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Feb. 3, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:08:40
2900 The Truth About Dalai Lama
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
I hope you will join me as well as we dip into the turbulent rainbow stream of complexities and contradictions and, occasionally, inspiration that is one Tenzin Gyatso, the current incarnation of the Dalai Lama.
This, my friends, is the truth about the Dalai Lama.
Now, of course, the Dalai Lama is the title given to the leader and high priest of the Yellow Hat sect of Tibetan Buddhism.
He is considered to be the incarnation of the Bodhisattva, a human being who has achieved an enlightened state of mind, particularly in the realm of compassion.
Tenzin Gyatso, the main subject of this conversation, is the 14th Dalai Lama and, of course, is thought of or accepted as a reincarnation of the 13th.
Now, before we look at the Dalai Lama and his institutions, let's have a brief dip into Buddhism.
Buddhism originated, of course, from the Buddha, a prince in northeastern India, who abandoned the ruling class in search of a way to end the cycle.
of reincarnation, which is of course a core principle of Indian Hinduism, and thus overcome human suffering.
Through extensive meditation on the cause of human suffering, he achieved enlightenment and became a sage, one who possesses wisdom.
His solution to the problem of the endless cycle of rebirth and human suffering was put forward in a set of axioms Called the Four Noble Truths.
Number one, all human beings suffer.
This does not mean that we suffer all the time, but there is illness, there is pain, there is death, and there is suffering.
The cause of suffering, fundamentally, is desire, particularly selfish desire.
If you want someone to notice your new outfit and then you feel slighted when they don't, your suffering in that realm comes because You wanted a particular reaction from someone, you didn't get it, and you had a desire that was thwarted.
The third of the Four Noble Truths is that all human suffering, or most of human suffering, can be brought To an end.
And that ending human suffering is achieved by following the Noble Eightfold Path, which is broken down in the following steps.
1.
Right understanding gained through the acceptance of the Four Noble Truths.
2.
Right resolve to free oneself from earthly pleasures and ill-will toward others.
3.
Right speech without lies, harmful gossip, or demeaning talk.
4.
Right behavior, free from stealing, immorality, and the destruction of life.
5.
Right occupation, making a living in a way that does not harm anyone.
6.
Right effort, striving to acquire good qualities and be free of bad ones.
7.
Right mindfulness, becoming detached from oneself, free...
8.
Right concentration, which is the practice of meditation.
So by rigorously following these steps, human beings can enter into the state of nirvana, which is the highest form of happiness, and this ends the cycle of reincarnation that brings them back to a suffering-bound and inherently flawed world.
Nirvana is said to be a dimension that transcends time and space where people are freed from suffering desire and the sense of self.
The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, the subject of this conversation, offers the following brief description of this Buddhist practice.
To practice Buddhism is to wage a struggle between the negative and positive forces in your mind.
The meditator seeks to undermine the negative and develop and increase the positive.
There are no physical markers by which to measure progress in the struggle between the positive and negative forces in consciousness.
Changes begin when you first identify and recognize your delusions, such as anger and jealousy.
One then needs to know the antidotes to delusion and that knowledge is gained by listening to the teachings.
We're going to delve into a little bit more of this philosophy and some of the associated histories, which of course are manifold and tragic.
And we're going to explore the history of Tibet, but let's hear first what the current Dalai Lama has to say about his country.
Quote,"...I see Tibet as what I have previously called a zone of peace, a neutral, demilitarized sanctuary where weapons are forbidden and the people live in harmony with nature." This is not merely a dream.
It is precisely the way Tibetans tried to live for over a thousand years before our country was invaded.
This is by the Chinese.
As everyone knows, in Tibet all forms of wildlife were strictly protected in accordance with Buddhist principles.
Also, for at least the last 300 years we had no proper army.
Tibet gave up the waging of war as an instrument of national policy in the 6th and 7th centuries after the reign of our three great religious kings.
Now, this view that Tibet is a peaceful utopia is not new.
It actually first came into Western culture with the publication in 1933 of a British novel called Lost Horizon.
In it, the author describes this fictional utopian kingdom called Shangri-La hidden in the Himalayas.
It was really literally considered to be a paradise on Earth.
But what relationship does this view of Tibet have with the reality?
Well, since the mid-17th century, the Dalai Lamas have been both the political and religious rulers of Tibet.
Sometimes they're called god-kings.
Now, contrary to their image portrayed and accepted by many, that they were peace-loving monks, the Buddhist priest seized political control of Tibet after the fifth Dalai Lama enlisted the armies of the Mongolian Gushi Khan to overthrow the Tibetan king, who was backed by the Red Hat sect, and unify Tibet under the control of the priestly class.
So they got mercenaries to do their dirty work.
This idea that someone else should do your dirty work so you can retain your otherworldly purity is pretty common in a lot of religions and cultures, and particularly in the Buddhist society of Tibet.
As the 14th Dalai Lama wrote in one of his autobiographies, quote,"...in most of Tibet the climate was rigorous, and although food was plentiful, it was very limited in variety, so it was impossible to stay healthy without eating meat.
And the custom had lingered there since before Buddhism was brought." Tibetans would think it a sin to kill any animal for any reason, but they did not think it sinful to go to market and buy the meat of an animal which was already dead.
The butchers who slaughtered the animals were regarded as sinners and outcasts.
Now, after using these mercenaries to acquire political power, the Fifth Dalai Lama reorganized the country's economy, providing many large yellow-sacked monasteries with land and serfs, allowing them to conscript children from those serfs if they were short on monks, and establishing government subsidies for monasteries without large estates.
And this was...
Not, I would argue, the most enlightened step forward in human political freedom and independence.
The serfs basically belonged to the monastery, and therefore the parents of the boys who were conscripted into becoming monks didn't really have any say in the matter.
Of course, there was a lot of propaganda back in the day.
The Buddhist priests ran the educational system.
If there was any, it would be run by them.
And so there's a lot of propaganda, and a lot of the children were, quote, volunteered by their parents for religious service.
As Melvin Goldstein writes, quote, In Tibet, monks were almost always recruited as very young children through the agency of their parents or guardians.
It was considered important to recruit monks before they had experienced sexual relations with girls, so monks were brought to the monastery as young boys, usually between the ages of 6 and 12.
