In my last post I wrote about current issues within the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT). As promised, to fill out my attitude to the NKT I am posting an article I wrote in 1996 in the second issue of Dharma Lifemagazine, just as the dispute over Dorje Shugden was breaking out into the open.

Much has happened since then and an enormous amount has been written, especially online: this Wikipedia entry is a starting point if you want to find out more, and the contribution of the scholar George Dreyfuss is especially informative. But be warned! The dispute has caused much bad feeling, most dramatically in allegations about the murder of a leading Tibetan critic of the Dorje Shugden practice.

In general, I think this article still hold good. Having reflected further on the subject over the years I have concluded that it is impossible for outsiders to take sides in this dispute: it would mean adjudicating on a dispute concerning the spirit world. That leaves the case for freedom of religious expression, which I think holds as a general principle regardless of the beliefs concerned and whether I like or agree with them.

Enemies and Protectors

Dorje Shugden lives in a palace surrounded by a wild sea of blood. It is filled with mounds of destroyed beings and the air is thick with the smell of human flesh. Shugden himself is dark red in colour, fierce like a savage spirit, and his mouth is bottomless like the sky. He is adorned with snakes, bones and a garland of freshly severed heads. He sends forth flames, winds and rain-clouds against opposing forces and, his followers believe, he encloses all evil-doers, vow breakers and obstacle-creating demons within a gigantic wall.

Wrathful figures like Shugden abound in Tibetan Buddhism within which they are believed to have a more than symbolic existence. To understand their role one has to look deep into Tibetan Buddhism’s shamanistic dimension – with its oracles, portents and spirits.

All reality in this perspective, is created by the mind, but if you believe in spirits they are real, and the Tibetans certainly do believe in them. There are many classes of spirits and some of them are considered very powerful. However, while some have been converted to the Dharma others are malevolent.

But how do you know which are which? The answer is that you ask a high Lama or a monk with shamanistic powers. But what if the lamas disagree? And what if those disagreements coincide with sectarian rivalries on a more mundane level?

Dorje Shugden is at the heart of just such a dispute in the Tibetan Buddhist community, between those who see him as an Enlightened protector and those, led by the Dalai Lama, who see him as an evil spirit.

In June this dispute finally boiled over into the UK media as a group called the Shugden Supporters Community (SSC) mounted demonstrations against the Dalai Lama outside the Office of Tibet. They sent out a press release which was headed ‘Dalai Lama persecutes his own people. Tibetan people in China have more religious freedom than Tibetan people in India’. It is widely expected that they will mount further demonstrations at the time of the Dalai Lama’s visit to the UK in July.

The issues involved are complex and arcane, and feelings have been running high. The dispute has pointed up several sensitive areas: the sectarian divisions within Tibetan Buddhism and the role of the Dalai Lama in these divisions; criticisms of the Tibetan government-in-exile; the difficulties posed by Westerners’ involvement in Tibetan Buddhism; and the deep-seated divisions among British Tibetan Buddhists. But for these very reasons, now that the issue has emerged it is important to attempt to clarify what is involved.

Dorje Shugden is considered by his followers to be a dharmapala or Enlightened protector and an emanation of the Bodhisattva Manjushri. These followers are mainly members of the Gelugpa school (although they have also included some Sakyapas), and they consider Shugden a special protector for the Gelugpas. He is therefore associated with the political power the Gelugpas had in independent Tibet.

According to the legend, Shugden is the reincarnation of a Lama who was a rival of the Fifth Dalai Lama and died as a result of their conflict. Then, it is said, he became a hostile spirit, but was eventually ‘tamed’, so that he was a protective force and hence an emanation of the Bodhisattva.

But there have always been those who maintain that Shugden was not properly subdued and is a worldly rather than an Enlightened protector. Propitiating such a figure is held to bring wealth and power, but it is also considered extremely dangerous. Shugden is associated by his opponents with Gelugpa sectarianism and said to be opposed to other deities, particularly the state protectors, Nechung and Palden Lhamo. In that case, to follow his cult would be tantamount to devil-worship.

