Word: gelugpas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Dorje Shugden is one 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...
...friends--as a lightning-breathing terror with three bloodshot eyes, wreathed in the smoke of burning human flesh. In fact, however, as one of a pantheon of "protector deities," he exercises his wrath only in defense of a 350-year-old purist interpretation of the Dalai Lama's own Gelugpa branch of Tibetan Buddhism. For decades the High Lama himself included Shugden in his daily prayers. But in 1976 he began preaching against the god; in 1996 he discouraged Shugdenites' participation in a key initiation, and soon his exile government prohibited Shugden services in state offices and even in government...
...many Westerners, the most familiar figure in contemporary Buddhism is the Dalai Lama, the point man for Tibet's aspirations to escape Chinese control. But among American Buddhists, his Gelugpa teachings are equaled in popularity by those of the related Kagyu Karma, or Black Hat, sect. Hence the consternation -- "a lot of confusion and pain," says Terry Sullivan, spokeswoman for Karma Triyana Dharma Chakra Monastery in Woodstock, New York -- that is spreading in American Buddhist circles over an ugly and odd battle for the Black Hat leadership...
| 1 |