On the other hand, it was not considered important what these boys themselves felt about a lifetime commitment to celibate monasticism.
And they were basically made monks without regard to their personality, temperament, or inclination.
So, in this enlightened society, you have medieval serfdom, you have conscription into religious fanaticism, lifelong celibacy, and so on.
And that does not seem to me to be massively, overly concerned with the rights and independence of children, let alone adults.
Now, what is really being described or has been described by some former monks Here's what the Buddhist magazine Tricycle had to say about homosexuality amongst Tibetan monks.
Gay monks were common in traditional Tibet and every other Buddhist culture and were an accepted part of society.
Drombo is a Tibetan term for passive homosexual partner, often someone in a close relationship with a monk.
Tibetan socio-religious attitudes considered penetration to be an unacceptable violation of monastic celibacy rules, whether or not the persons involved were the same or opposite gender.
So the commonly accepted workaround was for the monk to form a relationship with a drombo, Who might be a younger monk or someone from the society at large?
The dances of the Dalai Lama's personal troupe were considered especially desirable as drombo.
Instead of oral or anal sex, in the usual Western mode, drombo and their monastic patrons engaged in a modified form of the missionary.
Positioned, the drombo lay on his back with his thighs crossed, and the monk ejaculated by moving his penis back and forth between them.
No penetration, hence no violation of the rules.
Now, of course, what this means, and we of course have seen this in other religious institutions as well, is that some of the boys who were basically kidnapped and forced to become monks who were stuck in monastic training were raped by Buddhist monks.
This was a practice that was accepted.
Both socially and legally at the time.
As the Tibetan monk Tashi Tsering describes in his autobiography, he was forced into the current Dalai Lama's dance troupe at the age of 13.
He was beaten for minor infractions and raped by high-ranking monks in exchange for protection, becoming their drombo.
Now, in present Tibet, the surf boys are no longer kidnapped or forced into The monastic life, but accepting children as monks from a very young age is still widely practiced.
In 1986, the parents of Osel Hirte Torres brought him in front of the Dalai Lama when he was 14 months old.
The Tibetan leader chose the boy as an incarnation of a Lama.
The Guardian writes, As a toddler, he was put on a throne and worshipped by monks who treated him like a god.
The BBC commented, At the age of 18, Osel returned to his parents in Spain, claiming, It was like living a lie.
And there have been some more contemporaneous scandals with regards to rape in Tibetan monasteries.
In 2011, a famous reincarnate lama, Kalu Rinpoche, posted a shocking YouTube video where he detailed the abuse he'd suffered as a monk.
Here is an excerpt from the Details magazine which interviewed the young man, quote, For those who know only the gauzy Hollywood imagery of Little Buddha and Kundun and the beatific smile of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, It's almost incomprehensible that Tibetan Buddhism would have its own Catholic Church-style problem.
But Kalu says that when he was in his early teens, he was sexually abused by a gang of older monks who would visit his room each week.
When I bring up the concept of inappropriate touching, he laughs edgily.
This was hardcore sex, he says, including penetration.
Most of the time they just came alone, he says.
They just banged the door harder and I had to open.
I knew what was going to happen and after that you become more used to it.
It wasn't until Kalu returned to the monastery after his three-year retreat that he realized how wrong this practice was.
By then the cycle had begun again on a younger generation of victims, he says.
Kalu's claims of sexual abuse mirror those of Lodo Senge, an ex-monk and 23-year-old Tulku, a reincarnate lama, who now lives in Queens, New York.
When I saw the video, Senge says, of Kalu's confessions, I thought, shit, this guy has the balls to talk about it, but I don't even have the courage to tell my girlfriend.
Senge was abused, he says, as a five-year-old boy by his own tutor, a man in his late 20s, at a monastery in India.
Kalu's run-in with his monastic tutor, this is a quote, was anything but typical.
According to Kalu, after returning from his retreat, he and the tutor were arguing about Kalu's decision to replace the tutor.
The older monk left in a rage and returned with a foot-long knife.
Kalu barricaded himself in his new tutor's room, but, he says, the enraged monk broke down the door, screaming,"'I don't give a shit about you, your reincarnation.
I can kill you right now.
And we can recognize another boy, another Kalu Rinpoche.' Kalu took refuge in the bathroom, but the tutor broke that door too.
Kalu recalls, you think, okay, this is the end, this is it.
Fortunately, other monks heard the commotion and rushed to restrain the tutor.
In the aftermath of the attack, Kalu says his mother and several of his sisters, Kalu's father had died when he was a boy, sided with the tutor, making him so distraught that he fled the monastery and embarked on a six-month drug and alcohol-fueled bender in Bangkok, A more extreme Tibetan version of the Amish Rum Springer.
Afterward, an elder guru persuaded Kalu to continue as a lama away from the monastery and without the robes of a celibate monk, a not uncommon arrangement.
Kalu never said a word to the guru about what had precipitated his flight, a level of decorum that may seem bizarre by Western standards.
But Kalu says that a form of omerita, or code of silence, pervades Tibetan Buddhism.
Now, these are two examples, of course, to be rigorous and fair.
These are two examples of obvious abuse and molestation and rape.
The prevalence is, at least to my research, capacities unknown.
So, I don't want to give you the impression that this is every monk, of course not, but the prevalence remains unknown, which is troubling.
Okay, so let's move back to the topic of Tibet.
So the pre-1959 socio-economic model was based on a manorial estate system, very similar to medieval Europe, except in the 20th century.
Manorialism roughly is similar to feudalism, but you don't have a requirement to serve in the landowner's army.
Tibet scholar Melvin Goldstein noted,"...serfdom was the foundation for the manorial estate system and for the political and monastic system.
It was an efficient system of economic exploitation that guaranteed to the country's religious and secular elites a permanent and secure labor force to cultivate their land holdings without burdening them either with any direct day-to-day responsibility for the serf's subsistence or with the need to compete for labor in a market context." Urbanization is a big problem for feudalism because there's so few economic opportunities when you're a serf,
when you're basically owned with the land like livestock, that people tend to race off to the cities to work in factories if they can, which makes the continuance of feudalism a challenge, to say the least.
To help with the administration of the country or prevent political dissent, the Dalai Lama employed the Tibetan aristocracy, the lay officials, in addition to Buddhist monks.
