Buddha's Not Smiling

On August 2, 1993, Rumtek monastery was attacked. Its monks were expelled and the cloister was turned over to supporters of a boy-lamas appointed by the Chinese government. But Rumtek was not in China, and its attackers were not Communist troops. Rumtek was in India, the refuge for most exiled Tibetans. And it was Tibetan lamas and monks themselves who led the siege. Yet, evidence shows that Chinese agents directly supported Tibetan lamas and monks who attacked the Rumtek monastery.

While a complete picture of this controversy has been blurred by the media's focus on international Buddhist celebrities, Buddha's Not Smiling challenges readers to judge for themselves the health of Tibetan Buddhism today.

This book is about corruption in Tibetan Buddhism, but not about sex scandals. We have already seen discussions about Buddhist teachers, particularly well-known Zen masters and Tibetan lamas, having romantic affairs with their students, especially those from Western countries. This is nothing new, and it afflicts Buddhism as it does all other major religions. Here, I do not touch on this topic.

Instead, I explore a type of corruption that I believe is much more insidious, and whose exposure can be of much greater benefit to people seeking to find meaning in their lives through a spiritual path, or just trying to understand the massive phenomenon that Tibetan Buddhism has become in the past thirty years. This book is a history of a dispute among the highest lamas with roots centuries in the past and a present of deep shame. It is a dispute over the identity of a lama called the Karmapa.

I have been a student of Buddhism for a decade. I was inspired by this ancient path’s time-tested methods to escape suffering, and by the example of compassionate living offered by Tibetan lamas. A few years ago, when I first heard how spiritual leaders who stand for love, peace, and nonviolence had behaved in this dispute I was shocked and disillusioned. Were Tibetan lamas just hypocrites and charlatans? If this was so, I would have been ready to give up Buddhism altogether. The only way I could remain was to discover the facts for myself.

So that’s what I set out to do. In the process, I discovered a dark side to some Tibetan lamas. But I also developed a confidence in the basic teachings of a spiritual tradition that was more mature, based on my own investigation, rather than merely on hopeful faith. I believe that this journey did me much good, and helped me grow intellectually and spiritually. I hope the reader will take much the same journey in these pages, and discover some of the same benefits along the way.

For the past three years, I have been a student of one of the main lamas involved in the controversy, Shamar Rinpoche. Thus I cannot claim to be a disinterested outsider. Shamar even suggested that I write this book. Four books have already come out in the last few years sympathetic to the views of his opponents. These books raised many questions for me about the purity of Tibetan Buddhism, and I am sure they raised the same questions for many others. So it seemed only fair to investigate Shamar’s claims and give him a chance to tell his story. The following pages try to disentangle the many knots in the web of claims, counter-claims, and outright deceptions that have come to enshroud the topic of the Karmapa today.

Two young men are at the centre of our story, and both of them claim to be the Karmapa. The four most recent books on the subject all refer to one of the young men as “the Karmapa” while calling the other by his enthronement name, the equivalent of a personal name. Here, I begin from the premise of an authentic controversy, so I do not presume to know which candidate is the genuine reincarnate. Accordingly, I do not call either candidate “the Karmapa.” Instead, I refer to each young lama by his enthronement name. I hope this will make for a fairer presentation that is also clearer for the reader.

I would like to invite you, the reader, to make your own judgment on the specific issue of this book the story of the Karmapa. Considering the evidence, whom do you believe and whom do you trust? After that, it may be fruitful to consider how this connects to your attitude toward Tibetan Buddhism and spiritual teachers in general. Finally, if you follow a spiritual tradition, or if you know someone who does, then I encourage you to meditate on what it means to follow a spiritual teacher with maturity, as an intelligent person in the modern world. Is it possible to balance faith and logical thinking? Does rationality conflict with faith, or can rationality enrich faith? When should we just believe, and when should we ask questions?

If you can prove any of my claims wrong please contact me directly, and I will correct them in future editions.

Near the beginning of Martin Scorsese’s 1997 film Kundun, a search party from Lhasa arrives at a small village in the dusty northeastern borderlands between Tibet and China. The time is the late 1930s. the visitors are looking for a boy who they think might be the reincarnation of the thirteenth Dalai Lama Thubten Gyatso (1876-1933), who died a few years earlier.

Before his death, the Tibetan leader had left a letter, written in an obscure poetic style, indicating the family and place of his rebirth. Following their late lama’s instructions, and consulting intelligence reports, the Dalai Lama’s administration in Lhasa had put together a list of likely boys-candidates for the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation.

