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Sept. 30, 2023 - Conspirituality
01:32:23
Deep Cut: The Dalai Lama Spectacle

Deep Cut pulls from our bonus episode archive to unearth previous ideas that remain relevant today. What the hell happened between the Dalai Lama and that Indian boy? The internet served up a raft of painfully inflammatory takes, so I took a month to talk with Tibetologists and review the literature on sexual abuse in Tibetan Buddhist contexts. This is a deep, tangled dive. Content warnings apply. Chapters: Why cover this, and why now? Summary The Clip Virality Two Orientalisms Outrages and Pilled Mindset What do Tibetans and their allies say? Kazi Adi Shakti, Thi Nguyen, Becca Williams Deep Cut Intro Music Single Origins — Pete Kuzma Show Notes Stop Sensationalizing the Dalai Lama's Innocent Interactions | A Tibetan's Perspective Yin Sun རྒྱ་གར་མཐོ་སློབ་ཀྱི་བྱིས་པ་ཞིག་གིས་མཇལ་ཁ་ཞུས་པ། Cardi B on Twitter: This world is full of predators. The Dalai Lama is clearly pedo inclined. He wrote a statement (in third person) after we posted the clip below. https://twitter.com/MIAuniverse/status/1645530569042956289 MIA on vaccines, vindication and her visions of Jesus: ‘People fear me for some reason’ Himalayan Community comes out with massive outpour of support for HH the Dalai Lama https://thewalrus.ca/survivors-of-an-international-buddhist-cult-share-their-stories/ Survivors of an International Buddhist Cult Share Their Stories | The Walrus ‘Abuse of Power’ (1999) | open buddhism Confessions of Kalu Rinpoche ‘Not The Tibetan Way’: The Dalai Lama’s Realpolitik Concerning Abusive Teachers | open buddhism Independent: Sexual Abuse Allegations in Tibetan Buddhism Mind & Life Institute statement on the Dalai Lama Mongolian child named by Dalai Lama as reincarnation of Buddhism's third most important leader | Daily Mail Online China: Dalai Lama furore reignites Tibet 'slave' controversy - BBC News https://www.instagram.com/p/Cq4hDfaLe6d/ https://www.instagram.com/p/Cq_1L77vl2L/ Attune to the Body Cues of the Boy in the Dalai Lama Incident + Open Offer for Counseling to the Boy https://twitter.com/LizCrokin/status/1645971419447148545 Tibetans Say the Dalai Lama’s ‘Suck My Tongue’ Viral Video Is Being Misinterpreted Brother Lobsang commentary  “Eat my Tongue” explanation  Giaco Orofino commentary  HH Dalai Lama Archetype of Radical Innocence with Robert Thurman : On The Recent Viral Video Kazi Adi Shakti's essay  Holopoiesis MORAL OUTRAGE PORN C. Thi Nguyen and Bekka Williams Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello everyone, Matthew here with a deep cut from our Patreon bonus archive, unlocked for
you today.
It's called the Dalai Lama Spectacle.
You can join us on Patreon for access to hundreds of bonus episodes like this.
Now we first published this one back in May of this year, 2023, about a month after the viral outrage over a strange scene erupted in which the Dalai Lama asked a young Indian boy to suck his tongue at a public event.
The incident itself had occurred three months prior to the furor.
We put this essay behind our paywall at first because the backlash against reasonable, rounded, and culturally literate reporting was just too intense for us to risk, especially leading up to the publication of our book.
But at this point, I think enough time has passed for some perspective to prevail.
The outrage machine has moved on.
The QAnon influencers who spiked the story into the spotlight are no longer interested.
And, of course, more recently, the Russell Brand story dropped.
And that really puts this Dharamsala incident to the extent that it tested our understandings of history, consent, and cultural difference.
Into perspective.
So thanks for listening.
Here we go with the Dalai Lama spectacle.
Chapter One.
Chapter 1.
Why cover this and why now?
So just a word to regular and new listeners.
I want to be very clear, and I think this should be abundantly obvious from our record, that in no way do I or the podcast condone, tolerate, minimize, or deflect attention from sexual abuse, whether it directly or indirectly impacts men, women, non-binary people, or children, or whole communities.
So I won't be doing that here.
Quite the opposite.
Through good sourcing and historical context, my aim is to see the landscape of this strange incident clearly.
And that process is central to our beat, because sex abuse, as both a reality and a spectral presence, is often at the heart of conspiracy theory discourse.
The spectral presence part stems from an increasingly global institutional distrust rooted in a knowledge that powerful people almost always get away with abject crimes.
When survivors of child sexual abuse must struggle to be heard over years and decades, and when there is no accountability for documented abuse, as there almost never is, it makes sense that exaggerated stories, amplified by the algorithms, are a natural response.
The result is that our shared understanding of child sexual abuse, its perpetrators and incidence rate, is less rather than more understood.
Two months ago, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, was accused of child sexual abuse by a bafflingly diverse range of stakeholders.
From Chinese Communist Party propagandists and shitposters, to white Marxist-Leninist TikTok tankies who think that Mao liberated Tibet, to QAnon grifters photoshopping Jeffrey Epstein's head onto the Dalai Lama's maroon-robed body.
That was confusing enough, but when those same accusations came from American social justice activists and trauma therapists, that provided a window into the heart of our podcast thesis.
That otherwise left-leaning and progressive altruists, letting their instincts loom larger than the evidence, can add fuel to the fire of conspiracism.
When the Dalai Lama sticks out his tongue at a public event streamed online and asks an Indian boy to suck it, whatever he meant by that, and we'll get to that, we are presented with an uncanny moment that points down many roads towards an older and unfamiliar intimacy, a hidden but suspected ugliness, or the land of a thousand fever dreams.
Figuring out where these roads converge has to involve accurate and nuanced reporting.
And on that note, I've written for years on the incidents, contexts, and cover-ups and outcomes of physical and sexual abuse in spiritual communities, including an investigation of intergenerational abuse in the Shambhala Buddhist group, and a book on the criminal acts of the founder of Ashtanga Yoga.
And one of the reasons that I've never had to issue corrections is that I've corroborated all primary source interviews and I've waited until the story is solid before taking a strong position.
Now, is this story solid yet?
I dug in for long enough and talked to enough sources to feel that it's unlikely it will ever be stamped and sealed, so I won't be taking a strong position.
What I'm doing here is reviewing both the incident and the media response, with the benefit of multiple sources and a review of the recent history that set the stage for this demoralizing spectacle.
I've taken many weeks to put this together, in part because it's so complicated, and in part because any attempt to provide context or nuance to the story in the immediate aftermath was instantly and understandably tagged as suspicious or insensitive.
Now at this point, this report has missed the news cycle, but I hope that it captures something more complete.
🎵 Chapter 2
Summary.
So, it's an ambitious plan and that will make for a long report, so I'll cut down on any suspense by giving my summary up here at the top.
I'll review expert commentary, give my personal opinion, and then a brief media analysis.
And then I'll get into the weeds.
According to the Tibetan and non-Tibetan academic and culturally embedded sources I've reviewed and spoken to, it seems extremely unlikely that the Dalai Lama committed a sexual act within Tibetan understandings.
What is likely is that in a moment of improvised protocol breaking, an old and somewhat socially awkward man glitched into a familiar storehouse of intimate gestures loaded with familial memory.
He affected an elderly and perhaps inappropriate silliness, consistent with his public persona over decades, a persona he fosters to break ice and facilitate a universalist message he works hard to simplify down to grade school level.
Across various regions of Tibet, sticking out the tongue has several meanings dating back over centuries.
It's a common greeting that proves you aren't a black-tongued sorcerer.
It can echo the practice of grandparents pre-masticating food for young children.
It also features in the prank of a grandparent saying, eat my tongue when a child pesters them for candy.