Each aristocratic family had to provide one of its males to serve as a government official.
Failure to do so could result in confiscation of their lands.
If the Dalai Lama wasn't, quote, incarnated into an aristocratic family, his family was ennobled and given land and serfs.
So no separation of church and state, no private property rights, very little free market, and freedom of conscience is a ruler, a theocracy, fundamentally, with the usual bladed enforcers following the priests around.
So, religion, of course, a major driving force in the Tibetan society, and various religious entities competed for influence over the government, and this was familiar to 16th and 17th century Europe, after Luther broke Christendom into a variety of warring sects, the Zwinglians, the Anabaptists, the Calvinists, the Lutherans, and so on.
They all fought to gain control of the state, and during this time of Religious warfare for control of the state, political assassinations were extremely common.
The 9th Dalai Lama died at the age of 9, the 10th at 21, the 11th at age 18, and the 12th died when he was 19.
There's no conclusive evidence, of course, that they were murdered.
But the fate of the 13th Dalai Lama certainly points in that direction, given that his regent...
Tried to kill him using Buddhist black magic, most likely poison.
The assassination plot was uncovered and, of course, in a typical pacifist manner.
The regent was placed under house arrest and drowned in his bathtub.
His accomplices were also killed.
The priestly class in Tibet was really unified around one principle, continuing the system of serfdom that was the foundation for their power and the convenience of their life.
Goldstein points out that, quote, the mass monk ideology in the annual cycle of prayer festivals led the monasteries continually to seek more land and endowments and vigorously to oppose any attempt on the part of the government to decrease their revenues.
It also made them advocates of the surface state economic system and thus extremely conservative.
As Tibet attempted to adapt to the rapid changes of the 20th century, religion and the monasteries played a major role in thwarting progress.
You don't want to see Tibet through the eyes of the priests.
That's like viewing Saudi Arabia through the eyes of the ruling family.
So, economic and technological process was largely stalled, but religion did thrive in Tibet.
As the 14th Dalai Lama noted,"...Tibet has been called the most religious country in the world.
I cannot judge if that is so or not, but certainly all normal Tibetans regarded spiritual matters as no less important than material." And the most remarkable thing about Tibet was the enormous number of monasteries in it.
There are no exact figures, but probably 10% of the total population were monks or nuns.
Chinese estimates in 1959 put the nobility at about 5% of the population and the clergy at about 15%.
As far as secular punishments goes, killing was prohibited under Buddhism, and therefore punishments were typically administered through mutilation, cutting off limbs, gouging out eyes.
There were some exceptions to this rule, however.
The 1905 Tibetan rebellion offers a pretty clear And compelling example of what happened when the Buddhist religious authority was challenged in Tibet.
So beginning in the mid-19th century, Christian missionaries began infiltrating the isolated Tibet with the goal, of course, of converting the natives to Christianity.
They were met with enormous hostility, particularly by the local rulers, the monks, and the nobility.
They were chased away or killed.
However, their persistence did pay off, and over the next few decades, they successfully converted to Christianity many Tibetans in the Yunnan province.
This made the Yellow Hat sect quite upset.
They apparently seemed to have blown right past the Four Noble Truths.
And in 1905, the Tibetan monks began slaughtering French missionaries and Christian Catholic converts, burning their churches to the ground.
The rebellion was ultimately crushed by the Chinese army, but the message was pretty clear.
Killing is only prohibited if you're not trying to undercut our tax base.
So...
The Dalai Lama once famously claimed, quote, if every eight-year-old in the world is taught meditation, we will eliminate violence from the world within one generation.
Evidently, empiricism, not exactly his strongest suit, given the history of violence among meditation-trained Tibetan monks.
Now, this is something that is pretty key to Buddhism as a whole.
And again, there's lots of different approaches within the Buddhist ecosystem.
But the Buddhists believe that no part of your mind is material.
It doesn't rest in your physical brain at all.
And no part of your mind comes to you from your parents.
It is entirely yours, independent of your experience.
You could say it's 100% genetic, if by genetic you mean sort of a permanent quote-unquote soul that can never end.
So, my particular approach in this show is to talk about how parents' reasoning with and being peaceful with their children will bring about a peaceful world, which I think there's massive amounts of empirical evidence for.
And you can do searches at freedomainradio.com for peaceful parenting podcasts and the truth about spanking and other research that has been done to bring this forward.
But here, of course, you focus on the eight-year-old.
old, you don't focus on improving the parenting in the environment.
So, understanding the degree of violence that Tibetan monks were capable of and enacted, the words of philosopher Bertrand Russell make a lot more sense.
Quote, The Buddha was amiable and enlightened.
On his deathbed, he laughed at his disciples for supposing that he was immortal.
But the Buddhist priesthood, as it exists, for example, in Tibet, has been obscurantist, tyrannical, sorry, tyrannous, and cruel in the highest degree.
So has the current Dalai Lama renounced this history of oppression?
I would say no.
As two Tibetan scholars point out, To the desired image of traditional Tibetan society.
Any serious discussion of history and of possible shortcomings in the society before 1959 is taboo.
1959, of course, when the Chinese invaded and took over.
So let's have a look at the current Dalai Lama, the 14th, and see where he falls in the continuum set by his predecessors.
Tenzin Gyatso is the religious name of the current Dalai Lama.
It's shorthand for what translates to Holy Lord, gentle glory, compassionate, defender of the faith, ocean of wisdom.
Well, that's kind of begging the question a little bit there.
Is he wise?
Well, look at his name.
The second youngest of five children, he was born in a Tibetan peasant family in 1935 and was named Lamo Thondup.
And the young boy was separated from his parents and set to a monastery at the age of three, where he spent about a year in the company of two of his brothers and an uncle.
He recalled later, altogether that was a lonely and rather unhappy phase in my childhood.
Sometimes my brother, sometimes Tutu, used to put me on his lap and wrap me in his gown and give me dried fruits.
And that is...
Almost the only solace I can remember.
This, unfortunately, was only a taste of what was to come.
The Dalai Lama once wrote, quote, I've always been glad that I come from a humble family of peasants.
I've always felt that if I had been born in a rich or aristocratic family, I would not have been able to appreciate the feelings and sentiments of the humble classes of Tibetans.