Now, the Lhasa lamas have come to a remote province to investigate one of these boys, the son of a peasant family. Disguised as traders, they have not divulged the purpose of their mission to the small boy or to his parents. The lamas have brought personal items of the deceased Dalai Lama to test the boy. Inside the family’s rustic house, they spread these items out on a table and mix them together with newer, fancier versions of each object.

The parents bring in their boy and the disguised lamas invite him to choose “his” belongings-those which belonged to the thirteenth Dalai Lama. Unprompted, the boy correctly chooses the Dalai Lama’s rosary, ritual drum, and walking stick, leaving the more attractive, newer ones on the table. The boy has passed the test: he is the genuine reincarnation of the thirteenth Dalai Lama. Convinced, the lamas prostrate to the boy, and address him as “Kundun,” a title of respect for the Tibetan leader.

Buddhists everywhere believe that humans and all other beings die and then are reborn again and again in endless reincarnations until they reach the state of enlightenment. Enlightenment, or nirvana, is the end of all suffering and the goal of Buddhism. Buddhists believe that enlightenment is reached by developing perfect wisdom and compassion through following the Noble Eightfold Path of correct view, goal, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and meditation.

Siddhartha Gautama, a prince of the Shakya clan that ruled one of the small kingdoms in the Himalayan foothills of northern India in the sixth century B.C., set the example when he renounced palace life and took to the road as a wandering ascetic. After years of fruitless practices, one day the young man sat down on a pile of grass under a large leafy tree by the Naranjana River. He determined not to rise from his seat until he surmounted all craving, thus liberating himself from the need to be reborn again in the physical world. He meditated through the night, resisted all the blandishments and threats of Mara, the lord of death, and as the sun rose, the young man reached enlightenment, thus becoming the Buddha or Enlightened One.

Known as Shakyamuni or the Sage of the Shakyas, the Buddha spent the next forty years travelling around northern India, giving sermons on the way out of suffering, and gaining disciples. He formed a community of monks, and later, an order of nuns, creating the Buddhist sangha of ordained practitioners. As needed, the Buddha came up with rules to ensure the harmony of the sangha, and his disciples codified teaching on the impermanence of all beings and things, including the Buddha himself. After his death, the Buddha’s disciples carried on the work on the monastic sangha and passed along the Buddha’s teachings as the sutras.

After a couple of centuries, Buddhism began to divide into three main approaches or paths. Buddhism is defined by its religious practice as well as by the geographical areas it came to occupy.

The Theravada, or “Teaching of the Elders,” developed out of one of the early Buddhist schools of India, and taught the value of ascetic monastic practice in order to become an arhat, a “worthy one” who has freed him or herself from all worldly craving and from the endless cycle of birth and death known as samsara. Theravada Buddhism can be traced to the third century B.C. and is found today in the nations of South and Southeast Asia, including Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Burma.

Some early Buddhists criticized a focus on one’s own salvation, not explicitly thinking of others, as inherently selfish and dubbed it the Hinayana or “Narrow Path.” As an alternative, in the first century B.C., teachers began to present the Mahayana or “Great Path,” in which altruism became the path to enlightenment. Mahayana practitioners sought to become bodhisattvas, beings whose every thought, word, and deed was dedicated to saving all beings from suffering. Today, the Mahayana is found in East Asian countries including China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.

The path of the bodhisattva was said to be a sure path to enlightenment but was also said to take millions of lifetimes to achieve. Northwestern India came upon a more powerful approach, one they said could bring enlightenment in one lifetime, the Vajrayana, or “Diamond Path.” Vajrayana or Tantric practitioners sought to save themselves and all beings by realizing the enlightened qualities in their own cravings and illusions. Indian missionaries brought this supercharged version of the Mahayana over the Himalayas to Tibet beginning in the eighth century.

While all Buddhists believe in rebirth, only in the Himalayas did people come to believe that their highest spiritual teachers consciously chose to return to teach their students, lifetime after lifetime.

According to Vajrayana belief, after death, these teachers were reborn as reincarnate lamas, or tulkus, whose boundless compassion led them to postpone the bliss of enlightenment until all living beings would be liberated as well. The tulku is the Himalayan embodiment of the Mahayana ideal of the bodhisattva, but the tulku system is found in no other branch of Buddhism and in no other major religion. It is unique to Vajrayana Buddhism, and since its origin in the thirteenth century, the tulku ideal has been an important source of power, purity, and authenticity in the Diamond Path.

