Word: lamas
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...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...
...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 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...
...result of the earthquake is that Beijing, which already held most of the cards in negotiations with the Dalai Lama, has gained an even stronger hand, the go-between says. He points out that the Dalai Lama has made enormous efforts to comply with Beijing's demands in an attempt to ensure that there is no excuse to sink the talks. In early June, for example, the Dalai Lama pointedly reaffirmed his conciliatory stance on issues the Chinese consider critical if the talks are to succeed. According to reports in the Beijing-leaning South China Morning Post, Chinese officials have...
...another attempt to publicly demonstrate goodwill, the entire government-in-exile led by the Dalai Lama participated in lengthy prayers for victims of the Sichuan earthquake on June 4. "The Dalai wants to be invited back, but he wants to walk back in, not crawl," says the go-between. "He is already in serious danger of losing control to the radicals. He has to have something to show the Tibetan people. He has bent over backward, but it's all up to Beijing now. There's no more...