But owing to my lowly birth, I can understand them and read their minds, and that is why I feel for them so strongly.
And I've tried my best to improve their lot in life.
And this, by the by, this idea that the improvement of people's lives is the responsibility of the ruler It's fundamentally hierarchical to a really disastrous degree.
I would argue that history, I think, bears me out on this, not to mention economics, that if you release people from control, they tend to actually do very well by themselves.
Thank you very much.
It's when you take on managing and controlling and ordering them around and, quote, organizing everything to do with their lives that they tend not to do well.
So the Dalai Lama, of course, likes to emphasize his lowly peasant origins.
However, his father was apparently wealthy enough to hire farm workers so he could travel to nearby market towns and indulge in his love of horses.
He elaborates on his family's social status, quote, Except for the last two generations, a member of my family had always been the head man of our village.
So, he was identified as the next incarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama when he wasn't even two years old and was enthroned on the Tibetan lion throne at the age of four.
Aged five, he began his monastic training and Tibet was left in the hands of his regent, his caretaker.
His mother and father, of course, acquired great wealth and power by virtue of being the parents of the Dalai Lama.
His father demanded that he be given three estates in addition to the two he had already received.
A historian noted he somewhat gruffly reminded the government that before he and his family left Amdo for Tibet's capital Lhasa, the Tibetan government promised to give them whatever they needed to live in Lhasa and now should fulfill this promise.
The Dalai Lama's father became notorious for his abuse of power.
He requisitioned free transport and labor from serfs, interfered in government legal cases and disputes, sometimes even assuming the role of a judge.
And, quote, demanded unheard of deference when traveling in Lhasa.
For example, all mounted persons, regardless of rank, had to dismount and pay respects to him or risk being beaten by one of his servants.
Furthermore, he imprisoned a village headman and threatened to shoot the abbot who released his prisoner.
Lamo, the Dalai Lama, wasn't close with his short-tempered father, but he, quote, loved his mother very much.
One of his biographers noted, quote, he was extremely possessive and forbade his siblings to call her mother.
Like his father, Lamo was spirited, stubborn, and mischievous, and lost his temper when denied anything.
Now, at the age of 12, the Dalai Lama was effectively isolated from his family for the first time.
As one biographer noted, Now
that non-violent commitment of the Buddhist monks did not extend to refraining from whipping other monks, the Dalai Lama recalls the two whips that hung on the walls of his schoolroom, one for his brother, and the other, a holy one, for him.
My tutor carried a whip, he said with a smile during one of his speeches.
At that young age, it was a holy whip, but it didn't make any difference to holy pain.
Out of fear, I came to study.
Lamo's fear-induced education comprised lessons on reading, writing, chanting, meditation, and the philosophy of religion.
A great emphasis was put on the last discipline.
The boy spent years reading religious texts and memorizing half a page a day, as well as engaging in discussions and debates on religious topics with various Buddhist scholars.
The Dalai Lama wrote, quote, It was not very easy because I felt, again, a certain mental resistance, more intense than the similar experience six years earlier.
But soon the difficulties disappeared and the subjects became most agreeable.
Might have something to do with the whip.
Who knows?
He later added, I will confess that when I was introduced to metaphysics and philosophy soon after I was 13, they unnerved me so that I had the feeling of being dazed as though I were hit on the head by a stone.
At the age of 25, after a series of intense examinations and debates, the 14th Dalai Lama became a master of metaphysics, the equivalent of a PhD in Buddhism.
I've often actually wondered how, you know, obviously he's a smart guy, but I wonder how they choose the baby.
The baby, of course, has to grow up to be smart, and I wonder.
There is a, I think it's about 0.4 correlation between Head or brain size and intelligence.
Maybe they just pick the kid with the biggest head or maybe they can see the intelligence in the eyes or something like that.
It's just an interesting question.
So, of course, a core feature of the upbringing of this new god-king was isolation, an emphasis on the development of the mind and the neglect of the body.
It's, of course, also not surprising that the Dalai Lama was isolated at the age of 12, because after you hit puberty, maintaining this mind-body dichotomy is much more challenging.
eliminating anger and hatred and achieving enlightenment through celibacy, all, of course, examples of the core Buddhist tendency.
Now, the fact that the solution to a very rigid hierarchical and structured society, the solution to unhappiness, is self-manipulation, is changing your own thoughts, changing your own minds, is really quite common.
Nietzsche used to call it a slave morality, not that they were all slaves, but basically if you can't change your environment, you make helplessness and humility a virtue.
If you cannot overthrow your oppressors, you make obedience To authority, a virtue.
So you turn your trapped circumstances into a high moral code, and in this you are ably assisted by those who wish to keep you down.
So, what sort of companions did the Dalai Lama end up having?
When he was 13, the Dalai Lama met Heinrich Harre, who became his tutor and lifelong friend.
This fellow was an Austrian who escaped British captivity and sought political asylum in Tibet.
By that time, he'd already become a member of the Nazi Party and was also a sergeant in Hitler's notorious paramilitary organization, the Stutschstafel, or SS. So, kind of an interesting person to keep in the company of a developing mind.
And maybe because he became such close friends with this Nazi, ex-Nazi, the Dalai Lama throughout his life continues to associate with some...
Pretty shady characters.
One of these is Bruno Beger, a German racial anthropologist and member of the SS under Hitler.
Victor and Victoria Trimondi, German researchers on religion, noted, quote, the Dalai Lama claims not to have been informed about his Nazi friend's past.
One may well believe this, yet he has not distanced himself from them since their exposure.
Biger met with the Dalai Lama at least five times after he was convicted for his role in 86 murders that took place in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
He assisted the SS in identifying Jews and later helped select human subjects that would be killed in order to create an anatomical collection of Jewish skeletons.
Maybe not the best companion for a pacifist.
In 1959, the Dalai Lama met Miguel Serrano, a member of the Chilean Nazi Party and a proponent of esoteric fascism, a movement that mythologized and deified Hitler and his ideas.
Nicholas Goodrick Clark, a British historian, commented on the relationship between the Dalai Lama and Serrano.
Through his diplomatic role, he, Serrano, met many leading personalities and became a personal friend of Nehru, Indira Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama of Tibet.
The Tremontis wrote, the Dalai Lama has never distanced himself from Serrano.
