The opinion piece below was sent to dorjeshugden.com for publication. We accept submissions from the public, please send in your articles to ds@dorjeshugden.com.

By: Shashi Kei

There is one prominent characteristic of genuine spirituality, which is ‘consistency’ and this is especially true in Tibetan Buddhism with its focus on lineage. All authentic masters of Tibetan Buddhism and indeed all religions and spiritual paths will tell you that at the very minimum, a person must be kind, compassionate, honest and practice right livelihood which is not to make a living based on deception and dishonesty. And it is precisely this that makes Professor Robert (Bob) Thurman and his Menla Dewa Spa business very disturbing.

Bob Thurman is regarded as somewhat of an expert in the knowledge and practice of Tibetan Buddhism and regards the Dalai Lama as his teacher. The Dalai Lama on his part is supposed to be the embodiment and personification of compassion. Bob Thurman has written quite a few books on Buddhism, all of which ultimately advocate kindness and the generation of an inner wisdom that regards all phenomena and life in a fair and non-dualistic way.

Menla Dewa Spa is Bob Thurman’s business built on an image of wellness and healing based on Tibetan Buddhist principles. Menla itself refers to the Medicine Buddha and Bob Thurman presents Menla Dewa Spa as “Tibet in the Catskills” which is how Thurman takes advantage of the Hollywood image of Tibet as Shangrila, or heaven. According to Bob, at Menla you heal your mind and body, you become one with your environment, you sharpen your awareness and you study under ‘world class teachers’ (namely Thurman himself as his picture accompanies the caption on Menla’s promotional materials).

Great taglines and buzzwords, but are any of these real? The problem with fake spirituality is eventually you slip and expose yourself and this is precisely Bob Thurman’s problem – he cannot keep up with his own rhetoric.

The tweet sent out by Menla Dewa Spa.
Click to enlarge.

While Bob Thurman preaches great kindness and tolerance in his classes, his Menla spa has been inviting Menla participants to extend their search for healing into activities such as killing other sentient beings for pleasure. Menla promotes fly fishing in the Catskills which involves luring fishes, a form of sentient being according to Tibetan Buddhist teachings, to a painful death by teasing their hunger. How can a ‘wellness and spiritual healing’ retreat center based on Buddhism promote the killing of animals for pleasure unless its Buddhist values are fake and its spirituality is just a scam to draw people into spending money on Thurman’s business.

Killing cannot lead to wellness and healing, and Thurman should already know this. In fact, any beginner to Tibetan Buddhism would already know this, what more the ‘Je Tsongkhapa Professor’ of Buddhism. So, the question is why Bob Thurman condones this. Is his belief in Buddhist principles fake? Is Menla’s foundation of spirituality fake? The killing that Menla promotes is like placing cigarette vending machines within cancer treatment centers. It is absurdly contradictory and utterly shameful.

Thurman cannot say he didn’t know that Menla was promoting killing because Thurman personally operates Menla’s Twitter and social media accounts jointly with his henchman, Justin Stone-Diaz, who is rumored to be Thurman’s propagandist and manager of Thurman’s Twitter army. Together, they spread the Dalai Lama’s political agenda and along the way, promote Bob Thurman’s image and business. Bob Thurman needs to explain in what Buddhist tradition does the study and practice of Buddhism involve killing wildlife for sport and recreation?

By encouraging Menla participants to inflict suffering on other sentient beings, Bob Thurman is knowingly allowing them to accumulate even more bad karma, all for the sake of business and the bottom line – money. 

What is even more harmful is the way Thurman creates opportunities for people seeking healing and wellness to become even more unwell by creating more bad karma. If Thurman is a true Buddhist, he will know that there is bad karma that arises from harming and killing other sentient beings. This is a fact even if Menla participants are not aware of it because the law of karma, like the law of gravity applies regardless of whether one agrees with it or not. Instead of showing innocent participants the methods to clear their bad karmic energy through proven purification techniques, Thurman encourages them to create even more bad energy. This makes Thurman and Menla not only hypocritical but also highly damaging.

In Tibetan Buddhism, the illnesses of the body and mind are often related to karma. Even if Menla participants do not subscribe to Buddhism, Thurman as a Buddhist expert and a supposed firm believer must surely know better and should assume the responsibility of subtly leading participants to meritorious activities instead of harmful ones. Why Thurman does not do that and instead allows Menla to promote fishing and killing, can only be due to a few reasons. Either

1. Thurman is not truly knowledgeable about even basic Buddhist principles; or
2. Thurman is aware but does not truly practice Buddhism or does not believe in Buddhism; or
3. Thurman is aware and he personally believes in Buddhism but does not care about the wellness of Menla’s clientele; or
4. Menla is doing so poorly as a business that it has to cross-sell wildlife adventures to prop up its flagging business.

Whatever the reason may be, as a result, many are led astray by Menla.

Did the Dalai Lama tell Bob Thurman that he is exempt from the karma of killing? Why else would Thurman, a so-called Tibetan Buddhist “expert”, encouraging the sport of fly fishing?

Or perhaps, Thurman feels immune from karma through his association with the Dalai Lama. It is well known that the ‘success’ of Bob Thurman as a Buddhist teacher is only due to his reputation as the “Dalai Lama’s man in America”. It is a confluence of agendas – the Dalai Lama needs a Westerner to sell the Tibetan leadership’s agenda for Tibet to the Western people, and Thurman needs a justification to be regarded as a Tibetan Buddhist expert.

Now however, we can see clearly that his only qualification is his sycophantic involvement with the Dalai Lama. No emanation of the Buddha of Compassion whom the Dalai Lama is supposed to be, will encourage the torture and killing of other beings for recreation. Indeed, no authentic student and practitioner of Buddhism would engage in such harmful acts. But here we have it – a ‘Buddhist teacher’ promoting killing for the sake of business and riding on the Dalai Lama’s continued endorsement because he is a useful spokesperson for the Dalai Lama’s agenda. A few factors are at play here but none of them are based on the principles of kindness, tolerance, oneness with the environment, gentle understanding of the important principle of live-and-let-live, concern for others and not least of all, awareness of the suffering of others regardless of the form they take.

Would you want to experience this? If not, why would you want to inflict this experience on others?

Robert Thurman allowing Menla to promote fly fishing and killing for recreation exposes who he truly is – a greedy businessman who is using Buddhism and his association with the Dalai Lama to make money and a name for himself. Buddhism is just a trade to Thurman, just like the plight of the Tibetan refugees whom Thurman leverages on for monetary gain. As Tibet burned and over 150 Tibetan people self-immolated, Thurman did not appeal for the Tibetan people not to waste their lives as Buddhism advocates. Neither did Thurman do anything to help the families of those who lost loved ones, nor did he visit these victims of self-immolation in hospital or offer to pay their medical bills. Instead he again took advantage of these personal traumas to promote his Menla lectures on suicide and end of life. What kind spiritual person would see business opportunities in the tragedies of others? Apparently, the Dalai Lama’s man in America.
 

Not content with promoting fly-fishing and killing at what’s supposed to be a spiritual retreat, Thurman is now trying to drive people to leave good reviews for his business. In truth, there is no correlation between good reviews for Menla and showing love and support for Tibetan culture. Menla is a for-profit, commercial entity that makes use of Tibetan spirituality and healing practices to boost Thurman’s bank balance. Promoting this commercial entity will not aid the Tibetan struggle in any way; why does Thurman ask for people to show their love for Tibet through Menla, when they can do it directly through so many other actual non-governmental organizations? Thus Thurman yet again demonstrates that he is willing to exploit his relationship with the Tibetan struggle in order to make a quick buck for himself. This is a clear reflection of his greed and his presumption that the paying public will be swindled and fooled into believing falsely-derived positive reviews. Once again, Thurman is caught behaving at odds with his standing as a so-called spiritual leader.

The opinion piece below was sent to dorjeshugden.com for publication. We accept submissions from the public, please send in your articles to ds@dorjeshugden.com.

 
The following articles by UK-based independent journalist, Indy Hack are important to read. It reveals the extent to which the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) is prepared to go, to trick the unwary public into supporting its illegal ban on the practice of Dorje Shugden. The Dalai Lama and CTA have never had any legitimate reason to deny Shugden Buddhists their right to religious freedom. Instead they rely on smear campaign experts such as East German-trained Michael Jäckel who goes by his monk name Tenzin Peljor to do the dirty work.

As Indy Hack uncovered, Peljor, together with his cohorts like Robert Thurman, Joanne Clark and Carol McQuire are well-funded and have secretly started a number of websites and are also behind a number of social media campaigns that spread the CTA’s propaganda on the Dorje Shugden issue. Behind the façade of an ordained monk, Indy Hack exposes Peljor’s malevolent activities that have directly harmed the Gelug lineage and trust in Tibetan Buddhism. For more from Indy Hack, visit arebuddhistsracist.com.

Tenzin Peljor – Disgruntled Monk or CTA Puppet?

In researching the issues around the Dalai Lama controversy I was surprised to see the same group of names kept cropping up. There appeared to be a small Dalai Lama fan club that was aggressively promoting its “anti-protest” stance and within that group there was one name that seemed to dominate all their activities – Tenzin Peljor.

I stumbled across Mr Peljor early in my research, or to be more precise I had been directed to several of his websites for “authoritative and independent information” on the subject. It would appear that he has become an “unbiased expert” according to his friends in the group, but what they don’t mention are his close ties to the Dalai Lama and the exile leadership.

They also fail to mention that he has been aggressively campaigning against the protests for over 8 years and that he runs numerous websites registered under different aliases and tries to influence online discussions using several false identities. On further inspection Mr Peljor’s activities are anything but “unbiased and independent“, and more closely resemble those of an activist promoting a specific and clearly defined agenda.

His “independent websites” are listed as resources for journalists by the Tibetan exile leadership, he is promoted to journalists by Tibetan NGOs, he is the media spokesperson for the German Buddhist organisation DBO, and he targets any journalist and publication that portrays the protests in a positive light. For a monk whose main activities are teaching at a Buddhist centre in Berlin he is remarkably active and engaged in this controversy, almost as if it was his full-time job.

As with all the sources I come across in my research I did some background checks to see if he was as independent as he claims and to what degree his presentation of information could be influenced by those it benefits. Scratching the surface of his ‘independent monk’ facade revealed quite a bit more than I had initially suspected.

An ex-NKT Member

Tenzin Peljor is often very up front about his prior involvement with the NKT, after all he uses this as a basis for his credibility when it comes to the protests. He joined the NKT in 1995/96 according to his biography, becoming ordained in 1998 and later disrobing and leaving the group in 2000.

Both Tenzin and the teacher he had in the NKT decided to leave at the same time, after which he continued to be her student. He took ordination again in 2002 in Nepal, but disrobed after only 2 months and began studying with a new teacher from the Rime tradition.

In March 2006 after 4 years in Rime he then took ordination from the Dalai Lama in India, who gave him the name Tenzin Peljor.

It was soon after his ordination, that Mr Peljor began to take an interest in countering the protests. His approach followed much the same modus operandi as the Tibetan government, namely to try and undermine the credibility of the protests by attacking the NKT.

It’s worth noting at this point that prior to the protests the Dalai Lama had no problem with Geshe Kelsang Gyatso or the NKT. He had written the foreword to Geshe Kelsang Gyatso’s book, “Buddhism in the Tibetan Tradition“, and a note of praise in another of his books, “Meaningful to Behold“. It was only after the protests began that the Tibetan exile leadership started to attack Geshe Kelsang Gyatso and smear the NKT, attempting to label it as a cult.

Following his ordination by the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Peljor remained in India and began to assist the Tibetan government (CTA) with their disinformation campaign. He began by editing pages on Wikipedia, rapidly becoming the main editor for the page about the NKT.

His attempts to redefine the NKT on Wikipedia however seem to have been so clumsy that it aroused the suspicion of other editors. In describing Tenzin’s approach one of the Wikipedia editors stated:

“I’m very concerned that the opinions and viewpoints of a relatively small number of individuals is drawn upon as the source material for a large portion of the article, which is representative of the point of view of a single editor who, in his determination to ensure that the article fully describes his own perspective, has dominated the editing process.” (ClockworkSoul, 23rd October 2006)

The Birth of the Survivors

As Tenzin’s campaign to discredit the NKT on Wikipedia was starting to lose ground he then switched tack and focussed his attention towards online Buddhist chat groups, in particular he became very active on a group called e-Sangha. It was on this group that he struck up a friendship with David Cutshaw, a disillusioned ex-NKT member and encouraged him to start a new discussion group.

The group that Tenzin wanted Mr Cutshaw to set up was to be focussed only on the negative aspects of the NKT, it was to be named the “NKT Survivors” group and any pro-NKT messages were to be strictly forbidden. The idea was that the group would encourage people to leave the NKT and only post their negative experiences and opinions of them. Their rules state:

“No NKT members/followers/students are allowed.
If you are happy with the NKT, and have no desire to leave, this group is not for you. If you join anyway trying to post and try to get Yahoo to delete this group, we can only assume you are a troll trying to cause disharmony. Such people will be banned and removed at once from the group.”

Tenzin offered to support David in the creation of the group, but wanted to avoid being directly linked to it as its creator. In this way Tenzin had found the perfect surrogate to continue his online activities against the NKT.

The group was created on May 22nd 2007 and Tenzin was the first person other than David to post on it. He assisted with moderating the group, approving new members, editing its settings, and profile.

At the time of the groups creation Tenzin was still residing within the Tibetan exile community in India, however a few weeks later he was promoted to the position of Resident Monk at Bodhicharya Centre in Berlin. From his new base in Berlin he continued to be central to its development, shaping the “survivors” group and focussing its narrative portraying the NKT as a cult.

After a few months the group appeared to be achieving the goal Tenzin had failed to accomplish the previous year with Wikipedia.

On 31st Dec 2007 he posted to the group stating,

“At the New Years Day I will move to Italy, Istituto Lama Tzong Khapa, and pick up a qualified study there for the next 6 years.”

adding,

“I will leave the forum at the New Years Day…If there is anybody who feel he can support David’s moderator activities, please let him know privately.”

Instituto Lama Tzong Khapa is a centre of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT) a Tibetan group that follows the Dalai Lama. Clearly the FPMT centre approved of Tenzin’s activities because within 2 months of his arrival there he resumed his activities on the “survivors” group.

Weaving Websites and Alliances

In April 2008 another series of protests began as the Dalai Lama visited the US. In response to these Tenzin created two websites registered under an alias which according to him offered, “fair, neutral, and balanced information regarding NKT and Buddhist cults in general.“

The websites were registered under the false name of Losang Tashi, to an address in Gotha, the town in East Germany where Tenzin was born. In a post on May 21st 2008 to the “survivors” group he said, “maybe we use the power of the many people here and the motivation to protect others (giving fearlessness) by setting up 1-2 websites.“

Rather than offering fair or neutral information both websites were a continuation of his online campaign to undermine the protests by attempting to discredit the NKT. Had his intention been wholesome you would need to ask why a Buddhist monk with vows against lying was using a false name when registering websites?

Then in July 2008 Jamyang Khedrup posted a comment promoting one of Tenzin’s websites under a New York Times article about the protests. What I found interesting was that as I dug deeper into Tenzin’s background I found the same people who have been involved with his campaigning for a long time.

By this point in my research I had already encountered Jamyang Khedrup whilst investigating his involvement with the LamaGate hacking scandal, but I had no idea his involvement with Tenzin stretched as far back as 2008.

The reason I didn’t know Khedrup’s involvement went so far back is because he was posting to the ‘survivors‘ group using a false identity. For 6 months in 2008 Khedrup used the name Lobsang Jangchub in numerous posts to the group. Many people responded to his comments addressing him by the name Lobsang. At no time did he ever try to correct them or explain that wasn’t his name.

The fact that both Tenzin and Khedrup were using false identities whilst posting comments to the ‘survivors‘ group raises significant questions about the accuracy of other users identities and claims.

Significant discrepancies have already been uncovered with Khedrup’s accounts of his involvement with LamaGate, and here is yet another occasion where his credibility is called into question.

The Hidden Hand

Seeking to expand his sphere of influence beyond his own websites and the “survivors” group Tenzin began to strike up a relationship with Dialogue Ireland, a website which focuses on religious movements. Prior to Tenzin’s involvement his friend, Joanne Clark had also been in touch with them to offer her services as a self-proclaimed “expert” on Tibetan Buddhism.

Tenzin and Joanne’s approach in the Dialogue Ireland forums seemed to follow a pattern of promoting both Tenzin’s websites and the “survivors” group. In his attempt to form a stronger bond with Dialogue Ireland, Tenzin wrote to them explaining his position:

“I am much interested into the dynamics of Nazi, Stasi, dictatorship, totalitarian systems, and I am an admirer of Jay Lifton and Margaret Thaler Singer. I run also a website about the dynamics of Buddhist cults in German language. So we share quite a lot.”

Yet when they tried to ask him questions about his background he became very defensive, refusing to answer them. Tenzin said,

“I don’t see any use to answer. My experience recently at DI [Dialogue Ireland] was that whatever I say will be misunderstood or misinterpreted and finally twisted.”

adding

“Also I am not interested in any online discussion about me. East German biographies can be complex.”

A common theme in Tenzin’s response to critics is that they are “twisting” the facts, especially when someone is trying to pin him down on a specific point. It’s interesting that Tenzin used to be in the National People’s Army (NPA) in East Germany, which was strongly influenced by the Soviet Armed Forces, working as a radio operator.

His comments about the protests often accuse them of using ‘agitprop’, which is a Soviet style of propaganda, a methodology he would have been all too familiar with from his previous training. Unfortunately he didn’t expand on his “complex” biography, so we don’t know what type of activities he was employed to perform by the NPA, or what areas his training encompassed.

In 2013 Dialogue Ireland started to use Chris Chandler as their expert on Tibetan Buddhism and approached the issue as a problem with Lamaism, rather than just one or two specific traditions. Chris, who had been involved with Tibetan Buddhism for 30 years, raised the issue that Lamaism is a form of Tantric Hinduism. So it was not a question of focussing on the NKT as a cultish form of Buddhism, but was a case of finding the exact same tendencies and attitudes in all forms of Tibetan Buddhism, including those following the Dalai Lama.

Their new outlook limited the degree to which Tenzin could manipulate their website to promote his own agenda and when they began to look into Ringu Tulku Rinpoche, one of Tenzin’s teachers, he disengaged from them completely. (You can read Dialogue Ireland’s article about Tenzin Peljor in full here)

By this point Joanne had already left the Dialogue Ireland site, but when she heard that Chris was their new expert she returned with a vengence. As one person said, “She was like someone high on drink, totally under the influence.“

Dialogue Ireland stated:

“However since Chris has been the catalyst for our understanding of Lamaism as the cultist form of Buddhism Joanne has been like a Banshee on our site morning, noon and night. She disagrees with Chris’s analysis but can’t just get up and go. She is now camping on the site.”

A Sudden Increase

Following his failed attempt at using Dialogue Ireland to undermine the NKT, Tenzin Peljor spent the following years expanding the number of his own websites that he could control and direct, rather than having to rely upon others. During this period his group of websites grew from two to eight, and everything was proceeding as normal for him until 2014.

Prior to 2014 the protests generally garnered a relatively small degree of media coverage. Whilst they were mentioned on several newscasts in the mainstream media it was often along the lines of the Tibetan government’s media briefing notes, so the issues behind the protests were rarely covered.

That all changed in Oslo when the Dalai Lama returned to celebrate his Nobel Peace Prize and the media took a greater interest in the protests. This attention seemed to gradually build from one protest to another which prompted a corresponding increase in activity from Tenzin Peljor and his compatriots.

In the 8 months prior to May 2014 there were on average 16 messages a month posted on the “survivors” discussion board, however in May this figure jumped up to 144 messages. The vast majority of them were posted over the days when the protests were taking place in Oslo.

At the same time the “survivors” were asking what they could do to counter the protests the exile leadership were asking the exact same question, and before long the two groups were working hand in hand. The “NKT Survivors” became the “NKT Survivor Activists“, and at the request of people associated with the exile leadership they began a new phase in their campaign to try and discredit the protesters.

One of their first actions involved the creation of a declaration against the protests by ex-members of the NKT. Originally this was presented as coming from Carol McQuire and Tenzin as a spontaneous idea of their own.

On 5th November however Carol admitted that it wasn’t their idea saying,

“we were asked to do the declaration, it didn’t come from us, but we thought it was a great idea and agreed to do this as it would help the situation.”

adding,

“Once we were asked to join in, we haven’t looked back – it’s been so inspiring working with a load of amazing people”

There was a slight problem with the first version of the declaration though, it included the following text, “We acknowledge there may be some problems within the Tibetan community that need to be addressed“. This had to be removed from subsequent versions of the declaration before the exile leadership would allow it to be put on the CTA’s official website.

In explaining this on his own website Tenzin let slip, “One of the initiators of the declaration wished for a change“, then he presented both the old version and the changed version.

The declaration was then added to the Tibetan government’s official website (Tibet.net) at the very top of the page dedicated to the Dorje Shugden controversy. The significance of its placement should not be underestimated. It appears before any statements from the CTA and the Dalai Lama, which is somewhat unusual for a declaration signed by only 24 ex-NKT members who are supposedly unconnected to the exile leadership.

A New Website

Despite all the best efforts of Tenzin and the CTA the media was undeterred. They continued to take an interest in the protests and the Dalai Lama found himself facing questions about them during every press conference. The coverage in Hamburg seemed pivotal in that it was both widespread and also became the top news story on Google about the Dalai Lama.

Following Hamburg a new website was created specifically for the media to counteract the protests. It was a website that was designed to be both anonymous, yet have the support of Tibet House in the US. No name was associated with it, no contact details, and it was registered through a domain proxy service, designed to keep the registrant’s details hidden.