It's also been speculated that the Dalai Lama was half remembering or improvising a translation for che la sa or eat my tongue but transposing the English word suck for the Tibetan sa which means eat.
I spoke with a Tibetan communications expert, Dardan Sharling, who echoed other experts in the opinion that the phrase was 100% garbled by the Dalai Lama's middling level of English competency.
Now, when these cultural contexts were first mentioned, they provoked a strong outcry that cultural norms do not excuse child sexual abuse, and that's an understandable point.
But, it's important to note that not all Tibetans agree on those cultural norms, those meanings of the tongue gesture.
For one thing, they are regional.
And at least one scholar of Tibetan history expressed frustration that in the explanations of the phrase, some defenders of the Dalai Lama have tried to invent an essentialized and homogenous Tibet in which every grandpa is running around saying, eat my tongue, which is not the case.
Now that same scholar pointed out that even if the saying was common in the rural eastern province of Amdo, where the Dalai Lama was born, he would have been enculturated into a much more modest and exacting etiquette when he was brought to the court at Lhasa at the age of five.
But what there is consensus around is that none of the meanings of the gesture are sexual, and that it would be extremely unlikely for the Dalai Lama to be making a purient as opposed to a childish joke.
This helps to explain why the entire live stream was innocently uploaded by the Tibetan media, oblivious to the controversy that would erupt 45 days later.
So what happened?
I believe that eruption created a fracture in the discourse between private and public meanings.
It exposed the stress involved in not being able to sort out the event into two distinct components, the first being the exchange between two individuals, and the second being the greater culture war backdrop against which that exchange played out.
So here's how I sort it out personally, as an outsider witness with some familiarity with Tibetan culture.
My basic point is that two things can be true at the same time.
First, the Dalai Lama's interaction with the boy can be overbearing and intrusive, but not sexual within its private terms.
He is acting out of a heritage that hinges on the acceptance of elders encroaching on the physical space of children with implied consent.
In my opinion, this isn't a good thing in any culture, whether it's elders demanding hugs or gritting their teeth and pinching babies' cheeks or inviting toddlers onto their laps so that they can ambush them with tickling.
In response to the Dalai Lama's intrusion, the boy seemed to be disarmed with nervousness and awe.
But the second thing that can be true, and I say this as a media and culture critic, is that I can also see how the optics of the power dynamics in that moment, enhanced by propagandists, can be like salt rubbed into the psychic wounds of clerical sexual abuse of adults and children in both non-Tibetan and Tibetan religious contexts.
Moreover, the majority Tibetan response to the outcry, which did not clearly acknowledge this landscape, and which heavily relied on idealizations of the Dalai Lama and the assertion that he could never possibly be guilty of anything negative, they backfired.
Because that's just not true.
In the field of protecting Tibetan and non-Tibetan students of Tibetan Buddhism from clerical sexual abuse, the Dalai Lama has some things to answer for.
Tonguegate is a moment between two individuals that fell on multiple cultural fault lines,
in which private and public meanings swirled into a Rorschach firebomb.
Answer 3.
The Clip.
Answer 3.
It's now about four months in the past, so it's worth reviewing the details with some precision.
All cued up, I have 1 minute and 26 seconds of audio from a video of a public audience given by the Dalai Lama on February 23rd of this year.
For people who only saw the viral snippet, the occasion is an inspirational talk to 120 recently graduated Indian college students and beneficiaries of the M3M Foundation.
The setting is the yard of the Tsulakang, the main Tibetan temple beside the Dalai Lama's residence in McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala.
Much of the framing of the event emphasized Indo-Tibetan unity, with cows tethered to the gate and Indian officials offering Tibetan dignitaries traditional Gadi hats and shawls.
There are some poignant local overtones in this setting because Tibetans and Gadi tribespeople have, at times over the decades since the Tibetans arrived, clashed in the streets.
In his talk, the Dalai Lama recalled the ancient Indian sources of Tibetan Buddhism and written script, and then told an old joke that it was now Tibet that has preserved mystic ways for Indians under the sway of the West.
He advocated for the judicious use of science and technology, and for a shared commitment to non-discrimination.
All pretty standard for him.
The event was broadcast live and the video that exploded was clipped from that live stream, particularly the public Q&A portion of the event.
In this clip, you'll hear an Indian boy, who appears to be about 8 years old, ask the Dalai Lama for a hug.
I have not been able to source the start-to-finish video of the event, but according to Tibetan labor leader Jigme Ugan, this question initiated the second interaction between the Dalai Lama and the boy that day.
Ugan says in a YouTube video, and then he confirmed it by email, that during an earlier portion of the event, the welcome ceremony, the boy had been chosen to step up onto the rostrum to offer gifts from the organization.
At that moment, they had a first contact, featuring head-touching, the Dalai Lama tickling the boy's chin and then his armpit, and the boy giggling.
They hugged and posed for photos.
So, what you'll hear, according to Ugin, is the interaction that came later in the event.
The boy seized another opportunity to ask for another hug.
In the left margin of the frame, there's an Indian woman whose eyes go wide and, through an exasperated grin, appears to chide the boy for his boldness.
This is the boy's mother.
You'll hear the Dalai Lama's handlers, who are all middle-aged and older, bowing in deference as per protocol, none of them looking in the eye, and they're translating the boy's request.
My Tebotology sources say that this moment of translation is likely not only about language, but perhaps the request falls outside of the typical etiquette for public audiences.
Can I hug you?
It's a question.
Okay, come.
It's a question.
The Koran is a great teacher.
Okay, come.
Okay, come.
First here.
First here.
Then, I think, finally, Then, I think, finally,
Finally, chair also.
Yeah.
And suck my tongue.
Thank you.
Thank you.
We are same human brother sisters.
Bye.
Thank you.
If you only see this clip, it's confusing.
When the Dalai Lama points to his sticking out tongue and asks the boy to suck it, and remember the uncertainty around that, the boy stiffens but also laughs a moment later.
We see the Dalai Lama pulling the boy's head into his shoulder for a long, still embrace that seems private but is also spotlit by the lights and attention.
In some micro moments during the exchange, the boy seems to hesitate and pull back against the Dalai Lama's hand.
And in some moments, he relaxes in.
It's not clear what either of them are thinking or feeling exactly.
It can't be.
It's a video clip that shows a complex human interaction in a cross-cultural setting that most commenters have zero access to.
About 25 years ago, I sat in that same yard for some public event presided over by the Dalai Lama.
This was in the middle of a spate of weeks during which I was attending public classes in introductory Tibetan Buddhism at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives.
A few years later, I also attended a massive tantric initiation he gave in Bodh Gaya in Bihar province.
For non-Tibetans who expect quiet, button-downed, suit-and-tie solemnity at their religious rituals, there's an unusual amount of hubbub in these spaces.
Prayer books shuffling, monks and nuns whispering, school kids giggling.
And at the big initiations, the metal teacups clatter when monks sprint out of the kitchen tent carrying huge pots of butter tea.
In the yard, chairs scrape and flip-flops slap against the polished concrete, which also echo chambers the tinny public address system.
All of which is to say that during the uncomfortably long moment during which the Dalai Lama hugs the boy into his shoulder, the video seems to show quiet and stillness falling over the yard.
And if you've ever been to that part of the world, you'll know something about the air and the altitude.
Dharamsala is in the foothills of the Himalayas, and there's something electric about the stillness and silence of those mountains.
So something was definitely happening in that moment, which, algorithms aside, must be part of why the clip went viral.
But was it a blessing?
Or an omen?
Was it sweet and playful?
Or boundary-crossing, weird, dominating, or even abusive?
To answer these questions on day one, two, or five, or even now, you would need generous access to diverse sources and the benefit of expert commentary on both Tibetan culture and child sexual abuse.
