahayana is not a new phenomena. When the unutterable Xu Yun formed the China Buddhist Association in the early ’50’s, he was faced by the same kind of difficulty in attempting to include the Tibetans, because they were simply too arrogant to show up in the Mahasangha on any kind of a predictable basis, and if they did show up, the result was some political uproar. The primary perpetrator of all that disunity? Would you believe a young monk named Tensin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama? Xu Yun, the “Dragon-Elephant” of his day who was almost 120 years old at the time, was not working for the government of China. In fact, he had nearly been beaten to death by its representatives shortly before. The Dalai Lama simply had a devisive sectarian attitude towards other Buddhists. That they were Chinese was beside the point for him. They weren’t Tibetan, they had no reason to bow down to him, so he simply rejected them as Sangha to him.

Furthermore, at that time, half a century ago, this persistently enacted Tibetan divergence was also not a new phenomena. Ellen Pearlman is an American Buddhist who believes herself, quite wrongly in my opinion, to be practicing Tibetan Buddhism. She loves the Dalai Lama, and that’s fine. Love is where you find it. Far be it from me to criticize that kind of love. God knows, the “Tibetan God-King” needs it. Ellen’s path is Tibetan dance, and that’s also fine with me. The dynamics of the dance, like the tantra itself, will eventually save you from the false teacher that you dedicated yourself to in your ignorance. We’ve all done it, except those who are destined to do it in the future. On page 84 of her very lovely book on Tibetan Sacred Dance (2002), we read this:

Hashang (Ho Shang in Chinese) is a Chinese man who shows up often in Cham dance as a figure of ridicule, stemming from eighth-century Tibetan history. Sometime after the establishment of Samye Monaster by Padmasambhava, King Trisong Deutsen, and Shantarakshita, tensions arose due to vast differences in interpretation and translation between Chinese and Indian versions of Buddhist scriptures. In 792 Trisong Deutsen declared a public debate held at Samye to decide which course of scriptural interpretation should be used, Indian or Chinese. Shantarakshita’s most prominent student, Kamalashila, made the difficult journey from Nalanda University in India in order to argue the Indian point of view, which was that the path to liberation existed in certain defined stages and that enlightenment was attainable only through practice and achieving merit. The Chinese Emperor’s representative, the monk Ho Shang, argued that the Ch’an (which is best known now as its Japanese derivative Zen school) relied very much on “no thought,” with emptiness and enlightenment being attained in a flash –known in the West as the satori experience. Kamalashila won the debate and in C.E. 799 the King officially declared the Indian interpretation of Buddhism the state religiion. As the loser of the debate, Ho Shang is always depicted in a comic or derogatory light.

“Ho Shang” here simply means monk, and it’s the same term, as “Heshang” in standard Pinyin, that is used to describe Xuesheng Fashi. Da Heshang is a huge honorific in contemporary Mandarin usage, meaning “Great Monk,” an address given only to legendary lineage holders.

So here we have the real root of the problem between the Broad Mahayana orthodox Chinese Buddhism of the present, and the secret, extremist, and exiled Tibetan Vajrayana of eccentric if not outright heretical doctrine, and a history of repeated failure to hold state power in Tibet, after supplanting the Tibetan noble class which was its rightful traditional holder.

Let’s put it in perhaps a simpler way: After almost exactly 1150 years of being systematically scapegoated and ridiculed by the Tibetans, simply for a different interpretation of Buddhist scriptures, the Chinese invaded Tibet and systematically destroyed the power of those who did this to them. Why did the karmic result seem to be so much worse than the cause? Because the Tibetans did this in the name of the Buddha, that’s why. In deviding the Sangha by stubbornly continuing to ridicule Buddhists with another interpretation, the Tibetan theocracy was guilty of one of the Five Great Offenses, not once, not a hundred times, but innumerable times over a course of 1150 Years, and some of them are still doing it in exile.

The more closely you look at the history of Central Asia and Tibet in particular, and that includes practicing Tibetan Buddhism, which I have done, the more you necessarily encounter a huge dark side underlying the entire official line of the lamas. The quite deliberate and systematic ridicule of Chinese Buddhism is the tip of the iceberg. The Tibetan people were by nature warlike, and still are, and probably always will be. The gutless official “Compassion” of a theocracy supposedly led by the incarnation of Kuan Yin was never, and is not in the present, something that they are able, as a whole race, to actually represent. The current ongoing and stubbornly inextinguishable dissent and political disorder in Tibet is not a sudden or temporary aberration of an essentially peaceful people. Far to the contrary, it is exactly the same thing that went on throughout the history of Tibet under lamasic rule. There was always dissent against the iron rule of the lamas, and the monasteries maintained armies of soldier monks to deal with it. Dissidents, whether monk or lay, were routinely incarcerated, tortured and murdered.

In the profound isolation on the roof of the world imposed by their lamas, the Tibetan genome became progressively ingrown and unstable, Tibetan Buddhism became progressively deviant and unstable, and Tibetan government was progressively from hell. The Chinese have put an end to all of those profound problems, and they have recieved scant credit in the West for it, because of the PR job about the entire history of thier culture that has been successfully run down on the western media, and western governments, by the Tibetan government in exile, headed by the Dalai Lama. When the Dalai Lama fled to India, taking 100,000 Tibetans with him, because he was too weak to be the head of a Tibetan state, he made a clear choice. The choice he made was NOT to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, the 13th Dalai Lama, who in similar circumstances, fled to Mongolia, where he was able to regroup and repel the Chinese. It is not fair for the Dalai Lama, or for anyone in the West, to blame the results of that choice on the Chinese. Nature abhors a vacuum. The vacuum left behind by the Dalai Lama in Tibet was filled with Han Chinese. Nobody may like that, including some of the Han Chinese who were relocated, but the Dalai Lama is not the only human being on this planet who has choices. Life goes on.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping, aka Chönid Dorje (Nyingmapa), aka Norbu Dorje (Karma Kagyu)