At the bottom of the website the disclaimer stated:

“Official Tibet Houses are cultural centers of HH the Dalai Lama, non-profit organizations devoted to the preservation of Tibetan culture. This site appears with their approval since, while not responsible for producing the site or its content, the misrepresentations of Tibetan culture generated by this controversy distort and negatively affect the public perception of Tibetan culture.”

It was all very mysterious and Tenzin Peljor made no mention of the website until someone posted a comment on his website drawing his attention to it. He pretended to know nothing about the website until this comment on October 19th, however he had set one of his own websites to redirect to this new website two days previously, on October 17th.

The mystery deepened when I was discussing some of the controversy with Professor Robert Thurman on the fateful night of the LamaGate incident. It seemed that Professor Thurman was confused about who I am and was convinced that I had suggested to him that he should create the website.

On 30th October Prof. Thurman stated to me that, “we prepared shugdeninfo.com for you @IndyHack“, adding, “We produced this site on your suggestion @IndyHack“

I was a little baffled to say the least. Prof. Thurman was saying quite clearly that he was involved with the creation of the new website (shugdeninfo.com) and yet Tenzin Peljor had redirected his own domain name (shugden.info) to Thurman’s new site. It was too much of a coincidence for me to drop and I was encouraged that there was now a direct link between Thurman and Peljor, albeit a slightly difficult one to prove categorically.

Fortunately Tenzin helped out with that a few weeks later.

When is a Coincidence not a Coincidence?

When you’re dealing with investigations it’s tricky to pin down exact evidence to prove your case – people sometimes lie and when you catch them out they usually refuse to admit it. Often times you also have to deal with associations of probabilities, you look for groupings of supposedly unconnected events that push the boundaries of coincidence.

The fact Prof. Thurman had admitted direct involvement with the shugdeninfo.com website was a welcome and unexpected gift. It went beyond the mere approval of the site by Tibet House US and indicated that he had been directly involved in its creation with one or more other people. The fact that Tenzin was redirecting his domain to the site before anyone had told him about it on his blog was also helpful, as was his pretense not to know about it until that point, but it still wasn’t enough.

Then there was another unexpected gift, Tenzin updated the registration of his domain (shugden.info) through the same anonymous service as shugdeninfo.com and hosted it on the same servers as shugdeninfo.com. Now both domain names had exactly the same settings.

In the screenshots below you can see that Tenzin originally registered shugden.info using his legal name, Michael Jäckel and used the address of Bodhicharya Centre in Berlin.

Shugden.info (before)

Shugden.info (after)

Shugdeninfo.com

Out of all of Tenzin’s various websites and domain names this is the only one that is registered through the anonymous proxy service WhoisGuard Inc, it is also the only one that is hosted through Cloudflare.

Conclusions

When delving beyond the facade of a ‘simple monk’ or ‘independent expert’ we find that Tenzin Peljor’s background is far from simple or independent.

Here we have someone who in their youth was a Radio Operator in the National People’s Army, and who is familiar with the Soviet style of government propaganda. By his own admission he is, “interested into the dynamics of Nazi, Stasi, dictatorship, totalitarian systems” and has a complex East German biography (including his own Stasi file).

He’s an ex-NKT member, so that would account for his interest in speaking out against them, but there’s a huge gap of 6 years between him leaving the NKT and beginning his online campaign against them, which doesn’t tally. The timing of his campaign seems more closely related to his ordination by the Dalai Lama than his experiences within the NKT.

Moreover his approach to attacking the NKT seems to be in response to their involvement with the protests, rather than being a “survivor“. He began to develop his own websites only in response to the protests in 2008.

Tenzin claims the purpose of his websites are, “to counter the misinformation campaign of the NKT“, yet his own approach appears to be promoting the disinformation campaign of the Tibetan exile leadership. He also created a declaration and canvassed for signatures on it because he was instructed to by people who objected to even the slightest criticism of the Tibetan community.

His new website in response to the media coverage of the protests in 2014 appears to have been created in collaboration with Professor Thurman, who is alleged to have tried to solicit anonymous to hack protesters Twitter accounts (more here). His domain which redirects to the new website is also now hidden behind the same anonymous registration service that Thurman used.

Overall Tenzin Peljor’s campaign against the NKT seems more related to the protests than any negative experiences he had whilst being a member of the group. The level and depth of his involvement over such an extensive time period goes beyond the expected response of a disgruntled “survivor“.

Mr Peljor appears to be an activist who is promoting a clearly defined and well structured campaign. The fact that his campaign started whilst he was living within the Tibetan exile community in India seems to indicate the main influencing factor behind it.

He is well funded and has significant resources and time to invest in this issue that don’t fit with his role as a resident monk at Bodhicharya Centre. For instance at one point he offered to fly to Ireland to discuss his Stasi background when issues about it arose.

The logical conclusion is that Tenzin Peljor is acting in accordance with the wishes of the CTA as one of their de facto agents. The persona he projects as being an ex-NKT “survivor” simply trying to right the wrongs he experienced is nothing other than a smokescreen.

The problem he has with this facade is that it is poorly crafted and badly executed. When exposed to a sustained investigation it crumbles to reveal his close involvement with, and oversight from, the Tibetan exile leadership.

 
Update – 30th Dec 2014

Today Carol McQuire has publicly accused me of lying and taking advantage of Tenzin’s current ‘absent‘ status. In a recent post on social media she said that Tenzin is currently on retreat at Drepung Monastery until April, so she has sprung valiantly to his defense.

Amongst the various inaccuracies in Carol’s post she has likened the timing of this article to, “someone in a boxing ring deliberately hitting a last strike after the whistle has been blown“, claiming it is published at a time when Tenzin is unable to respond to it. This is untrue.

Carol posted her comments a few hours after Tenzin had posted a new article on his blog. Tenzin had also posted a comment on social media about his new article 2 hours prior to Carol’s post. So her claim that Tenzin is somehow absent from this situation is incorrect.

If he is on retreat at Drepung Monastery as claimed then it is a retreat which allows him to continue to work on his blog and social media. As usual with Tenzin and his friends their accounts often crumble when a small degree of scrutiny is applied to them.

She is also incorrect in stating that the initial version of the ex-NKT declaration was posted on the CTA website – Tibet.net. It is only the version which contains no reference to any criticism of the Tibetan community that was ever posted on Tibet.net.

Carol said,

“the first version of the declaration was already published on the CTA’s website before the second had even been thought of. How sad that such an enormous theory of political intrigue that IndyHack has developed has quite differing origins.”

As you can see from Carol’s own posts she requested that people approve the change on August 26th:

It was only after the declaration had been changed that it was allowed to go on the CTA’s official website, Tibet.net. As you can see from Carol’s own post it was not on their website prior to September:

So Carol’s claim that, “the first version of the declaration was already published on the CTA’s website before the second had even been thought of“, is a lie.

It’s another example of Tenzin and his friends playing fast and loose with the truth.

She did at least admit that Tenzin Peljor primarily attacks the NKT because he is, “involved in looking after the Dalai Lama’s interests in the most profound way“.

Unfortunately for Carol her desperate attempt to try and refute the claims made in my article only destroys her own credibility.

Source: http://www.arebuddhistsracist.com/tenzin_peljor.html

When Buddhists Lie

3rd March 2015

When I began researching the Dalai Lama controversy I expected to face a certain degree of lies, deception, and misinformation, but as it turns out this expectation was greatly underestimated. Even when politicians have been caught lying they can often hold their hands up and apologise, yet I encountered some Buddhists who seemed to find this impossible.

As I’ve mentioned previously it’s a strange feeling to find supposedly spiritual people who manage to make politicians look ethical by comparison. During my research there have been three exceptional examples which warrant an article in their own right.

Tenzin Peljor

Tenzin is without doubt the most compulsive and active promoter of misinformation regarding this controversy that I have encountered. He has good reason since he works for the Central Tibetan Authority (CTA) and has been actively promoting their propaganda for over 8 years as a previous article uncovered.

When asked about Tenzin, Dr. Suzanne Newcombe, a researcher with the religious watch charity Inform stated,

“We are aware that he works towards the [sic] promoting the Dalai Lama’s position on various issues.”

adding,

“it is clear from his many public websites that Tenzin Peljor works actively in ways that support the agenda of the CTA.”

Due to his rather sketchy East German military and Stasi background Tenzin aroused the suspicions of Dialogue Ireland whom he was trying to co-opt into his propaganda campaign against the protests. A member of that group who had extensive knowledge of East Germany queried several serious discrepancies in Tenzin’s biography. Rather than explaining this Tenzin instead began to attack Dialogue Ireland accusing them of twisting the facts – an accusation he frequently directs against anyone who fails to agree with his stance.

In addition to running multiple websites under various false names Tenzin also operates several different online identities which he uses to try and create the appearance of people agreeing with his views. After creating the “survivors” group with David Cutshaw, Tenzin engaged in several online conversations between some of his different accounts to make it appear that people were speaking out.

One such identity Tenzin used for this was named York Johns (yjohns2000) which was a similar user name style to David Cutshaw (davcuts2000). Tenzin also set up a You Tube account under this pseudonym where he uploaded several videos to use in his various websites.

The unusual aspect of York Johns You Tube channel is that it contains a large number of German language videos, several of which feature Dr. Birgit Schweiberer, a teacher from Instituto Lama Tzong Khapa, where Tenzin spent several years studying. Both Tenzin and Birgit studied under Geshe Jampa Gyatso at Instituto Lama Tzong Khapa, which makes York Johns decision to upload Birgit’s teachings to his You Tube account a somewhat unbelievable coincidence, unless of course he was Tenzin.

Throughout Tenzin’s history in this controversy he has systematically lied and deceived people. From using fake names to register websites, aliases to falsify online “survivors” accounts, and blatant lies about his activities in India, Tenzin is about as trustworthy as a snake oil salesman.

To the casual observer he appears to be a normal Buddhist monk, who has strict vows against lying. In accordance with Buddhist traditions if it is shown that he has knowingly lied he ceases to be a monk because he has broken a root vow. So far I have exposed just a small fraction of the lies Tenzin has told.

He is a Buddhist monk in the same way that Valerie Plame was an energy consultant. That was her cover whilst being a CIA operations officer and “monk” is Tenzin’s cover whilst being a CTA operations officer. The only difference is the agency they work for.

For example in late December 2014 Tenzin wrote on his blog that he would be away in India until the end of April 2015 and he would be, “offline during that time“, so no comments or articles would be added until he returned. He later amended this on 1st January 2015 because he needed to upload some more articles to the site. He stated:

“I had a change of the schedule in India and some limited internet access. Therefore there was a bit time to confirm comments and to add some additional posts. I might be able to continue this until the 3rd or latest 5th January and then I am totally offline as I said already.”

In actual fact Tenzin was in India not to engage in a strict retreat without internet access but to work with the CTA to counter the protesters online campaigns. The CTA were very concerned they were losing the battle online and the coverage of the protests in the US and Italy had them very scared.

Tenzin has been online almost every day since he’s been in India, working in part on the Wikipedia pages related to the protests, trying to build support for the ban. This is similar to the role he had in 2006 when he first began working for the CTA.

He’s also found time to review comments and articles for his website. Carol McQuire has continued to claim that he is offline and unable to respond to any claims made about his activities. However she is in touch with him via email and has submitted articles for his blog, the latest of which he published on 27th February 2015.

At the time of writing this Tenzin has so far managed upload new articles as well as edit and approve comments on his blog on 19th January, 21st January, 27th January, 29th January, 30th January, 31st January, 2nd February, 8th February, 11th February, 15th February, 16th February, 25th February, 26th February, 27th February, and 1st March. In fact for someone who is supposedly “totally offline” Tenzin has been updating his own blog with a somewhat miraculous diligence.

Tenzin was lying about being “totally offline“, from 5th January onwards. The truth is that he’s been online and very active for the CTA ever since his arrival in Dharamsala. Which brings a very important question to bear – how can a genuine Buddhist monk lie so blatantly and still be a monk?

The answer in Tenzin’s case is quite simple, he’s not really a monk, he’s an operations officer for the CTA.

Carol McQuire

Tenzin’s preeminent recruit in his fight against the protest movement is Carol McQuire, an ex-NKT member. In Carol’s own words her, “greatest refuge for a long while was Tenzin Peljor“.

Although Carol doesn’t work as an employee of the CTA she works for them principally through Tenzin, and whereas Tenzin receives regular payments from the CTA Carol receives only occasional renumeration from them. One such example was her recent trip to Basel as their special guest.

During her time there Carol had privileged access to the event in return for helping Tenzin with his work to oppose the protest movement. A source within the movement who was in Basel stated that during the first day of the protests Carol attempted to gain access to the protest area. She was stopped by the International Shugden Community (ISC) security as she didn’t have a valid pass.

Despite failing to blend in with the ISC protesters she spent long periods of time observing the administrative area and photographing it. It was the opinion of the person I spoke to that she was trying to gather as much information as possible about the organisers and which Tibetans were involved, presumably to feed back to Tenzin.

Carol has continually refused to explain how she managed to attend the Dalai Lama’s teachings in Basel since the event was sold out months in advance. She also dismissed claims that she received any favourable treatment from the CTA or was allowed any privileged access.

However Carol has now posted a picture she took from the side of the stage area when the Dalai Lama was teaching (shown below).

As you can see from this image the access Carol was given by the CTA is not in any way normal. As well as being a highly privileged position it is also a highly dangerous one given her close proximity to the Dalai Lama. It is therefore impossible for anyone to be in this position without having received a high level of clearance from the CTA’s Department of Security who are responsible for the Dalai Lama’s personal security during such events.

Not only does this photograph demonstrate that Carol is considered to be of significant value to the CTA, it also shows that her handlers are connected to senior members of the exile leadership.

As well as assisting Tenzin with managing the “survivors” she has been their main representative with the religious watch charity Inform. Both Carol and Tenzin have spent considerable time and effort trying to unduly influence Inform’s information about the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT) as explained in a previous article.

When that article was first published it contained a screenshot of Carol claiming that Inform had asked her to participate in the Dorje Shugden discussion at the SOAS University in London. Carol responded to various parts of the article but didn’t dispute the screenshot of her comment.

It was only when a follow up article was published 2 weeks later which included a response from Inform that Carol suddenly tried to refute the statement. She deleted the comment that was taken from Facebook and claimed that I had forged the screenshot.

Previously she also lied about the CTA’s involvement with a “survivors declaration” she claimed to have organised. Carol stated that it hadn’t been altered following instructions from the CTA and that the first version of it was published on their website. Screenshots of Carol’s own comments around the time showed that she was lying by making these claims (see more here).

Linda Ciardiello

As part of the CTA’s fight back against the protesters online campaign several of Carol’s associates have taken to Twitter using various pseudonyms. Whilst most of the battle appears to be a ping-pong game of memes from either side it occasionally steps over the bounds of campaigning into hate speech and bullying.

One such instance occurred between the @LaughingDaquini account and Jan, an ISC protest member. Over the course of a few hours @LaughingDaquini accused Jan of creating an image of the Dalai Lama which she found offensive and seeking to, “destroy the Dalai Lama“.

This sort of rhetoric is quite normal for Twitter and for clashes like these, however @LaughingDaquini took it a step further by targeting Jan’s employer and encouraging other users to target them with tweets. What followed was a blatant case of bullying and harassment which was clearly designed to have a negative impact on Jan’s employment.

This type of approach is quite typical of the controversy and what we see in the example of @LaughingDaquini is simply a microcosm of the same approach the CTA takes where they publish the names of protesters and encourage other Tibetans to treat them as outcasts. Rather than addressing the issues the protests raise, namely that of discrimination and segregation, the CTA and its supporters just attack protesters and attempt to bully them into submission.

In my own dealings with @LaughingDaquini I challenged them that they were in fact Linda Ciardiello. Eventually they made a mistake and Linda published the following comment on Facebook:

I had made no threat whatsoever to Linda and I find it somewhat childish that she would make such a claim. What I found interesting though was that I had never communicated directly with Linda, I had only communicated with @LaughingDaquini. Yet here she was stating I had sent her a tweet, clearly Linda Ciardiello is also @LaughingDaquini.

Following this I tweeted the error and she immediately deleted her comment and claimed I had forged it. It would seem that Carol’s approach to being caught out is now the standard protocol – delete the comment, lie about it, and accuse me of forging evidence.

To be honest I don’t know what I find most offensive, being accused of forging evidence or being accused of forging such tediously insignificant pieces of evidence.

Conclusions

The three examples above are by no means the only ones I’ve encountered, they simply illustrate the main trends in this controversy. I’ve lost count of the number of lies I’ve heard, and I’ve lost track of the amount of time it takes to check each one.

From the stock CTA lie that the protesters are funded by China all the way through to lies about forging evidence, each one is convenient, but totally unsupported by any evidence. It seems that Tenzin and his associates have spent so long spinning lies and having people believe them they think they can get away with saying anything.

The problem for people like Carol is that if they claim to represent ex-NKT members with genuine grievances they are completely undermining themselves. With each lie and each falsification they gradually destroy not just their own credibility, but that of other ex-members.

They are obviously highly motivated to criticise the NKT, both financially and in terms of ongoing access to the Dalai Lama, which will play a role of introducing significant bias into their comments. When that bias is also conjoined with clear evidence of lying their credibility is practically non-existent.

If they have an ability to lie and an incentive to lie, then how can Inform or anyone else who deals with them give credence to their comments?

Whilst they may think they are being clever and getting away with making up events to suit their agendas the reality is the opposite.

If Tenzin is honest, as a Buddhist monk is supposed to be, then why is he lying about being offline in India? Why did he lie when he created false users and false accounts for the “survivors” group? Why did he lie about his military and Stasi background in his biography? Why did he lie when he used false names to register websites?

If Carol is honest and a credible “survivor” then why did she lie about the CTA’s involvement with the declaration? Why did she lie about Inform asking her to be on the panel of the Dorje Shugden discussion? Why did she lie about the CTA giving her access to restricted areas? Why is she being given such special treatment by the CTA?

If Linda is honest and credible then why did she lie about her comment on Facebook? Why did she lie when she said I forged it?

This all goes back to the very heart of this issue – if there is no discrimination and persecution of Shugden Buddhists by the Dalai Lama and his government then why are there so many lies?

If these people are lying to protect the Dalai Lama then what else are they lying about?

 
Update

4th March 2015

In a continuation of her online antics Linda Ciardiello has continued to make false allegations about me. Normally I ignore most of these, but when people are wrongly named as being me it puts their life in danger.

I have publicly explained several times to Dalai Lama supporters that I have received credible threats to my life and I have security precautions in place to mitigate against these risks. Other people who aren’t me don’t have those measures in place and when people recklessly name someone as being me they put that person in serious danger.

It is beyond ironic that Linda accuses me of threatening her and at the same time threatens someone else and puts their safety at risk. Her post is shown below:

The person who has independently researched the matter is an associate of Robert Thurman and is loosely connected to the Anonymous hacking collective. He attends Tibet House in New York and is very much against Shugden practice.

He’s currently on a US National Security Agency (NSA) watch list and he threatened to hack into several protesters Twitter accounts around the time of the LamaGate incident. This is the type of person Linda, Carol, and Tenzin think will add credibility to their cause.

In addition to lying about me forging evidence Linda also lies about this person’s background and independence on the issue. She uses that as justification for endangering someone’s personal safety and the safety of their family.

Below Carol is shown repeating the same false accusation with absolutely no regard for the named person’s welfare or safety. She admits the information comes from a “hacker“, but that clearly doesn’t bother her.

This again illustrates my point that people like Linda and Carol, who claim to be representing ex-NKT members undermine their own credibility by lying and bullying people. What they fail to understand is that in so doing they also undermine the credibility of any ex-NKT members they represent who may have genuine grievances.

It seems very clear they are more concerned with protecting the reputation of the Dalai Lama than in helping ex-NKT members. To that end lying, bullying, threatening, deceiving people, and relying on hackers all appear to be acceptable methods for them.

Source: http://www.arebuddhistsracist.com/when_buddhists_lie.html

Yet More Lies

7th March 2015

It comes with the territory of investigative journalism that people will lie both to you and about you. As I explained in a previous article, When Buddhists Lie, some of the Dalai Lama’s western supporters will happily lie if it helps to suppress the truth about issues in the Tibetan exile community.

One such example, Tenzin Peljor, has responded to some of the accusations against him with a post on one of his blogs accusing me of being an, “ill-informed conspiracy theorist“. Now I know that Tenzin isn’t my greatest fan, but this is going a little far.

It’s a cheap shot simply to try and dismiss these accusations as a conspiracy theory. Also, one of the burdens on someone making such a claim is to show some weakness in the evidence against them. Tenzin’s approach to this is simply to deny everything in an affronted tone.

In itself this is nothing new, I’ve encountered it time and again when exposing lies. To try and defend themselves people simply tell more lies, which is exactly what Tenzin did.

One of the lies I exposed is that Tenzin claimed he was offline whilst being in India. He specified that from 5th January 2015, “I am totally offline as I said already.“

I refuted this lie by stating that Tenzin had been online almost every day since his arrival in India as he was working for the CTA in countering the protests against the Dalai Lama’s ban. I provided evidence for this by showing that Tenzin had been actively updating one of his websites, publishing articles, and approving comments on it on 15 separate dates between 6th January and 3rd March.

Ironically Tenzin’s defence of himself relied in part on his ability to read my article and write a response, which he published on 4th March, again proving that he was lying about being offline in India.

Interestingly Tenzin’s main concern is about “Inform“, a religious research charity he stands accused of manipulating, and their comments about his websites. The particular comment from Inform he spends much of the time trying to refute is, “it is clear from his many public websites that Tenzin Peljor works actively in ways that support the agenda of the CTA.“

He seems to take great exception to this comment, yet he shows no interest in explaining why he lied by using a false name to register two of his websites to an address in Gotha, his childhood home town, as shown below:

It is the same address in Gotha he used to register another domain (info-buddhism.com) using his legal name, Michael Jäckel.