The Dalai Lama’s principal teacher, Trijang Rimpoche, was an ardent devotee of Dorje Shugden and he brought up his pupil to worship the deity. However, in 1976 the Dalai Lama made it known that he had concluded on the basis of divinations that Shugden was a worldly spirit who was indeed engaged in conflict, in the spirit realm with the other protectors. In this he followed the Thirteenth Dalai Lama who had tried to suppress the Shugden practice. The present Dalai Lama stopped doing the practice himself and in the following years he asked others to stop.

Initiation into a practice such as this implies a solemn commitment including a promise to perform it every day for the rest of one’s life. In the case of a protector, the consequences of breaching this commitment are believed to include bad fortune and ill health as well as a rebirth in a hell realm. It would also mean breaching the relationship with the teacher who gave the initiation.

he Dalai Lama said he would personally accept the karmic consequences of other people stopping the Shugden practice, meaning that he would do battle with Shugden in the spirit realm to prevent him from causing harm. None the less many Lamas continued as private practitioners and the Dalai Lama’s advice was widely ignored.

In March this year the Dalai Lama changed his tone. Whereas before he had been critical of the practice, he now became insistent that it should be stopped forthwith. Failure to do so, he suggested, was tantamount to treason. Shugden was harming his health and Shugden’s conflict with the other protectors was a reason for the Tibetans’ failure to regain independence. ‘Shugden’, he stated, was ‘a spirit of the dark forces’.

Representatives from the Tibetan-Government in exile travelled to the refugee communities across India to try to ensure the ban was enforced and refugee organisations instructed their members to comply.

It is in relation to the way the ban is being enforced that the charges of abuse of religious freedom have been made. Much emotional pressure has clearly been applied. The Dalai Lama argued ‘everyone is free to say “If the cause of Tibet and the Dalai Lama’s life are undermined so be it… We will not change our tradition of propitiating (Shugden).”

‘But this means he is asking people to choose between himself and the Tibetan mainstream on one side, and Shugden and the injunctions of their personal teacher on the other. The SSC, comparing these events with the Spanish Inquisition, have said that unrepentant Shugden devotees have been ‘purged’ from government posts and Tibetan organisations, and even ostracised from the refugee community.

These are serious accusations and a concerted attempt to suppress the Shugden cult is clearly underway. The SSC have won the opening rounds of their media war against the Dalai Lama by using a western language of human rights, while the Dalai Lama’s language is heard as medieval superstition. Their charges are yet not proven, and westerners should keep an open mind until there is conclusive evidence.

This will be hard for followers of the Dalai Lama, as it raises the possibility, which they may find hard to countenance, that he has acted unskilfully. The tone of his statements is plainly exasperated. At such times Buddhists should recall the Buddha’s advice that his disciples should not follow blindly, but should ‘test my words as you test gold.’

However, as so often in Tibetan affairs, there are also other more political issues involved. ‘The Shugden schism,’ remarked seasoned commentator Stephen Batchelor, ‘reveals the cultic, shadowy side of a society breaking apart from within.’ Shugden is associated a faction which asserts Gelugpa supremacy and with their sometimes virulent opposition to the Nygmapa sect.

According to Rigdzen Shikpo (Mike Hookham) the full Shugden sadhana invokes Shugden against named Nygmapa figures. In the 1940s the ardent Shugdenite, Pabonkha Rimpoche, is reported to have led an anti-Nygmapa campaign including the destruction of Padmasambhava images.

In a persuasive article in Tibetan Review Gareth Sparham argues that ‘Shugden is a political symbol’ representing a faction which wants to maintain monastic political dominance, and a ‘fundamentalist version of Tibetan Buddhism as a state religion’ which excludes the other schools, who are considered ‘heterodox’. However, in exile the Dalai Lama has sought to represent the Tibetans as a whole and to allow diversity. Although his actions against Shugden seem to have been authoritarian, his supporters claim that his aim is to counter another intolerant faction.

If this is the case, at this stage his actions would appear to have been counter-productive. The reaction in the west, at least, has been angry and hostile and the Dalai Lama’s reputation is undoubtedly suffering. But this too has a context. His western critics in the SSC are closely associated with the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT).

