The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism by Jacob P. Dalton

Author:Jacob P. Dalton
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780300153927
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

In many ways, the Dalai Lama’s language here follows the well-worn tracks of the language of ritual violence and of past Tibetan prophets warning of threats from the borderlands. Pointing to the hostilities that inhere in Tibet’s “border regions,” he recommends they be subdued through diplomacy backed by threat of violence. He warns his people of an impending age of darkness, when Rudra like ignorance and impurities will reign and the Buddhist teachings will be destroyed. In the face of such demonic threats, he recommends swift preparations for the “suppression” of these enemies, and the term he uses, literally “to press down the head,” echoes the violent ritual practices of the earliest tantras: “Having made an image of [the obstructing demon], one should crush its head with one’s left foot,” instructs the Mahvairocana-abhisambodhi Tantra.35 In the tradition of Orgyen Lingpa’s revealed Padma Chronicles and many prophets since, the Dalai Lama was foretelling a violent darkness to come.

No longer, however, was the prophecy placed in the mouth of a legendary master of the distant past, with the prophet retrospectively predicting events that had already occurred. Now the Dalai Lama himself was speaking, and this time the ominous prophecies came true on a scale never before seen in Tibet. With the Chinese takeover in 1959 and the subsequent depredations of the Cultural Revolution, the symbolic violence of Tibet’s age of fragmentation returned with terrible reality. Perhaps it is not coincidence that today, as Tibetans begin to rebuild their Buddhist communities, Tibet’s borderlands of old, the same regions in eastern Tibet and along the Himalayas, are emerging once more as powerful sites of renewal.

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