Inform, who now appear to be floundering between criticising and defending Tenzin’s online activities, claimed in his post that:

“The opinions voiced on these website [sic] are his as an individual. In particular, on http://info-buddhism.com/ Tenzin Peljor promotes a range of independent academic opinions, some of which are critical of the CTA, and Tibetan Buddhism more generally.”

I don’t know why Inform believe they can state as fact that the opinions voiced on his websites, “are his as an individual“. It seems a very strange comment for an independent researcher to make. What facts or evidence does Inform use to make this assertion? Just Tenzin’s claim that they are his independent opinions.

By now I’m starting to see a pattern with Inform, but I’ll come back to that in a future article.

For the time being it is worth bearing in mind that the info-buddhism.com website is the same as the info-buddhismus.de website, one is English and one is German. So why did Tenzin lie when he registered info-buddhismus.de?

Another assertion Tenzin makes is:

“I am not working for the CTA nor did I set up or run the website http://www.dalailamaprotesters.com. However, I gave them permission to use articles from http://www.info-buddhism.com and after their request I gave them also the domain http://www.shugden.info which I bought for another purpose.”

Dalailamaprotesters.com began life as shugdeninfo.com, which shares a close resemblance to Tenzin’s domain name shugden.info. It also contains content almost exclusively from Tenzin’s websites.

On 12th December 2014 Tenzin published an interview he had organised with Dr Robert Barnett on his info-buddhism.com website. What Tenzin doesn’t know is that on 10th December, Dr Barnett revealed to an International Shugden Community (ISC) member that he had just been contacted by the organisers of the dalailamaprotesters.com website.

Dr Barnett stated that prior to that contact he had no knowledge of the website, nor the person who contacted him on behalf of it. Clearly that person can’t have been Robert Thurman as Dr Barnett knows Thurman very well.

It’s a somewhat unusual coincidence that days after the organiser of the dalailamaprotesters.com website contacted Dr Barnett, Tenzin published an interview with him on his info-buddhism.com website. Of course this isn’t definitive proof of any direct link between Tenzin and the dalailamaprotesters.com website, but there are a lot of coincidences surrounding it.

For instance they initially used a domain name very similar to the one Tenzin had registered under his own name. Why not use the one Tenzin had already? Because this would tie Tenzin directly to the site.

So a similar name was used which was registered under an anonymous domain registration service. Tenzin’s own domain name was later re-registered under the same anonymous service.

The reason that Tenzin’s shugden.info domain name couldn’t be used to host the site is because no matter how many times it was re-registered it would always have the original registration details on its record, so it would always lead back to him.

When the dalailamaprotesters.com website was launched (under the name shugdeninfo.com) it contained content exclusively from Tenzin’s websites. Over time it has added an occasional article from other sources, but initially it was only his content.

To summarise, the website Tenzin claims not to have set up or run contained content exclusively from his own websites, was on an almost identical domain name to one he had registered under his own name, and he also redirected shugden.info to the new site.

Add to that Dr Barnett’s revelation that he was contacted by the operators of the website days before Tenzin published an interview with him and the probability of Tenzin lying about his involvement with dalailamaprotesters.com is extremely high.

Conclusions

Perhaps this is all just an elaborate ill-informed conspiracy theory as Tenzin would have us believe? If so, why have Tenzin and his friends been caught lying so often?

• Why did Tenzin lie about being offline in India?

• Why did he lie about his name when registering his websites?

• Why did he lie when he pretended to be York Johns?

• Why did an expert question his East German military and Stasi background, and why did Tenzin refuse to explain the inaccuracies?

• If he isn’t working for the CTA then why did Tenzin only begin his activism against the NKT after he had taken ordination from the Dalai Lama in India? Why didn’t he begin it in any of the 6 years prior to that?

• Why did Tenzin lie and claim Lobsang Jangchub wrote an article about Sera Monastery when he knew it was written by his friend Jamyang Khedrup?

• Why did Carol lie about Inform asking her to be on the SOAS discussion panel?

• Why did she lie about deleting the comment showing this on Facebook and then claim I had forged it?

• Why did Carol sit so closely to the Dalai Lama in Basel if she doesn’t have contacts in senior positions within the CTA?

• Why did she lie about the CTA’s involvement in drafting the “survivors declaration” and when it was published on their official website?

• Why did Linda Ciardiello lie about an ISC member to their employer accusing them of creating a meme and seeking to, “destroy the Dalai Lama“?

• Why did she delete a comment exposing her as the operator of the @laughingdaquini Twitter account and then lie about me forging the comment?

I don’t expect them to have the courage to be truthful in these matters, rather I fully expect them to continue to lie and deceive people. Sadly for them I will continue to expose their lies and take away their most useful tool, as Stephen King once said:

The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.

Source: http://www.arebuddhistsracist.com/yet_more_lies.html
 

The opinion piece below was sent to dorjeshugden.com for publication. We accept submissions from the public, please send in your articles to ds@dorjeshugden.com.

The Dorje Shugden ban is a travesty of justice and also an indictment against everyone who has perpetuated this grave injustice against innocent monks and four million Dorje Shugden believers around the world. One of the enforcers of the Dalai Lama’s illegal ban is none other than Robert Thurman, regarded as ‘the Dalai Lama’s man in America’. Thurman had previously labelled Shugden Buddhists as the “Taliban of Buddhism” with the intention of creating public enmity towards Dorje Shugden people.

Thurman’s disregard for the law is not limited to defaming innocent Shugden practitioners but also extends to seeking to engage hackers to attack the social media accounts of some who are critical of the ban. This itself is a felony and shows Thurman’s utter scorn of the people’s right to express their opinions.

Fortunately, there are people like Indy Hack, an independent UK based journalist who has devoted himself to reporting on the deceit of the Dalai Lama and his coterie. In this story, Indy Hack exposes Thurman’s criminal enterprise in denying Shugden worshippers their right to their religion. For more from Indy Hack, visit arebuddhistsracist.com.

What is #LamaGate?

#LamaGate refers to the hacking scandal that surrounds the Dalai Lama’s trip to the US in fall 2014. It centres around the Dalai Lama’s most trusted US friend and confidant, Professor Robert Thurman, who allegedly tried to solicit members of Anonymous to engage in computer hacking on his behalf.

On 29th October 2014 Professor Thurman published a tweet (shown below) asking how to get the help of the Anonymous group to “get info out” about certain individuals he wished to target.

In and of itself this may seem like nothing more than a foolish and careless over-reaction on the part of Professor Thurman to the widespread media coverage the Shugden protests had been receiving. Yet when it was pointed out to him that such an action could be considered illegal in the US this didn’t dissuade him from continuing down his chosen path of action.

In the following hours Thurman published a series of tweets identifying specific Twitter accounts to target. He identified each of them as, “key Anti HHDL Shugden Twitter Spam Accounts”, and followed the account name with the tags #anon and #OpShugden.

#OpShugden was devised by another Twitter user (@OpTsampa) who appeared to be working alongside Thurman in his campaign. @OpTsampa also tweeted an offer of 50 BitCoins ($16,967) to anyone who could link the most accounts together that had been identified by Thurman.

Exactly what information Thurman wanted Anonymous members to “get out” of each of the identified accounts is uncertain, although it appears that he was trying to reveal the identities of the owners of the accounts. The only way to get this information would be to gain access to the users accounts without their consent, as such it appears that Thurman was soliciting computer hacking against each of the individually named Twitter accounts.

Why would Professor Thurman solicit hacking?

Throughout his fall tour of the US the Dalai Lama has faced an unprecedented level of media attention about allegations of human rights violations and religious discrimination, as anyone familiar with this site will know. Professor Thurman plays a key role in the dissemination of information against the protesters because of his academic standing and his close friendship with the Dalai Lama. They are so close in fact that the NY Times magazine referred to Thurman as, “the Dalai Lama’s man in America”.

Prior to 29th October, all of the Dalai Lama’s attempts to avoid addressing the issues raised by the protesters had been unsuccessful with the US media. Everywhere the Dalai Lama spoke, protesters gathered and news agencies covered not just the protests, but the issues behind them (see here).

As the time drew closer for the Dalai Lama to appear in New York City, where Thurman is based, the pressure had been increasing on Thurman to do something to counteract the effect of the protests. Under such increasing pressure it appears that he may have taken the highly unusual step of soliciting computer hacking in an attempt to reduce some of the exposure they were getting on Twitter.

It seems that Thurman believed several Twitter accounts were run by one or two individuals, and that by hacking those accounts he would be able to silence them.

What happens now?

Presently the #Lamagate scandal is continuing to increase on a daily basis. On 30th October this website published a guide on how to indict Robert Thurman and on 31st October it ran an Indict-Storm on Twitter, calling for any users who felt violated by Professor Thurman’s actions to report them to the authorities.

During 30th/31st October multiple reports were filed with the NYPD and the FBI asking for them to investigate the allegations against Thurman. Specifically they stated:

“It is alleged that Professor Robert A. Thurman (@BobThurman) did knowingly solicit others to commit computer hacking and provided information to direct said computer hacking against several users of Twitter in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1030 (a) (2).

On October 29th 2014 it is alleged Professor Robert A. Thurman directed computer hackers associated with the ‘Anonymous’ group to hack Twitter’s computer servers and extract information about the following users: @tompotter1945, @TalkingTibet, @wisdomdakini2, and @Vajralight.

I am making a formal complaint about alleged criminal activity by Professor Robert A. Thurman and asking you to investigate whether any criminal activity has taken place.”

Despite this Professor Thurman continues to maintain a public list of Twitter users which he refers to as, “Known Spammers”. Members of this list continue to report suspicious activity on their Twitter accounts.

Who is involved?

Given Professor Thurman’s close relationship with the Dalai Lama it is highly likely that he may have known about this course of action. As the management of the Dalai Lama’s visit is also conducted with the US Office of Tibet, now based in Washington DC, it is also highly likely that they were aware of Thurman’s decision to try and recruit Anonymous.

Despite the high profile of this scandal both the US Office of Tibet and the Dalai Lama have so far remained silent, refusing to comment or even acknowledge its existence.

Likewise Columbia University, Professor Thurman’s employers, have refused to acknowledge or comment on the scandal.

Fortunately the Anonymous group are less afraid of speaking publicly on this issue. On 2nd November they issued the following public statement about the scandal addressed principally to Professor Thurman:

“.@BobThurman we have no position on this currently but can tell you one of Anon’s only central principles is NYPA: Not Your Personal Army”

More to follow…

Source: http://www.arebuddhistsracist.com/lamagate.html

Robert Thurman & Anonymous

On October 28th 2014 respected scholar and author Robert Thurman decided to mention me on Twitter and make false and unsupported claims about me. He also tried to add me to a list which he promotes to followers of the Dalai Lama so they can send threatening and offensive tweets to its members. I responded by publishing an open letter to him on 29th October, but what I wasn’t expecting was his vehement and extreme reaction.

Throughout the day there was no response from Professor Thurman, yet things suddenly changed as the evening arrived and he issued a tweet publicly asking for the help of Anonymous.

Screenshot taken at 18:00 EDT 29th Oct 2014

I was one of the people that Professor Thurman was wanting to target and unearth information about, including my identity. Whilst I have the greatest respect for the ethos of Anonymous, I have never been their focus, nor have I ever considered my work to warrant their focus.

I raised the issue of the legality of publishing such a tweet and the hasty reply from an account that Professor Thurman was working with in his new Anonymous campaign replied that it was just about re-tweets and whois searches.

Screenshot taken at 07:44 EDT 30th Oct 2014

Of course re-tweets and whois searches are standard practices and certainly not in any way illegal. However the Anonymous group is not renowned for its use of whois, or its social media re-tweeting campaigns.

As @OpTsampa says, “Anyone can backtrace an IP”. So why would they be asking for the help of Anonymous if they only wanted to back-trace IPs and conduct whois searches?

Anonymous is well known as a collective of hackers who engage in electronic civil disobedience (ECD). You don’t ask for the help of Anonymous for re-tweets, you ask for their help for one thing – hacking, which is a federal crime in the US.

Asking for the help of Anonymous is fairly easy on Twitter, you just publish a tweet and insert the call sign “#anon”. Both @OpTsampa and Professor Thurman then engaged in a campaign of publishing tweets identifying Twitter users and encouraging Anonymous members to target them.

Screenshot taken at 07:45 EDT 30th Oct 2014

Screenshot taken at 21:36 EDT 29th Oct 2014

If you thought this was maybe a bit of harmless fun from Professor Thurman and his accomplice the next tweet may surprise you.

Screenshot taken at 07:44 EDT 30th Oct 2014

For those unfamiliar with the Bit Coin currency it’s a virtual currency which enables transactions to be carried out completely anonymously. It is often used when paying for services which are illegal, such as hacking. The value of 50 Bit Coins at the time this tweet was published was $16,967.00.

Offering hackers just under $17,000 to target people on Twitter is not harmless fun. It is a very serious financial offer, and a US federal crime. As this statement from the US Attorneys Office in April 2014 makes clear in the case of Fidel Salinas.

Whilst Salinas was accused of engaging in hacking, it is a criminal offence to solicit federal criminal acts and you can be an accessory to the crimes if you are found to have encouraged or instigated them.

On October 29th 2014 it would appear quite clearly that @OpTsampa and Professor Robert Thurman were not only accomplices in cyber crime, but that they actively engaged in soliciting cyber crime, as defined by the FBI.

The question is why would a Professor at Columbia University in New York, the co-founder and president of Tibet House US, and father of Hollywood star Uma Thurman, be so desperate as to break federal law?

Maybe it was never intended as an attempt to solicit hacking? If so then why did Anonymous themselves issue a formal response through their official Twitter account?

If there is nothing to hide, if the allegations of religious discrimination and human rights violations by the Dalai Lama are unfounded, then why would an eminent professor ask for Anonymous to help?

Why not simply debate the issue and show evidence that refutes or counters the claims?

At the present moment I am taking legal advice regarding filing a complaint with the Internet Crime Complaint Centre (IC3) of the FBI so that they can further investigate Professor Thurman’s role in soliciting cyber crime.

I will keep you posted with updates as this case develops.

*****UPDATE*****

14:30 – 30th October 2014

After having taken legal advice I am in the process of drafting a formal complaint for investigation by the FBI. I am awaiting the FBI’s decision whether it is best to submit the formal complaint through their New York field office, or through IC3.

As the alleged offenses occurred over the Twitter platform it is likely to be an inter-state matter placing it within federal jurisdiction.

I am advised that Professor Thurman is currently aware that he is one of the subjects named in my formal complaint.

More to follow.

***Further Update***

As this is now an ongoing criminal investigation I am unable to add further comments.

Source: http://www.arebuddhistsracist.com/robert_thurman_anonymous.html
 

Question:

One of the reasons most quoted in support of the Dalai Lama’s ban on Dorje Shugden is the 1997 murder of the principal of the Buddhist School of Dialectics, Geshe Lobsang Gyatso, along with two of his students. No one has been arrested to date, yet this incident was seized upon by the CTA as the opportunity to defame and criminalize Dorje Shugden practitioners. Is there any substance to the CTA’s allegations?

Answer:

The Answer is extracted from the article: “How the Dalai Lama is destroying a religion, lie by lie” which was written in response to false statements made by Robert Thurman in an article posted in the Huffington Post.

Lies In Robert’s Thurman’s Huffington Post Article

Thurman Lie #1: Dorje Shugden was behind the murder of Geshe Lobsang Gyatso and his associates

The incident that Thurman referred to was the grisly triple murder of Geshe Lobsang Gyatso and two of his assistants on a February night in 1997, in Dharamsala. The Geshe was known to be a harsh critic of anything that did not agree with the Dalai Lama, and made a lot of enemies over the years as the Geshe’s assistant would concede in 2005. The Geshe was however, loyal to the Dalai Lama and his demise did serve the Dalai Lama clique as it provided an excuse for the Dharamsala establishment to reinforce a political gambit it had launched the year before.

Immediately, the murder was pinned on Shugden worshippers without any evidence. The only ‘evidence’ was purportedly a letter from the Secretary of the Dorje Shugden Society in Dharamsala to Geshe Lobsang Gyatso sent a few months prior to the incident, supposedly threatening to kill the Geshe. In a deliberate attempt to mislead the public and sway sentiments against the Shugden community, the letter written in Tibetan was waved by a minister of the Tibetan government in exile (now known as the Central Tibetan Administration, CTA) before the public, claiming it to be the smoking gun that linked the murders to Shugden worshippers.

It was only on closer inspection and when the letter was translated that it became clear the so-called death threat was no more than a firm letter by the Shugden society challenging Geshe Lobsang Gyatso, who had been a fierce critic of Dorje Shugden, to a discussion on the merits and reasons of the religious ban which in fact lacked any theological basis. Helmut Gassner, an established Western Buddhist monk and scholar who had been an interpreter for the Dalai Lama for 17 years said of the incriminating letter:

I could not resist stopping the video [of the government minister waving the letter] to copy the Tibetan text and translate it. It contained no death threat at all, simply an impertinent letter containing a challenge to debate the issue so as to settle the difference. By now I was convinced that something foul was going on. Otherwise, why would Tashi Wangdu [the Tibetan minister] go to such lengths as to show a fake death threat on TV?
- Helmut Gassner
Source: http://www.dorjeshugden.com/articles/HelmutGassner01.pdf

Nevertheless, the false evidence was enough for the CTA to push for the arrest of various leaders of the Shugden religious community in Delhi and illegally imprison them. Despite interrogations by the Indian authorities lasting weeks, not a shred of evidence was produced. Finally, an Indian court in Dharamsala formally quashed all accusations that linked the Dorje Shugden Society to the murders, on the grounds that there was no evidence to support such accusations.

Of all the ‘clear proof’ that circles around the Dalai Lama and CTA claimed they had, they were never presented when called upon. Instead, malicious gossip circulated saying that the murderers had escaped into Tibet where they were being sheltered by the Chinese government, the sworn enemies of the Tibetan people.

The Dorje Shugden Society chronicled their harrowing accounts after being falsely accused by the CTA for the crime, which began with an army of forty Indian police, instigated by the CTA, descending upon five targeted leaders of the Dorje Shugden Society, arresting them in the dark of the night of February 9, 1997 (four days after the triple murder) without any court order, as they were celebrating Tibetan New Year. This episode and a number of other suspicious incidences around that time foretold that a serious campaign was underway to terminate an age-old Buddhist practice that has been at the heart of the Gelugpa tradition.

Thurman and the Dalai Lama go a long way back

Robert Thurman, who has long claimed to be a close friend of the Dalai Lama (despite being the first Western Buddhist monk to disrobe), made an outrageous statement to Newsweek in April 1997 saying,

I think there’s no doubt that Shugden was behind the killings

It has to be asked, on what basis was Thurman making his claim when events that were being played out evidenced the opposite to be the case? And why did Thurman further lay blame on an entire community of innocent monks and laypeople who worshipped Dorje Shugden, if not to seize the moment for some opportunistic sycophancy?

Assuming that the murderers of the Geshe and his associates were Shugden worshippers, Thurman’s statement tarnishing a specific religion is equivalent to saying that Jesus Christ is behind the killings committed by criminals who happen to be of the Christian faith. Thurman did not mean to imply that the murderers may be Shugden practitioners, he said “Shugden was behind the killings”, the precise strand of venom that the Dalai Lama clique needed the world community to swallow.

In the same breath, Thurman went further to say, “It would not be unfair to call Shugdens the Taliban of Tibetan Buddhism,” no doubt as a means to portray Shugden Buddhists as a brutal and dangerous ‘tribe’ at a time when America watched the Taliban regime nervously as it gained power and edged closer to Pakistan, a country on America’s watch list. The damage inflicted on the reputation of Dorje Shugden and his followers was considerable as Thurman was regarded as an American expert on Tibetan Buddhism. (Time Magazine honoured Thurman as one of its 25 most influential Americans in 1997, describing him as a “larger than life scholar-activist destined to convey the Dharma, the precious teachings of Siddhartha, from Asia to America.”).

The American, and indeed the English-speaking world public, took what Thurman said to be accurate as there was little rebuttal from the accused Shugden community in Dharamsala. Being mainly monks and exiled people, Shugden practitioners were ill equipped to defend against the enormity of the propaganda attacks on a world scale, even as they faced physical challenges and threats from the CTA within their own exile community. Nearly all media in the western world blindly took the official version of the Shugden story from the CTA and propagated news that incriminated Shugden worshippers in the murders.

The Dalai Lama clique had scored an important victory with the help of Robert Thurman. The Dalai Lama knew that it was totally undemocratic to ban a religion and suppress a community of people based on their religion, especially when he was seeking support from the West against China, accusing the latter of precisely the atrocity he and his government were committing. Therefore the West had to be manipulated into assent for the vicious suppression the Dalai Lama was inflicting on his own people.

Over the months that followed, Dorje Shugden was forcibly outlawed as, for the first time in modern history, a ‘democratic’ nation legislated the stoppage of a religious practice and systematically marginalised its believers, even to the point of refusing them the right to vote. Shugden monks were expelled from the monasteries – the only homes they had, having renounced all worldly pursuits, and lay worshippers went into hiding from their own government and community. In Dharamsala, clear posters forbidding people of Shugden faith to enter shops, government offices and even public hospitals could be seen. All this time, the world was celebrating the Dalai Lama as a man of peace, preaching compassion, love and tolerance around the globe.

In the Huffington Post article, Thurman stated that the Shugden ‘cult continued its campaign at the behest of… the People’s Republic of China’ another lie designed to tag the Shugden community as agents of the Tibetan people’s enemy, China. It is baseless accusations such as these that split the Tibetan community as a whole in a manner that China could not have achieved, in their effort to stymie the Tibetan Cause. Of course, China leveraged on this chasm that the Dalai Lama and Thurman have presented to them.