Instead of decisively opposing fascism in any country, he recently called for the former Chilean state president and fascist, Augusto Pinochet, to be spared a trial.
Pinochet, also known as the Butcher of Chile, was facing extradition for trial and human rights violations in 1999 because of the several thousand people who disappeared or died under his rule.
The Dalai Lama called upon the West to forgive the brutal dictator, claiming, I think forgiveness is important, but forgiveness does not mean to forget about what happened.
Probably, I guess almost definitely, the most notorious amongst the Dalai Lama's friends is Shoko Asada, The Dalai Lama first met Asahara in 1987 when His Holiness reportedly said the following to him, quote, Dear friend, look at the Buddhism of Japan today.
It has denigrated into ceremonialism and has lost the essential truth of the teachings.
As the situation continues, Buddhism will vanish from Japan.
Something needs to be done and you should spread real Buddhism there.
You can do that well.
If you do so, I should be very pleased and it will help me with my mission.
The Dalai Lama denies having said any of that, but according to a German magazine, he continued to have meetings with Asahara, five in total after 1987.
When he returned to Japan, Asahara changed his name and tried to register, a religious organization he'd created back in 1984 with the Japanese government.
The authorities were initially reluctant to accept his application, but eventually recognized the legal status of what came to be known as the AUM cult, What swayed the official's opinion was a note from the Dalai Lama, stating, To the best of our knowledge, AUM attempts to promote public well-being through various religious and social activities, for example, through instruction in Buddhist doctrines and yoga.
As it turns out, there was quite a bit more than Buddhist instruction and yoga in Asahara's organization.
The AUM called carried out two terrorist attacks in Japan involving sarin gas, the second being the 1995 Tokyo subway attack that killed 13 people, severely injured 50, and temporarily blinded 1,000 more.
Asahara boasted an ability to levitate, promised his followers to rid them of sin and bestow them with supernatural powers, and his writings contained references to Hitler.
The Tremondis wrote, from the world of esoteric fascism, Asahara had his reverence for Adolf Hitler, who was said to still be alive and be landing with an escort of UFOs in the near future.
Asahara was arrested and sentenced to death following the subway attack.
In an interview with Japanese media, the Dalai Lama claimed he was shocked by the attack, but also added, I consider him, Asahara, as my friend.
But not necessarily a perfect one.
It is not clear whether the Dalai Lama supported Asahara's ideas.
It is well known that the Japanese cult leader donated nearly two million dollars to the Tibetan god-king, which may explain the relationship a little bit between the two men.
The Dalai Lama became the Tibetan head of state at the age of 15 after Mao Zedong's Chinese government claimed Tibet as part of its territory and assumed partial control of its government.
Tensions between Tibetans and the Chinese occupying forces escalated to a boiling point in 1959.
A full-scale uprising against the Chinese took place in Lhasa.
The Dalai Lama fled the country and established the central Tibetan administration in India, commonly known as the Tibetan government in exile.
Almost without doubt, the biggest blow to the reputation of the Dalai Lama as a non-violence advocate came from the U.S. government when it was revealed that the Holy Man had connections to the Central Intelligence Agency or CIA. Accusations of CIA involvement had always been denied by the Dalai Lama and his administration, but the truth came out.
Let's go right back to the beginning and look at the declassified document with status report on Tibetan operations as a subject.
The CIA Tibetan program, parts of which were initiated in 1956 with the cognizance of the committee, is based on U.S. government commitments made to the Dalai Lama in 1951 and 1956.
This program consists of political action, propaganda, paramilitary, and intelligence operations.
The connection was established a year after Mao's China invaded Tibet.
It was revealed that from the late 1950s up until 1974, the Dalai Lama was on the payroll of the CIA, receiving $180,000 each year as a quote subsidy to the Dalai Lama.
$180,000 in 1960 would be about $1.1 million in 2013.
In addition, the Dalai Lama's administration received $1.7 million annually to fund the aforementioned operations, which included the arming and training of Tibetan guerrilla fighters.
One of the CIA's training factories was actually located in Colorado.
There's something for your Trivial Pursuit game.
When the Dalai Lama fled Tibet after the 1959 rebellion, the Tibetan government requested help from the U.S. Here's an excerpt from the message they sent to Washington.
Please inform the world about the suffering of the Tibetan people.
To make us free from the misery of the Chinese Communist operations, you must help us as soon as possible and send us weapons for 30,000 men by airplane.
It was also revealed that Yala Thondup, the second eldest brother of the 14th Dalai Lama, was a top CIA asset.
As usual, the references will be below.
Of course, after Nixon went to China in 1974, the U.S. relationship with China changed and the funding was cut off.
In 1962, the CIA, in conjunction with the Indian government, created a Tibetan paramilitary organization called the Special Frontier Force, or, as it was also known, Establishment 22.
The organization was comprised of Tibetan refugees who were eager to fight the Chinese, or so historians thought before WikiLeaks made a shocking revelation.
One of the U.S. documents that was released by WikiLeaks contained the following statement, quote, Membership in Establishment 22 was compulsory for Tibetan students graduating from Tibetan children's village schools until the late 1980s.
According to Karma Yeshi, a member of parliament and editor of the Voice of Tibet radio news service, who trained with Establishment 22 in 1986 and received a waiver after six months of combat training to pursue his college education.
Ah, you may ask, what is Tibetan Children's Villages?
Well, they're a non-profit charitable organization that takes care of poor refugee children, many of whom are orphans.
The Tibetan children's villages were under the administrative control of the Tibetan government in exile, but between 1964 and 2006 its president was the Dalai Lama's younger sister, Jetsun Pima.
It seems impossible to imagine that there was any way the Dalai Lama did not know what was going on.
A Tibetan man recalls his experience at a TCV school, quote, each year as the seniors graduated we would see trucks waiting at the school gate.
Indian army trucks all set to cart many of the graduating students off to the barracks for training.
At the time I was confused and wondered why these new graduates were not simply going home.
In 1971 Establishment 22 joined the Indo-Pakistani war with the approval of the Dalai Lama not only Did the supposed pacifist authorize a military operation, but he likely sent many Tibetan orphans to their death.
So these are refugees, many of them orphans, given, quote, free schooling and then forced to become soldiers and sent to war by the Dalai Lama.
