Sikyong Lobsang Sangay launches new anti-Shugden book

On 14 November 2016, the Central Tibetan Administration’s (CTA) Department of Information and International Relations (DIIR) released its latest installment of anti-Dorje Shugden material, a video titled, ‘Shugden Protesters: Allegation versus Facts’.

The content of this 13-minute video attests to the singularity of its purpose i.e. to bolster the CTA’s justification for its now 20-year campaign to destroy the ancient Tibetan Buddhist practice of Dorje Shugden. Revered for over three centuries as an enlightened Dharma Protector, the CTA suddenly banned the practice in 1996 without any sound explanations or reasons.

What ensued was a miscellany of off-hand commentaries by the CTA spanning two decades and covering a multitude of mediums, each attempting to persuade the audience to think unfavorably of this Buddhist deity and his believers. Interestingly, the CTA never did produce any scholarly works to validate its attack on this old Buddhist practice that can stand up to cross-examination and debate, an established trait of the Gelugpa school, as a process to uncover the truth.

Whilst the CTA’s narrative of Dorje Shugden never made much effort to be inclined towards historic truth and logic, the unsuspecting public nevertheless easily accepted it. The CTA’s affiliation with the Dalai Lama, and being the supposed instrument of a holy man’s governance gives it vicarious credibility.

But as Buddhism teaches, nothing exists alone and in complete independence and this is precisely what makes the CTA’s chronicle of Dorje Shugden dangerous. Dorje Shugden is ultimately a religious subject that has been force-fitted into a political frame and that could not happen without considerable distortion. To accept the CTA’s version of the story is to accept a warped account of foundational Buddhist beliefs that challenges every teaching built on them.

Therefore, this post and the accompanying videos below, compiled from various online sources, aim to set straight the facts about Dorje Shugden and his practitioners who have been maligned through decades of CTA effort.

The Need for Honest Government

If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost. ~ President Barrack Obama in ‘An Honest Government, A Hopeful Future’, 2006

It has been 57 years since the Dalai Lama made a dramatic escape from Tibet in 1959. Over a hundred thousand Tibetans followed suit and today, they form a community who are the most famous refugees in the world. The Tibetan fight to regain their homeland has become cause célebrè for the western world’s political elite and celebrity philanthropists. And yet for all the financial and political support the Tibetan refugees have received for over half a century, there is little progress for the Tibetans to speak of.

In examining all factors contributing to the prolonged stagnation of the Tibetan Cause, an important element to consider is the leadership, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA). The November 14 video provides valuable insights into the psyche of the CTA.

To begin with, a true Democracy, which the CTA professes to be, recognizes that the minority has as much right as the majority. Democracy is not about the power of the government to rule as it likes but about preserving the authority vested by a democratic Constitution for all citizens to express their freedom, including the freedom to be different, without fear of persecution. In other words, Democracy is about diversity and embracing diversity, the root of a genuine democratic system.

The CTA leader Sikyong Lobsang Sangay clearly understands this. During the 56^th annual Democracy Day (that is how long the CTA has declared itself to be a Democracy) on 2 September 2016, he said,

Democracy confers you with the right to speech and freedom of expression and in a democracy, diversity of opinion should be respected.

However, it is disturbing that the November 14 CTA video shows none of the respect for diversity that the Sikyong mentions. Not even a pale shade of any tolerance for diversity.

An Attack on Freedom

Under Sikyong Lobsang Sangay, the CTA’s Department of Information and International Relations became the vehicle for the most vindictive, un-tolerating attacks on the practitioners of Dorje Shugden, a religious tradition that the Tibetan Constitution is supposed to protect and uphold. This is the same Constitution by which the CTA declares itself to be a democratic nation unlike its oppressor, China. It is also the Constitution that the CTA trampled on en route to assaulting its own citizens because of their religion.

It’s clear that the video is meant to be an instrument for the protraction of an unlawful, illegal and unholy religious ban. Unlawful because it flies in the face of the CTA’s highest law, namely Articles 9 and 10; illegal because it is a willful assault with the intention to inflict injury on persons of a certain religion, and unholy because it conflicts every aspect of truth, honesty, and kindness enshrined in just about every religion known to man.