Read the full article: http://www.dorjeshugden.com/all-articles/the-controversy/how-the-dalai-lama-is-destroying-a-religion-lie-by-lie/

By Shashi Kei

Recently, the Huffington Post ran an article written by Robert Thurman, “The Dalai Lama And The Cult Of Dolgyal Shugden” which although sensational by its title, was no more than a rehash of allegations spawned by Thurman over 17 years ago, against a 350-year-old Tibetan Buddhist practice that the Dalai Lama has been trying to destroy since 1996 with some, but incomplete success.

Thurman wasted no time revealing the purpose of his article. In the first few sentences alone, Thurman launched a barrage of adjectives against a community of Buddhist practitioners calling them ‘murderers’, ‘cult members’, ‘spirit worshippers’ and ‘agents of the Chinese government’:

“Ever since 1997, when, according to detailed Indian police investigations, pseudo- monks who infiltrated to Dharamsala from China murdered the Venerable Lobsang Gyatso, a noted lama close to the Dalai Lama, and his two young disciples, the cult of the Dolgyal-Shugden spirit has been on the attack. The well-evidenced culprits were not tried as they escaped back into Tibet and China, but the cult continued its campaign at the behest of, and with substantial funding from, the United Front department of the People’s Republic of China, the agency handling relations with non-Chinese “minority nationalities.”

If ever there is a need of a good example of a poison-pen note, Thurman’s article contains enough venom, spite and malice to qualify as the best illustration of such. Especially so when the allegations therein have already been revealed to be outright lies. Thurman’s piece offers no new revelations or insights into the most controversial and damaging events to have hit Tibetan Buddhism in the modern era but the timing of this old news resurfacing and indeed why there is even a need to regurgitate past stories, is worthy of note. To understand this, we have to back track to an event that took place the year before.

An Unholy Distraction

In March 1996, the Dalai Lama decided to ban the three hundred and fifty year old Buddhist practice of Dorje Shugden (long regarded as an emanation of Buddha Manjushri, and one in the myriad of Dharma Protectors in the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon), claiming that the practice endangers his life and was to blame for the Tibetan people’s failure to regain their country from China. The reasons for the ban did not make much sense to the scholars, geshes and monks who were familiar with the deity. In addition, Dorje Shugden has been practiced by the highest and most respectable lamas over the generations, many of whom were regarded as enlightened beings themselves. Not surprisingly, the ban met with quiet resistance by the powerful and logical Gelugpa monastic community and laypeople.

Although the real reason(s) for the Dalai Lama’s decision to destroy the Shugden practice that he himself had engaged in has never been revealed, many suspect that the reasons may be political in nature. The Dalai Lama’s escape to India in 1959 presented the leader both with an opportunity as well as a dilemma. Historically the Dalai Lamas were accepted as political leaders of the Tibetan people but each of the four major Tibetan Buddhist traditions had their own spiritual leaders who conducted the affairs of their respective lineage quite independently of the institution of the Dalai Lamas. Exiled from their homeland with the Tibetan community scattered, that dynamic changed and placed the Dalai Lama in the position of an absolute head of the exiled people, albeit de-facto.

It is difficult to say if the Dalai Lama had a genuinely noble objective to hold his people closely together in strength or whether he saw an opportunity to formalise this new-found universal power once and for all, but not long after his arrival in India, the Dalai Lama sought to consolidate all four Tibetan Buddhist schools into a single entity under his control.

This would mean that mixing of different practices from different schools would be inevitable and the idea was resisted by stalwarts of the Gelugpa school and others from different traditions. The old Gelugpa masters were not opposed to the Dalai Lama or his wish to unite the people but they felt that the purity of the lineage practices that have been preserved for centuries, should not be sacrificed for political expediency. The Dalai Lama’s politico-religious ambition was thus thwarted.

Being in exile posed another problem for the Dalai Lama i.e. how to secure Tibetan independence and return the Tibetans to their beloved homeland. This question became more intense as the months of anxious waiting became years and then decades. Tibetans had hoped to regain their independence quickly and indeed, various proclamations by the Dalai Lama and the state oracle (Nechung) over the years kept their hopes alive. However by the start of the 1990s the Tibetan voice demanding independence was becoming louder. This was of concern to the Dalai Lama as many Tibetans began to realize that the Dalai Lama had in fact abandoned the fight for Tibetan independence in 1988, choosing instead a “middle way”, a compromised goal of self-autonomy.

Another theory that has been advanced to explain the Dalai Lama’s ban of the Shugden practice is that he needed a ‘fall-guy’ to blame for his inability to deliver the Tibetan freedom that his people had expected but that which he could not fulfil any longer. The timing of the Dalai Lama’s key attacks on Shugden certainly matches this theory:

• 1996: when pro-independence voice became louder after the Dalai Lama’s own brother founded the Tibetan Independence Movement in 1995 in defiance of the Dalai Lama’s preferred ‘middle way’, the Dalai Lama decreed a ban on the Dorje Shugden practice;
• 2008: The year of the Beijing Olympics when the pro-independence movement was at its most active, with the people sensing that it was the best opportunity for the Tibetans to fight for their freedom as the international community watched China. The Dalai Lama intensified the ban and called for the expulsion of Shugden monks from the Gelugpa monasteries.
• 2013-2014: When the Dalai Lama’s Sikyong Lobsang Sangay (at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC on May 8, 2013) openly declared that they would accept Communist rule, essentially putting an end to any hopes of Tibetan independence or even significant autonomous self-rule. The Dalai Lama renewed his attack on Shugden after a few years of relative silence.

The Dalai Lama chose Dorje Shugden as his scapegoat because it would have occurred to him that in one fell swoop, he could remove the resistance to his ambition of political consolidation and at the same time create a controversy that would affect a large enough segment of the population to serve its purpose.

Now a false casus belli had to be established for the Tibetan people to go against an ancient deity and its practitioners. A negative propaganda war had to be waged against Dorje Shugden and his followers. Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, responsible for whipping up mob emotions that facilitated Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and eventually led to one of the greatest devastations to have afflicted mankind, had said:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

It is only in light of Goebbels’ ‘big lie’ that we begin to see why there was a need for Thurman to dredge up and breathe life into an old incident that had already been forgotten. It was time to repeat the big lie again and Thurman’s article does not disappoint. It is vicious in its attack of Shugden and its worshippers but chronically lacks the element of truth. It would not be unfair to say that in fact, Thurman lied throughout the entire article.

Lies In Robert’s Thurman’s Huffington Post Article

Thurman Lie #1: Dorje Shugden was behind the murder of Geshe Lobsang Gyatso and his associates

The incident that Thurman referred to was the grisly triple murder of Geshe Lobsang Gyatso and two of his assistants on a February night in 1997, in Dharamsala. The Geshe was known to be a harsh critic of anything that did not agree with the Dalai Lama, and made a lot of enemies over the years as the Geshe’s assistant would concede in 2005. The Geshe was however, loyal to the Dalai Lama and his demise did serve the Dalai Lama clique as it provided an excuse for the Dharamsala establishment to reinforce a political gambit it had launched the year before.

Immediately, the murder was pinned on Shugden worshippers without any evidence. The only ‘evidence’ was purportedly a letter from the Secretary of the Dorje Shugden Society in Dharamsala to Geshe Lobsang Gyatso sent a few months prior to the incident, supposedly threatening to kill the Geshe. In a deliberate attempt to mislead the public and sway sentiments against the Shugden community, the letter written in Tibetan was waved by a minister of the Tibetan government in exile (now known as the Central Tibetan Administration, CTA) before the public, claiming it to be the smoking gun that linked the murders to Shugden worshippers.

It was only on closer inspection and when the letter was translated that it became clear the so-called death threat was no more than a firm letter by the Shugden society challenging Geshe Lobsang Gyatso, who had been a fierce critic of Dorje Shugden, to a discussion on the merits and reasons of the religious ban which in fact lacked any theological basis. Helmut Gassner, an established Western Buddhist monk and scholar who had been an interpreter for the Dalai Lama for 17 years said of the incriminating letter:

I could not resist stopping the video [of the government minister waving the letter] to copy the Tibetan text and translate it. It contained no death threat at all, simply an impertinent letter containing a challenge to debate the issue so as to settle the difference. By now I was convinced that something foul was going on. Otherwise, why would Tashi Wangdu [the Tibetan minister] go to such lengths as to show a fake death threat on TV?
[Source: http://www.dorjeshugden.com/articles/HelmutGassner01.pdf]

Nevertheless, the false evidence was enough for the CTA to push for the arrest of various leaders of the Shugden religious community in Delhi and illegally imprison them. Despite interrogations by the Indian authorities lasting weeks, not a shred of evidence was produced. Finally, an Indian court in Dharamsala formally quashed all accusations that linked the Dorje Shugden Society to the murders, on the grounds that there was no evidence to support such accusations.

Of all the ‘clear proof’ that circles around the Dalai Lama and CTA claimed they had, they were never presented when called upon. Instead, malicious gossip circulated saying that the murderers had escaped into Tibet where they were being sheltered by the Chinese government, the sworn enemies of the Tibetan people.

The Dorje Shugden Society chronicled their harrowing accounts after being falsely accused by the CTA for the crime, which began with an army of forty Indian police, instigated by the CTA, descending upon five targeted leaders of the Dorje Shugden Society, arresting them in the dark of the night of February 9, 1997 (four days after the triple murder) without any court order, as they were celebrating Tibetan New Year. This episode and a number of other suspicious incidences around that time foretold that a serious campaign was underway to terminate an age-old Buddhist practice that has been at the heart of the Gelugpa tradition.

Robert Thurman, who has long claimed to be a close friend of the Dalai Lama (despite being the first Western Buddhist monk to disrobe), made an outrageous statement to Newsweek in April 1997 saying,

I think there’s no doubt that Shugden was behind the killings.

It has to be asked, on what basis was Thurman making his claim when events that were being played out evidenced the opposite to be the case? And why did Thurman further lay blame on an entire community of innocent monks and laypeople who worshipped Dorje Shugden, if not to seize the moment for some opportunistic sycophancy?

Assuming that the murderers of the Geshe and his associates were Shugden worshippers, Thurman’s statement tarnishing a specific religion is equivalent to saying that Jesus Christ is behind the killings committed by criminals who happen to be of the Christian faith. Thurman did not mean to imply that the murderers may be Shugden practitioners, he said “Shugden was behind the killings”, the precise strand of venom that the Dalai Lama clique needed the world community to swallow.

In the same breath, Thurman went further to say, “It would not be unfair to call Shugdens the Taliban of Tibetan Buddhism,” no doubt as a means to portray Shugden Buddhists as a brutal and dangerous ‘tribe’ at a time when America watched the Taliban regime nervously as it gained power and edged closer to Pakistan, a country on America’s watch list. The damage inflicted on the reputation of Dorje Shugden and his followers was considerable as Thurman was regarded as an American expert on Tibetan Buddhism. (Time Magazine honoured Thurman as one of its 25 most influential Americans in 1997, describing him as a “larger than life scholar-activist destined to convey the Dharma, the precious teachings of Siddhartha, from Asia to America.”).

The American, and indeed the English-speaking world public, took what Thurman said to be accurate as there was little rebuttal from the accused Shugden community in Dharamsala. Being mainly monks and exiled people, Shugden practitioners were ill equipped to defend against the enormity of the propaganda attacks on a world scale, even as they faced physical challenges and threats from the CTA within their own exile community. Nearly all media in the western world blindly took the official version of the Shugden story from the CTA and propagated news that incriminated Shugden worshippers in the murders.

The Dalai Lama clique had scored an important victory with the help of Robert Thurman. The Dalai Lama knew that it was totally undemocratic to ban a religion and suppress a community of people based on their religion, especially when he was seeking support from the West against China, accusing the latter of precisely the atrocity he and his government were committing. Therefore the West had to be manipulated into assent for the vicious suppression the Dalai Lama was inflicting on his own people.

Over the months that followed, Dorje Shugden was forcibly outlawed as, for the first time in modern history, a ‘democratic’ nation legislated the stoppage of a religious practice and systematically marginalised its believers, even to the point of refusing them the right to vote. Shugden monks were expelled from the monasteries – the only homes they had, having renounced all worldly pursuits, and lay worshippers went into hiding from their own government and community. In Dharamsala, clear posters forbidding people of Shugden faith to enter shops, government offices and even public hospitals could be seen. All this time, the world was celebrating the Dalai Lama as a man of peace, preaching compassion, love and tolerance around the globe.

In the Huffington Post article, Thurman stated that the Shugden ‘cult continued its campaign at the behest of… the People’s Republic of China’ another lie designed to tag the Shugden community as agents of the Tibetan people’s enemy, China. It is baseless accusations such as these that split the Tibetan community as a whole in a manner that China could not have achieved, in their effort to stymie the Tibetan Cause. Of course, China leveraged on this chasm that the Dalai Lama and Thurman have presented to them.

Robert Thurman who carries out the Dalai Lama’s anti-Shugden propaganda in the West

Thurman Lie #2: There is No Ban on the Dorje Shugden Practice

Thurman’s purveying of falsehood did not end there. In the same article, Thurman blatantly denied that there was even a ban on the religious practice. He wrote,

The worship of their [Shugden practitioners] chosen deity was not “banned” by the Dalai Lama, since he has no authority to “ban” what Tibetan Buddhists practice.

As most of the Dalai Lama’s communications in instructing the ban were in Tibetan, Thurman gambles on the fact that most people in the English-speaking world would not be able to read the Tibetan language. But here is ample proof of the ban:

1. From a booklet entitled ‘Selected Addresses of His Holiness the Dalai Lama on the issue of propitiating Protector Deities’, published by Sherig Parkhang, Dharamsala, July 10th 1996
   1. from the address by H.H. the Dalai Lama, Dharamsala, May 5th 1996, p175:
      

      ‘It may have been about ten years ago. While giving a Lamrim teaching at Drepung I once gave my reasons for issuing the ban (Tibetan: dam.bsgrags).’

   2. P183, of the same document cited above:
      

      ‘In this way came the reasons, on account of which I have issued the ban (Tibetan: dam.bsgrags) in recent times. In banning (this reliance on Shugden), many came forward and declared that henceforth they will abide by my injunctions. I happily thank and appreciate their gesture.’

2. From a letter to Ganden Shartse Monastic College, from the Tibetan exile government’s Department of Religion and Culture, Dharamsala, 5th May 1996:
   

   ‘A letter of the Private Office of the Dalai Lama dated 30th March 1996, with a video cassette of the Dalai Lama’s address given in the Spring during the Lamrim teachings forbidding (Tibetan: bsten gsol mi chog pa) reliance on Dhogyal as well as an emphatic address (Tibetan: bka’ slob nan pebs) has been sent (to the monastery).’

3. From a letter to the Abbot of Sermey Monastic College, Bylakuppe, from the Private Office of HH the Dalai Lama, March 30th 1996:
   

   ‘As you are aware, the great 13th Dalai Lama had issued a ‘ban’ on the worship of Dorje Shugden on the basis of the Great 5th Dalai Lama’s secret visions. In addition to our government oracles pointing towards danger to the health of H.H. the Dalai Lama, as well as the cause of Tibet due to the worship of Shugden, after this ‘ban’, this observation is also the conclusion reached by His Holiness after years of observation.’ (See Note 1 – Original Tibetan version)

   Note: The statement claiming that the 13th Dalai Lama issued a ban on the Shugden practice is also false. It has been clearly documented that the 13th Dalai Lama himself relied on Dorje Shugden’s oracles advice for important matters pertaining to the State of Tibet.

4. The Tibetan term ‘dgag.bya spyi nan shugs cher bstsal.rje’s or “strong prohibition emphatically proclaimed” was used in Report No. 28/7.8/1997 by the exile Tibetan version of [India’s most secret police] RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) of the Department of Security in Dharamsala:
   

   ‘His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in view of the present and future pros and cons on Tibetan politics and religion, through various religious investigations, has given repeated talks about the need to give up reliance on Dolgyal. Specifically, after issuing an emphatic ban at his spring teachings of 1996, most of the Tibetans living in exile and within Tibet, who are gifted with intelligence and patriotism, have respectfully compiled and appreciatively mended their faith accordingly. This deserves to be applauded.’ (Note 2: Original Tibetan version)

5. As Ursula Bernis, a world respected scholar and Tibetologist also highlighted, the word ‘bkod.‘doms’, “order to stop,” thus “ban” is used in Resolution No. 21 of the Assembly of Tibetan People’s Deputies prohibiting Dorje Shugden in very strong terms, to the extent of “never ever” permit the practice. In addition, Resolution No. 21 refers to the 13th and 14th Dalai Lama’s use of the word ‘bkag.’gog’, “order” and “prohibition” “to stop” or “to take out forcibly.”The official English translation of Resolution 21 as it appears on the Dalai Lama’s website is careful not to carry the word “ban” but point 6 of the Resolution stated that the practice is indeed forbidden.
6. In January 1998, in a documentary by Swiss TV ’10 vor 10’ the Dalai Lama was questioned by Swiss journalist Beat Regli, who pointedly asked, “why was the [Shugden] ban enforced..” The Dalai Lama answered, “Traditionally Tibetan Buddhism is such a profound tradition. The danger of such practice is for Tibetan Buddhism to degenerate into spirit worship”.

The Dalai Lama did not deny that there was in fact a ban on the religious practice although it is interesting to note that he did not offer the same reasons for the ban as he did to the Tibetans i.e. the worship of Shugden would shorten his life and adversely affect the Tibetan people’s effort to regain their country. Such a reply would be deemed ridiculous to the western mind.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Or watch on server | download video (right click & save file)

All the above information showing definite proof of a religious ban somehow escaped Thurman’s detection even after 17 years. Clearly Thurman’s objective is not to seek Truth but to continue in spreading a lie in an effort to diffuse pressure from mounting questions as to why such a blatant breach of human rights has been allowed.

Ironically and quite perversely, Thurman insisted that the Dalai Lama was only “exercising his religious freedom” by rejecting those who refused to succumb to the ban (which Thurman regarded as “advice”). In Thurman’s world, religious freedom is applicable to an oppressor of a person’s right to practice his religion, but the same is not applicable to the victims of such an oppression.

In all of Thurman’s statements, there is only a single truth i.e. that the Dalai Lama indeed does not hold any “authority” to effect a religious ban, although this fact was mischievously proffered by Thurman as the reason why the Dalai Lama could not have banned the religious practice. The assumption here is that the Dalai Lama would not breach the Tibetan Constitution nor violate international conventions on human rights preserved in a multitude of instruments and treatises. By the same token, the wealth of evidence that such a religious ban has been imposed and is still being enforced, demonstrates irrefutably that the Dalai Lama has in fact committed such unlawful violations and now, Thurman is lying in his desperate and unctuous attempt to cover up the Dalai Lama’s crime.

Thurman Lie #3: Dorje Shugden is a Minor Cult and has Never Been Mainstream.

Next, having insisted that the Dalai Lama and his government have not wronged a community of, (what Thurman would have readers believe) demonic-Chinese-funded-murderous-cult-members, Thurman slyly suggests that it is actually a small matter because the practice ‘has never been mainstream’. That Thurman should even offer this consolation in fact shows not only how significant the ban has been in destroying the harmony within the beleaguered Tibetan community, but also how badly it has undermined the corporeality of Tibetan Buddhism, not to mention the purity of a lineage that Je Tsongkapa himself founded.

It is not difficult to imagine how pervasive the practice of Dorje Shugden was prior to the Dalai Lama’s ban. The greatest Gelugpa master in the earlier part of the 20th Century was Kyabje Pabongka Rinpoche and there was hardly a noteworthy Gelugpa lama who was not a disciple of his. Pabongka Rinpoche had personally instructed that Dorje Shugden should be taken as the Dharma Protector of the Gelugpas for the modern time, and given that unwavering obedience to the Guru is the foundation of Tibetan Buddhism, it would have been the duty of his disciples to preserve and practice the belief in Shugden. Pabongka Rinpoche’s disciples would go on to become the most significant personages in modern Gelugpa history.

Pabongka Rinpoche, Domo Geshe Rinpoche and later Trijang Rinpoche were three of the greatest Gelugpa masters and with a large majority of Tibetans belonging to the Gelugpa tradition, a great number of people became spiritually connected to these masters and through them, the Dorje Shugden practice. It would follow that Dorje Shugden, whom Thurman claimed to be a minor cult, was in fact the mainstream practice of the Tibetan people.

In fact, right up until 2008 when the Dalai Lama became even more forceful with the ban, Dorje Shugden was still being actively propitiated in all the major Gelugpa universities and monasteries. The Dalai Lama himself was an ardent practitioner of the deity and wrote one of the most famous praises to Dorje Shugden. Given the prominence of Pabongka Rinpoche and other Shugden masters at that time and the influence of the Dalai Lama, then a strong Shugden believer himself, it would only be natural for the practice to be widespread.

Thurman Lie #4: Shugden is an Exclusive Practice of a [small] Fundamentalist Sect of the Gelugpa

Thurman did not end his disinformation crusade for the Dalai Lama there. He went on in the same article to say that Shugden is an exclusive practice of the ‘super-orthodox fundamentalist of the majority Gelukpa sect…’.

This again is not true. The practice of Shugden was common in the Sakya lineage (one of the four major Tibetan sects) as early as the 18th century with the 31st throne holder of the lineage, Sakya Trinzin Sonam Rinchen (1705-1741) enthroning Shugden as a Sakya Dharma Protector. Dorje Shugden was one of a trinity of Sakya Protectors (the other two being Setrab and Tsui Marpo) who were highly regarded. The 32nd Sakya Throneholder, Wangdu Nyingpo was also depicted in Tibetan thangkas with Dorje Shugden as well as other important Sakya deities.

