17 August 2011

AN OPEN LETTER

Persecution within Buddhist communities world-wide: a request to everyone

Dear Everyone,

With this letter, we, the Western Shugden Society would like respectfully to request you to use your influence to help millions of Buddhist practitioners of the Buddhist Deity Shugden who are presently suffering religious persecution perpetrated by the Dalai Lama of Tibet. We request you to please ask the Dalai Lama to stop this persecution and religious discrimination.

For his own political ends, the Dalai Lama is persecuting Buddhist people who practise this Deity. Most people around the world believe that the Dalai Lama is a compassionate man of peace, but the hidden reality is that, because of the high regard in which the ancient title is held, the Dalai Lama is actually now a dictator who is systematically causing immense suffering to millions of innocent people throughout the world. His actions banning the practice of Dorje Shugden and persecuting practitioners blatantly contravene the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights on several counts.

The book A Great Deception, published by the Western Shugden Society, is a revelation of the Dalai Lama’s great deceit. The purpose of the book is fourfold:

• To liberate from this persecution the millions of innocent Buddhist practitioners of the Deity Shugden, and their families;
• To restore peace and harmony between Shugden and non-Shugden practitioners within Buddhist communities world-wide;
• To re-establish the common spiritual activities of all Shugden and non-Shugden practitioners; and -
• To free Buddhism from political pollution.

Please may we encourage you to come to understand the real nature of the Dalai Lama of Tibet by reading this book A Great Deception. We believe that you will then be able to help the innocent people presently experiencing his persecution. Please download A Great Deception as a free e-book from the Western Shugden Society web site.

The Western Shugden Society is also making requests to world leaders to help release these innocent people from the suffering caused by the religious discrimination of the Dalai Lama. Please see the attached letter that has been sent to the British Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary.

Yours sincerely, with thanks,
John McBretney PhD, BSc (Hons) Representative, Western Shugden Society

Source :
http://www.westernshugdensociety.org/files/2011-08-17_WSS_Open_Letter.pdf

A series of short video messages speaking against the ban, It opens with a powerful message from a Tibetan monk (speaking in English) from Gaden Shartse monastery. He says the message is not just to the Dalai Lama but to the Tibetan government and anyone who is in the Gelugpa tradition. The rest of the messages are from westerners – all asking the Dalai Lama to listen to them and to give religious freedom.

The main points raised are:

1. Dorje Shugden practice causes world peace so don’t stop this practice.
2. People should not suffer because of their religious choices.
3. Dalai Lama’s criticism and ostracizing Shugden practitioners contradicts his own teachings to not harm others.
4. Please listen, engage in dialogue and be willing to change.
5. Please give religious freedom.

Buddhist monks and nuns of the Shugden Society
demonstrate against the Dalai Lama in front of
New York’s Radio City Music Hall
Thursday, July 17, 2008.

It was not an object lesson in Buddhist dispassion. On Thursday afternoon, following a teaching by the Dalai Lama at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall, a group of 500 or more audience members screamed at and spat at a mixed group of about 100 people, both Tibetan and Western, who had been peacefully protesting the high lama. Police felt it prudent to move in fast, with horses, and herded the smaller group into buses for their own protection. The pro-Dalai Lama crowd had also flung money at their foes, an insult indicating that they had been bought (presumably by the high lama’s enemies in Beijing). Said one of the anti–Dalai Lama protesters, Kelsang Pema, who is British, has a Tibetan name and is the spokeswoman for the Western Shugden Society, “If this is what the Dalai Lama’s people do to us in America, can you imagine what they would have done somewhere else?” The combination of adrenaline, relief and the prospect of coverage left her sounding almost elated.

What had prompted the unnerving Buddhist-on-Buddhist confrontation was an intra-Tibetan problem that seems poised to go international. The protesters, devotees of a fierce “protector deity” called Dorje Shugden, claim that the spiritual leader of Tibet has curtailed their civil rights as part of a religious vendetta. For now, the allegations of the Shugdenpas (as they are known) are hard to prove or disprove. But even a brief investigation provides a vivid look into what experts call “the shadow side” of Tibetan Buddhism, contrasting the tolerance and rationalism that the Dalai Lama represents globally and the theological hardball over mystical principles that he seems to play on his home turf.

Dorje Shugden is one of hundreds of “protector deities” that distinguish Tibetan Buddhism from more purely philosophical varieties. Historically, the god is associated with maintaining, sometimes violently, the purity of Dalai Lama’s own lineage of teachers and gurus, called the Gelugpa. Indeed the high Lama himself prayed to Shugden for years; but the sect’s purist and exclusionary emphases contradicted his own outreach to other Tibetan lineages, and in 1996 he began demanding that monastic abbots renounce the deity.

