Monday, April 15, 2024

Does His Holiness the great 14th Dalai Lama advocate Laicism?

For now, we do seriously need to give a close look at 'why His Holiness the great 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet willingly devolved his centuries old full political authority to a people-elected leader (Kalontripa to  Sikyong) at the outset of 2011, with his half onus of it having already passed on to the same leader of Tibetans diaspora.' He has now and again emphasized on the need of clear demarcation between the religious and political institutions, namely political or worldly deeds for the laity and spiritual deeds for the ordained. From this very act, not just speech and moralizing over, it can be perceived that he advocates laicism at institutional level, namely at functioning level. But at the same time, he has emphasized on the co-existence of, as per the Western term, 'church and state' and that at individual level, namely a politician or a political leader with a strong moral fiber shall prove more domos-oriented or come out as the real utilitarian doer of a public servant. 

Though our democracy in exile is still nascent, thanks for the grandness of HHDL's view and vision and courage, we are proudly sort of one hundred years ahead of those states where a commoner or plebeian can't sound off a phrase of dissatisfaction or being disgruntled against his leader or king or monarch, etc. But we should still work hard to pave the way for that clear demarcation between the two institutions that are sort of more or less jumbled for the time being. 

Monday, January 22, 2024

We Tibetans don't believe in 'Soul': Then what kind of battle

I once read an article by him, LS, rather of one or two paragraphs, maybe on tibet.net, when he was in his first term as Sikyong, that reasonably challenges Red China's interference with the reincarnation of His Holiness the great 14th Dalai Lama. Even the gist of the paragraph or the two was about his having been taken by surprise and thereby demanding what an atheistic group like CCP has such an interest in the same spiritual process of long ethnic history based on Tibetan Buddhism. And now I wonder why he puts himself in the same position, for his being alien to the same process rooted in a unique tradition, and his being so illiterate in Tibetan and Tibetan Buddhist Studies? 

'Soul', as per its direct sense in the Western ethnicity or in the theistic faiths at large, is related with 'Self' or the notion of having such a self or 'I' even after death, such a self or I, rather dogmatic than instinctive that even an animal has, such a self that's in reality out of pure personal fabrication. And, funnily, we Tibetans equate the term with our རྣམ་ཤེས།, the core consciousness of a being, the 'sixth sense', if the term has any deeper implication. But the term 'soul' can't be a phenomenon that is a fundamental consciousness, though there is such a term as 'metempsychosis'. 

By and large, his endeavor of such of any designs, when HHDL himself has made it clear about the same case, if needed, more than twice, is a sort of mimicry of his own way of seeing--Western but not so, Tibetan but not so. Duplicity or a slavish attempt to enlarge his own image even after having failed for ten long years, the time lost in proving himself for being the first young democratically elected personage to whom HHDL devolved his entire political authority with blessings and praises and his own sense of relief by quoting the visionary line from his own work, The Words of Truth.