Depicted at the top of the painting are the principal meditational deities special to Wangdu Nyingpo. At the top left are Chakrasamvara, Vajrayogini and Hevajra. At the top right are Vajrakila, Hayagriva and Vajrapani. At the middle left is Shmashana Adhipati, the two dancing skeletons, and on the right is Dorje Shugden Tanag, riding a black horse

The Tibetan Travel Guide, Footprint Tibet Handbook (Second Edition, 1999) on page 281, detailed a Dorje Shugden chapel within a Sakya Monastery complex, confirming the prominence of the deity in the Sakya lineage.

In addition, Dorje Shugden was also revered by the Drukpa Kagyu lineage and rituals to Shugden as a Dharma protector can be seen in the compositions of one of the lineage’s greatest patriarchs, Jigme Norbu, published by the National Library of Bhutan in 1984 with the title, “The Collected Works of the Fourth Zhabdrung Tulku of Bhutan, Jigme Norbu (1831-1861)”.

The practice of Dorje Shugden remains popular but whether one would openly declare to be a Dorje Shugden practitioner today and face the fury of the Dalai Lama and CTA is different story. However, it is very clear that Dorje Shugden is not an exclusive practice nor a small fundamentalist cult within the Gelugpas, as Thurman describes it. It is highly unlikely that Thurman, a Columbia University Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies would not know that and one can only assume that this misdirection is intended to play down the magnitude of the ban on a very large segment of the Tibetan population.

Thurman Lie #5: The Dalai Lama Did Not Ask Anyone to Persecute Shugden Worshippers

Thurman’s Huffington Post article continued in similar vein as it started and he proceeded to defend the Dalai Lama, claiming that the Dalai Lama has never approved of provocations against Shugden worshippers. The thing is, the Dalai Lama in fact does not need to. To understand this, it is vital to understand the realpolitik of the Dalai Lama that concentrates absolute power on a single entity that Tibetans regard both as a king as well as a god, and the culture of superstitions that define the Tibetan state.

The Dalai Lama’s authority is absolute and despotic even though many people assume that the Tibetan community in exile is administered by a liberal government. That the Dalai Lama’s CTA is a democratic entity is a complete myth. It is impossible to have true democracy in a one-party government where the candidates to CTA seats are vetted and approved by the Dalai Lama himself, and where powers rests on a ruling elite dominated by the Dalai Lama clique.

The ex-Kalon Tripa (Prime Minister) of the Tibetan government in exile, Samdhong Rinpoche himself, admitted that he had to work within a framework defined by the Dalai Lama’s wishes, which were paramount and unquestionable, and that the job of the Prime Minister was to “anticipate the Dalai Lama’s unstated thoughts and direct his efforts to their realization” (Tim Johnson, Tragedy In Crimson: How The Dalai Lama Conquered The World But Lost The battle With China, Published February 1st 2011 by Nation Books [ISBN13: 9781568586014] p. 130.) This requirement to anticipate the Dalai Lama’s wishes pervades all levels of Tibetan government and associated bodies, and seeps into the Tibetan community itself.

So, when in 1996 the Dalai Lama expressed his dissent in the people’s worship of Dorje Shugden, the Kanshag (Tibetan Cabinet in exile) wasted no time in declaring,

It is the duty of the Tibetan Government-in-exile to encourage compliance with any advice given out of concern for the cause of Tibet, the security of its head of state and the honor of all Tibetan Buddhist traditions including the Geluk tradition. Consequently, it has initiated a programme prevailing upon those still following Dolgyal to make a break with it.

In the meantime, the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC) passed a resolution to, [Point 6]

… urge that everyone must abide by the address of the Dalai Lama

and [Point7]

…this Congress will urge each and every spiritual master, including geshes, that in the interest of the health of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Independence, they should stop worshipping Dholgyal.

This “urging” that the TYC mentioned in fact involved illegal ransacking of houses, masked mobs attacking innocent Shugden believers, burning of Shugden images and altars, and putting up posters of Shugden practitioners in public labelling them as ‘enemies of the Tibetan people’. A Tibetan Cholsum Convention, held in 1998, resulted in identified Shugden believers not being able to obtain travel papers, or receive pensions and social security payments. The Dalai Lama did not have to ask as it was expected of his government to antedate his instructions. And if they were wrong in their assumption, then the Dalai Lama certainly did not correct them.

To the Tibetan people, the Dalai Lama is not just an ordinary political leader but a manifestation of the Buddha of Compassion himself. Therefore in their estimation he can do no wrong. After 1959 when the Tibetans lost their homeland to the Chinese, the Dalai Lama become the sole embodiment of their hopes and therefore to oppose the Dalai Lama would not only be regarded as anti-Buddhist but also an act of treason. Not surprisingly the Dalai Lama’s disapproval of Shugden witnessed the advent of a militant organization loosely known as ‘the secret society for the destruction of internal and external enemies of Tibet’. The organization was not shy in its death threats and made public their warnings:

Anyone who goes against the policy of the government must be singled out, opposed and given the death penalty…

As for the reincarnations of Trijang Rinpoche [the Dalai Lama’s own Spiritual Guide] and Zong Rinpoche [another great Tibetan spiritual master of the Gelug Tradition], if they do not stop practising Dolgyal and continue to contradict the word of H.H. the Dalai Lama,

…not only will we not be able to respect them, but their life activities will suffer destruction. This is our first warning.
http://internationalshugdencommunity.com/incitements-murder/

But this is nothing new and the Dalai Lama knew full well what he had to do to inflame the Tibetan people into becoming a hit squad. As the notable Tibetan writer and activist Jamyang Norbu observed in his critique of the Dalai Lama and CTA’s anti-democratic methods in ‘Waiting For Mangtso,

Later attacks (often physical and violent) were directed against Tibetan intellectuals who wrote anything that could be remotely construed as critical of the Dalai Lama, Buddhism or Gyalo Thondup (The Dalai Lama’s brother).

The late Professor Dawa Norbu was threatened with violence for an editorial in the Tibetan Review, while Karma Zurkhang, the editor of the Tibetan Youth Congress magazine, Rangzen, was attacked for publishing a letter-to-the-editor, which was denounced for being insulting to His Holiness.

A well organized and extensive hate-mail campaign was directed against a Tibetan academic in Japan, Tsultrim Kalsang Khangkar, who was alleged to have criticized His Holiness in his writings – but which he has consistently denied doing.

Alo Chonze, the leader of the anti-Chinese Mimang organization in Lhasa during the mid 50’s, was also mobbed in Dharamsala and humiliated in the Cultural Revolution style with ink and spittle being smeared over his face. His daughter, a Tibetan government official, was also briefly held hostage.

A more recent example of how the Dalai Lama can deftly incite violence against Shugden people, without having to expressly instruct it, can be seen in his talk on Shugden during the Jangchub Lamrim teachings at Sera Monastery (December 25, 2013 to January 3, 2014) in Bylakuppe. See video below:

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At 31:52 the Dalai Lama frames Shugden worshippers together with the enemy-Chinese and at 34:09 the Dalai Lama speaks of looming dangers to his life from Shugden quarters. The Dalai Lama was further heard saying that certain ‘pujas’ being performed presumably by Shugden worshippers were ‘killing’ him. To a listener who is not familiar with how the average Tibetan worships the Dalai Lama and pins his hopes on the spiritual leader, the message may sound benign enough. But to anyone who knows how Tibetans react to anything that opposes the Dalai Lama, it is essentially a call to arms.

Sure enough, a few days after the Dalai Lama’s speech, Trijang Rinpoche’s ladrang was attacked by knife-wielding masked intruders, and the long-time assistant of His Holiness Trijang Rinpoche, Gen Chonze was hurt but escaped with his life. Trijang Rinpoche is viewed by many as the most famous Shugden figure, whose respect within the monastic community and continuing worship of Shugden demerits the Dalai Lama’s accusations of Dorje Shugden.

Gen Chonze who escaped an attempt at his life after the Dalai Lama’s incendiary speech a few days before

But it is not enough that the Dalai Lama has this dangerous sway over the people and ability to rouse their hatred. On many occasions, the Dalai Lama himself agitated for harsh actions to be taken on those who refuse to give up their faith in and practice of Dorje Shugden. For example, on March 21, 1996 during his talk at the preparatory session of Tamdrin Yangsang and Sangdrub empowerments, the Dalai Lama warned monks against their continuing worship of the deity saying,

…if you private monks and spiritual masters continue making excuses and continue worshipping thus, you shall have a day of regret. Likewise, in the monastic colleges the majority are beyond criticism; I also see that there are some who remain firm. If you can think by yourselves it is good; as mentioned… it will not be good if we have to knock on your doors.

This is my responsibility, although some people may not like it … I will carry through to completion the work I have begun. I will not back off because of a few disgruntled individuals. I am determined to implement the conclusions of my careful research and will not let it be.

Contrary to Thurman’s statement, the Dalai Lama’s words are as brazen and as threatening as a warning can be. The Dalai Lama’s reference to knocking on doors was an echo of what was actually happening in the streets of Dharamsala where the Tibetan Youth Congress, acting as a lynch mob, were conducting door-to-door witch-hunts, seeking out Shugden practitioners to punish them.

And in the following video, words from the Dalai Lama’s own lips (at 0:33) leave no doubts that he is the primary driving force behind persecutions of Shugden worshippers:

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With the Dalai Lama showing an example of how we would like Shugden worshippers to be dealt with, his people went to work accordingly. In September 12, 2000, representatives of the Dalai Lama issued instructions for villagers, monks and nuns to protest [read, ‘attack’] 600 monks from Dokhang Khangtsen who were conducting a peaceful retreat. The notice from the Dalai Lama’s representatives in Dharamsala ordered that even children above 13 years of age and senior citizens must also join in the attack and a fine of 560 rupees will be imposed on those who do not take part in the assault on Shugden monks.

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So, we see that Thurman has in fact lied yet again, and to add insult to injury, Thurman has the audacity to say that “members of the cult who mind their own business and do not attack the Dalai Lama are not bothered by other Tibetans”. In others words anyone who dares to stand up for their right to practice their religion will be seen as attacking the Dalai Lama, and therefore deserve the hostilities meted out to them! If indeed Thurman is correct in saying that the Dalai Lama ‘remains steadfast in his adherence to nonviolence in principle and practice’ then why hasn’t the Dalai Lama or his government issued a single statement condemning the abhorrent assaults on the Shugden community?

Thurman Lie #6: The controversy has persisted for this long because Shugden worshippers are being funded by the Chinese to cause trouble and drive a wedge between the Dalai Lama and his people.

Since 1996, the Dalai Lama and cronies such as Thurman have alleged that Shugden worshippers are paid agents of the Chinese government but there has never been even a sliver of proof to support their accusations.

Thurman’s suggestion that pictures of the 11th Panchen Lama taken with images of Dorje Shugden constitutes “evidence” that is “very plain on the surface” that Shugden people are Chinese agents is simply bizarre. It is disturbing to see such absurdity from a member of academia usually associated with higher intelligence. A picture of the Panchen Lama taken with icons of the deity is no proof of Shugden worshippers’ culpability any more than pictures of the Dalai Lama taken with Bruno Beger, Shoko Asahara and Austrian Neo-Nazi Jorg Haider (who denied that the holocaust ever existed) are proof that the Dalai Lama is anti-Semitic.

If the picture of the Panchen Lama says anything, it would be that the highest lamas all recognized Dorje Shugden to be a Buddha. In fact the 10th Panchen Lama too was a firm practitioner of Dorje Shugden as is an entire lineage of Gelugpa high lamas. It is simply ridiculous for Thurman to demand that readers must stretch their imagination beyond the point of stupidity in order for his lie to find justification.

The Dalai Lama with Jorg Haider, an Austrian Neo-Nazi who claimed that the Jewish holocaust was a myth

It is ironic that for all the Dalai Lama’s fear of infiltration by enemy-Chinese into the Tibetan exile community (which he accuses Shugden people of) his concerns went into a complete lapse when in 1992 the Dalai Lama, acting ultra vires, endorsed Ogyen Trinley to be the 17th Karmapa over another candidate. Ogyen Trinley was recognized, enthroned and trained in China, and his mentor Tai Situpa is a well-known associate and ally of the Chinese government. It does not appear that the Dalai Lama is really worried about Chinese-sponsored subversion after all. (Note: As the result of the Dalai Lama’s interference into the affairs of the Kagyus, the lineage remains divided and in conflict until this day. Two of the biggest causes of disharmony within the Tibetan community, the Shugden ban and the Karmapa controversy both had the Dalai Lama’s hand in play).

As to why the Shugden conflict has persisted for this long, the reason in fact has nothing to do with the Chinese government whatsoever. The Dalai Lama started his opposition to the Shugden practice in the late 1970’s softly at first, and then in 1996 he formally decreed an official ban of the practice and finally the anti-Shugden movement reached its peak in 2008 with the forceful expulsion of Shugden monks from monasteries.

Over the decades, efforts to eradicate this religious practice have intensified and yet the practice has endured simply because there has never been any genuine grounds, spiritual or logical, to justify this wrong. The Dalai Lama underestimated the loyalty of Shugden monks and lay-practitioners to the pure Dharma and misjudged the strength of their devotion to their lineage Gurus.

An Assault Against Truth

In the absence of genuine reason, the campaign against Dorje Shugden had to resort to lies and this is precisely where people like Robert Thurman come into play. Whilst the Dalai Lama has dominion over his own people and can force his will, he cannot do the same with the people of the western world. So he depends on people like Thurman to canvass them into looking the other way as he wages his illegal war on this group of Buddhists that stands in his way.

Robert Thurman’s Huffington Post article and in fact the entire campaign against Dorje Shugden bear all the hallmarks of a negative propaganda – a campaign initiated by Dharamsala to discourage by force and by fear the practice of an ancient deity that is incongruous with the Dalai Lama’s political ambitions. It is when we dissect the claims and accusations against Dorje Shugden that we see a pattern emerge that fits into the schema of a disinformation and fear propaganda.

Characteristics of a negative propaganda/smear campaign:

Appeal to Fear: This approach scares the target audience into fearing the worst if they do not support what the propagandist is advocating. Goebbels exploited Theodore Kaufman’s Germany Must Perish! to turn the German people’s mind against the Allies. Similarly the American people were persuaded to believe that Saddam Hussein was in possession of WMD that he would one day use against the USA. Likewise, the Dalai Lama appeals to the Tibetan people’s fear of the ‘enemy-China’, and of losing their beloved leader. In addition the Tibetans fear not being able to regain independence. Thurman, whose writing targets audience in the West brings in a different ‘enemy’ i.e. the Taliban.

Appeal to Authority: To support his ban, the Dalai Lama constantly cites the Great Fifth Dalai Lama and the Great Thirteenth Dalai Lama as having the same negative view about Dorje Shugden. In so doing, the anti-Shugden propaganda ignores the fact that these authorities actually recognized the enlightenment nature of Dorje Shugden. The Dalai Lama also cites his senior tutor Ling Rinpoche as never having any connection to Shugden when in fact, Ling Rinpoche even wrote a prayer to Dorje Shugden.

Black-and-White Fallacy: The propagandist presents only two choices e.g. “You are either with me or you are the enemy”. In the campaign against Shugden, it is deemed a crime even to be seen with Shugden worshippers. Anyone that disagrees with the Dalai Lama’s position is labelled a ‘traitor’.

Big Lie: This propaganda technique calls for the repeated articulation of a complex series of events merging real events with false explanations to gradually supplant the public’s accurate perception of the underlying events. A good case in point is Thurman’s article that keeps falsely connecting the triple murder with Dorje Shugden.

Obtain Disapproval: A propaganda technique used to persuade the target audience to disapprove of a belief or idea by suggesting that the idea is popular with groups hated, feared, or held in contempt by the target audience. Dorje Shugden is tagged as a “Chinese ghost” knowing that Tibetans have a negative association with the Chinese.

Intentional Vagueness: The Dalai Lama never did specify for certain whether Dorje Shugden is a minor god, an evil spirit or unenlightened protector. (Thurman refers to Dorje Shugden as a ‘minor angel or demon’) Neither does the Dalai Lama go into detail how the practice of Shugden harms the Tibetan cause or even how it shortens the Dalai Lama’s life when the practice has been in existence for over three hundred years. In his accusations, the Dalai Lama has often remarked that he changed his mind about Shugden after having done ‘extensive research’ and yet not once has the Dalai Lama disclosed this ‘research’ nor any evidence that Shugden worshippers are paid by the Chinese.

Demonizing the Enemy: A technique to make the party who opposes the propagandist appear evil/sinister. In the case of the propaganda against Dorje Shugden, a Buddha is portrayed as a malicious spirit bent on causing harm to the Tibetan people and the Dalai Lama. Worshippers of the deity are de-humanized and labelled as spirit worshippers and those seeking to shorten the lifespan of the Dalai Lama.

Labelling: The propagandist makes use of sensitive words/terms that have been demonized by society. Thurman’s article is a classic case where Shugden believers are labelled as a ‘cult’, ‘fundamentalists’, ‘minorities’, and ‘agents’. Shugden worshippers have also been tagged as ‘traitors’ and ‘spirit worshippers’.

Scapegoating: The Tibetan Kanshag and the Dalai Lama have not hesitated to blame Dorje Shugden for the failure of the Tibetans to achieve independence. By this, attention is distracted from the fact that the Tibetan independence cause could never have been achieved since it was abandoned by the Dalai Lama himself.

Inconsistency: It is said that one of the easiest ways to spot a propaganda campaign is how easily it changes depending on circumstances. A truth is always constant and does not change easily. To the Tibetans, the Dalai Lama alleges that the worship of Dorje Shugden harms his life and weakens the Tibetan cause. Later on he recanted to say that the practice of Dorje Shugden does not shorten his life and in fact he will live till at least 90 years of age. But to the Western people, the reason for the ban is completely different i.e. the practice of Shugden is ‘spirit worship’ and will degenerate the Dharma. Interestingly, the Dalai Lama frequently consults the unenlightened spirit Pehar (Nechung) as does his government, the CTA. If indeed consulting spirits causes the degeneration of the Dharma, then the Dalai Lama should cease in his ‘spirit worship’ post haste.

There is one other ingredient that is crucial for a propaganda campaign to work i.e. the public. A smear campaign cannot work if the target audience questions its veracity and seeks accurate information instead of accepting in toto what is fed to them by the propagandist. But this is indeed what has happened. Many around the world who have taken up the Dalai Lama’s stance against an enlightened Dharma protector cannot even begin to articulate why they do so except for their belief in what the Dalai Lama has told them and what people with seeming authority, like Thurman, have written about the deity and its worshippers.

The biggest casualty of the Dalai Lama/CTA’s attack on Dorje Shugden is the Dharma itself. When fear of reprisal or eagerness to please a leader creeps into consideration in one’s spiritual path, it distorts the true Dharma – it promotes the pursuit of worldly concerns (avoiding blame/shame) instead of an honest inner path.

In fact, the pursuit of an outer and mundane agenda is the complete opposite to a true practice. When this happens en masse and entire communities of practitioners around the world are affected, then the degeneration of the Dharma truly takes place. Therefore it is not the practice of Dorje Shugden that has eroded Tibetan Buddhism but this unholy and illegal ban and lies that are churned out in its wake, such as Robert Thurman’s article.

Until this day, not a shred of evidence has been produced to support accusations that Dorje Shugden believers were behind the triple murder in 1997, that they are agents on the payroll of the Chinese government, and that the practice undermines the Tibetan cause. On the other hand, there is ample evidence to show that the ban has created a very serious fracture or schism within the Tibetan Buddhist monastic community. Schism is considered one of the most heinous sins in Buddhism, yet this particular schism was created by none less than the Dalai Lama himself. In addition, it has caused tremendous disharmony amongst the Tibetan people precisely when they should be united behind a single cause, and that it has perverted the sacred Guru-disciple relationship that has been held sacred since the Buddha’s time.

The case against Dorje Shugden that so many people have embraced has been founded on their faith in the Dalai Lama and not based on their own investigations. But the Buddha himself stressed the importance of discriminating between blind faith and faith. The Tathagatha counselled that a practitioner should examine what he has heard in Dharma against reason and logic before accepting it and not ignore manifest evidence that reveal contradictions in a proposition no matter how authoritatively that proposition is delivered.

And what if we are not quite sure how to approach such examination? Then the wise counsel of the great Indian pandit, Dharmakirti must be heeded i.e. what professes to be true Dharma must not be inconsistent with recurrent themes in the Buddha’s teachings, such as never to create schism in the sangha. And it is by this reference that we see that everything about this religious ban contradicts what the Buddha taught. The most famous Buddhist icon today himself said that after we investigate something and if it does not match with reason, then we are to reject. Ironically, the person who said that is none other than the Dalai Lama, whose actions do not match his preaching.

Notes:

1. ‘ched ‘bul / dgongs par mnga’ gsal ~ rgyal mchog lnga pa chen poi gsung rgya can nang dol rgyal ‘bkag sdom’ dgos pa gsal ba ltar bka’ drin zla med ~ rgyal mchog sku phreng bcu gsum pa chen pos dmigs bsal ‘dam bsgrags bkag sdom’ mdzad yod pa de ltar yang / dus phyes rgyal chen bsten gsol rgya che byas pa ‘dis spyi nor ~ gong sa ~ skyabs mgon chen poi sku pya dang / bod bstan srid mi rigs rang dwang dang bcas par gnod ‘gal bar chad ci che yong sum skor gzhung bsten chos skyong kun nas snga rjes su bka’ lung phebs pai khar/ gtso che spyi nor ~ gong sa ~ kyabs mgon chen po mchog nas lo mang ring brtag dpyad zab nan sgo gang sa nas bkyangs pai snying por / bstan srung dmar nag gnyis dang / …’
2. ‘… skyabs mgon chen po mchog gis / bod bstan srid spyi byu’i ‘phral phugs kyi khe nyen la gzhigs te / chos phyogs kyi brtag thabs sna tshogs brgyud / dol rgyal bsten gsol mtshams ‘jog dgos gal che ba’i blang dor bka’ slob snga rjes phebs pa dang / lhag par du 1996 loi dpyid chos skabs ‘dgag bya spyi nan shugs cher’ bstsal rjes / rigs zhen blo gros dang ldan pa’i gzhigs byes gnyis su gnas ‘khod bod mi phal mo ches bka’ gsung spyi bos blangs te…’

Since the ban on the Dharma Protector Dorje Shugden, Thurman has maintained a deliberately offensive stance towards Shugden practitioners, comparing them to the Taliban, and accusing them of being Chinese spies against the Tibetans.