In 1989, of course, the Dalai Lama received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition, in, quote, recognition of his non-violent campaign over nearly 40 years to end China's domination of his homeland.
This kind of turned him from an obscure mystic into a worldwide superstar.
So, we've already commented on the CIA funding.
What other sources of revenue does His Holiness have?
In 1950, right before the Chinese invasion, the Dalai Lama's, quote, substantial stocks of gold and silver amounting to 11 million dollars, according to Tibetan officials, a huge man-a-man back in the day, And this was enough to become the Tibetan rule that was the principal source of funds for almost two decades.
When it pleaded to the West for financial support, the Dala Ramas administration lied about its gold treasure.
To quote an official U.S. document, quote, Dr.
Ye, the Chinese ambassador, said that he was surprised to learn from Gyalo Thondup, Dalai Lama's brother, that the Dalai Lama did not bring out any treasures from Tibet and consequently was very hard up financially.
When asked who was supporting the Dalai Lama at present, Thondup had replied that all his support was coming from the Indian government.
On the current sources of the Dalai Lama's funding, the political scientist Professor Barry Southman remarks, quote, The United States is at least the second largest donor after India to the Tibetan government in exile, providing $2 million in humanitarian aid annually, and may be the largest donor.
Since 2004, it has given the exile $4 million annually and provided $5.25 million for Tibetan community assistance in 2008.
The U.S. National Endowment for Democracy supplies additional funds.
The group's founding president, Alan Weinstein, has said, quote, a lot of what the National Endowment for Democracy does today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA. The Dalai Lama's Department of Finance told an Australian journalist that it had annual revenues of about 22 million US dollars.
Their expenses were broken down as follows, quote, politically related expenses amount to 7 million, administration 4.5 million, and overseas offices almost 2 million.
The Department of Finance provided no information on the amount of donations it receives, but they, quote, likely run to many millions annually.
In 2006, the Tibetan government in exile acknowledged that 25% of its budget was contributed by the Dalai Lama himself, and 10% came from charges levied on aid.
The simple Buddhist monk is clearly a millionaire.
Now, Tibet's dependence on foreign aid and donations from the West seem to have had some influence on the Dalai Lama's political views and support.
In 1998, he supported India's development of thermonuclear weapons, given that his government in exile operates on Indian territory not entirely shocking.
The Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has said that the United States bombing campaign against Afghanistan represents a more mature approach than taken during previous wars.
Report of the BBC in 2001.
In a 2006 interview, the Dalai Lama stated, quote, Because I know him personally.
I wrote this letter and expressed, besides my condolences and sadness, a countermeasure to this tragedy, a non-violent response, because that would have been more effective.
When the war started, some people immediately asked me if it was justified or not, whether it was right or wrong.
In principle, any resort to violence is wrong.
With regard to the Afghanistan and Iraq cases, only history will tell.
At this moment, Afghanistan may be showing some positive results, but it's still not very stable.
With Iraq, it is too early to say there are so many casualties, there is so much hatred.
The pacifist monk claimed, while delivering a lecture in 2009, it is difficult to deal with terrorism through nonviolence.
He also somewhat surprised the audience by saying, I love President George W. Bush.
So, his capacity to say okay to the use of violence seems to be not entirely independent of who gives him money.
Now, Very briefly, we'll just dip in with a little philosophy here.
So very deeply, very briefly, sorry, hopefully deeply.
Methodologies for determining truth that rely upon introspection will forever remain subjectivist.
And where you have a subjectivist philosophy, you do not have an independent standard for arbitrating dispute claims of truth.
So, in the mathematical world, you simply run through the equations and see which ones are more correct.
In the world of physics, you have a hypothesis, you subject it to the rigors of the scientific method, empirical testing, reproducibility, all that kind of good stuff, and you figure out which, if any, of competing hypotheses have validity to them.
In the realm of the marketplace, if you say, my coffee cup is worth a million dollars, well, that's a hypothesis, and you can put the coffee cup on eBay and just see What you get, which of course, given how the European Central Bank is printing euros these days, will probably be about a million euros this time next Tuesday.
So when you have a epistemology, the study of separating truth from false claims, when you have an epistemology that's based upon subjectivism, You end up with commandments and you end up with kind of like a ruling class that has to enforce these things because there's no spontaneous, independent, objective, universal, empirical way to determine truth from falsehood.
And because you have enlightenment as the source of your wisdom, you end up in this Platonic totalitarian nightmare, frankly.
So Plato said that the kings should be philosophers, or at least the philosophers should be kings, but in the Platonic world, in the Platonic universe, there's this world of forms that are not measurable through the senses.
They're not empirical, they're not universal.
You basically meditate until you achieve this enlightenment, and then you can impose your will on others who are unenlightened.
And the fact that there's a mystical country which ends up with a very structured, hierarchical, pretty brutal system of subjugation of the masses is incredibly common.
And if you really want to know, this goes all the way back to my master's thesis when I was 25 or 26...
If you want to know what the political structure of a society is going to look like, look first at its epistemology.
Well, metaphysics first, nature of reality, particularly epistemology.
If the epistemology relies upon revelation, you will end up with a dictatorship.
If the epistemology relies upon sense data and the scientific method and the free market, then you end up with a republic, a limited government, a small government, or perhaps ideally no government in the long run.
So...
This is the grave danger of, to me, all mystical-based, I hate to say sort of philosophies, because if it's not empirical, if it's not rational, if it's not universal, if there's no null hypothesis, if it can't be disproven, I don't think it's in the realm of philosophy at all.
But this is the real challenge of...
Religions like Buddhism that rely upon enlightened or an enlightened group, like a priestly class or a monk class.
They can't prove to you what it is that they believe and what it is you must obey.
Therefore, they must subjugate you.
There's really no other way to do it.
Now, one other challenge in These kinds of ideas is the concept of the soul.
The concept of the soul is really a great challenge, and I know that the Buddhists don't exactly call it a soul, but let's just use that word as an umbrella term for immaterial consciousness.
Now, imagine if I were some smoker and I genuinely believed That I had a backup pair of perfect lungs that were immaterial that could replace my true lungs at any time.
Well, I'm more likely to smoke and, you know, if I got lung cancer, I'd say to the doctor, it's okay, just use my emergency backup spirit lungs and I'll breathe with those.