You would need some insight into the process of how quickly hot takes are baked, served up, eaten, and then countered.
You would need to be sensitive to how often non-white populations become pawns in US-style culture war spectacles.
You would need to pull back the veil on why the viral clip was appearing in your feed at all and what forces might have pushed it there and why.
You would also benefit from understanding how the gamification of opinions works, how social media influencers are congenitally opportunistic when it comes to inflammatory content.
Additionally, as mentioned, you would need to have a broad view of the wounds of institutional sexual abuse in both non-Tibetan and Tibetan religious cultures.
Conversely, it would also really help to know how the reality of these abuses are co-opted by conspiracists to drive online moral panics.
But on the level of basic reporting, you would also need to talk to a journalist in Dharamshala or Delhi who was able to track down that boy and his mother and actually interview them if they'd be willing amidst all the noise.
In short, you would need everything an internet spectacle has to deny, if not prevent.
In this case, the universe did not provide.
So, without knowing the boy's name, where he lives, whether his family is religious or not, what his relationship with his mother is like, countless commenters weighed in on every granular detail and what must be going through his mind and how it must definitely affect him for the rest of his life.
In my zone of social media, therapeutic practitioners branded as trauma-aware quickly issued very strong opinions about what must be going on in his nervous system as though they had x-ray or shamanic vision, and according to their self-professed expertise in reading bodily cues, presumably through video, this was clearly sexual assault, they said.
And similarly, without knowing any of the basics of Tibetan history and culture, or what the Dalai Lama has to do every day, politically, ritually, and interpersonally, or what his track record of public interactions shows, or how he has been demonized by Chinese state media for decades, Many of those same commenters issued equally strong opinions about what he must have been doing, what was going on in his head, who he is really, and what he wanted in that moment.
And all of these takes were strongly sculpted from the jump.
and then the heat of the algorithm fired them into hardness and fragility.
Chapter 4. Virality.
The incident occurred February 23rd.
The recording of the live stream was posted that same day by Tibetan media outlets, which, as I've said, were oblivious to the coming storm.
45 days later, on April 8th, a 22nd excerpt of the exchange began to go viral.
Now, we can't say for sure which account posted first, but a post from Yin Sun at NISIV4 is a good candidate, and that went up at 5.04am Eastern Time.
It read, Pido Dalai Lama kissed an Indian boy at a Buddhist event and even tried to touch his tongue.
The boy then resisted.
What a disgusting scene.
And then there's a barf emoji.
In the video published on the official networks, the scene was obviously cut, as if by magic.
So Yinsun's profile picture looks sus, and the account was only opened in February of this year.
The bio says, quote, interested in China, politics, economy, tech, military, pro-multipolarity, work in finance as a quantitative analyst, views my own.
That original tweet has almost 2,000 retweets and almost 7.5 million views.
Now, by the way, Ian Sun is mistaken or lying when he says he's publishing a censored clip.
The full encounter was available on the original livestream and even on YouTube as early as March 7th, a full month before his tweet.
The following day, Cardi B vague tweeted the story out to 29.4 million followers, writing,
This world is full of predators. They prey on the innocent, the ones who are most unknowing,
our children. Predators could be our neighbors, our school teachers,
even people with money, power, and our churches.
is.
Constantly talk with your kids about boundaries and what they shouldn't allow people to do to them.
8.2 million views.
Now, consider for a moment just how bleak this take is.
This world is full of predators.
They prey on the innocent, the ones who are most unknowing, our children.
Predators could be our neighbors, our school teachers, even people with money power in our churches.
How over-determined and immersive it is.
Constantly talk with your kids about boundaries and what they shouldn't allow people to do to them.
Now, constantly?
Cardi B's own children are only one in four, and I doubt she's constantly talking with them about boundaries, because that would be its own boundary issue.
It's much more likely that this is an example of the medium favoring extremism.
And there's a symmetry between having a huge account and pumping out huge opinions.
The viral spread prompted the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to issue a statement of apology on the 10th.
Now that statement sidestepped the gesture, but acknowledged the potential for the Dalai Lama's unconventional behavior to be vulnerable to cultural misunderstanding.
And all of this was then picked up by the major outlets, circulating the truncated story further with headlines like, Dalai Lama Apologizes After Video Asking Child To Suck His Tongue Sparks Outcry, that's from CNN, and Dalai Lama Regrets Asking Boy To Suck My Tongue, from the BBC.
Now as a side note, these early reports from mainstream publications took the existence of the clipped video itself as unremarkable, which meant that their coverage started on the kind of postmodern treadmill of responding to responses instead of seeking primary sources.
And what we have is major news organizations basically functioning as posters on this topic.
Of course, the actual posters didn't stop.
Stu Peters, the far-right broadcaster and producer of the anti-vaxx misinformation film, died suddenly, tweeted the clip under the caption that began, quote, the Dalai Lama is clearly pedo-inclined, unquote, 1.5 million views.
That was retweeted by Anglo-Indian rap star M.I.A., also an anti-vaxxer, to over 700,000 followers with the caption, quote, No one even had this type of evidence on Michael Jackson, and given most of the governments now protect this behavior, nothing will happen.
I should note here that this intersection between anti-vax sentiments and the eagerness to declare a liberal statesman a pedophile indicates that some of the virality of this moment is propelled by the ongoing churn of QAnon, which conflates vaccination with rape, both in terms of the act itself and its effects.
Influencers in this zone use children as bellwethers for the unseen horrors that everyone carries, And in the quest to hashtag save the children, they view every negative experience as the aftershock of childhood trauma or the long-term effects of poisonous medical interventions.
So there are certain black hole events that seem destined to suck every passion and grievance down into a vortex to mingle with the churn of commodification.
Social media does what it is best at doing, maybe designed to do, opening multiple wounds with a blunt object to watch the blood run wild and to monetize the gore.
And as the platforms cash in on recirculating the frenzy, plenty of online actors are going to take their cut.
Influencers with social justice aligned wellness brands weigh in.
Therapists who are licensed or not, who see an obvious opportunity to foreground their content in child sexual abuse or trauma therapy, regardless of whether it's fit for purpose, they jump in too.
And on the cursed end of this same spectrum, QAnon promoters use it to chalk up yet more evidence for a world in which every leader, except Donald Trump, is a pedophile.
But beneath this foam, there's a tier of folks who are less online, as per their temperament, and who also don't get paid for being there.
Their engagement is lower because they have perspectives as opposed to hot takes.
They tend to hedge every statement conservatively because they are hypervigilant in relation to cultural complexity.
So these are the scholars and anthropologists whose posts and comments I reviewed or who I also DM'd with.
And none of them wanted to go on record because they are worried about getting things wrong and they're also worried about being tagged as child abuse apologists.
They have no incentive to monetize their views in the manner that influencers do.
And in general, they're extremely concerned about not adding fuel to the fire in the name of nuance or appearing smart in a smug or condescending way.
But lastly, there are folks who pay for this type of online debacle with their bodies and their emotions and in real time and in real life.
And here I'm thinking of the tens of thousands of Tibetans in exile communities.
Spiti, Arunachal, Sikkim, and the Ladakh cities of Leh and Kargil who took to the streets in the week following the online storm to strike and protest what they saw as the defamation of not only their leader, but their country, their history, and their spirituality.
There were scenes of Tibetan schoolchildren openly weeping, And online, the influencers who posted so boldly just move on to the next story.
But for Tibetans in exile, their leader, whose body is nearly synonymous with the home they
cannot return to, has been humiliated in a way that feels existential.
Chapter 5.
Two Orientalisms.
So So I'll continue this report with some background on a couple of interwoven themes.
Firstly, there's an Orientalism at play in the responses, both positive and negative, that's so immersive that it's almost invisible.