In 2008, the Western Shugden Society wrote a letter to Robert Thurman urging him to produce proof to support his statement that Shugden people are sectarian, like the Buddhist Taliban and “working for the Chinese.” The full letter is reproduced below:

10th September 2008

An Open Letter
To Robert Thurman,

We the Western Shugden Society are writing this letter regarding your previous public statement that Shugden people are sectarian, naming them “the Buddhist Taliban”; and your recent public statement that the Western Shugden Society protestors are “working for the Chinese”.

As you know, Shugden people want to practice the Gelug tradition purely, without mixing with the Nyingma tradition. Because of this the Dalai Lama has said to Shugden people that they are sectarian. In truth, the Nyingmapa also want to practice their Nyingma tradition purely without mixing with the Gelug tradition; and it is the same for the Sakyapa and Kagyupa. So according to the Dalai Lama’s view, the Nyingmapa, Sakyapa and Kagyupa are also sectarian, but he only says that Shugden people are sectarian. In reality he is lying.

If you, Robert Thurman, are not yourself lying, then you must show your evidence to prove your public statements: that Shugden people are sectarian, “the Buddhist Taliban” as you named them; and that the Western Shugden Society is working for the Chinese. You should show your evidence publicly through the internet before 25th October 2008. If your evidence does not appear by this date then we will conclude that you have lied publicly and are misleading people.

Sincerely,
Western Shugden Society

By 25 October 2008, Thurman had not responded to the letter in any way. It wouldn’t be unfair therefore, to consider that he has indeed lied publicly and misled people by what he is saying.

Thurman is in an especially precarious situation as someone who has already garnered a reputation as a kind of authority in Buddhism. To make statements like this is not something to be taken lightly, especially when he has nothing to substantiate what he says.

Surely, as an academic, he should understand better than anybody else that when one conveys any statements as fact, the ability to produce supporting evidence is an indivisible part of the academic process. Above all else, as a respected academic, he can (and should) be held responsible for the accuracy and truth of whatever he communicates.

Thousands of people read his books, most likely with the view that it might help their understanding and practice of Buddhism. If he is reacting in such irresponsible and hurtful ways in relations to one of the most crucial issues of Tibetan Buddhism today, a shadow of doubt would surely be cast over the rest of his writings, talks and teachings too.

Further, as a Buddhist, he has a double responsibility to upholding the truth. He should be abiding by the most basic refuge vows of not lying and not using harsh speech by launching false accusations and defamatory comments at fellow practitioners. That is the least that can be expected of someone who was even a monk for two years and is considered a close friend of the Dalai Lama.

For all the unpleasant words he has issued against Shugden practitioners however, it is his silence in response to this open letter that has been most deafening. It proves, above all, the falsities of what he has been saying and a great disappointment that someone who is so highly respected in Buddhism could have such little empathy towards fellow Buddhists.

The information in the following article is extracted from the blogs http://robertthurman.wordpress.com, http://dorjeshugdentruth.wordpress.com and
http://www.westernshugdensociety.org. For more interesting reads on the subject, please visit the blogs directly.

The 14th Dalai Lama and Robert Thurman. Photo from www.thinkglobalarts.org

Everyone who knows the Dalai Lama is most likely to also know of Robert Thurman. Here is a man who has been inextricably linked to the Dalai Lama since the 1960s, when Tibetan Buddhism was just starting to grow in the world. Many well-known Buddhist texts today are attributed to Thurman, making him a leading scholar and authority in the Buddhist academic circles.

Thurman is also known to have been the very first Westerner to have taken ordination vows as a monk in 1964. He says, at the time, “All I wanted was to stay in the 2,500-year-old Buddhist community of seekers of enlightenment, to be embraced as a monk. My inner world was rich, full of insights and delightful visions, with a sense of luck and privilege at having access to such great teachers and teachings and the time to study and try to realize them.”

Two years later, however, Thurman decided that the life as a monk was not what he wanted, so he returned his vows and focused his career instead in academia.

The New York Times magazine refers to him as “The Dalai Lama’s man in America”, he still holds the respected position of Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and is still highly regarded within the Buddhist academic community. Surely this is a person who knows everything there is to know about Tibetan Buddhist practices, philosophies, culture and traditions.

But there is another side to him, revealed through one of Tibetan Buddhism’s darkest hours.

In light of the Dalai Lama’s ban of the Protector Dorje Shugden, Robert Thurman has remained stoically quiet on the subject, refusing to comment nor to respond to any sincere letters written to him on the subject. Is this the behavior of someone who was once a monk and now a leading figure of Buddhism in the West?

Well, perhaps the very fact that he could hold his monk vows for only two years is testament enough to his fickleness. Little do most people know that he is also remembered within Buddhist circles for having begged high lamas for Dorje Shugden’s initiation and was denied, precisely because of his unstable nature.

Thurman is not Tibetan. It may be his personal decision not to continue his practice of Dorje Shugden and that is his prerogative. However, though he seems to be a reputed Western academic, he doesn’t engage in any dialogue or discussion on this with fellow Western practitioners.

Instead he is seen to openly insult Shugden practitioners using greatly offensive terms to speak about them – he has been documented calling Shugdenpas “the Buddhist taliban” and accusing them of being Chinese spies. He seems to be playing into Tibetan politics more than standing up for the modern Buddhist practice of his own people.

Is this the behavior of a former monk and a supposed expert in Buddhist studies? For someone who has made Buddhist teachings and philosophy such an integral part of his life for the last five decades, shouldn’t he at least have a little empathy for the plight and practice of fellow Buddhists – especially those of his own country and people?

For more stories about Robert Thurman, visit these comprehensive websites:

• http://robertthurman.wordpress.com
• http://dorjeshugdentruth.wordpress.com
• http://www.westernshugdensociety.org.

Photo from http://daylife.com

How a leading Dalai Lama supporter and Buddhist scholar begged for Dorje Shugden’s initiation.

Anyone interested in the subjects of Tibetan Buddhism and the Dalai Lama will know of Robert Thurman, a self-professed “personal friend” of the Dalai Lama and prolific writer about the Dalai Lama and his teachings.

In light of the Dorje Shugden issue over the last decade or so, Robert Thurman has remained significantly quiet on the subject, refusing to answer any open letters to him nor engage in debate. He is even known to have launched accusations against Dorje Shugden practitioners, calling them Chinese spies. He seems to be very stoically on the side of the Dalai Lama, and not at all empathetic to the plight of Shugden practitioners suffering under the ban.

Now, we learn that in fact, Thurman was known to have “begged” very prominent high Lamas for Dorje Shugden initiation.

In his paper, “Dalai Lama Dorje Shugden”*, respected translator Helmut Gassner – who worked very closely with the Dalai Lama as his translator for many years – recalls,

For his part, Robert Thurman thought it appropriate to portray for Newsweek magazine a murderous Dorje Shugden cult describing it as “the Taliban of Buddhism.” Yet Robert Thurman, presumably before he begot Uma, had been one of the first Western monks with Buddhist vows and had tried twice to obtain Dorje Shugden initiation from revered masters well before the controversy began. Both masters, however, had refused on grounds of his fickle character. Thurman should know quite well what Dorje Shugden actually is about.

(It is interesting to note also that Robert Thurman was one of the first Westerners to have been ordained as a monk in the Tibetan tradition. However, he was also among the first to disrobe, returning his vows only 2 years after taking them. Fickle? It certainly seems so.)

An online commentator and former supporter of the Dalai Lama who goes by the moniker “Thomas Canada” further confirms that these Lamas who denied Thurman the initiation were the renowned Dromo Geshe Rinpoche and Gelek Rinpoche. He writes,

Gelek told me [...] that Thurman even begged him, and it was no. For however that is decided. [Dr. Ursula Bernis] (personal attendant to Dromo Geshe Rinpoche) told me Dromo Geshe Rinpoche denied Bob several times. [She told me] that Bob used to push and connive for the Empowerment and he was always denied. Dromo Geshe said, Bob crawled across his floor begging and crying for it and he told him no way.

Interestingly, it wasn’t that these lamas had denied everyone the initiation. Thomas Canada himself reveals that he had received the initiation, along with other prominent personalities at the time, such as poet Alan Ginsberg. Also, these lamas did have close connections with Thurman; they were not just lamas that he met in passing.

For example. Dromo Geshe Rinpoche founded the New York and New Delhi Tibet House and Thurman is very much involved in running the New York branch. So their decision not to have given him the initiation cannot have been an arbitrary one, but one they made in full knowledge of how Thurman is or how he would maintain the practice.

Observing the way he now behaves towards Dorje Shugden practitioners, it is clear why the lamas had refused him the initiation “on grounds of his fickle character”. Would he have done even more harm if he had been given the initiation? Perhaps. And if he did, he would have damaged both his own spiritual path and the faith of the many thousands who read his books and follow his writings.

* Download the full paper by Helmut Gassner here

The information in this article was extracted from the blog http://robertthurman.wordpress.com For more interesting reads on the subject, please visit the blog directly.

Robert Thurman meets Kelsang Pema at the Lehigh University protests. Photo from here.

The shocking way a world-renowned Buddhist scholar speaks towards an ordained nun and Shugden practitioners.

Robert Thurman, world famous Buddhist scholar and professor, author on many Buddhist subjects and close “personal friend” of the Dalai Lama, might be expected to act in more courteous ways towards the Sangha.

Imagine everyone’s surprise then, when he retorted to nun Kelsang Pema of the Western Shugden Society, “You should be ashamed of yourself,” as she first approached him. This encounter was at a peaceful WSS protest outside the Dalai Lama’s teachings in Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, while they were demonstrating against the ban on Dorje Shugden.

Kelsang Pema went on to say to him that she had heard him making comments about the WSS being sponsored by the Chinese. He replied curtly, “Of course you’re funded by the Chinese.”

The Lehigh University protests against the Dalai Lama’s ban of Dorje Shugden. Photo from http://flickrhivemind.net/

Kelsang Pema asked him what proof he had to make statements like these to which he answered, “You use the same terminology as the Chinese like ‘fuedalism’ and ‘theocracy’.” Is this how a respected writer, scholar and academic of Buddhism, and a former monk, speaks to a nun or to any fellow Buddhist practitioner?

We must remember that Robert Thurman was himself a monk but gave his vows back after only 2 years. Generally, speaking in such dismissive and disrespectful ways towards a Sangha is a direct contradiction and breaking of a Buddhist’s most basic Refuge commitments.

The Western Shugden Society had also written an open letter to Robert Thurman regarding the Dorje Shugden ban, to which he never replied. You can read about this here.

This protest at Lehigh University in July 2008 saw the participation of over 400 Tibetan and Western Buddhist monks, nuns and practitioners from 16 countries. More information about this protest can be read here.

There is also a video account of the protest at Lehigh University.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

The information in this article was extracted from the blog robertthurman.wordpress.com. For more interesting reads on the subject, please visit the blog directly.

Part One

Extracted from from the Wisdom Buddha Dorje Shugden Blog

Robert Thurman is the Je Tsongkhapa Professor of Buddhism at Columbia University, New York. He is also a close friend of the Dalai Lama and his chief advocate in the West.

This year (2008) he has written a book: ‘Why the Dalai Lama Matters’. Its purpose seems to be to praise the Dalai Lama and to propose how the People’s Republic of China could benefit by making friends with the Dalai Lama and establishing an autonomous Tibet to which the Dalai Lama could return. Thurman suggests that the Tibetan plateau could be designated as a ‘Zone of Peace’, a giant environmental preserve.

The rather sycophantic book is clearly intended to improve the popularity of the Dalai Lama and support him in his stated political goal of gaining autonomy for Tibet.

The purpose of this critique is to exhibit how the Dalai Lama is quite a different man to the one depicted by Thurman, by examining the Dalai Lama’s actions of the past thirty years in relation to both the Karmapa and the Dorje Shugden issues. It will hopefully raise questions as to whether the Dalai Lama is as trustworthy as Robert Thurman would have it appear; and also show that Thurman’s depiction is so out of touch with reality that his views are not to be trusted either.

The reason for this critique is to call Thurman and the Dalai Lama into question so as to reduce the power of their speech. Why? Because both men are adept at poisoning Dharma with politics and have sadly used their considerable reputations to cause harm to pure spiritual practitioners and the Buddhadharma over the past thirty years. This has to be stopped — already their sectarianism and politicking has caused much damage in the Buddhist community.

This critique is not motivated by Chinese or Tibetan politics, nor concerned with Thurman’s proposal for an autonomous Tibet. We wish only to show the discrepancy between the characters of the two men (as presented in the book) and their actions. We do not intend to harm anyone by doing this. Our motivation is to disclose various facts and inconsistencies so that people can see themselves if they are being deceived by Thurman or the Dalai Lama. The worst deception is one that is given in the guise of spiritual teaching that causes others to go in the wrong spiritual direction. This is something that both these men are guilty of.

For the purposes of this critique, only the first three chapters that comprise Part 1: Who is the Dalai Lama and why is he key? will be examined. The rest of the book is Thurman’s political solution and of no interest from a religious point of view.

Introduction of the book

The book starts with a sweeping generalization:

Everyone tends to like the Dalai Lama, even when they don’t think they will.

Not everyone tends to like the Dalai Lama. This sentence alone reveals how out of touch this book is. Even Buddha had to deal with people who didn’t like him. Does Thurman think that the Chinese leadership likes the Dalai Lama? If they liked or even trusted him, he would be back in Tibet by now. In some ways, the Chinese have been quite shrewd judges of character when it comes to not trusting the Dalai Lama because, as will be shown, he is a consummate wily politician — adept at saying one thing and doing another.

From the Mongoose-Canine letter, this is what at least one Tibetan thinks of the Dalai Lama:

In your words you always say that you want to be Gandhi but in your action you are like a religious fundamentalist who uses religious faith for political purposes. Your image is the Dalai Lama, your mouth is Mahatma Gandhi and your heart is like that of a religious dictator. You are a deceiver and it is very sad that on top of the suffering that they already have the Tibetan people have a leader like you.

Not everyone tends to like the Dalai Lama, even when they think they will or they should – interviews of the audience after his public teachings have shown that people of course have differing opinions of him, and that some of these are surprisingly unfavourable (one of the most common being “he doesn’t seem sincere”). Although in general the Dalai Lama is a media darling, he has also received criticism from journalists and writers over the years because of seemingly commercially motivated actions, such as advertising Apple Computers, guest editing Vogue Magazine, wearing Gucci shoes or staying in very expensive hotels, that are not in keeping with the spiritual leader image that people expect. Whether these opinions of him are valid or not, it is a fact that he is not universally admired or liked. No one is.

Thurman also writes (pages x -xi):

The Dalai Lama’s wish and vision for humanity are absolutely right and reliable, realistic and not far-fetched, helpful and not harmful. And he has been living his act of truth for the last sixty years, as you’ll see throughout this book. I present to you his exemplary act of truth and the implications of his wise words as the key to solving the problems of China and Tibet and, indeed, flowing away from the planetary crisis into which we are plunging headlong.

The Dalai Lama’s vision for humanity as expressed in his public teachings is indeed right and reliable because it comes from the holy masters of the Gelugpa lineage of Tibetan Buddhism and ultimately from Buddha himself. However, the Dalai Lama does not ‘walk the talk’. He has been using the Buddhist teachings of his root Guru Trijang Rinpoche to bolster his own reputation worldwide. Through these teachings he has managed to gather a circle of followers and maintain power and status as a political and spiritual leader. Given that the teachings themselves are so effective, anyone in his powerful position, with a little charisma, could have become as popular.

Thurman claims “he has been living his act of truth for the last sixty years…I present to you his exemplary act of truth”; and the subtitle of the book is ‘His act of truth as the solution for China, Tibet and the world’. According to one plausible sequence of events, the Dalai Lama’s ‘career’ began with deceit, not with truth, although this deceit was not his own fault. The Reting Rinpoche, regent of Tibet, caused a false boy to be chosen as Dalai Lama over the true candidate, who was the son of a rival. Tibetan history has always been full of such intrigues and misuse of the Tulku (reincarnate Lama) system.

What is this ‘act of truth’ that is so important to Thurman? He says:

The act of truth is an ancient Indian concept refering to an action of a person of great integrity who confronts seemingly overwhelming power and yet, without violence, stands on the truth and justice of her or his intention and real situation; the impossible becomes possible…Inspired by these ancient and modern sources, the Dalai Lama has always said that against the great might of China, Tibet’s only weapon is the truth.

The problem is that the Dalai Lama is not a person of great integrity as Thurman claims. One of the Western Shugden Society’s slogans at demonstrations against the Dalai Lama’s ban of Dorje Shugden practice is “Dalai Lama, stop lying!” This can seem surprising to some when they first hear it, but becomes clearer when you tot up the number of things the Dalai Lama has lied about in relation to this controversy. For example, he says:

• There is no ban on Dorje Shugden practice (when speeches prove that he himself introduced it)
• Dorje Shugden is a harmful spirit.
• His Teachers were ‘wrong’ to worship Dorje Shugden
• Dorje Shugden harms his health and the cause of Tibetan independence
• Shugden practitioners are murderers, terrorists and arsonists
• Shugden practitioners are Chinese agents
• The oracle for the Deity Nechung was responsible for his safe escape from Tibet (when in fact it was the oracle of the Deity Dorje Shugden, whose practice he has banned)

Proof that these are lies will be given later. Suffice it to say that the Dalai Lama is not a person of integrity but has been shown to act out of political expediency in order to maintain his own power and influence over Tibet and the Tibetan people. Although he claims to want to introduce democracy in ruling the Tibetan people, he has made little effort to do so and still behaves like an autocrat.

The Tibetan Government in Exile is still a theocracy controlled by him. From the news report by Al Jeezera:

The decision to ban the worship of Shugden was taken here in Dharamsala. Since 1960 there are 46 MPs working here to decide the affairs of Tibet and the refugees living here. This is the heart of Tibetan democracy.

Reporter: “Did you debate about Shugden in parliament?”

(Tsultrim Tenzin, parliament member): “There was no argument. There was no argument. If there is some opposition then there will be argument. But there is no opposition. We do not have any doubt about Dalai Lama’s decisions. We do not think he is a human being. He’s a supreme human being and he is god. He’s Avalokiteshvara. He has no interest of himself. He always thinks of others. Everybody is happy. In our system everybody is happy because there is full democracy. Everybody can express whatever he likes.”

There is no argument because everyone does what the Dalai Lama says.

Since the Dalai Lama lacks integrity, what ‘act of truth’ is he performing? This is another romantic fiction of Thurman’s. Can Thurman really not see the political machinations of the Dalai Lama and his ‘government’? These are clear to see, even for those with limited experience of the Dalai Lama, but Thurman claims to have known him for forty years! He is liberal with his praise:

He is a Prince of Peace and Philosopher King of Tibet, by which I mean that he walks successfully in the path of loving meekness so powerfully pointed out and exemplified by Jesus, while also fulfilling the ideals of Plato in action. He is the champion of the Buddha’s wisdom, deep, vast and exquisite for his carry one Shakyamuni’s scientific teaching of the ultimate freedom of voidness, his religious teaching of the vast art of compassionate action, and his psychological teaching of the power of beauty to liberate. The Dalai Lama calls himself a simple Shakya monk but he is also Shakyamuni’s devoted heir. He reaches out to all humans, nonreligious as well as followers of every kind of religion, as upholder of the common human religion of kindness, embracing all, regardless of belief system, in the church of life in the rite of human kindness… (pages xiii-xiv)

And so it goes for several more paragraphs. If such statements were made about other Teachers, they would cause raised eyebrows. If the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT) students ever said anything remotely like this about Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, they would be accused of being brainwashed and cultish – they already have been accused of this by the Dalai Lama’s followers for far, far less. It is clear that Thurman is going completely over the top in his rose-tinted view of the Dalai Lama’s qualities.

What Thurman writes is not only the worse kind of purple prose, like a bad English school essay, but it is not true. Let’s examine some of these extravagant claims and provide evidence to the contrary:

He is a Prince of Peace…

The Dalai Lama’s divisive ban of Dorje Shugden has not brought peace to the Buddhist community but fractured it beyond repair. Look at the segregation wall at Ganden monastery as an example.

Quote from a transcript of a news report by Al Jeezera on the Dorje Shugden issue:

On the streets of the Tibetan refugee camp of Bylakuppe in southern India, Delek
Tong, a Shugden worshipping Buddhist monk, is no longer welcome.

(Delek Tong) “Look at this, it says: ‘No Shugden worshippers allowed.’”

(Delek Tong) “Hi, I worship Shugden, can I come in?”

(Shopkeeper) “No, I am sorry, I don’t want you or any Shugdens in my shop.”

Another point: Why was the ‘Prince of Peace’ on the CIA’s payroll in the 1960s, receiving $180,000 per year?