Those who did not suffered consequences, although how dire is yet unclear. Shugdenpas have long claimed to have been shunned and harassed. A 1998 Amnesty International report, however, said Shugdenpa complaints fell outside its purview of “grave violations of fundamental human rights,” adding that “while recognizing that a spiritual debate can be contentious, [we] cannot become involved in debate on spiritual issues.” The sect suffered a public relations setback in 1997, when Indian police were quoted in the press saying that practitioners were suspects in the ritual slaughter of one of the Dalai Lama’s close associates. (The suspects have never been tracked down or tried, however, and the Shugdenpas claim they were never proven to be devotees.)

Shugden practitioners deny that they are fundamentalist, purist or violent, and have renewed their complaints in light of an intensifying crackdown by the Dalai Lama. He — or people acting in his perceived interests — has expanded the loyalty demand from abbots to monks and even laypeople as far afield as France. In a nod to the Tibetan Government in Exile’s self-definition as a democracy, each monastery has been taking a referendum on Shugden. When the “anti” faction inevitably wins, the monks pledge to renounce Shugden and deny spiritual or material aid to those who hold out. 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.”

What pushes the current allegations into a potential human rights matter is the contention that those who won’t take the oaths are denied monastery I.D. cards that the Tibetan Government in Exile allegedly requires to process visa requests through to the Indian government. (Most of the Tibetan diaspora lives in India.) “Families are being torn apart,” reads Shugden literature.

Tashi Wangdi, the Dalai Lama’s American representative, denied the allegations. “I have heard about the ,” he said. “But as far as official policy goes, there’s no discrimination.” Regarding the oath to give no assistance, he said, “I am sure that no Tibetan government administration office has asked anyone to sign this document.” However, he notes, “It is within the rights of individual organizations to have conditions that they stipulate for members.”

The problem is that in Tibet most people shun those whom they think the Dalai Lama wants them to shun. The protesters display photos of signs they say have gone up recently in Tibet urging shopkeepers not to do business with tainted monks. They could be written by anybody, but most people assume they know the ultimate author of the signs.

Experts seem to think that there is something to the Shugden allegations. “There is considerable anecdotal evidence to support what they say,” Stephen Batchelor, co-founder of the Sharpham College for Buddhist Studies and Contemporary Enquiry, wrote in an email to TIME, although, he adds, “I have yet to see any hard evidence.” Wrote Donald Lopez of the University of Michigan, “Buddhist monks who apply for an Identity Certificates must also submit a letter form their abbot. I was told that there may have been cases in which, contrary to the policy of the Government-in-Exile, monks who worship Shugden have not been provided with such a letter.”

Pema, the Shugden spokesperson, observes correctly that even if the Dalai Lama is not behind the current Shugden woes, “if he wanted it to stop, all he’d have to do would be to snap his fingers.” Yet no one expects that. Most scholars e-mailed for this story were hesitant to line up behind the Shugdenpas, partly because of insufficient data, partly, perhaps, because of a feeling that this was a Tibetan issue (“these are monk wars,” said one), partly because many are themselves deeply invested in the Dalai Lama, and partly because of the whiff of fundamentalism and recklessness that clings to the sect. Shugden “is about vengeance,” says Robert Barnett of Columbia University. “I think that any talk of [its devotion to] compassion is misleading.” Barnett believes that the movement’s true goals must be “brought out into the open” — especially to innocent Westerners — before “the real social concerns that must exist” in Tibet can be addressed.

“People see hope in the Dalai Lama,” says Shelley Turner, another protester spokesperson, with some empathy. “Seeing these protests against him must make them feel hopeless.” She means, when they finally hear the harsh truth about him. Others surely believe the truth is on his side.

The original version of the story had the name of the Western Shugden Society spokesperson as Kelsang Norden. Her name is Kelsang Pema. The original version also misinterpreted the 1998 Amnesty International report, saying that the human rights group believed the claims of the Shugdenpas were exaggerated. Amnesty International’s more nuanced view is now quoted in the story.

Source: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1824531,00.html

On Friday May 30, the dreaming spires of Oxford awoke to cries of ‘Dalai Lama, Stop Lying’ as over 500 members of the Western Shugden Society gathered to protest against the Dalai Lama’s religious discrimination while he gave a public talk at the Sheldonian Theatre.

Ordained monks, nuns and lay people congregated together shouting, “Dalai Lama Stop Lying. Dalai Lama give Religious Freedom”

Tibetans protest in India and Germany

[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)

Video showing marches by monks in the streets of India, photos of multitudes raising their hands in the air and holding banners, “Dalai Lama Stop Lying. Dalai Lama Give Religious Freedom.”

ABC Radio National’s interview with Kelsang Pema, the international spokesperson for the Western Shugden Society. This interview by Stephen Crittenden was aired on 11 June 2008 on The Religion Report.