Second, part of this backdrop is fleshed out through oscillating public and academic perceptions of Tibetan Buddhism over time.
And third, some of that volatility is rooted in how the globalization period of Tibetan Buddhism made it a fetish object of countercultural liberalism, but then also a site of institutional abuse.
So first, on the Orientalism front, throughout the reporting on this story, there were two abstractions that were repeated ad nauseum.
The boy, the boy, the boy, his mother, his mother, his mother.
Now, of course, the boy has a name.
Tibetan news outlets interviewed him and his mother after the event and published his name in the Chiron.
Kayan Konodia. It was amazing meeting His Holiness and I think it's a really great
experience meeting somebody with such high positive energy.
It's a really nice feeling meeting him, and you get a lot of that positive energy.
It's not just like that, but once you get the positive energy, I think you're happier, and it's a better thing, and you smile a lot more.
It was a really good experience overall.
And as I'm sure many journalists have, I've reached out twice to his mother, Dr. Payal Kanodia, the trustee for the M3M Foundation, to request an interview.
And I'm not surprised that I haven't heard back from her given the media storm.
I have seen two reports that the Kanodia family has written to the office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to offer their sympathies for whatever role they played in the controversy, but so far this has not been verified.
Some outlets have not named them, but I'm using their names in this report because it was disturbing to me how in the immediate aftermath, extremely strong opinions were formed about them by non-Indian and non-Tibetan commentators, seemingly without knowing or caring about the fact that they are just people with their own lives and experiences.
People one could talk to and learn from.
It was like watching pawns being moved around on a board.
Even a brief look shows that Dr. Konodia is well-off, fluent in English, and highly educated in business and management subjects.
And as the trustee of M3M, she holds sway within a wealthy real estate conglomerate.
She's a global citizen, fluent in English, Hindi, and who knows what other languages.
She's not abstract at all.
She's somebody you could probably have chai with if you too had a university degree and the right class connections.
However, non-Indian and non-Tibetan commentators were quick to pigeonhole her when video was released of her being interviewed after the event.
She talked about how blessed she felt to have had the audience with the Dalai Lama.
I'm Dr. Payal Kanodia, trustee, M3M Foundation.
We've been working in Dharamshala on this Skills Centre, which we started last year.
And since then we were looking at seeking blessings from His Holiness.
And you know, today we got this opportunity and especially when my family was there with
me and all the students who graduated from IIM Power Academy of Skills were also present.
We're totally, totally blessed to have got these blessings from His Holiness.
He came, addressed us in person, taught about peace that the world needs and how everyone
needs to feel together like brother and sister.
And I absolutely cannot, you know, express how I feel getting blessed by Him.
And the common dismissive response was that she was indoctrinated to see Him as a God
and that she had passed this delusion on to her son.
Bye.
Now when I flag non-Indian and non-Tibetan commentators, I'm mainly saying white, because one indelible backdrop for this spectacle is Orientalism in its polarized forms.
On one side, we have the demonizing mode, quick to other an unfamiliar sight.
And on the other side, we have the idealizing mode, equally quick to find salvation in the very same thing.
And in some cases, these two modes aren't simply a fork in the road.
They're kind of a me-be-us strip, whereby the failures of the idealizing mode provoke a sense of betrayal that cues demonization.
And I'll get to that part in a bit.
Because some of the most negative interpretations of this moment came from people who had formerly been enthralled with all things Tibetan Buddhist.
And I'd say that a lot of the sparks flying in the white Anglophone internet that I live on came not only from the dispute over whether the tongue incident was abusive or culturally coded, but from the grinding gears of these two Orientalisms.
And that grind is very old.
For centuries, Tibet has been a blank slate and battleground for the colonial imagination.
Prior to the 1960s, European and American scholars of religion were loath to call Tibetan Buddhism a form of Buddhism, which in its more familiar South Asian forms was regarded as highly rational and modern.
In their smug view, and then bolstered by Chinese Communist Party propaganda, the Tibetans practiced Lamaism, or sorcery.
The custom of collecting human thigh bones from sky burials to carve into ritual trumpets was falsely taken as evidence of ritual murder and cannibalism.
And the pre-modern feudal and hierarchical economy was oppressive to be sure, but too often conflated with colonial slavery, which continues to be a keynote of CCP rhetoric.
And then finally, wrathful tantric deities, who were said to represent the passions of spiritual transformation, were framed as mascots for a barbarian culture.
The early 20th century brought about a countercultural idealization of Tibet via the ramblings of spiritualists like Helena Blavatsky, who pretended she was in telepathic communication with the spirits of the Himalaya, And claimed the ability to read secret texts in the Tibetan language.
She was totally full of shit.
And then in 1933, British novelist James Hilton published Lost Horizon, adding to this early fantasy of Tibet as the home of Shangri-La.
Now Hilton doesn't apply the same idealization to the region's actual people because the Llamasary, as he calls it, found by the novel's plane crash survivors, is actually populated by European bluebloods who have semi-cryogenized themselves in the mountain air and feasted only on organic foods to the point of approaching immortality.
If we fast forward to the 1970s, we see that the Dalai Lama is increasingly visible on the world stage, both politically and through interfaith summits, and then also colloquia with scientists who study meditation.
Tibetan Lamas were beginning to globalize through a network of meditation centers that functioned as sites of soft political power in support of the Free Tibet Movement, which was fronted by celebrities like the Beastie Boys and Richard Gere.
Many of the most influential spaces were founded by the enterprising Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, under the auspices of what they called the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition.
Mahayana being the type of Buddhism practiced in Tibet, which emphasizes the path of compassionate worldly action more than the path of austere meditation.
Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa attracted earnest, pacifist young folks from around the world who perhaps yearned for something more ritualistic and less secularized than the styles of meditation starting to be known as mindfulness.
As mindfulness gradually got scrubbed of its Burmese, Thai, and Vietnamese roots, I know that, as a lapsed Catholic, the rich pageantry of Tibetan temple life and prayer felt like home to me.
It was all the religion, but none of the abuse.
Or so I thought.
But the globalizing Tibetan Buddhist scene was not simply conservative and straight-laced.
For some, it offered a continuation of the post-Woodstock transgressive vibe.
So these are the days in which Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche exploded onto the spiritual lecture circuit in the U.S.
after a tumultuous and drunken start in Scotland.
He rhapsodized in ways that seemed ancient but also very new.
offering a Tibetan Buddhism that could be anglicized, generalized, and stripped of its cultural trappings.
Something that could challenge every last taboo, every hang-up, every yearning for what he called spiritual materialism.
He founded Naropa University in Boulder, where Buddhism was seamlessly integrated with painting, dance, poetry, and psychotherapy.
So, there were a good many years where Tibetan visionaries and spiritual entrepreneurs, championed by hippies and artists and innovators in psychology, provoked a new wave of idealization that looked more stable than what we saw in the Theosophy era, and it was also more lucrative.
But as I covered for an investigative article in The Walrus in 2020, Chogyam Trungpa's exuberance and mystical wit cast a spell over his followers that effectively concealed his emotionally and sexually abusive behavior.
And he wasn't the only high-profile Tibetan religious figure to disgrace himself.
His contemporary, Sogyal Rinpoche, gained fame through the 1992 publication of his book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which was likely ghostwritten by devotees Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey.
Face recognition fame came through his appearance in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1993 film, Little Buddha, where he played opposite Keanu Reeves.
But that performance as a giggling monk was tarnished, though not enough, by reports that began emerging in 1994 of his deep patterns of sexually abusive behavior.
In 1999, a Scottish academic named June Campbell published a book called Traveller in Space, in search of female identity in Tibetan Buddhism.
In it, she detailed how, while she worked as a translator and assistant, she was also the secret spiritual sexual partner of an elderly mystic and Tibetan statesman named Kalu Rinpoche.