Philosopher King of Tibet…He is the champion of the Buddha’s wisdom

If the Dalai Lama is such a great philosopher, why can he not use logic and reasoning to justify and debate the ban of Dorje Shugden? Rather, he claims irrationally that Dorje Shugden harms his health and the cause of Tibetan independence, based on no logic whatsoever.

he walks successfully in the path of loving meekness so powerfully pointed out and exemplified by Jesus…

Hmmm. ‘Meekness’ is a curiously Biblical word – will Thurman be claiming that the Dalai Lama is the Son of God next? Perhaps Thurman is another John the Baptist, proclaiming the arrival of the saviour of the world? Meekness is defined as ‘the feeling of patient, submissive humbleness’. Is the Dalai Lama humble? Is the Dalai Lama patient? Read some of his spiritual demands and decide for yourself:

‘You might feel that by publishing letters, pamphlets, etc. against this ban, the Dalai Lama will revoke the ban. This will never be the case. If you take a hard stand, I will tighten this ban still further.’ – on the Dorje Shugden ban, 1996

‘There will be no change in my stand. I will never revoke the ban. You are right. It will be like the Cultural Revolution. If they (those who do not accept the ban) do not listen to my words, the situation will grow worse for them. You sit and watch. It will grow only worse for them.’ – on the Dorje Shugden ban, 1999

From Time magazine’s article this year, ‘The Dalai Lama’s Buddhist Foes’:

In transcripts that Shugdenpas allege record the Dalai Lama’s comments, he sounds atypically (to the Western ear) authoritarian. “Shugden devotees are growing in your monastery,” he is quoted as snapping at one abbot. “If you are this inept, you had better resign.”

He reaches out to all humans, nonreligious as well as followers of every kind of religion, as upholder of the common human religion of kindness, embracing all, regardless of belief system, in the church of life in the rite of human kindness…..

The Dalai Lama does not reach out to everyone. Why has he banned Dorje Shugden practitioners from attending his teachings? Non-Buddhists are welcome but Buddhists are not! If the Dalai Lama is kind, why has his government, under his control, legislated against Dorje Shugden practitioners so that they cannot enter shops, go to hospitals, receive travel visas or live safely in their communities? The Dalai Lama has made Tibetans promise not to have anything to do with Shugden practitioners. They are cast out and ostracized by their own communities. From the news report by Al Jeezera:

(Shopkeeper) “I have taken an oath and I won’t have anything to do with the Shugden people who are doing bad things for the Tibetan cause. I won’t do anything he says. But he is telling the truth. I’m not a person who just blindly believes someone. I believe someone who is telling the truth. Here Dalai Lama always tells the truth.”

Shugden practitioners are not doing anything bad for the Tibetan cause, it’s just that the Dalai Lama has told his people that they have. He has lied and destroyed their reputation, whipping up resentment for his political purposes. Is this the ‘common religion of human kindness’ that Thurman thinks the Dalai Lama exemplifies?

As for (Buddha’s) psychological teaching of the power of beauty to liberate – what does this mean? Wisdom liberates, not beauty. Does Thurman even understand basic Buddhist teachings? He’s not making any sense!

These few examples serve to show the discrepancy between who the Dalai Lama is, what he is doing in terms of causing suffering and problems to Buddhists worldwide, and Thurman’s view of him.

Thurman’s blindness to the Dalai Lama’s faults and his exaggeration of the imagined good qualities he does not possess makes this present book a work of fiction and thus irrelevant. When the purple prose is analysed for facts, there are not many of them, and Thurman appears naïve and gullible.

Part 2

Chapter 1: Who is the Dalai Lama?

Here Thurman continues the work of expounding on the Dalai Lama’s good qualities. As this chapter proceeds, superlative is piled upon superlative. It is like being at a banquet where one rich course after another is served, but each new course is received with less and less enthusiasm until it’s not possible to eat another morsel.

At a certain point, you become aware that you’re had your fill and are feeling a little nauseous. Is any living being on the planet truly worthy of such transcendent praise? Especially a politician?!

Thurman begins:

In the forty-three years that I have known the Great Fourteenth Dalai Lama, he has never failed to impress me with his sincerity, his compassion, and his commitment to purpose…

…The Dalai Lama is a giant of spiritual development – a living exemplar of the best qualities of a Buddhist monk, an inspired practitioner and teacher of the ethical, religious and philosophical paths of the bodhisattva, a Sanskrit term suggesting a cross between a wise saint and a compassionate messiah. He is believed to be a conscious reincarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of universal compassion. (page 3)

Let’s critically examine Thurman’s claims. We can all agree that the Dalai Lama has commitment to purpose. For example, he is very committed to destroying the spiritual tradition of his root Guru, Trijang Rinpoche. From the Dalai Lama’s speech on the Al Jeezera News Report:

“Recently monasteries have fearlessly expelled Shugden monks where needed. I fully support their actions. I praise them. If monasteries find taking action hard, tell them Dalai Lama is responsible for this.”

From a talk in Caux, Switzerland in July 1996:

“Until now you have a very good job on this issue. Hereafter also, continue this policy in a clever way. We should do it in such a way to ensure that in future generations not even the name of Dhogyal (Dorje Shugden) is remembered”

The Dalai Lama has single pointedly pursued the persecution of Dorje Shugden practitioners, banning the practice at home while lying to the Western media abroad:

“So then it is my duty or moral responsibility to make clear, but whether listen or not, up to them. So some people criticise me, I banned that sort of spirit worship, that is not true…” (From an interview in Nottingham, UK, May 2008)

More calumnies from the Dalai Lama: (Al Jazeera news report)

“Shugden followers have resorted to killing and beating people. They start fires. And tell endless lies. This is how the Shugden believe. It is not good.”

Where is the evidence of the violence and arson? The only violence for which monks have been sent to jail is the bombing a Shugden practitioner’s residence by Dalai Lama followers. Who is telling endless lies? The Dalai Lama has told hundreds of lies over the years to justify his persecution and ostracism of Shugden practitioners. Can a liar exemplify the best quality of a Buddhist monk? Do the Dalai Lama’s lies qualify him as a Teacher of Buddhist ethics? Do they make him worthy of Thurman’s extravagant praise?

Strangely for a Buddhist scholar, Thurman reverts to biblical language to express his emotions, and in doing so sounds like he is gearing people up to believe in the Second Coming! He really does seem to see the Dalai Lama as a messiah or saviour of the world, even though this is not a Buddhist understanding of what a Bodhisattva is (that is, a person striving for enlightenment motivated by compassion for all living beings.)

As to the claim of being the bodhisattva or Buddha of universal compassion, let’s hear from some of the victims of the Dalai Lama:

“If he is really Buddha, if he’s really God, he would not create so much problem. He won’t give us so much trouble. If he is the Buddha, he would not give any problem to any human being.”

“Dalai Lama is being unfair and selfish. He is doing his own wish.”
(Al Jazeera report)

From the same report:

(Reporter:) No Shugden worshipper has ever been charged or investigated for terrorism and yet the monks that continue to worship Shugden remain victims of name and shame.

(Shugden monk:) “What the posters say is that we are related to the Chinese government. We don’t have anything to do with China. There is no proof, yet many people are harassing us and threatening us.”

(Reporter:) Fearing for their lives, these Shugden monks are now living in hiding in a monastery in southern India where they sought refuge after being told they must leave their monastery.

And from a recent report by popular French documentary channel, France 2, quoting one of the Dalai Lama’s faithful, old bodyguards:

(Lobsang Yeshe:) The Dalai Lama, I don’t want to hear about him any more. He is no longer the Buddha of Compassion. He is a traitor. The Dalai Lama has commited the gravest crime. He has divided all the Tibetans. He is against our deity, Dorje Shugden. He has forbidden us from venerating him. Because of him, I had a heart attack. Today, I am a broken man.

The Dalai Lama’s persecution of Shugden practitioners is the source of these sufferings. For all the sweet words plucked from his Guru’s teachings, he displays no compassion whatsoever for his enemies, who were his erstwhile closest friends and supporters — the practitioners of Dorje Shugden. In this respect at least, he is acting like an ordinary, deluded person, not an exemplar of the holy qualities of a Buddha or a bodhisattva.

Wake up, Robert Thurman. You look complicit or at least foolish writing a book of such high praise to someone who is now being publicly revealed as persecuting others like this. It is only a matter of time before everyone knows what the Dalai Lama has been up to in his own backyard, and then how will you defend your words?

The next section is ‘Personal Encounters’ — a misty-eyed trip down Memory Lane in which Thurman recounts his meetings with the Dalai Lama. What he seems to be describing is how he gradually came under the Dalai Lama’s power. He recounts firstly how he ordained and then abandoned his ordination for a worldly life:

“…I had firmly expressed my lifetime determination only later to change my mind” (page 7)

and later:

“I spent the next eight years in the sword dance of overachievement required to get tenure as a college professor” (page 8 )

Thurman abandoned his meaningful spiritual life as a monk within just a couple of years to seek the position of a college professor. Yet his ordination as the first Western monk ordained by the Dalai Lama is still heralded as a credential in all his biographies and profiles, despite it being totally undermined by the fact that he was also one of the first Western monks to disrobe!

Thurman openly admits that he felt the Dalai Lama was strongly disappointed with him for disrobing. However, in some ways it is not Thurman’s fault because the Dalai Lama does not seem anyway to have much respect for Westerners who practice Dharma. Certainly, the liberal and seemingly open-minded speeches to Westerners abroad are at stark variance in tone and content to the authoritarian speeches to his Tibetan faithful at home. From a talk in Caux, Switzerland in 1996 by the Dalai Lama:

…As for foreigners, it makes no difference to us if they walk with their feet up and their head down. We have taught Dharma to them, not they to us…

Moreover, the Dalai Lama has said that it is only in getting Tibet back that Dharma can really flourish again – in other words, Westerners are not capable of carrying on Buddhist traditions without Tibetans. This belief is also plain to see from the hierarchy of Western Buddhist Centers under the Dalai Lama’s patronage, where Tibetan teachers always come first.

In reading this section, it becomes clear that Thurman became more and more enamored with the Dalai Lama, falling under his charismatic power. First he had a dream of the Dalai Lama as a giant Kalachakra Buddha towering over the Waldorf Astoria where he was staying during a visit to New York (the Dalai Lama doesn’t stay in modest accommodation) and then he says:

During that trip and the following year, I couldn’t get over the rich power of his charismatic energy. He had always had charisma of office; now he had ten times more charisma of person. (page 9)

In a Newsweek article in 1998, Thurman vilified Dorje Shugden practitioners as a cult:

“Shugden appeals to crazies by offering instant gratification,” says Thurman. “Once you get involved, you’re told you have to devote your lives to the cult, because the god gets very angry if you don’t attend to him every day.

He did not back these wild statements up with any evidence or examples. No one who practices Dorje Shugden recognizes what he is talking about.

Here, by leaving reason and truth outside the door in a desperate attempt to defend the Dalai Lama in the national press, Thurman appears to be the one who has been brainwashed. He has fallen under a spell that makes him feel he can describe holy beings and sincere Buddhist practitioners of the past 400 years, including the Dalai Lama’s own teachers, as “crazies” – with no seeming fear of censure. He has devoted his life to the Dalai Lama, to fulfilling his wish to exert power and control over Tibet once again; and his entire career is bound up with the Dalai Lama. Therefore, he must defend him at all costs, even if it means telling lies to the public. The whole purpose for writing this book is to serve the Dalai Lama and to accomplish his goals. Who has been swept up by the charisma, who is behaving like someone in a cult?

Thurman praises the Dalai Lama’s talks on various topics:

Especially since around the time he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, his general talks – on kindness, the common human religion; on non-violence, even disarmament; on science, focusing on the ecology of the environment; and on comparative religion, focusing on Buddhist-Christian dialogue in particular – have gotten better and better, more moving, lucid and powerful in understanding and passion (page 10)

Actions speak louder than words. The Dalai Lama is full of words, but his actions speak differently. Talk of kindness is cheap – one has to act kindly to make a difference.

The great Indian Buddhist teacher Nagarjuna says that spiritual practitioners are like mangoes – some are ripe on the outside but unripe on the inside, some are unripe on the outside and ripe on the inside, some are both ripe on the outside and ripe on the inside, and others are unripe on the outside and unripe on the inside. Based on his divisive and harmful actions, the Dalai Lama is clearly very ripe on the outside but unripe on the inside. Like many politicians, he’s good at saying one thing and doing the opposite. He knows the effect he is looking for and how to achieve it with his speech.

The next section is entitled ‘The living embodiment of the Buddha’ in which, amazingly, Thurman argues that the Dalai Lama has grown so close to Shakyamuni Buddha that they are indistinguishable.

This is a clear case of double standards. Bob Thurman and other Dalai Lama devotees think nothing of praising him to the high heavens because they know that no one will lift an eyebrow, yet the phrase “third Buddha”, used precisely once about Geshe Kelsang 15 years ago, is quoted again and again by the Dalai Lama’s supporters to prove that Geshe Kelsang’s disciples are cultishly enslaved by him.

Later on in the book is a picture by the artist Alex Grey, depicting the Dalai Lama as Avalokiteshvara. What if someone painted a similar picture of Geshe Kelsang as Buddha? NKT would never hear the end of the accusations of being a cult, brainwashed by a charismatic leader. What hypocrisy!

In the next section, ‘What the Dalai Lama Represents Today’, Thurman begins:

It is not merely that the Dalai Lama represents Buddhism. He is much more than a nominal leader of an organization. (page 11)

The Dalai Lama does not represent Buddhism for everybody. He is a political leader who has received a religious education and who happens to be a monk. He may be regarded as the leader of Tibetan Buddhism but in reality he cannot speak for any of the individual schools of Tibetan Buddhism because he is not the head of any school of Tibetan Buddhism, let alone any other Buddhist tradition in the world. The Dalai Lama is, in fact, the nominal leader of the Tibetan Government in Exile, nothing more. That is really as far as his authority goes; his spiritual authority is self-assumed.

Usually Dharma Teachers are appointed by senior Teachers in their tradition. Who appointed the Dalai Lama and gave him spiritual authority? Who gave him permission to give Buddha’s teachings throughout the world?

It is precisely the use of the Dalai Lama’s self-assumed spiritual authority to interfere with the individual schools of Tibetan Buddhism that is the root of both the Karmapa and Dorje Shugden controversies. In 2001, the International Karma Kagyu Organization wrote an open letter to the Dalai Lama completely rejecting his interference in the matters of the Kagyu tradition:

Up until Your Holiness’ interference in 1992, no other Dalai Lama has ever played a role in the recognition of a genuine Karmapa. As Your Holiness well knows, the Karmapa incarnations precede the Dalai Lama line by over three hundred years. There is no historical precedent for Your Holiness’ current involvement.

It doesn’t matter that Thurman views the Dalai Lama as being Buddha Shakyamuni — the Dalai Lama has no authority to interfere in the spiritual matters of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism. The Dalai Lama has similarly interfered with the Gelugpa school, but he has no authority to brand Dorje Shugden practice as ‘a cult’ and ‘spirit worship’, and he certainly has no authority to pass a law to ban the practice. The Dalai Lama’s ban is unlawful and immoral. There is currently a case against the Dalai Lama in the High Court in Delhi for his breach of the Indian law of Deity discrimination, which will be heard in November 2008.

Thurman concludes:

What is the Dalai Lama? I have come to see him as a living Prince of Peace, a teacher of intelligence, an inspirer of goodness of heart, a reincarnation of the Buddha of universal compassion. He comes to join us in our world today, offering us hope in our stressed-out lives and calling upon us to take up our own wild joy of universal responsibility.

The Dalai Lama does not offer hope to Dorje Shugden practitioners, he just makes them more stressed-out:

‘There will be no change in my stand. I will never revoke the ban. You are right. It will be like the Cultural Revolution. If they (those who do not accept the ban) do not listen to my words, the situation will grow worse for them. You sit and watch. It will grow only worse for them.’ (January 1999)

If the Dalai Lama really was as pure as Thurman has portrayed him, by practising the love, compassion, tolerance and religious freedom that he espouses, there would be no problems: no Karmapa controversy, no Dorje Shugden issue, no Western Shugden Society and no demonstrations. Buddhists of all traditions could continue their practice in peace and harmony with all other Buddhists.

However, all the problems that the Dalai Lama blames on Dorje Shugden are of his own making, principally because he’s acting as a politican and not practicing what he preaches. It’s about time he started to act responsibly and put Buddha’s teachings into practice if he really wants to solve everyone’s problems.

Later on, more hyperbole:

The Dalai Lama has been called a “Buddhist Pope”, a “bodhisattva” a “head of state” in exile, and so on. Each of these is incomplete but has a grain of truth. He describes himself as a “simple Buddhist monk”, though he is not aware of the other dimensions of his being. (page 13)

Maybe the Dalai Lama has been called a “Buddhist Pope”, but only by those who do not understand Buddhism. There is no supreme head of Buddhism like there is a supreme head of the Catholic Church. There are some who believe that the Dalai Lama does have ambitions in this direction. We can certainly say that the Dalai Lama is the most well-known Buddhist in the world, but that’s due to his tireless self-promotion, aided and abetted by Bob Thurman, more than anything else.

How do “simple Buddhist monk” and “head of state” go together? Does Thurman not see some contradiction in some of these roles? Later on he says that the Dalai Lama is “a statesman, a politician, a diplomat, a personal manager, and a chief executive officer”. Again, more contradiction with being a “simple monk” who traditionally practises renunciation and has no interest in power, politics, diplomacy or being a statesman because he understands that they are the nooses of samsara. Nagarjuna, for, example, used to pray never to be reborn as a politican because it is an obstacle to pure spiritual practice.

Furthermore, the Dalai Lama’s more ‘commercial’ interests do not sit well with being ‘a simple Buddhist monk’. In the article om “money” padme hum? on the Dalai Lama’s book on leadership “The Leader’s Way” he is quoted as saying some very strange things:

Buddhism also values free enterprise. “Buddha recognized entrepreneurship as a valuable activity,” the Dalai Lama writes. “He encouraged entrepreneurs to be successful by being reliable and having an eye for what should sell.”

The article concludes:

Free marketers will be happy that the Dalai Lama – with his moral stature – has unequivocally backed capitalism and globalization, with the usual riders about mitigating its excesses.

Is it really right for a ‘simple Buddhist monk’ — who has taken vows to not even handle money or obtain profit through business, and who regards wealth and worldly attainments as deceptive — to advise big business on how to make more?

Clearly the Dalai Lama can’t be all things to everyone, despite what Thurman says.

It is a concern that when Thurman attempts to explain various aspects of Buddha’s teaching, his casual use of language can actually lead to misconceptions. I understand that he is trying to be ‘populist’ and is appealing to an audience that is not necessarily Buddhist but he does take considerable liberties. For example, using the word ‘soul’ for the root mind that transmigrates from life to life will quite possibly evoke an understanding in the minds of Christian readers that is not what Buddha intended.

There are other examples too. When describing karma, Thurman says:

According to this Buddhist view, the effects of these actions become encoded at a super-subtle energy level in a “mental gene” or “soul gene” which then shapes the experience and quality of the individual’s gross mind and body as it evolves through many lifetimes.

Huh? This raises more questions than it answers. Where is the ‘super-subtle energy level’ – is it the ether?, what encodes the action? What does the encoding look like? Actually, all these questions are spurious because Thurman’s initial explanation is inaccurate and, as we know, there’s no meaning in trying to refine your understanding of something that’s wrong in the first place. Karmic actions leave an imprint on the mind – no encoding! This imprint is not a gene in the sense the most people understand genes because it’s non-physical; it’s not made of DNA. There’s no ‘super-subtle energy level’, just the very subtle mind, and so on.

I think that Thurman has gone too far in trying to adopt scientific language and concepts in his attempt to make Buddhism acceptable to people who view science as a religion in itself. Perhaps the lack of clarity will pique their curiosity and they will start reading about Buddhism, who knows? I’m used to Geshe Kelsang’s explanations where he gives clear definitions for all his terms and never uses pseudo-scientific language to explain Buddha’s teachings. The muddiness of Thurman’s explanations suffer in comparison.

I’m disappointed with Thurman: I would have expected a more accurate and careful explanation from a Buddhist scholar. It would have been better not to include this material at all rather than to present it badly with the possibility of causing serious misunderstandings in his readership. There are enough problems in this world without people misunderstanding the path that leads away from problems!

The rest of the chapter continues in this vein, highlighting the good qualities and achievements of the Dalai Lama in the same sycophantic manner as before. There’s nothing new to say. The material is too much and too monotonous to warrant further examination. One thing that Thurman says is:

“The present Fourteenth Dalai Lama has already earned the title “Great Fourteenth”, due to his profound inner development and his magnificent works of teaching, writing, political leadership, and prophetic engagement with global society.” (p 32)

Who confered this title on him? There’s no committee like the Nobel committee in Buddhism to bestow such honours. This smells of something introduced either by Thurman or the Dalai Lama. Perhaps they hope that such an honorific will become common currency, like “the Pope of Buddhism” and that it will be widely accepted and held to be true. Here Thurman seems to be disingenuously attempting to write history. He has an eye to the Dalai Lama’s ‘legacy’, just as many politicians are concerned with how they are seen by history. He’s a good servant!

And Thurman’s final, convoluted description of who the Dalai Lama is:

The Dalai Lama is something more and something less than a pope of Tibetan Buddhism. He is more than a pope because he is not merely a vicar of the Buddha; in messianic form as the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, he is actually seen as the returning presence of the Buddha himself. He is like Jesus returned, not just for the second time but always returning. (p 34)

(Hmmm, Sarah Palin anyone?) What a stew of mixed religious terms! It’s difficult not to poke fun at this final over-the-top comparison. He’s a Catholic, Church of England, bodhisattva messiah Buddha, multiple Jesus kind of guy! Just remember that the next time someone asks you who the Dalai Lama is!

He’s not just a politician with delusions of grandeur then?

Postcript: I am not pointing out Bob Thurman’s and the Dalai Lama’s flaws just for their own sake and especially not for political reasons, but because they are having an adverse effect on Buddhism and Buddhists. If people believe all the hype about the Dalai Lama perpetrated by Thurman, the Dalai Lama will be able to continue to persecute Dorje Shugden practitioners with impunity, and succeed in destroying a priceless spiritual tradition.

All I am aiming for is to allow people to see Thurman’s and the Dalai Lama’s actions more clearly. Then they may question them about the Dalai Lama’s ban of Dorje Shugden, and maybe even urge the Dalai Lama to lift that ban. Once he has lifted the ban and met the aims of the Western Shugden Society, there will be no further need for book reviews.

