[LINK] "A lesson for the Dalai Lama"

[rfmcdonald]

Johannes Nugroho's Open Democracy article examining the increasingly negative reaction to the suppression, by the Tibetan government-in-exile under the Dalai Lama, of the Shugden sect outlines interesting things. My skepticism about freedom of religion (and other freedoms) of an independent Tibet under the current leadership seems justified, for instance, while Nugroho's argument that this reveals a serious clash between Tibetan adepts and Western converts also seems sound.

More significantly, it is the western Shugden devotees who spearheaded the campaign to pressure the Dalai Lama to stop discouraging Tibetan Buddhists from worshipping Shugden. The official discouragement against the deity took place in the 1970s. In 1996, the Tibetan Parliament in exile went further and passed a resolution against the employment of Shugden practitioners in government departments.

Western Shugden activists claim that within the Tibetan community in India, Shugden devotees are discriminated against, and prevented by ordinary people from entering shops and denied hospital services. However, the Central Tibetan Administration counters that the ill-treatment of Shugden practitioners is a spontaneous act by the people, not an official government policy.

Tibetologist Thierry Dodin, while agreeing that Tibetan Shugden followers are “shunned by the community”, said in an interview in May that the shunning takes place “for no other reason than the fact that they themselves choose to live in groups largely cut off from the rest of the community.”

Judging from various interviews with the media, the ostracized Tibetan Shugden followers living under the jurisdiction of the CTA, while bemoaning their fate, have so far failed to organize themselves into an activist group in their own defence.

The opposite is the case, however, with their western counterparts. There is undeniably a great difference in cultural values between Tibetan Buddhists who grew up within their community in India and the western converts who were raised with liberal western values.