It's an amazing book, and Campbell's academic and ethnographic chops opened a vigorous discussion about sexism, misogyny, and abuse in Tibetan monastic culture.
And that discussion hasn't stopped.
And here's a wild twist.
Kalu Rinpoche died in 1989, and in 2012, the 22-year-old young man named as his reincarnation disclosed to Facebook that he had been the victim of long-term sexual abuse during his childhood monastic training.
Talk about karma.
There are many more stories like this involving many more abusive Tibetan lamas.
They're all publicly known.
And that leads to a heavy question that has hung over the Dalai Lama's head, which is, how did he respond to those stories?
Dutch journalist Rob Hogendorn and American Zen practitioner Stuart Latch wrote an extensive analysis that labeled the Dalai Lama's positioning towards these abuses as a form of realpolitik that works to preserve the status quo more than to correct injustice.
They argued that his custom is to not intervene when cases are made known and to acknowledge abuse too late and in ways that place the burden on complainants to do repair work.
For example, they detail a 20-minute meeting in Rotterdam in 2018 between the Dalai Lama and students who had been sexually, physically, and financially abused by Tibetan lamas.
This meeting took years to set up.
But they report that the Dalai Lama spent the first 15 minutes lecturing them about how they must out abusive lamas when their whole point was to ask him for help in doing exactly that.
But he did go on to make a public statement about how his friend Sogyal Rinpoche had disgraced himself.
Some commentators on Tibetan Buddhist administrative etiquette point out that the participants in that meeting might not be fully aware of the issues that might limit the Dalai Lama's ability or willingness to take a stronger stance.
He is the political and spiritual head of the culture, but he's not a pope who can discipline clerics, especially in other denominations.
The culture also is disinclined to intervene in teacher-student matters, which are viewed as sacrosanct.
For many Tibetans, a verbal reprimand from a living saint would be viewed as harsh punishment.
But of course, none of this is how abuse accountability is supposed to work, if it ever does, in modern global organizations.
Those who knew these stories of abuse in Tibetan Buddhist contexts were positioned to have their worst suspicions aggravated by the video clip of the Dalai Lama confronting the boy with his strange gesture.
Because for them, it was evidence that abuse in Tibetan monasteries or committed by lamas against Western students wasn't an aberration.
And it wasn't even enough to call it systemic.
Now, it was plain for them to see that it flowed downwards from the very top, from this god-like being who influences nations.
It took several weeks for some informed responses to trickle out, but then they missed some key points.
On April 21st, 35 trained Tibetologists signed a public statement decrying the inflammatory media coverage of the incident.
They made the positive move of acknowledging that Tibetan lamas have faced numerous accusations of sexual assault in recent years, and asserted that this was not the correct lens through which to view the interaction between the Dalai Lama and Kyan Konodia.
They neglected to mention, however, that the Dalai Lama himself has been criticized for his response to the issue.
We find the same omission in the statement from the Mind and Life Institute issued on April 24th.
Mind & Life Institute is the nonprofit organization founded by the Dalai Lama and a small circle of neuroscientists in 1991 to explore the science of meditation.
This statement ramps the idealization back up with lines like, quote, Throughout his life, he has been guided by the North Star of Compassion, which we now exercise in his honor and with deepest gratitude for his example and unwavering commitment to the values of peace, love, forgiveness, and kindness toward others."
This might be true for some, but it's just not going to land with the people they need it to land with.
Now granted, most social media users in the Anglosphere wouldn't know many of the stories of clerical abuse by Tibetan lamas.
What they would know, however, is that for decades it was the Catholic Church that had been found over and over again to have enabled and shielded priests who abused children.
Most recently, the Attorney General of Maryland released a 400-plus page report detailing the
crimes of over 150 priests against more than 600 children going back over 80 years.
So, to round up the background here, the Dalai Lama didn't just stick his tongue out in an either
playful, ill-advised, or abusive way.
Bye.
he also stuck his tongue to the frozen pole of history.
Chapter 6 Outrages and Pilled Mindset Now, as I mentioned, assessing the levels of CCP manipulation of this story is beyond my scope.
I will say that several Tibetan commentators claimed that the Chinese authorities were particularly incensed by a March 23rd event in which the Dalai Lama recognized and enthroned an American-born boy as a tulku, or reincarnated spiritual teacher and leader.
That boy will go on to receive a monastic education which will prepare him to lead the Mongolian Buddhist diaspora.
The Chinese have been adamant that the Dalai Lama just cannot make such political appointments, and they do whatever they can to erase him from public awareness.
They prosecute citizens for carrying his picture, they block internet searches for his name, and in 1995 they kidnap the six-year-old boy who had been named as the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, who holds an exalted position in the Dalai Lama's denomination.
His present whereabouts are unknown.
There's a lot of fighting over young boys in this story, isn't there?
However, the BBC reports that they tested the Tibetan claim that the viral spread of the story was driven by state actors and, quote, did not find signs of inauthentic online activity, indicating that the criticism comes from genuine sources, unquote.
Now, Yin Sun, the initial poster, is a really sus account, but the jury will apparently be out for a while.
I'm also not really going to get into the numerous responses from white tankies who did a great job of recycling CCP talking points, to the extent that many liberals and progressives in my feed seemed to instantly be experts in how Tibet was uniquely and irredeemably barbaric before 1951, that it definitely deserved to be invaded, and that the Dalai Lama has always been a CIA asset.
All of that stuff is super crude and bears no resemblance to credible histories.
I'm going to focus rather in this chapter on hot take responses from people in yoga, wellness, and global Buddhist economies, who for the most part have altruistic intentions, but perhaps a little too much eagerness to seize the opportunity presented by a complex geopolitical event to sell their bag.
And in that eagerness, they can point people down some cursed roads.
And the reason I'm narrowing my focus is that we've spent a lot of time tracking the pipeline between these demographics, including those who practice trauma therapy and the paranoia of QAnon and the satanic panic.
Because that's what's at stake here, along with all of the post-colonial baggage.
Whether we can clearly see and accept and treat the reality of historic and systemic abuse while avoiding fever dreams and inquisitions.
To see if we can clearly challenge power hierarchies without collapsing every iconic figure into a nihilistic demonology.
To see if we can see both people and systems.
Because there are political implications if we don't, and they all bend towards right-wing anxiety.
The viral clip of the Dalai Lama framed as a pedophile can play the same function as viral clips of Joe Biden that accuse him of the same crime as he awkwardly poses for photo ops with uncomfortable children.
In both cases, the droning subtext is, do not trust displays of generosity from public figures who are branded as wholesome, generous, and liberal.
Do not trust the smiling elites.
This doubt, which is so reasonable, so intuitive for those neglected by power, can also erupt into a patricidal frenzy.
It very easily goes from something is wrong with this picture, which is something we all feel, to these Satanist pedophiles must be lined up and shot.
The first comment I'll look at comes from spiritual writer Jeff Brown.
He's been on our show because he writes books about what he calls grounded spirituality.
He published his Dalai Lama take to Substack on April 11th, the day after the news broke, under the title, The Dalai Lama is a Patriarchal Construct.
Let's Focus on the Child He Dishonored.
And he plugged the post on Instagram to 108,000 followers.
The first part of the title is in Brown's wheelhouse.
His self-published oeuvre of nine books centers on pushing back against religious and spiritual hierarchies.
His rejection of the very idea that the Dalai Lama should be a thing makes sense when you get that it's really targeted at his mainly white readership who he suspects of adopting a naively idealizing view.
He's not writing for Tibetans or anyone else who would understand that patriarchal construct is a little reductive here.
What's more troubling is that in the title and the article, Brown pegs Kyan Kanodia as being dishonored and that he should be centered, which is hard to do when you haven't found out the first thing about him.