Indeed, Robbie Barnet of the Tibet Information Network describes SSC as ‘an NKT cover organisation’. NKT, based at the Manjushri institute in Cumbria, is of the most successful Tibetan Buddhist movements in the west, and the Shugden sadhana is one of its ‘essential practices’. Devotion to him is central to the NKT tradition which, furthermore, teaches a highly conservative form of Gelugpa doctrine and is associated with the Shugden faction in India.

In 1983 NKT split acrimoniously from the broader Gelugpa tradition in a dispute arising from its leaders’ desire for autonomy. The split was not over Shugden, but it followed the same fault line and NKT has subsequently, ‘been out of communion’ with the Dalai Lama. Much ill-feeling in the Tibetan Buddhist world has resulted but until now neither side has spoken out publicly.

That all changed with the formation of SSC whose attack has extended to virulent personal criticism of the Dalai Lama. In an extraordinary hyperbole, their open letter to the Dalai Lama says ‘Your behaviour is the worst example in Buddhist history.’ They accuse him of causing a schism which for Buddhist is a heinous crime on a par with matricide. Given the literal nature of their own Buddhism, according to which a true Lama’s actions are necessarily skilful, they suggest that he is not, in fact, the true Dalai Lama and is himself a malevolent force.

While it is possible that SSC’s charges of violations of human rights have some justification, their own language is so intemperate that it is highly unskilful in itself. One can understand their sense of grievance at the suppression of a beloved deity, their perplexity at the arcane reasoning with which it has been justified, and their concern that it will make NKT’s teaching work harder. But the nature of their attack seems entirely out of proportion to the evidence they have presented and quite un-Buddhistic. It amounts to a personal attack and appears to be a concerted attempt to destroy the Dalai Lama’s reputation.

As a non-Tibetan Buddhist researching these issues I have found myself perplexed by the literalism of both sides. Believing literally in spirits, in the infallibility of Lamas, and the inviolability of religious vows leave neither side any flexibility with which they can seek to understand the other’s position. And yet these are problems inherent in some Tibetan Buddhist approaches. The most notable absence from the whole affair is the key Buddhist virtue of tolerance of others who hold differing opinions.

Vishvapani

Source: http://www.wiseattention.org/2012/02/the-shugden-dispute/

The Dalai Lama arrives in Britain today as a sect based in Yorkshire criticises him for persecuting them and assisting the Chinese oppressors. Can they possibly be right?

Andrew Brown, 15 July 1996

Ruth Lister drove her shining 7-series BMW with aplomb down one of the worst roads I have ever seen. It was so badly potholed and steep that we might have been in Tibet. And so, in a sense, we were. For though physically we were in the small West Yorkshire town of Hebden Bridge, making light conversation about the iniquities of the council roads department, we had come to discuss the oracles and demons of ancient Tibet.

Ruth and her husband Ron are central figures in an unprecedented attack on the Dalai Lama and are among the organisers of demonstrations against him planned for his visit to this country, which begins today and culminates in an appearance at the Alexandra Palace in north London on Saturday. They even have their own alternative spiritual leader.

I had come to talk to them about the Shugden Supporters Community, the shadowy group they founded which has been bombarding the English media and the worldwide Internet with accusations that the Dalai Lama is “persecuting his own people” by discouraging or even forbidding the worship of a deity named Dorje Shugden – originally the ghost of a disgruntled 17th-century abbot – in the monasteries under his control. Such worship is causing disharmony among Tibet’s protector deities, the Dalai Lama says – he is a harmful spirit whose veneration may even be assisting the Chinese oppressors.

No one had heard of the Shugden Supporters, or the still more mysterious Freedom Foundation, until the spring, when they both started to issue press releases. Ringing the number given by one of these organisations, I got through to a Buddhist centre run by a rich, fast-growing and secretive Buddhist sect called the NKT [New Kadampa Tradition]. It was in Hebden Bridge, in Ruth Lister’s house, that Steven Lane, a plump young man in his twenties with monkishly cropped hair, arranged to tell me the story of the Shugden Supporters Community.

Steven Lane talked for nearly an hour, hardly drawing breath, without notes. He had the catechetical manner you find among Scientologists or Trotskyists: people who not only know all the answers, but all the questions, too. If the wrong question came up, he simply steamed on and ignored it.

