In the wake of Tulku Ugen Topgyal’s inveighing expletives—‘devil’, ‘detractor of Buddha dharma’, ‘audience seeker’—, ineffably baseless and vulgar and unthinkable for an individual conscience as a Tibetan but stark infantile a series of the same designations coined by CCP leaders, against His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, one of the icons of refuge of this world in huge hubbub of emotional instability, I hold my ground of defending my icon of refuge thus, despite Lord Shantideva’s insightful caveat as to be able to stand as a tree, namely firm in one’s integrity, when someone inveighs against one’s guru, for such a someone is usually biased and gripped by a horrendous partiality. As a Tibetan, I want to remind myself and interested ones with such factual account that there was time once when guru Padmasambava, as mentioned in his pastoral, autobiographical annal Pema Kadu, happened to shed in such a way dithyrambically doleful lamenting about our being insensibly ungrateful ever to his doings for us. Aren’t we, and so to His Holiness the Dalai Lama even from now? Like this collective fate posed by this viral plague of now, besides defending our icon of refuge against such puerile labeling by a libertine in ordained form but trying to present as a prig, I take the opportunity to try to self-mirror and revise my own stand as how firm I am in taking His Holiness the Dalai Lama as my icon of refuge spiritually and temporally, namely how I can stand in face of such challenges, to see if I am collected myself as not to be acting childishly like the libertine himself in the form of hurling some outweighed wordings against him. Namely, if such as a one like the libertine himself can’t be reasoned that he is seemingly of the type so far from his past personal history of being such a jackanapes, then it’s, I think, better to leave him or her to rot, deliquesce, stink to deliver himself or herself out of it at last… Such happens but takes a long, long time ahead, for our instinct is of such always being self-deceptive to the extent of placing ourselves at the disposal of such mundane self-interests and sensual pleasures typically carnal ones but presenting as something else, so puritanical, so punctilious, or someone else as a good guy, as a defender of the sort.