One practical advantage of the tulku system at its inception was to take politics out of deciding who would lead a monastery after its last leader’s death. Previously, in Tibet, powerful aristocratic patrons would use their influence to get one of their sons appointed to lead a monastery. This effectively put the cloisters under the control of local landowners and warlords and made the religious centres subject to the rivalry of competing families. These families involved lamas in their political conflicts and disrupted the monasteries’ spiritual work. The Tulku system promised to solve this problem. Over eight centuries that followed, reincarnate lamas became the bedrock of Tibetan religion and the foundation of the largest monastic system on earth.

The First Tulku of Tibet 

Today, in Tibetan Buddhism, there are hundreds of lamas reputed to be tulkus. The Dalai Lama-the current incarnation of Tenzin Gyatso is the fourteenth of his life and is the most famous tulku of Tibet. But he and his thirteen predecessors were not the first lamas said to take rebirth intentionally to continue their work as bodhisattvas. The first tulku of Tibet was a lama known as the Karmapa.

In the twelfth century, the first Karmapa Dusum Khyenpa predicted that he would return to teach his students and manage his monastery in his next lifetime. And sure enough, when Dusum Khyenpa died, his students located a boy who showed signs that he was the reincarnation of the Karmapa. The boy was named Karma Pakshi and when he was old enough, he inherited control over the Karmapa’s cloister and his activities. From then on, the Karmapa’s monastery was relatively free of control by local noble families. Being able to choose their own leader, the Karmapa’s lamas became masters of their own destiny.

Impressed by the success of this system, other monasteries copied it as a means to choose their own top lamas. Thus, over a period of a couple of centuries, power shifted in Tibet from land-owning families to the lamas who managed the most powerful monasteries. The most revered tulkus attracted donations and students, developing monastic empires and political power of their own. As tulkus became major political leaders in their regions, lama-rule in Tibet reached its apex. In the late fourteenth century, nearly three centuries after the first Karmapa, the Dalai Lamas would appear. Two centuries after that, in 1642, the fifth Dalai Lama would take over the throne of central Tibet from a dynasty of secular kings.

Outsiders might think that tulkus were always chosen according to set procedures laid down to ensure the accuracy of the result that the child located would be the genuine reincarnation of the dead master as in the scene from the movie Kundun. But in Tibetan history, tulku searches were not always conducted in such a pure way. Because reincarnating lamas inherited great wealth and power from their predecessors they became the centre of many political disputes.

Tulkus were often recognized based on non-religious factors. Sometimes monastic officials wanted a child from a powerful local noble family to give their cloister more political clout. Other times, they wanted a child from a lower-class family that would have little leverage to influence the child’s upbringing. In yet other situations, the desires of the monastic officials took second place to external politics. A local warlord, the Chinese emperor, or even the Dalai Lama’s government in Lhasa might try to impose its choice of tulku on a monastery for political reasons.

Only the strongest monastic administrations had the ability to resist such external pressures, and the Karmapa’s monastery was one of these. Sixteen Karmapas were recognized by the Karmapa’s own monastery without participation from outsiders. Only in one instance, when the sixteenth Karmapa was recognized in the 1920s, did the Tibetan government of the thirteenth Dalai Lama try to intervene in choosing a Karmapa. In that case, as well as will see later, the government ultimately had to back down.

When the highest lamas fled Tibet along with nearly a hundred thousand refugees from Chinese rule in 1959, the lamas reestablished their monasteries in exile. The sixteenth Karmapa built the monastery of Rumtek in the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim, which became a state of India in 1975.

After the sixteenth Karmapa died in 1981, the lamas who ran Rumtek clashed with other lamas from the Karmapa’s Karma Kagyu school of Buddhism over finding his reincarnation, the seventeenth Karmapa. In 1992, two high-ranking lamas enthroned a boy of their choosing in Tibet against the wishes of the previous Karmapa’s administration at Rumtek. To his credit, this boy had powerful friends and enjoyed the support of the Dalai Lama and, surprisingly, the Chinese government as well. But this was not enough to convince the administration of Rumtek to accept him. So, with the help of local state police and paramilitary forces, the two renegade lamas and their followers took over the monastery in 1993, replaced the administration with their own people, and then proclaimed their boy the new Karmapa.

In response, the lama who had been in control of Rumtek but was ousted in 1993 installed his own boy in India the following year. Thus there came to be two Karmapa candidates, two boys taking their places in a struggle to control the largest school of Tibetan Buddhism that has continued to the present day.