The view from inside the Shugden Supporters’ Community was almost a photographic negative of everything the outside world believes about Tibet and the Dalai Lama. The worship of Dorje Shugden, Lane said, could not possibly be taken as threatening. It was a harmless spiritual practice, comparable to the worship of St Francis in Christianity; and four million people followed the deity.

A long and damning report on the NKT which had appeared in the Guardian could be explained because its author was a member of a rival Buddhist organisation. The Dalai Lama, he said, was not a spiritual leader; not even a member of the Gelugpa tradition [the dominant Buddhist tradition in Tibet].

In fact, the Dalai Lama was not really struggling for Tibetan freedom at all, and his actions against Shugden were motivated by political desires. It was as if Lane was asserting that Nelson Mandela was a secret agent of apartheid with no moral stature at all.

It was a powerful indictment, flawed only by the fact that almost everything I was told in the Lister’s house was untrue. The figure of four million worshippers for Dorje Shugden is preposterous. There are only about six million Tibetans in the world at most, of whom less than half are members of the Gelugpa order (Steven Lane estimated 30 per cent), where the veneration of Shugden is concentrated.

Even among the Gelugpa, only monks can be initiated into the cult of Shugden, and only a minority of those actually are. Most of the experts I talked to thought that about 100,000 people at most could be affected by the Dalai Lama’s ban.

The Dalai Lama is venerated as a spiritual as well as a political leader by all Tibetans, especially those in the Gelugpa order, to which he belongs. Only within the NKT centres are his photographs not displayed: in fact they are banned, as is all mention of his name. As for not struggling for Tibetan freedom, he was awarded a Nobel prize for his efforts, and caused a major diplomatic ruction between Germany and China earlier this summer after the German parliament passed a resolution in his honour.

Shugden himself is not necessarily the compassionate figure portrayed by the NKT. In one rite, reprinted in a Western study, his followers are asked to consider him “living in a palace in a lake of boiling blood, wearing a necklace of skulls and human body parts, in a terrible stench of human flesh”. Not quite the home life of St Francis of Assisi.

Such shamanistic beings do have a role in Tibetan Buddhism: they are considered to have been tamed and bound by the exceptional sanctity of the greatest lamas. But they are considered by most students to represent marginal aspects of Tibetan culture, hold-overs from shamanism rather than central to the Buddhist message.

To be initiated into the cult of Shugden involves a contractual relationship with this terrifying deity: the initiate promises to meditate on him and pray to him every day for the rest of his life. One can see why Tibetans could be reluctant to offend Shugden; and in the Dalai Lama’s speeches to Tibetans against the practice, he has suggested prayers to protect them from the spirit’s vengeance. But why should English Buddhists in West Yorkshire be getting so worked up?

Let us start with the allegiances of the people involved. Ron Lister and his wife claimed to not to be members of the NKT, but merely “concerned Buddhists”. However, when I went to use the telephone in the hall, I noticed that the first number on their speed dial was for “Geshe-la”, as the devotees of Geshe Kelsang Gyatso call their guru; later I discovered that Ron and Ruth Lister had edited the first of Geshe Kelsang’s books to be published in English, and Geshe Kelsang himself told me that he had accompanied Ron Lister on his “fact-finding” tour round India to find evidence of the Dalai Lama’s alleged persecutions.

The more one digs into this story, the more everything comes back to the NKT, a sect founded by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso in the late 1970s after he gained control of the Buddhist centre at Coniston Priory in Cumbria from a rival Buddhist organisation. Since then, the NKT has been enormously successful. Unlike most Buddhist organisations, it actively makes converts and solicits donations. Steven Lane – an NKT member for eight years – said: “I have met Geshe Kelsang on numerous occasions. He never orders. Sometimes he suggests. Sometimes he helps you to see different options.”

This is a curious perspective. All the other evidence suggests an attitude of slavish devotion on the part of his followers. The foreword to one of his recent books says: “From the depths of our hearts we thank the author for his inconceivable kindness in composing this book. Throughout the preparation of this book, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso has demonstrated compassion, wisdom, and inexhaustible patience … there can be no greater proof of the immense value of the Bodhisattva’s way of life than the living example of such a realised Master.”