Brown does admit up top that he doesn't know how the boy is traumatized or in what way, but by the end he is openly imagining and asking his readers to imagine what type of healing modalities Cayenne might need.
Brown's punchline comes back on brand, quote, And how can we construct a world that shields him and all of us from the fallacious notion that there are human beings among us that were born superior?
The main problem, in other words, is that Kyan lives in a world where the Dalai Lama exists, and millions of Tibetans and non-Tibetans believe that he is extraordinary.
And if you read Brown's books, you'll realize that's not true.
Second up is Susanna Barkataki, who is a Desi yoga teacher and colleague who's built her brand on the principle of decolonizing yoga, or challenging the commodification and cultural insensitivity through workshops that have names like Honoring Yoga's Roots, where she argues that authentic yoga practice must be both inclusive but also culturally reverent.
And accordingly, she's amassed a lot of social justice cred, which she can then spend in other subject areas, such as anti-racism and disability justice.
Advocating for child sexual abuse survivors is absolutely on brand here, and so she did just that on April 11th with an Instagram post to 99,000 followers titled, Content Warning, We Need to Address the CSA Child Sexual Assault by the Dalai Lama.
Now, the post didn't say much about the incident itself at all.
It mainly provided a space for Barkataki to list off-the-shelf facts and figures about child sexual abuse and to share resources for people to consult.
The vibe was public service announcement, albeit one that gave a criminal designation to the incident, and hundreds of comments validated her framing.
But then, here's what happened when Barkataki changed direction.
Three days later, after considering context provided by Tibetan sources, Barkhataki posted a more moderate view.
She wrote, quote, I've heard many Tibetan folks and those who know the language explain how this
was an unfortunate video manipulation and mistranslation of a common innocent Tibetan
phrase and gesture. And information about child sexual assault and its prevention is so important.
And I reacted too quickly to the manipulated Dalai Lama video, and I definitely am seeing that deeper cultural context is important to consider.
I lived in Dharamsala and have seen affection from elders to young people that is caring and kind, and that is different than in the West.
Care and connection looks different culture to culture.
Being hyper-aware of child sexual abuse is important and definitely part of my and many folks' realities, and media is tricky and so easy to manipulate these days.
It feels especially harsh to manipulate folks around issues of child sexual abuse.
I also believe it's not an either-or of cultural care or child awareness and welfare.
Both can be true.
We can hold and care for both.
So what was Barkataki's reward for this deeper consideration?
Well, she was punished with almost two times as many comments on the second post as on the first, with most of them condemning her more neutral stance.
She's really in an impossible situation, hemmed in on all sides by conflicting altruisms.
The desire to flag child sexual abuse outpaced the evidence that then pointed her towards nurturing cultural sensitivity, which is her baseline brand.
By the time she wants to moderate her view and resist that audience capture, her followers have hardened.
The last influencer I'll look at here is Nina Goradia, a daisy American somatic experiencing practitioner who produced a YouTube video called Attune to the Body Cues of the Boy in the Dalai Lama Incident and Open Offer for Counseling to the Boy.
Somatic experiencing is an alternative form of body-based psychotherapy rooted in the energetic ideas of people like Wilhelm Reich and then codified by Peter Levine.
The central claim is that emotions can be stored in the body during traumatic experiences and then released through sensory approaches.
In practice, somatic experiencing is very much tied up with the buzz around the bestseller by Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score.
And something that we try to make clear in our material is that this axiom of the body knowing all was and remains a cornerstone of the kinds of therapy that are vulnerable to the excesses of recovered memory theory.
Just listen to Ellen Bass and Linda Davies here.
They're the authors of The Courage to Heal, which was a bestseller in the self-therapy literature and promised to help readers recover their memories of child sexual abuse.
We've spotlighted this excerpt in a number of different episodes, so if you've heard it before, I think it's worth hearing again, but also apologies.
If you have unfamiliar or uncomfortable feelings as you read this book, don't be alarmed.
Strong feelings are part of the healing process.
On the other hand, if you breeze through these chapters, you probably aren't feeling safe enough to confront these issues.
Or, you may be coping with the book the same way you coped with the abuse, by separating your intellect from your feelings.
If that's the case, stop, take a break, talk to someone for support, and come back to it later.
It's important that you don't bear this book the way you bore the abuse, numb and alone.
If you come to a part that stops you, you may be having a hard time with the material in that section.
Don't force yourself to read it.
Try a different chapter.
Often the knowledge that you were abused starts with a tiny feeling, an intuition.
It's important to trust that inner voice and work from there.
Assume your feelings are valid.
So far, no one we've talked to thought she might have been abused and then later discovered that she hadn't been.
The progression always goes the other way, from suspicion to confirmation.
If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were.
Now, Bessel van der Kolk enthusiastically endorsed this book, which went so far as to include uncorroborated stories about satanic ritual abuse.
Garadia's video didn't get a ton of views, but I'll spend some time with it because it really summarizes the Kafka trap at the heart of this trauma-aware altruism, in which all roads point to one conclusion, and if there's any disconfirming evidence, that's even more proof that the truth is being covered up.
Here's how Gerardia opens.
My name is Nina Gerardia.
I'm a somatic experiencing practitioner, which means I work with people who have PTSD, and I've spent over 10 years reading sympathetic and parasympathetic body cues.
So body cues signifying if someone is in the fight or flight response or stressed.
And I've spent the last three days processing my horror and disgust at the Dalai Lama incident with the little boy and I have never made a reaction video before but in this case I can't not speak.
So with my background and reading these body cues it was apparent to me that there were several boundary violations So she is very personally moved and super invested and she opens with a fairly neutral framing of boundary violations.
She goes on to say that explanations from Tibetan sources that explain how elders tease children with their tongues must be false.
Now why are they false?
Because she found one Tibetan source on YouTube who says this interpretation is wrong.
And she linked to that response video, and it was clear that the guy was speaking from the point of view of the small anti-religious Tibetan political opposition movement who believe that the Dalai Lama has not done enough for Tibetan liberation, that he's working for the CCP, and that Tibetans who have faith in him are all brainwashed.
So, for Garadia, the majority of Tibetans are delusional, but she's found one who is sane.
Now, how is she determining Kyan's reality for him?
The first time and every time I've seen that video, I've had such a cringe reaction.
It's like gut-wrenching.
And I'm going to trust that, and I hope you trust yours too.
I'm going to trust my direct experience, not any programming that is trying to tell me, that's culture, that's okay.
So in the absence of any real interest in the cultural question, Gharati asserts that it's her direct experience that will be the arbiter of what happened, because she's an expert in reading bodily cues.
It doesn't matter to Garadia and those who praised her that she knew nothing about the Kanodia family, or that this is a major clinical overreach on her part, or that it uses the same charismatic logic used by abusive gurus that says, I know what is going on for you.
Guratiya finishes her video by offering her therapeutic services to the family.
She offers herself as the solution to the trauma that she defined and promoted as an explanatory framework.
Now, why is this one important?
It's because our whole project on this podcast involves tracking how the yoga new age and wellness worlds can point well-meaning people down the road to some gnarly places that share the umbrella category of conspirituality, where a paranoid view of the world, evidenced subjectively, can only be redeemed through enlightened activity.
Like most therapists in this zone, Gerardia doesn't frame her solution as spiritual, but it approaches that level through the mystery of her intuition, which begins with the insistence that her own disgust is the pole star.
She implies that everyone who hasn't been groomed to accept abuse should feel what she feels.
Now I'm not saying that Gurati is aware of or wants to do any of this.
She likely doesn't.
But unfortunately, the structure and ethics of her argument here comes straight out of satanic panic logic, in which the therapist's job is to know absolutely that every negative feeling and symptom comes from a transgression.
from a violation, from a trauma that the therapist believes they can see clearly and assign blame
for even when the client cannot, even when the client denies it happened.