So that there is no mistake of its intentions, the following words were carefully selected and used in the video, in association with Dorje Shugden – “cult”, “controversial”, “divisive”, “monetary gains”, “malevolent”, “disharmony”, “fringe group”, “extremist”, “fundamentalist”, “harmful”, and “attack”.

How can a democratic government attack its own people? And what’s more, the elected Prime Minister of the CTA himself spearheads the attack in the November 14 video as he has done on countless occasions before. If a leader of a liberal nation should decide to intervene in religious matters, then surely it must be to repair a rift that threatens the unity of an already fractured and disenfranchised community, not to add to their woes.

Religion is an extremely sensitive topic and bears heightened significance when it comes to the Tibetan people whose lives are inseparable from religious habitude. And to rob a class of Tibetan people of their faith, for which they gave up their homeland, is simply unscrupulous. It is more the character of a tyrannical leader of an oppressive regime, than that of a leader of a free and liberal nation that the CTA tells the world it is.

The Sikyong’s actions confuse attributes ascribed to the Tibetan people as peaceful Buddhists and disturbs the coherence of the Dalai Lama’s message of peace and tolerance, which he preaches worldwide. In that way, he undermines the Dalai Lama himself.

The 14th Dalai Lama, a strong advocate of Human Rights who constantly preaches about Compassion and Harmony, is misrepresented by the CTA’s persecution of Shugden practitioners.

The people the Sikyong targets with religious persecution are the children, grandchildren and the citizens of Tibet themselves, who for the love of the Dalai Lama and for the sake of their religion, readily left their homes, families and country to walk with the Dalai Lama into statelessness, banishment and an uncertain future. Today, the CTA accuses them of colluding with the Tibetan people’s nemesis and brands them as traitors. But they are the same people who went into voluntary exile with the Tibetan spiritual leader.

Up until the CTA’s unilateral and baseless decision to ban Dorje Shugden in 1996, Dorje Shugden practitioners were patriots and loyal spiritual subjects of the Tibetan people’s God-King, a people who like the rest of the exile community trusted the CTA to take proper measures to reinstate their dignity and identity. They didn’t change. How can these simple Tibetan people, together with 4 million Shugden believers around the world with different backgrounds, nationalities and experience, most of whom began the worship of Dorje Shugden before the Sino-Tibetan conflict, suddenly pull off a coordinated and well calibrated change overnight? Logically, the CTA changed and rendered their own Tibetan people to be nothing more than acceptable political attrition.

But the CTA did not imagine that the fire they started would become a global inferno that today threatens to engulf the CTA’s integrity and credibility in its flames. As more and more people around the world become aware of the CTA’s Machiavellian plots, the CTA’s narrative has had to evolve and so the reasons for the ban have had to keep changing. It is also the reason why the CTA’s propaganda machinery has had to work overtime.

Sikyong Lobsang Sangay could have decided to heal the conflict or settle the controversy once and for all by producing concrete evidence to support the Administration’s very damaging religious ban if indeed it had valid reasons to believe that such a move was necessary. Failing which he could have ordered the retraction of past official Resolutions that unfairly and wrongly punished a group of Tibetans for their benign spiritual practice. Lobsang Sangay could have initiated dialogue between Shugden and non-Shugden groups – divisions the ban created, and take the view that unity of the Tibetan nation was far more important than differences in religious beliefs. He could have proclaimed that the human rights enshrined in the Tibetan Constitution and the Indian Constitution (that the Tibetans, as guests of the country, are obliged to observe) are to be upheld.

But instead, the Sikyong decided to commission this very harmful video and persist in the Shugden religious persecutions. This confuses supporters of the Tibetan plight and obscures the core objectives of the Tibetan struggle.

The Long Arm of Oppression

The International Shugden Community whose members comprise of Shugden practitioners from all over the world who have suffered discrimination.

But it is not only the Tibetans that the CTA’s November 14 video sought to scandalize. Even a religious group operating legally in another country, outside the CTA’s dominion, has not been spared.

It is unheard of for the leader of a country to comment unfavorably on a religious group of another country, especially seeing that [in this case] the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT) operates as a legitimate and highly successful organization under the laws of countries where they are represented. To do so would be to interfere with the religious freedom of citizens of another country and to display incompetence in addressing matters relating to international relations.