Within the NKT, Geshe Kelsang is now regarded as the “third Buddha”, who will bring Buddhism to the Western world. When I asked the guru himself about this, he replied: “Some people believe I am the third Buddha, but this is people’s choice. From me, never. I have never pretended I am special.”

The chance to meet him came unexpectedly. The day after I had returned from Hebden Bridge, two saffron-clad, shaven-headed NKT monks appeared in the reception of the Independent, accompanying a rather confused Tibetan devotee of Dorje Shugden. This party had made its way round several broadsheet newspapers to offer interviews with Geshe Kelsang.

I found him in the attic bedroom of a house in Golders Green. It was painted entirely white, except for a sort of shrine behind him. Two English NKT members sat on each side of me, ready to interpret, for the guru’s English is poor and his pronunciation difficult to understand.

Much of what he said to me was already entirely familiar: the claim of four million supporters; the idea that the Dalai Lama was planning to return to China as a Communist puppet ruler; the preposterous assertion, made with great force, that the Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent (a devout Catholic) was “working for” a rival Buddhist organisation.

I asked him something that puzzles me about this story: what business was it of his what the Dalai Lama does in his own monasteries? The NKT clams to have nothing to do with the Dalai Lama. It certainly doesn’t recognise his authority over its centres. Yet if the two streams of Buddhism are so separate, why does the NKT care what the Dalai Lama does?

His reply was illuminating in its passion if not its logic. There was a sense of sacrilege when he described the Dalai Lama’s actions which made many things clear. “The practice of Dorje Shugden came from generation to generation,” he said. “There is so much joy in the daily practice; and the Dalai Lama suddenly says this is bad, this is harmful. The Dalai Lama is not an ordinary being, and when he said this, everybody shocked. They experienced mental pain.” Here he pressed one fist against his heart, in a gesture to ensure I understood what he meant by mental pain.

If Dalai Lama right, then up to now, this practice we have done for 20 years, everything wasted: time lost, money lost, everything lost. That is the big issue.

And maybe it is. Within traditional Tibetan politics, these theological disputes always have a political pay-off. Gods such as Shugden, or Nechung, the traditional protector deity of all Tibet, make their wishes known through trance-oracles, on which all the major decisions of state are based.

In the confused and troubled times of the 1940s, before the Chinese invasion, the cult of Shugden was linked to narrow Gelugpa factionalism, and to a policy that exalted the interests of Central Tibet over the east. In arguing against the cult, and trying to suppress it within his monasteries, the Dalai Lama is not just making a theological point, but a political one: that the Tibetan state he wants would not favour one form of Buddhism over another.

But the dispute over Dorje Shugden makes no sense in terms of practical politics in the West. It has already directed a great deal of media attention on to the NKT and its elastic ways with truth. Some of the mud being flung at the Dalai Lama will probably stick. The reputation of Tibetan Buddhism as a uniquely clean and rational religion will certainly be damaged. The only lasting winners from the row will be the Chinese, who have mounted a fresh campaign of repression inside Tibet this spring. And Dorje Shugden himself, aching for worshippers inside his lake of boiling blood.

Editors Note: This article is very biased against Dorje Shugden and ignorant over the symbolism in protector practices. Dorje Shugden is also not a God, Dorje Shugden practitioners are not in a cult. Dharma Protectors are not from shamanistic Tibetan practices but have come from India. Even if only 100,000 practitioners are affected, isn’t that a significant number? Even if 10 people were affected – shouldn’t they be allowed religious freedom?

This article has been written many years back and since then many other Buddhists groups besides NKT have risen up to oppose the ban in one way or another. Great monasteries like Serpom and Shar Gaden have sprung up from this crisis and they are continuously growing in strength and stature.

Dorje Shugden practice is no longer kept to only Tibetans – and this growth is directly attributed to HH Dalai Lama for creating awareness of this powerful Dharma Protector through the ban. From China to USA to Europe to Southeast Asia – Dorje Shugden practice has been growing swiftly as people personally experience the benefits of the practice. The controversy is generating much more benefit than the harm it has caused.

Source : http://www.independent.co.uk/news/battle-of-the-buddhists-1328839.html