Gharadia's offer of help, which she announces at the end of the video, is therefore implicitly
prefaced with a condition, that Kayan and his mother accept the premise of having been
traumatized.
But is this really any kind of help at all?
This well-meaning opportunism is at the heart of the Recovered Memory Movement, which at its peak during the Satanic Panic resulted in 12,000 criminal charges against U.S.
citizens without any trial ever turning up any evidence that satanic ritual abuse was a thing.
Intuition is the hinge point of New Age epistemology.
It's the do-your-own-research mode.
And that is what Gharati is appealing to here.
No outside or eyewitness reports.
Anthropology is useless.
No journalism.
She even references Kayan himself saying in the interview after the event that he had a positive experience.
And yes, I did see the video that came out afterwards of the child and his mother saying that it was a good experience.
But what I can say about that, that sweet boy, you know, he's so good natured and people are going to interpret things from that place of their own good nature.
So he said it was very positive experience, positive energy.
But I wonder if that is what got projected onto the Dalai Lama from this sweet, innocent young boy who is the one with the good energy and the one who's so positive.
Of course, it's up to each individual's body's reaction and mental perception of what trauma is.
But a child doesn't have words to explain what happened here.
A child doesn't understand how adults interact and can groom children. A child doesn't know these
things. A child is completely innocent.
It's very bold to say a child doesn't have words to explain what happened,
even though he used words to explain what happened. That doesn't matter.
Garadia can recognize by video, taken six weeks prior and thousands of miles away, what is happening.
It's bad.
Her body tells her so, but she has the solution.
And just to be clear, of course our intuitions about our bodies can be extremely important and can be explored in many fruitful ways.
Of course we remember sensations and discomfort and pain and these can be confusing and it can be crucial to our sense of identity to work those confusions out.
But what Gharadia is talking about in public is her intuition about his body.
Now I'm going to make a leap here and it might sound harsh, but I'm going to soften the fall on the other side.
All three of these posts, with the exception of Barkataki's Part 2 walkback, share a cultural and political naivety and a willingness to jump to abstract certainties to save the innocent.
They all rely on personal insight to do it.
And these are some of the qualities that can swing wide the door to a QAnon type speculation that assumes the abject worst about any data point and then snowballs from there.
Because each begins with the certainty that a categorically bad thing has happened.
Not a complex thing or a confusing thing, a purely bad thing.
And that leads me to Liz Crokan.
The absolute certainty that the Dalai Lama is purely bad is where the original QAnon booster Liz Crokan started in with the subject on April 11th.
Quote, The shocking video of the Dalai Lama sexually assaulting a young boy has been a massive red pill for many.
I've been saying for seven years now that the world is run by elite pedophiles.
These child sex predators are strategically put into positions of power and often hide behind religious institutions, charitable organizations, government offices, and other businesses that claim to do good for children and humanity.
They're also deliberately propped up and many are given awards and positive press to serve as the smoke and mirrors to hide their true sinister nature."
Now that caption for that tweet was accompanied by memes including Jeffrey Epstein's head photoshopped onto the Dalai Lama's red robed body.
I am not saying that Brown, Barkataki or Gharadia are pipelining people towards QAnon.
I'm saying that the willingness to assume the worst about elites from fragmentary bits of internet flotsam, being willing to view disconfirming evidence as proof that you're right, And then anxiously amplifying those assumptions, guided by intuition and personal research, without testing them against good journalism or expressing any real curiosity about what the in-real-life outcome might be?
This is a pilled mindset, entrenched by the parasocial rewards of taking an uncompromising and righteous stand.
Pilled mindset is what left the yoga, wellness, and new age worlds vulnerable to QAnon throughout the pandemic.
Chapter 7 What do Tibetans and their allies say?
Those scenes of Diaspora Tibetans marching down dirt and stone roads against a backdrop of snow caps, shouting and weeping, and holding banners that say, stop the defamation of His Holiness are, they're quite a sight.
And setting the protest content aside, what stands out to me is the image of people in the real world trying to communicate with and push back against people sitting behind keyboards.
But also, there were many Tibetans and their allies who did push back with response videos and social posts.
One of the earliest and most prominent responses came from Jigme Ugen, who I cited at the top.
He works in Minnesota for the AFL-CIO.
Ugen also was the first responder to widely publicize the longer excerpt.
Here's how he opens, sitting in front of Tanka paintings and traditional butter sculptures.
It is absolutely baffling and heartbreaking to watch a manipulated viral video, edited and cleverly spliced without the beginning and end, to negatively change the context of an innocent and playful interaction between His Holiness the Dalai Lama with a young Indian student.
Now we do live in a new era of synthetic media, but if you are willing to open your mind and make decisions without assumptions, and even fact check the quality of the tailored information that you have received, then I encourage you to watch this video till the end where I will pull the full Unedited interaction between His Holiness and the young Indian student.
In a follow-up, Ugen traced the viral spread of the initial video but also added more footage from the event showing the initial gift-giving moment between Kayan and the Dalai Lama.
Over the days, there were other response videos from diaspora Tibetans and it seemed that YouTube was going to be the main site of pushback.
Notable during this time was the near absence of journalism quoting Tibetan or Tibetan-embedded sources.
A former Tibetan Buddhist monk from Eastern Europe who goes by the handle Brother Losang,
that means clear mind, put it this way on Instagram in a caption to pictures that were
among the first to quote Tibetologists on the meaning of the tongue gesture.
Needless to say, as a person who's been immersed in the richness of Tibetan culture for more than
half of my life, I am infuriated by the incredibly lame journalism displayed by this story. Not only
were no Tibetans or Tibetologists consulted on the issue, this is commonly happening to dispossessed
people, no one also thought to ask anything of other people on the stage or the parents or
literally anyone other than one's own perverse projections.
I'm grateful to my non-Buddhist friends who have taken the three minutes it takes to ask any expert, and especially the ones who have given Tibetan Voice as a platform, and disappointed by the tendency to grab the bait without a second thought that some others displayed.
Then Giaco Orofino, who's a professor of Tibetan studies at the University of Naples, Orientale, posted the tongue info to Facebook and commented, quote, people understood suck and projected a sexual connotation.
It is a case of language mix-up and of fake news subjugated to a precise political agenda.
It was perhaps a mediatic mistake, but the hate speech that it provoked is horrible.
Then we have Tenzin Pema, who's a Tibetan mother of three who posted similar contexts to Facebook, and then flipped the demand for the Dalai Lama to further apologize to say that it was the world who needed to apologize, especially to, quote, so many Tibetans like my 77-year-old mother who weeps through the day and has lost sleep for the past few days.
Because this vicious, vitriolic, targeted attack on His Holiness has been the worst attack so far that she and so many like her have known in their nearly eight to nine decades-long years of existence.
For her, this, she told me as she called me weeping, unable to sleep past midnight, has been, quote, the worst attack so far on the Tibetan faith and the Tibetan way of life.
And she's right, for this is a blatant attack on everything the Tibetan world holds dear.
Our culture, our way of life, our innocence, our humor, our unabashed optimism, our resilience, our naivety, and our faith.
Now at this point, there are hundreds of similar responses, and some of them made it up the media food chain to be collated by Vice magazine.
But most of the original, truncated reporting remains online, along with the shitposts, and that's what still comes up first in searches.
And I know of at least one scholar who, in the context of discussing the complexities of the issue, was told, quote, you run interference for pedos, unquote.
Responses like this have inhibited all of my sources for this report to want to go on record.
I do, however, want to point out a major way in which the Tibetan response is dissonant and may backfire with the very people they are appealing to.