That would be, you know, somewhat anti-scientific and probably would not extend my days very much.
So this idea with the soul that there's an incorruptible, perfect aspect to the mind which cannot be harmed, Thank you.
really disarms people in the face of a world that is not underfilled with predators.
I think this is going way back when I was a gold panner, but I read a book, you probably know it, Stephen King's The Stand, and in it there was a mentally challenged fellow, and at one point someone was talking to him in some mystical manner, and he was speaking very rationally, very intelligently. and at one point someone was talking to him in I can't remember the guy's name is Bob and he said, who are you?
He said, I'm God's Bob.
In other words, I'm the part of the brain that's not been harmed by whatever physical incapacity had hurt the mind.
That there was an intelligent person within the person whose brain was not functioning very well.
And that is a very dangerous notion.
Because what it means is that there's always hope for reform.
Always hope for reform.
And that can be dangerous because that is quite against what is generally accepted, as far as I understand it, in the realm of of psychology.
So we'll see how this plays out with this stuff.
Of course, the big argument from the Dalai Lama is compassion, universal responsibility.
He says, today we are truly a global family.
What happens in one part of the world may affect us all as interdependence.
Therefore, we have no other choice than to develop what I call a sense of universal responsibility.
This is acquiring compassion for others, the altruistic concern for the welfare of people as a whole.
When you recognize that all beings are equal in both their desire for happiness and their right to obtain it, you automatically feel empathy and closeness toward them.
By accustoming your mind to this sense of universal altruism, you develop a feeling of responsibility for others.
The wish to actively help them overcome their problems.
Nor is this wish selective.
It applies equally to all.
As long as there are human beings experiencing pleasure and pain just as you do, there is no logical basis to discriminate between them or to alter your concern for them if they behave negatively.
And the problem, of course, is that psychopathy and sociopathy and other forms of mental disorders have kind of split human beings in many ways, I would argue, into predator and prey.
And Psychology Today reports a September 2013 study from the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, found the neurobiological roots of psychopathic behavior.
When highly psychopathic participants imagined pain to themselves, they showed a typical neural response within the brain regions involved in empathy for pain, including the anterior insula, the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, somatosensory cortex, and the right amygdala.
The increase in brain activity in these regions was unusually pronounced, suggesting that psychopathic people are sensitive to the thought of pain, but are unable to put themselves in someone else's shoes and feel that pain.
When participants imagine pain to others, these regions failed to become active in high psychopaths.
In a sadistic twist, when imagining others in pain, psychopaths actually showed an increased response in the ventral striatum, an area known to be involved in pleasure.
Other studies have shown that psychopaths have less gray matter in areas of the brain involved in empathy.
They have a decreased physical capacity to be empathetic.
Psychopathy is significantly more prevalent among prison inmates.
23% of prison inmates compared to about 1% of the average population.
In the US, of course, given that over 80% of arrests in 2009 involved drug possession of the victimless crime, the relationship between psychopathy and crime is fairly well established.
Of course, it's not one-to-one.
There is no generally accepted treatment as of this recording to psychopathy One researcher has written that where traditional treatment is used, like psychotherapy or counseling, the sessions merely act as a kind of unintentional specialized training to help psychopaths more effectively mimic healthy emotional behavior.
So it's actually training them to be, in a way, more dangerous.
So that is a challenge.
If somebody has withered arms or their arms are missing, To say, let's play catch or let's throw javelins or whatever is...
unrealistic.
And if you believe that there is an essence to the person that is independent of any of their physical substrata, then you are going to forever be trying to reach through a broken brain to a whole person.
But if consciousness is merely an effect of the brain, if the mind is an effect of the brain, utterly dependent upon the brain, as dependent upon the brain as gravity is to the presence of mass, Then when the brain is broken, the mind is broken.
And there doesn't seem to be any particular way to regrow that stuff.
And I've got some research and some interviews with subject matter experts, which you can find at bombinthebrain.com for more of this.
But this is a big challenge.
And I think it gets a lot of people locked into and lost in some very destructive relationships where they're forever trying to help A person that science says they really can't help.
So, in that same speech, he gave a speech before the Society of Neuroscience, Dalai Lama said,"...although the Buddhist contemplative tradition and modern science have evolved from different historical, intellectual, and cultural roots, I believe that at heart they share significant commonalities, especially in their basic philosophical outlook and methodology." From the methodological perspective, both traditions emphasize the role of empiricism.
For example, in the Buddhist investigative tradition between the three recognized sources of knowledge, experience, reason, and testimony, it is the evidence of experience that takes precedence, with reason coming second and testimony last.
This means that in the Buddhist investigation of reality, at least in principle, empirical evidence should triumph over scriptural authority no matter how deeply venerated a scripture may be.
That is an astounding statement, and again, part of his sort of, I would assume, playing to the audience.
And there were some scientists who were not too happy having a mystic give a speech before some scientists.
This is a religion founded upon the unprovable anti-notion, anti-hypothesis of reincarnation.
And the idea that the mind is completely independent of the brain and can outlast the body and so on.
So this idea that this is somehow empirical is not valid.
And this man with a straight face claims that there's Buddhist empiricism, but he relies on the divination of his oracles to make important decisions.
And this concerns even religious people within his own organization.
Gonsal Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama, stated, quote, These days the state and other oracles, there are about four other oracles in India, play a great role in the different decisions of our exile government.
Many of us think that this is somewhat of a risk.
Here's how two writers describe the Dalai Lama's relationship with the state oracle, quote, Criticism or public debates are not welcomed in Little Lhasa, the headquarters of the Tibetan government in exile.
Dalai Lama prefers to ask gods and demons for advice.
His holiness official state oracle is called Thupten Ndupt, born in 1958.
He is living in Nechung monastery right behind the parliament.
Whenever the Dalai Lama has a question, Thupten Ndupt would put on his 40 kilogram Ritual garment, incense would be burned and his assistants would put a huge crown on his head.
Then the oracle would start dancing to the music of horns and cymbals until he would enter a trance murmuring words only well-trained ears.
Can I understand?
Dalai Lama strongly believes in his predictions.
Looking back, he found out that the oracle was always right, he once said.
In the late 1960s, this exact same man, who said the oracles are always right, claimed,"...the oracles are absolutely without importance.
They are only small tree spirits.
