Rebuttal of Commonly Cited False Accusations Against Dorje Shugden

Question:

One of the reasons most quoted in support of the Dalai Lama’s ban on Dorje Shugden is the 1997 murder of the principal of the Buddhist School of Dialectics, Geshe Lobsang Gyatso, along with two of his students. No one has been arrested to date, yet this incident was seized upon by the CTA as the opportunity to defame and criminalize Dorje Shugden practitioners. Is there any substance to the CTA’s allegations?

Answer:

The Answer is extracted from the article: “How the Dalai Lama is destroying a religion, lie by lie” which was written in response to false statements made by Robert Thurman in an article posted in the Huffington Post.

Lies In Robert’s Thurman’s Huffington Post Article

Thurman Lie #1: Dorje Shugden was behind the murder of Geshe Lobsang Gyatso and his associates

The incident that Thurman referred to was the grisly triple murder of Geshe Lobsang Gyatso and two of his assistants on a February night in 1997, in Dharamsala. The Geshe was known to be a harsh critic of anything that did not agree with the Dalai Lama, and made a lot of enemies over the years as the Geshe’s assistant would concede in 2005. The Geshe was however, loyal to the Dalai Lama and his demise did serve the Dalai Lama clique as it provided an excuse for the Dharamsala establishment to reinforce a political gambit it had launched the year before.

Immediately, the murder was pinned on Shugden worshippers without any evidence. The only ‘evidence’ was purportedly a letter from the Secretary of the Dorje Shugden Society in Dharamsala to Geshe Lobsang Gyatso sent a few months prior to the incident, supposedly threatening to kill the Geshe. In a deliberate attempt to mislead the public and sway sentiments against the Shugden community, the letter written in Tibetan was waved by a minister of the Tibetan government in exile (now known as the Central Tibetan Administration, CTA) before the public, claiming it to be the smoking gun that linked the murders to Shugden worshippers.

It was only on closer inspection and when the letter was translated that it became clear the so-called death threat was no more than a firm letter by the Shugden society challenging Geshe Lobsang Gyatso, who had been a fierce critic of Dorje Shugden, to a discussion on the merits and reasons of the religious ban which in fact lacked any theological basis. Helmut Gassner, an established Western Buddhist monk and scholar who had been an interpreter for the Dalai Lama for 17 years said of the incriminating letter:

I could not resist stopping the video [of the government minister waving the letter] to copy the Tibetan text and translate it. It contained no death threat at all, simply an impertinent letter containing a challenge to debate the issue so as to settle the difference. By now I was convinced that something foul was going on. Otherwise, why would Tashi Wangdu [the Tibetan minister] go to such lengths as to show a fake death threat on TV?
- Helmut Gassner
Source: http://www.dorjeshugden.com/articles/HelmutGassner01.pdf

Nevertheless, the false evidence was enough for the CTA to push for the arrest of various leaders of the Shugden religious community in Delhi and illegally imprison them. Despite interrogations by the Indian authorities lasting weeks, not a shred of evidence was produced. Finally, an Indian court in Dharamsala formally quashed all accusations that linked the Dorje Shugden Society to the murders, on the grounds that there was no evidence to support such accusations.

Of all the ‘clear proof’ that circles around the Dalai Lama and CTA claimed they had, they were never presented when called upon. Instead, malicious gossip circulated saying that the murderers had escaped into Tibet where they were being sheltered by the Chinese government, the sworn enemies of the Tibetan people.

The Dorje Shugden Society chronicled their harrowing accounts after being falsely accused by the CTA for the crime, which began with an army of forty Indian police, instigated by the CTA, descending upon five targeted leaders of the Dorje Shugden Society, arresting them in the dark of the night of February 9, 1997 (four days after the triple murder) without any court order, as they were celebrating Tibetan New Year. This episode and a number of other suspicious incidences around that time foretold that a serious campaign was underway to terminate an age-old Buddhist practice that has been at the heart of the Gelugpa tradition.

Thurman and the Dalai Lama go a long way back

Robert Thurman, who has long claimed to be a close friend of the Dalai Lama (despite being the first Western Buddhist monk to disrobe), made an outrageous statement to Newsweek in April 1997 saying,

I think there’s no doubt that Shugden was behind the killings

It has to be asked, on what basis was Thurman making his claim when events that were being played out evidenced the opposite to be the case? And why did Thurman further lay blame on an entire community of innocent monks and laypeople who worshipped Dorje Shugden, if not to seize the moment for some opportunistic sycophancy?

Assuming that the murderers of the Geshe and his associates were Shugden worshippers, Thurman’s statement tarnishing a specific religion is equivalent to saying that Jesus Christ is behind the killings committed by criminals who happen to be of the Christian faith. Thurman did not mean to imply that the murderers may be Shugden practitioners, he said “Shugden was behind the killings”, the precise strand of venom that the Dalai Lama clique needed the world community to swallow.

In the same breath, Thurman went further to say, “It would not be unfair to call Shugdens the Taliban of Tibetan Buddhism,” no doubt as a means to portray Shugden Buddhists as a brutal and dangerous ‘tribe’ at a time when America watched the Taliban regime nervously as it gained power and edged closer to Pakistan, a country on America’s watch list. The damage inflicted on the reputation of Dorje Shugden and his followers was considerable as Thurman was regarded as an American expert on Tibetan Buddhism. (Time Magazine honoured Thurman as one of its 25 most influential Americans in 1997, describing him as a “larger than life scholar-activist destined to convey the Dharma, the precious teachings of Siddhartha, from Asia to America.”).

The American, and indeed the English-speaking world public, took what Thurman said to be accurate as there was little rebuttal from the accused Shugden community in Dharamsala. Being mainly monks and exiled people, Shugden practitioners were ill equipped to defend against the enormity of the propaganda attacks on a world scale, even as they faced physical challenges and threats from the CTA within their own exile community. Nearly all media in the western world blindly took the official version of the Shugden story from the CTA and propagated news that incriminated Shugden worshippers in the murders.

The Dalai Lama clique had scored an important victory with the help of Robert Thurman. The Dalai Lama knew that it was totally undemocratic to ban a religion and suppress a community of people based on their religion, especially when he was seeking support from the West against China, accusing the latter of precisely the atrocity he and his government were committing. Therefore the West had to be manipulated into assent for the vicious suppression the Dalai Lama was inflicting on his own people.

Over the months that followed, Dorje Shugden was forcibly outlawed as, for the first time in modern history, a ‘democratic’ nation legislated the stoppage of a religious practice and systematically marginalised its believers, even to the point of refusing them the right to vote. Shugden monks were expelled from the monasteries – the only homes they had, having renounced all worldly pursuits, and lay worshippers went into hiding from their own government and community. In Dharamsala, clear posters forbidding people of Shugden faith to enter shops, government offices and even public hospitals could be seen. All this time, the world was celebrating the Dalai Lama as a man of peace, preaching compassion, love and tolerance around the globe.

In the Huffington Post article, Thurman stated that the Shugden ‘cult continued its campaign at the behest of… the People’s Republic of China’ another lie designed to tag the Shugden community as agents of the Tibetan people’s enemy, China. It is baseless accusations such as these that split the Tibetan community as a whole in a manner that China could not have achieved, in their effort to stymie the Tibetan Cause. Of course, China leveraged on this chasm that the Dalai Lama and Thurman have presented to them.

Read the full article: http://www.dorjeshugden.com/all-articles/the-controversy/how-the-dalai-lama-is-destroying-a-religion-lie-by-lie/