For instance, in one widely circulated post, a Lama named Dagmo Khaldun Sakya recited the data points that I've covered but then quotes a friend, quote, ìUgenla, another Tibetan, Asked his grandmother for her opinion on the video, and she expresses every Tibetan's opinion when she sees the students' interaction as being supremely blessed.
To have the opportunity to meet, speak to, and touch His Holiness is beyond fortunate.
She also mentions the fact that His Holiness kissing the student without any judgment or regard of his status as the Dalai Lama speaks so highly of His Holiness' humility and love instead.
This is how most Tibetans would interpret what happened.
Now he goes on to say, We all know His Holiness to be compassionate, but also humorous, transparent, and extremely spontaneous, such beautiful qualities we can only aspire to have.
His pure qualities are untainted and unaffected by the fear, restrictions, and social norms that we are all bound by.
In addition, His Holiness is a Tibetan with a unique Tibetan way of doing and understanding things, as well as a monk who has always lived separately from regular society, whose interactions with others are almost always in a formal setting, and hence unaware of what many people in society learn through social conditioning and experience.
So, to sum it all up, To be touched by the Dalai Lama is an immeasurable blessing.
His compassion is endless.
He is beyond all human weakness.
Sakya does not emphasize the cultural context around the tongue, but this is implied.
So the gesture must be understood culturally, but then again, we should also know that the Dalai Lama is not just a conventional Tibetan or a monk.
So maybe you can hear the contradictions.
He is plain and humble, but he's also exalted and perfect, and he's also uncanny and beyond human understanding.
Now this dissonance is audible in many Tibetan responses, and it makes sense because it's hard to overemphasize just how precious this man is to them, how completely he embodies their hopes and dreams, and how anxious they are that at 87 he will soon be gone.
And how illegal it might be both politically and spiritually to entertain any criticism of him, especially of this sort.
When I attended the Kala Chakra or Wheel of Time initiation given by the Dalai Lama over 10 days in Bodh Gaya, this is back in the late 90s, many Tibetans told me that simply being in his presence was enough to save me from a thousand rebirths in the hell realms.
And I took it all in.
I loved the conviction.
And it haunted me.
Of course, it's not just Tibetans promoting the sacred idealization.
Robert Thurman, yes, he's the dad of Uma, is the American Tibetan Studies professor and former monk who has probably done more than any single American to translate the Dalai Lama's message for popular consumption, and he released a response video titled, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Archetype of Radical Innocence
with Robert Thurman, on the recent viral video. So, this over-the-top language
isn't just in the title. This framing and these epithets run throughout Thurman's comments. And I've
been waiting to make my own statement in defense of His Holiness, or really, not
really, he doesn't need defense.
He's the ultimately innocent person, if there ever was.
And friendly and loving and kind and compassionate and innocent.
Completely, with no sexual nothing about anybody.
In the online battlefield in which this culture war is being fought, I'm going to suggest that the likely defamation that the Dalai Lama is a pedophile cannot be countered with the argument that in actual fact, he is a saint operating on a level the mundane world cannot understand.
Archetype of radical innocence?
The ultimately innocent person, if there ever was one?
I mean, how would you test that claim, Dr. Thurman?
This defense is also toothless in the broader context of non-Tibetan awareness of endemic clerical sexual abuse.
Every one of the 150 Catholic priests recently named by the Attorney General of Maryland as a child abuser would have likewise been lauded in their day as upright, holy, and faithful men.
He's a great man is not a good argument.
He's a perfect man is a terrible argument.
If we just imagine for a moment the devout Catholic who is confronted by the fact that Pope Emeritus Benedict, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, did a lot to prevent sex abuse victims of priests from being heard or taken care of.
Imagine the Catholic response to that being, but he is infallible, chosen by God.
I'm not running PR defense for the office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, but I would say that there's an opportunity here to cut through the fog of both the demonizing and the idealizing forms of Orientalism, to find, as the Buddhists might say, the middle way.
But that would require speaking plainly.
about the Dalai Lama in a way that the non-devotee can understand.
Situating him in time and culture, letting him have flaws or to be doddering, imagine that he can be childish as well as childlike, and allowing him to be the politician he must be in relation to the complex interests of a nation in exile.
This would require acknowledging, head on, that the entire panic over his tongue arises
out of a real place, that both Tibetan and non-Tibetan religious cultures are deeply
wounded by common human failings that we desperately try to cover up.
8.
Kasi Adi Shakti.
T. Nguyen and Becca Williams.
I want to end by passing the torch to two big picture ideas that don't come from me.
The first probes the social psychology of this spectacle, and it comes from Kazi Adishakti, a practitioner of Dzogchen, a Tibetan Buddhist lineage.
She runs a blog called Holopoiesis, and also curates a conversation around what she calls Process Buddhism.
And she posted the following to Facebook on April 12th, quote,
it's interesting how the more hypersexual a culture gets, the more sexually puritanical
it is about situations that are obviously not sexual in any way. Like for example, drag queens
reading books to children, trans women using the women's restroom or changing rooms, fathers being
publicly intimate with their kids or the Dalai Lama playfully teasing a boy.
Such puritanism tends to be guilty of the very thing it accuses the other of doing, projecting a fantasy onto reality out of the basis of its own anxieties, and then confusing that fantasy for reality, thus circularly reproducing the conditions for that same anxiety.
Worse still is when crowds of people then share the same sort of fantasy and end up mutually supporting each other's delusion about its reality because they naively assume that intersubjective validation of a shared idea is identical to validating its objectivity.
Algorithmically accelerated social media just makes this process happen faster and consolidates this delusion even more strongly, especially because of the fact that when the fantasy exists predominantly in the virtual world, you're not compelled to validate its truth in the real world for yourself.
Qazi goes on to contemplate the conflation of private and public spaces, and private and public acts, and how online events automatically become private to individuals who cannot process the public context.
Public media, she writes, starts to become consumed in terms of the interests of the private, leading to an ironic state of mutually supportive solipsism where everyone occupies the center of their own metaverse.
I encourage you to read the whole essay and I'll put a link in the notes.
And finally, for reasons you might find obvious, here's the nut graph from that stellar essay called Moral Outrage Porn by friend of the podcast philosopher T. Nguyen, you can check out episode 55, he was our guest, and his colleague Becca Williams.
Here's Nguyen and Williams.
Moral outrage porn, as we understand it, is representations of moral outrage engaged with primarily for the sake of the resulting gratification, freed from the usual costs and consequences of engaging with morally outrageous content.
The gratifications might include, among other things, a sense of moral superiority or smugness, the comforting sense of clarity that arises from moral certainty, and the sheer pleasure of the feeling of outrage itself.
We suspect that a significant amount of the activity on Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media might plausibly count as moral outrage porn, as does much of the content on many partisan news outlets.
We will also argue that moral outrage porn is potentially more dangerous than other sorts of generic porn.
Some kinds of porn are mechanistic, that is, they bring about their gratifications without requiring that their user engage in any sort of belief or belief-like states.
Food porn, real estate porn, and many uses of sexual pornography are mechanistic in this way.
But moral outrage porn is non-mechanistic.
It is an essentially cognitive form of porn.
One must engage in a belief or a belief-like state, a state of judging something to be morally bad or something very much like this, in order to acquire the desired gratification.
And this use, we will argue, is a bad thing, other things being equal.
Let us be clear, our purpose here is not to condemn the use of moral outrage in moral and political discourse.
Moral outrage is essential when it proceeds from nuanced moral engagement, leads to moral action, and is aimed at the genuinely morally outrageous.
Our goal here is to distinguish such authentic engagements with moral outrage from the use of moral outrage porn.
Moral outrage porn, we will suggest, invites its users to seek simplified moral representations of the world and to simplify their own moral beliefs in order to maximize the gratifications of outrage.
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