They do not belong to the three treasures of Buddhism.
Relations with them are of no help.
For our next incarnation, they should be looked upon as manifestations of popular superstition, which is deleterious to the health of human beings." So, I mean, this is all very superstitious.
Speaking of superstition, one of the biggest conflicts within Tibetan Buddhism is the Dorje Shugden controversy.
The late and lamentedly gone, Christopher Hitchens provided a brief summary of it.
Quote, Supporters of the Dorje Shugden deity, a Dharma protector, and an ancient object of worship and appropriation in Tibet have been threatened with violence and ostracism and even death.
Following the Dalai Lama's abrupt prohibition of this once venerated godhead, a Swiss television documentary graphically intercuts footage of His Holiness denying all knowledge of menace and intimidation with scenes of His followers enthusiastically promulgating wanted posters and other paraphernalia of excommunication and persecution.
Whilst banning the worship of Shugden as an example of the frequent power struggles within the Buddhist religion, the Dalai Lama, who is an avid advocate of freedom of religion, reportedly based this decision on the advice of his state oracle.
So, a bit of a blow against empiricism.
So, the Dalai Lama is also...
A committed Marxist, which is, of course, ironic, given that he's fighting against, or was fighting against, Chinese communism.
In a 2013 interview, he claimed, quote, I am not only a socialist, but also a bit leftist, a communist.
In terms of social economy theory, I am a Marxist.
I think I am farther to the left than the Chinese leaders.
They are capitalists.
He explains why he is a Marxist.
Quote, The economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability.
Marxism is concerned with the distribution of wealth on an equal basis, as well as the fate of those who are underprivileged and in need, and it cares about the victims of minority-imposed exploitation.
For those reasons, the system appeals to me, and it seems fair.
That's interesting.
I mean, I don't want to get into a big capitalism versus Marxism conversation.
You've been patient enough.
But one thing that is true, I've been an entrepreneur, I guess, for over 20 years, for the most part now.
In order to gain profits, you have to be empathetic.
You have to know what people want.
You have to present whatever it is in a way that appeals to them.
You have to get them to voluntarily exchange money for whatever service or good or whatever it is you're providing.
I'm not sure that Marxist dictatorships, and they always end up being dictatorships, are exactly overburdened with empathy.
So in religion, in particularly very, very mystical kinds of religion, there is Aggression and intimidation seem to be part of it.
I mean, the poor guy was beaten in a non-violent society and so on as a child to learn his lessons.
That's not very empathetic, but...
I mean, to take a much maligned example, if you want to make a Disney movie that appeals to kids, you kind of have to know what kids like because they're going to show up voluntarily or not.
And so the idea that the free market is somehow anti-empathetic and communism or Marxism is empathetic is, I think, fairly much the opposite of the truth.
On the relationship between Buddhism and Marxism, The Dalai Lama commented, quote, the aims of the Lord Buddha and of Karl Marx are not incompatible.
Both were concerned with bringing happiness to the masses.
The Buddha with spiritual happiness and Marx with material happiness.
Is it not reasonable then to see how the two might work together?
And that, of course, is what is typical between these two belief systems.
Is there these ideals and then they're put into practice and it turns pretty horrible and flawed people are blamed.
So, it's not a philosophy because it does not rely on the metaphysics of objective reality.
It doesn't rely on reason and evidence as the sole methodologies for separating truth from falsehood.
It does not have universality as its ethics because in, of course, both Marxism and Buddhism you need a top-level class which have revealed mysteries and have the right to impose those revealed mysteries, whether it's the good of the class or the good of the The spirit or the soul in Buddhism,
because they're mystically and revelatorily based, they have the right and the mission and the necessity of imposing their visions upon everyone else.
And this fundamentally von Mises' critique of socialism and Marxism is that any kind of rational or efficient organization of Goods, materials, people, services, any economic product is impossible because there's no such thing as price.
Price is the objective methodology for determining the value of something and it's not embedded in anything in particular.
It's just simply a matter of supply and demand.
And so price is the objective way in which goods are organized spontaneously without centralized authority in a free market.
And therefore, wherever the market is the most free, you need the least amount of authoritarianism.
In the same way, in Buddhism, because there are not simple and empirical truths that people are subjected to, you need a priestly class to impose their will on everyone else.
It is, of course, tragic.
He's viewed as an empirical rational thinker.
Of course, he takes that pose.
Obviously, mysticism, like water, can often take the shape of whatever fashionable or required container you want to pour it into.
Empiricism and rationality tend to be a bit more spiky, the jagged little pills that sometimes seem to go down sideways.
But I did want to put these arguments out there, as I've done with presentations on Abraham Lincoln, on Nixon, on Gadi, on Martin Luther King Jr., and Karl Marx himself, which you can all check out on this channel or freedomainradio.com.
or youtube.com slash freedomainradio I think it's really important that we do not personalize any thinker and we certainly don't want to look at a giggling guy in funny robes and think that because of his length of study and his dedication and so on that we're going to give him a free pass when it comes to the rigors of requiring a objective metaphysics and A non-revelatory,
a non-I had a vision, therefore you have to be my serf approach to epistemology.
Philosophy works best in the same way that science works best.
In fact, it's really the only way it can work when truth is reason and evidence and is not the province of any one person and is not the province of any one class, but is able to be participated in by all, particularly the crown jewel of philosophy, which is ethics.
The crown jewel of philosophy is ethics, and if ethics cannot be understood by a five-year-old, Then ethics cannot be applied against a five-year-old or a 10-year-old or a 20-year-old.
So, if it takes 20 years of rigorous study to develop morally high standards, then it cannot be available to the masses, which is why the masses must be ordered around by people in a wide variety of funny hats in general, whether it's Bobby's bobble hat or The Pope's hat or the yellow hat or the red hat in the Tibetan tradition.
My goal has, I'm not trying to put myself forward, front and center here, but my goal has always been to put philosophy out in a way that is actionable and understandable to anybody of reasonable intelligence and curiosity.
And I've certainly worked as a parent to To instruct my child on philosophy in terms that make complete sense to her and start it at the age of four, it's not that hard to do.
You just have to give up all superstition and all desire to impose authority and thus rob people of the greatest gift of consciousness, which is moral autonomy.
Thank you so much for watching and for listening.
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