Part 3

In this article we continue to examine Thurman’s book and point out the inconsistencies in what he writes about the Dalai Lama and the Dalai Lama’s actions over the years. Through the Dalai Lama’s actions, we can glimpse his real qualities and beliefs; and we can see a big difference between Thurman’s lavish hype and the truth.

To quote his own expression, the Dalai Lama’s “Three Main Commitments in Life” are:

1. As a human being, to promote common human values, tolerance, compassion, and so on
2. As a religious practitioner, to promote world religious harmony, Buddhist self-discipline, and so on
3. As a Tibetan, to represent his people until oppression by China is solved, then retire to being a spiritual teacher in Drepung, his traditional monastic university. (p 35)

If the Dalai Lama claims that this is what he is trying to do with his life, let’s examine these claims to see how much he is acting in accordance with his commitments. Thurman uses the world ‘promote’ rather than ‘practice’. Does the Dalai Lama see himself as a promoter of these values, or as someone who encourages people to adopt these values through his own practice and example? Given the frequent discrepancy between his example and his rhetoric, it might fairly be said that he is acting like a salesman for something he hasn’t bought himself.

For example, do these speeches by the Dalai Lama sound like tolerance, compassion and promoting world religious harmony to you?:

“Recently monasteries have fearlessly expelled Shugden monks where needed. I fully support their actions. I praise them. If monasteries find taking action hard, tell them the Dalai Lama is responsible for this.” (Al Jazeera news report, October 2008)

“Until now you have done a very good job on this issue. Hereafter also, continue this policy in a clever way. We should do it in such a way to ensure that in future generations not even the name of Dholgyal (Dorje Shugden) is remembered.” (At a meeting of Tibetans in Caux, Switzerland in 1999)

For more examples of the Dalai Lama’s harsh and intolerant attitude toward fellow Buddhist practitioners, see In the Dalai Lama’s words.

Thurman now talks about the third commitment of the Dalai Lama:

In terms of the third commitment, the Dalai Lama is Tibetan and Tibetans place their trust in him (p 37)

Although the Dalai Lama is loved by many Tibetans, not all Tibetans trust him, and with good reasons. Here are some examples of Tibetans who do not trust him or accept the function of the Dalai Lama as it stands presently:

From the pro-Tibetan “Phayul” website:

The institution of the Dalai Lama has served its purpose and is now obsolete. It has to end for the sake of Tibet. Religion, like a lot of other things, is personal. It must never meddle in the politics of Tibet. We have the past blunders to prove it. There must never be another regent. There must never be another religious king. There must never be another monk or nun Prime Minister. There must never be another Dalai Lama, at least with political powers. There must never be another Lama with political powers no matter who, whether it is a Bonpo, Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, Gelug et al. It all now depends on the current Dalai Lama, the type of legacy that he wants to leave for Tibet…The Dalai Lama has to resign in this incarnation as it will be almost impossible to do so if a 15th Dalai Lama is enthroned.

(From the recent France 2 Documentary Report, translated from French)

Reporter: Lobsang Yeshe and Namgyal were previously the Dalai Lama’s bodyguards. 50 years ago, they saved the life of the head of Tibet, running away from the Chinese. But today, they feel betrayed.

Lobsang Yeshe: The Dalai Lama, I don’t want to hear about him any more. He is no longer the Buddha of Compassion. He is a traitor. The Dalai Lama has committed the gravest crime. He has divided all the Tibetans. He is against our deity, Dorje Shugden. He has forbidden us from venerating him. Because of him, I had a heart attack

And, of course, the Mongoose-Canine Letter, written in the 1990s by a group of Tibetans:

…you always give priority to your own well-being and power, even at the cost of Tibet’s future. I am not trying to tell you that you should be concerned with the future Dalai Lamas regarding them being leaders of Tibet. I am telling you that you are not working for the future progress and democracy of the Tibetan people in Tibet. Also, I am telling you that you are extremely dishonest and hypocritical.

Thurman continues:

His sense of himself as a Tibetan comes, in this incarnation, from an extraordinary life, detailed in two autobiographies so far, and many works by others. Born in a well-off peasant farmer-trader family, he was recognized as the Dalai Lama very young, was brought up as a monk with a special education, was trained to be a head of state, and was entrusted with the political leadership of his people. (p38)

No mention is made that he was born into a Muslim family. Many people misunderstood why the Western Shugden Society made known in the West what is already public knowledge to many Tibetans. There was no insult to Muslims; it is just curious why, if the Dalai Lama was genuine, he would choose to be born into a family of a completely different religion. Given that the genuine Dalai Lama is supposed to have control over his rebirth, is it not a curious choice? The implication is that the Dalai Lama may not be genuine and that his non-Buddhist actions in discriminating against the practitioners of his Spiritual Guide’s tradition seem to corroborate this. This is further supported by the article on the Western Shugden Society website explaining how the Reting Rinpoche, the regent of Tibet, caused the wrong boy to be chosen as the Dalai Lama. The deception by Reting Regent was suspected in Tibet at the time, but naturally covered up for political reasons. (Later, the deception was compounded by recognizing the Dalai Lama’s siblings also as reincarnate Lamas).

That, of course, was no fault of the boy who became the Dalai Lama. One cannot help but feel compassion for the Dalai Lama if he is not a realized being. His upbringing must have been curious and lonely. Indeed, Thurman makes the observation earlier in the book that the Dalai Lama seemed to him to be “slightly stressed, lonely and a little sad” (p 6). No wonder the eleven-year-old boy greeted the arrival of Heinrich Harrer in Lhasa in 1946 with such excitement, receiving from him much tutoring about the outside world, despite Harrer having been a Nazi sergeant in the Waffen-SS from 1938.

The young Tenzin Gyatso was certainly invested with a lot of responsibility and the heavy weight of everyone’s expectations from an early age. However, no matter how abnormal the Dalai Lama’s childhood may have been, it cannot be used as an excuse for his present sectarian actions in persecuting Shugden practitioners, for which he should be made to answer internationally. If the Dalai Lama’s actions of working for a peaceful solution to the Tibetan problem was recognized with a Nobel Peace Prize, his actions of persecution, curtailing religious freedom and causing disharmony in the Tibetan community should also fairly be recognized.

Part 4

Continued from Chapter 2: What has the Dalai Lama Accomplished?

The next section is ‘accomplishments and impacts’. Here, Thurman waxes lyrical on the Dalai Lama’s achievements in various spheres but, as before, is somewhat prone to exaggeration. For example:

If you understand Buddhism not merely as a world religion, religion as primarily a system of belief and the Dalai Lama as being a great philosopher in the tradition he claims as his own, that of the Seventeen Great Professors (Pandits) of Nalanda University (the great Monastic University of classical India), then he emerges not as a religious preacher but as a world teacher. The Dalai Lama can be classified as someone like Albert Einstein, Arnold Toynbee, Bertrand Russell or Stephen Hawking who advances human knowledge from a philosophical and scientific point of view. If Buddhism is one third ethics, one third psychology and religion as therapy, and one third scientific wisdom, then the Dalai Lama brings new aspects of those three values to the world. (page 39)

These days the Dalai Lama talks about ‘the Nalanda Tradition’. He mentioned it again in an interview in Nottingham in May 2008:

So some people criticize me, I banned that sort of spirit worship; that is not true. I just simply make clear what is the reality, whether as we are follower of Nalanda tradition, we are not spirit worshipper. So there is a sort of danger, I feel in my eye, the degenerating, the pure Nalanda tradition eventually become like spirit worship. That is not good.

Thurman says that the Dalai Lama claims this tradition as his own. These days, the Dalai Lama does not talk about the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism so much as the Nalanda tradition. This term is his own invention. The Dalai Lama was not educated in the ‘Nalanda tradition’ but in the Gelugpa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, a tradition he seems to have disowned and for which he shows increasing disrespect.

The Dalai Lama’s Junior Tutor and Guru is Trijang Rinpoche, the Spiritual Guide of a whole generation of Gelugpa teachers from the highest Lamas to the most humble novices. The Dalai Lama has ordered Trijang Rinpoche’s thrones to be removed from Ganden Lachi and Shartse monasteries. The thrones represent the continuing presence of this great Master, so what is the Dalai Lama saying by ordering their removal? Even though Trijang Rinpoche treated the Dalai Lama as his own son and cared for him in every way, how does the Dalai Lama repay that kindness? By branding him as a ‘spirit worshipper’, telling everyone he was ‘wrong, yes wrong’ and having his thrones removed from two monasteries where he was revered.

The Dalai Lama is clearly trying to destroy Trijang Rinpoche’s reputation. In Buddhism, respect for one’s own Teacher is vital. It is said to be the root of the path. The Dalai Lama has cut his root. Even so, he continues to travel around the world, giving the teachings from the very lineage he has turned his back on.

Where does the Dalai Lama’s knowledge come from? It comes only from Buddha through the Dalai Lama’s teachers, whom he has thoroughly disrespected by calling them ‘spirit worshippers’ and enabling the persecution of their followers. The Dalai Lama is not the source of these teachings. Whereas the theory of relativity as formulated by Einstein was a unique achievement that came from his own thought experiments, if the Dalai Lama is teaching Buddhism correctly, he has nothing doctrinally “new” to offer. Buddha’s insights were uniquely established two and a half thousand years ago and the content is non-negotiable. Buddha is the true genius and advancer of human knowledge, but he’s not given the credit – the Dalai Lama takes the credit in Thurman’s mind.

Recently, at an FPMT Center in Deerfield Beach, Florida, they proudly advertized that the teachings they gave were in the “lineage of the Dalai Lama”. But what is this lineage exactly? Does it begin and end with the Dalai Lama?

Buddhism is so much more than philosophy, science or ‘religion as therapy’ (a curious choice of words!). Boiling it down to mundane subjects of study seems to do Buddhism a grave disservice. Maybe it is the academic in him, but Thurman here misses the magic of Buddhism. No amount of philosophy, science or therapy can lead to permanent liberation from suffering and the full enlightenment of Buddhahood.

Later, Thurman gives us some insight as to why he wrote his book:

The main accusation against the Dalai Lama that surfaces from time to time around the world is that of being ineffective. People have said, “What has the Dalai Lama ever accomplished, for all his running around the world meeting celebrities?” In fact, answering that question is one of the main drives of this book. (page 45)

It is clear what the Dalai Lama has accomplished by doing this – celebrity and power. And Thurman seems to be justifying this lifestyle (or defending it, not sure which). While it is true that the Dalai Lama has been so far ineffective in his political work for Tibet, no doubt he will also receive more accusations against him in the future as a result of his illegal and unconstitutional actions. It could be argued that the main accusation against the Dalai Lama already is, ‘Why is he lying?’ or ‘Why is he using Buddhism to maintain his own power and position at the cost of harmony in the Buddhist community?’ Not surprisingly, Thurman does not address these questions.

He has been working on and gradually introducing a democratic constitution in the exile community as a way to live in exile and a model of self-rule whenever it is recovered in Tibet. It is a secularist constitution based on the separation of church and state, in which all religions are equal under the law (p 51)

Since 1959 the Dalai Lama has had ample opportunity to introduce a democratic system of government into the Tibetan community in exile. Why hasn’t it happened? Could it be because he wants to continue the union of politics and religion for his own ends?

More and more Tibetans see the faults with this system. For example, in an article called “He Has Got It Wrong” (on pro-Tibetan Phayul, taken from the Times of India), Eliot Sperling says of the recent meeting (November 2008) about Tibet’s future in Dharamsala:

And while the Dalai Lama has repeatedly stated that the Tibet issue is not about him but about all Tibetans, the end result of the special meeting bears out China’s stance: in spite of his democratic rhetoric, the Dalai Lama has never empowered Tibetans to feel comfortable taking stands at variance with him. Accusations of disloyalty to the Dalai Lama remain a weapon in political and personal feuds in Dharamsala.

In her article commenting on this newspaper opinion piece, a Tibetan woman calling herself Mountain Phoenix says:

So when we look at the outcome of this “special meeting”, there was nothing special about it, let alone “historic”. The ultimate decision was again not to decide but to leave the decision to the Dalai Lama.

In the article ‘Tibetan Religion and Politics’, posted on Phayul, Samten G Karmay makes a powerful case for separation of church and state based upon the incompatibility of the role of head of democratic government with being a spiritual master:

In this theocratic system the head of the state was not only the political leader of the people, but also their spiritual master. In other words, the whole population was subjected and put in the position of spiritual disciple to the master. Within the context of this essentially religious bond no devotee would ever dream of opposing the view of the master, because that would be tantamount to breaking the sacred relationship between the master and the disciple. How does this fit with the discussion of democracy among the Tibetans in exile for whom HH the Dalai Lama is the political leader, but who nonetheless bestows on them the Kalachakra initiation?

This ties in with the Mongoose-Canine letter, in which the writer says:

Moreover, to challenge Lamas you have used religion for your aim. To that purpose you had to develop the Tibetan people’s blind faith. In the end you adopted the same activity that you yourself had pointed out was mistaken in other Lamas. For instance, you started the politics of public Kalachakra initiations. Normally the Kalachakra initiation is not given in public. Then you started to use it continuously in a big way for your politics. The result is that now the Tibetan people have returned to exactly the same muddy and dirty mixing of politics and religion of Lamas which you yourself had so precisely criticised in earlier times.

The implication is that the Dalai Lama has used his position as a Spiritual Leader through Kalachakra initiations to keep the Tibetan people docile because they would never challenge their Teacher with whom they have ‘samaya’ (sacred bond) through initiation. Geshe Kelsang Gyatso of the New Kadampa Tradition has been branded ‘a samaya breaker’ for the very reason that it is claimed that he received this initiation from the Dalai Lama in 1954 and has subsequently spoken out against him (N.B. he never received this initiation).

The point of the Dalai Lama using Kalachakra for political purposes is mentioned again later in the Mongoose-Canine letter:

Nowadays you have given the Kalachakra initiation so many times you have made the Tibetan people into donkeys. You can force them to go here and there as you like. In your words you always say that you want to be Gandhi but in your action you are like a religious fundamentalist who uses religious faith for political purposes.

Samten G Karmay’s article was well read and received many supporting comments from Tibetans. Some examples:

religion and politics should be separated in order to have a true democratic system.people will more freely speak out when its a religious person most people don’t want to speak freely.the present tibetan govt needs to listen to people and stop calling people who give their opinion as chinese spy etc.this is not democracy

As you know, Tibetan government in exile, in realty there is no democracy. It’s like still old Tibet style empire rules, Lama Rules or one of the linage rule. One man leader for ever and at the same time they call it real democracy. In fact no Democracy and it’s like banana democracy. Young educated Tibetans have no chances to become a Top leader of Tibet as a ‘President”.

You are right — majority Tibetans has no power to tell or comment to the head of the exile. Because our head leader is Religious one. One of the four linage of mahayana Tibetan Buddhism. If you do so there is Dhamtsik Samaya breaking between a guru and the deciple.

Since the Dalai Lama alone has the power to determine whether democracy is introduced or not, and there is no democracy, the facts speak for themselves. Thurman should not whitewash this situation by pretending that the Dalai Lama is pro-democracy when his clear lack of action in this area shows that he is not. Either the Dalai Lama is fooling Thurman, or Thurman is fooling us.

Thurman talks about the Dalai Lama’s enthusiasm for inter-religious dialogue. Why then doesn’t the Dalai Lama want to talk to Dorje Shugden practitioners to resolve the big schism in his own community? Their pleas for understanding are ignored. The Religion section in the recent Memorandum has fine words for the Chinese, but surely the Dalai Lama and his government should get their own house in order first?

Thurman also mentions that the Dalai Lama defends the Muslim religion. In these times, when Muslims tend to be demonized as terrorists due to the actions of a relative minority of fanatics, this is a laudable thing to do. But surely it would have been worth mentioning here that the Dalai Lama has a natural sympathy with Muslims because he is from a Muslim family and was born in a Muslim village? It is a curious omission.

Thurman talks about ‘what we might call the magic of the Dalai Lama’s special presence’ (page 62). He reports that ‘the effect of his presence is galvanizing; people often burst into tears, forget what they were planning to say, commonly change their preconceived ideas completely’. Is it a good idea to mention this? Thurman’s intention is probably good, and what he wants to show is how his Guru’s presence has a powerful effect on others’ minds. However, there have been many charismatic leaders throughout history who have had powerful speech and been able to get people to do what they want, and this has not always worked out to their advantage. Does Thurman really want us to think that the Dalai Lama has some power to influence others, and maybe even to be able to control their minds?

It’s a curious thing to talk about and, more than anything else, it indicates a somewhat unexamined faith. Thurman doesn’t see how it could be misunderstood, which is a little naïve of him. If people said such fanatical things about Geshe Kelsang, no doubt his critics would jump on the bandwagon with their accusations of ‘mind control cult’; so why do no alarm bells sound when people talk so glowingly of the control the Dalai Lama exerts over others?

Thurman talks extensively about Tibetan, Tibetans and the Tibetan cause, which is also the other main motivation for his writing this book. He’s obviously trying to coax Chinese sympathizers to see a different view of the Dalai Lama with one aim in mind – the fulfilment of the Dalai Lama’s wishes for autonomy for Tibet within China. This is where the book is quite political and a little obvious in its intentions. Thurman is saying “look, the Dalai Lama is really a very special guy and you can trust him, so give us back Tibet!”

Whilst not wanting to get too political, I have to mention an obvious lie about the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan resistance, and the CIA because it has implications for Thurman’s trustworthiness and honesty. Thurman says:

Tibetan warriors did fight for over a decade as guerrillas (with a low level of support from CIA until betrayed by Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon), against the Dalai Lama’s instructions, but admittedly with his admiration for their bravery.

Does Thurman really believe this version of events? There is evidence that the Dalai Lama himself was on the CIA payroll in the 1960′s, to a tune of $186,000 per annum. From the Wikipedia article on the 14th Dalai Lama:

In October 1998, The Dalai Lama’s administration acknowledged that it received $1.7 million a year in the 1960s from the U.S. Government through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and also trained a resistance movement in Colorado (USA).

According to a report in a Vancouver newspaper:

Funds to pay this army were funnelled through the Dalai Lama and his organization, which received US$1.7 million a year, later reduced to $1.2 million. (Of this, the Dalai Lama himself was paid $186,000 a year. But no one has ever suggested that he pocketed it. The money was used to operate his exiled government’s offices in Geneva and New York.) The last year in which the stipend was paid out was 1974. By then, of course, U.S. policy had changed to one of embracing China, not antagonizing it.

According to Thurman, the guerrillas fought ‘against the Dalai Lama’s instructions’; yet the Dalai Lama’s administration received the funds to pay for the army from the CIA, with the Dalai Lama himself being paid. No one can claim that the Dalai Lama didn’t know what was going on, or that it was against his instructions.

From an interview with the Dalai Lama with the New York Times in 1993:

Q: In Tibet, from the late 1950′s until the early 1970′s, one of your brothers was involved in leading a guerrilla movement against the Chinese. In fact, the guerrillas were supported by the C.I.A. How did you feel about that?

A: I’m always against violence. But the Tibetan guerrillas were very dedicated people. They were willing to sacrifice their own lives for the Tibetan nation. And they found a way to receive help from the C.I.A. Now, the C.I.A.’s motivation for helping was entirely political. They did not help out of genuine sympathy, not out of support for a just cause. That was not very healthy.

The Dalai Lama says “they found a way to receive help from the CIA” as if the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Administration knew nothing about it; but they were on the payroll! The Dalai Lama is being disingenuous, as is Thurman in misrepresenting events. The aim is to maintain the Dalai Lama’s public image as someone who does not agree with armed struggle, which is obviously wrong.

Things become even more nefarious when the Mongoose Canine letter states:

The problem of your government splitting the Tibetan guerilla fighters in Mustang. In fact, they were originally organised by your government with the help of the CIA. In 1969, as a consequence of Nixon’s policy with China, you provoked a fight among the Tibetan guerillas over their weapons. This fight finally destroyed them.

What then are we to make of Thurman’s statement:

But overall, in spite of massive oppression, Tibetans have maintained the non-violence the Dalai Lama has asked of them. The greatness of this achievement cannot be overstated (page 74)

Thurman seems attached to Tibet and what it represents in his mind, as he is attached to the Dalai Lama and what he represents. Such attachment is obviously going to influence his views. Either Thurman is deliberately misrepresenting events, or he is genuinely in the thrall of the Dalai Lama and Tibet and ignoring obvious truths. This is also evident when he says:

Nowadays the world is spinning out of control in a “war on terror” which is endless in principle because violence simply breeds more counter-violence. Then, to our amazement, we encounter a people who eschew terrorism and violence from the beginning. (page 74)

Michael Parenti is an American political scientist, historian and media critic whose article Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth explains the excesses of Tibet as a feudal society. The view that Tibet was some kind of Shangri-la filled with happy, non-violent practising Buddhists is a complete myth.

As for ‘eschewing violence from the beginning’, there was almost a riot in New York in July 2008 when a large group of Tibetans who had just been to a teaching by the Dalai Lama surrounded a much smaller group of Western Shugden Society protestors to spit, jeer and throw things. The protestors had to be evacuated by New York Police for their own safety. There have also been many other instances of violence against Dorje Shugden practitioners, some of which are itemized on the Dorje Shugden Controversy article in Wikipedia.

Again, there are many more points in this chapter that merit comment, but we will finish on something positive — the Dalai Lama’s concluding statement from his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech:

I pray for all of us, oppressor and friend, that together we succeed in building a better world through human understanding and love, and that in doing so we may reduce the pain and suffering of all sentient beings. Thank you. (page 95)

We pray that the Dalai Lama will live by these words and stop all the problems he has created in the Buddhist community through his divisive actions. Dalai Lama, please give religious freedom to Dorje Shugden practitioners.