Governments today face competition in virtually all aspects of statesmanship from military to trade to their standing in the global arena. And when we see the proliferation of multinational and regional organizations – the EU, APEC, ASEAN, NAFTA just to name a few, it is not difficult to see that cross-border relationships and co-operation between governments and between the government of a country and the private sector of another, are crucial in a highly globalized world. It is a matter of survival. Diplomacy is a sign of a good government and the nations of the world are sparing no effort to create favorable environments to advance trade and build goodwill.

But all this seems to be lost on the Sikyong, an unfortunate fact that the Tibetan situation can ill afford. Sikyong Lobsang Sangay and the Minister equivalent of the CTA’s Department of Information and International Relations putting on a show to criticize and slander a religious group that happens to be a citizen of another country shows in no uncertain terms that the CTA has no interest in conforming to the platitudes of liberty, freedom and human rights espoused in their own literature and the Tibetan Constitution.

The CTA video slurs the NKT as a fringe and fundamentalist group. This is not only an insult to the NKT but to the country that approves of its establishment. This is the CTA’s reaction to people outside its jurisdictional reach who are merely exercising their constitutional right to participate in protests against the Dalai Lama, appealing for the cessation of a campaign that derides a deity they worship. It raises questions as to how much more the CTA might do to people who are within their striking range. Imagine that and one may then understand what Shugden-worshipping Tibetans have had to survive.

No government that is genuinely committed to the pursuit and preservation of democracy will decry the expression of freedom vested in the people by an egalitarian society. This is even more so if the said people are outside the government’s administration. That the CTA does puts it at risk of suspicion that it doesn’t have any intentions of being a true democracy.

Disobeying the Dalai Lama

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Finally, the November 14 video shows that the CTA couches its behavior as a noble defense of the Dalai Lama’s reputation. But the footage shows the incongruity of the CTA’s actions with its own purported motivation. The Dalai Lama has, in the video, stated clearly that all people have the freedom to choose what to practice and that no prohibition had been intended and similarly no infringement of anyone’s rights meant. If the Dalai Lama intended for all Shugden believers to choose freely, then why does the CTA commission propaganda videos to attack people for having chosen to keep their religion? It doesn’t make sense and again provides an insight into what the CTA is.

Conclusion

If one is not careful, it is easy to be drawn into the CTA’s fiction and be mistaken that all this aggression towards Dorje Shugden practitioners worldwide is in retaliation to a centuries-old Tibetan Buddhist deity and all its followers being conscripted by China to oppose the CTA. That itself is a desperate use of superstition hoping that this will explain away why the CTA has failed miserably after half a century of promises to the Tibetan people.

In that time, the Tibetan people, Shugden and non-Shugden worshippers alike have had to endure a lot. Time is running out for the Tibetan people as world nations grapple with new and complicated problems and the Tibetan Cause begins to slip into obscurity. Left with little choice, many Tibetans have left the settlements to carve a life elsewhere and from the start. Some others chose to return to Tibet under Chinese rule, and whatever they found there, they have remained and began new lives. Fifty-seven years in exile with no sign of change is enough.

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International Tibetan Shugden Community’s Response to the CTA’s press conference on Shugden (English)

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International Tibetan Shugden Community’s Response to the CTA’s press conference on Shugden (Tibetan)

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Response to the Central Tibetan Administration’s Latest Video on Dorje Shugden

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The CTA’s Role in the Shugden Conflict

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Allegations of Chinese Links – Is There Any Truth?

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A Body of Evidence

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Misdirection

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An Appeal to the Dalai Lama

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This short video sums up 20 years worth of information about the unethical Shugden ban and the discrimination, fear and coercion faced by Shugden Buddhists on a daily basis, especially those who are brave enough to stand up, speak and fight for their Religious Freedom.

Through sharing this video, you are helping millions of Shugden Buddhists worldwide by creating awareness of their sufferings and helping them regain their rights to freedom of religion and freedom of choice. On their behalf, we at DorjeShugden.com thank you.

For more evidence of the ban and the suffering it has caused: http://www.dorjeshugden.com/press/proof-of-discrimination/