stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

HELLO, DALAI! 247
And how did the compassionate, bodhisattva-filled Tibetan
Buddhist community react to such allegations?
[M]any rejected out of hand Campbell’s claims as sheer fabrication
coming from somebody eager to gain fame at the expense
of a deceased lama (Lehnert, 1998; italics added).
* * *
Well, enough of Buddhist sex. How about some Buddhist violence?
More specifically, in keeping with such extreme contemporary
brutality as is regularly portrayed in tulku Steven Seagal’s movies,
it has been whispered that
in old Tibet ... the lamas were the allies of feudalism and unsmilingly
inflicted medieval punishments such as blinding
and flogging unto death (Hitchens, 1998).
Visiting the Lhasa [Tibet] museum, [journalist Alain Jacob]
saw “dried and tanned children’s skins, various amputated
human limbs, either dried or preserved, and numerous instruments
of torture that were in use until a few decades
ago”....
These were the souvenirs and instruments of the vanished
lamas, proof, Jacob notes, that under the Buddhist religious
rule in Tibet “there survived into the middle of the
twentieth century feudal practices which, while serving a
well-established purpose, were nonetheless chillingly cruel.”
The “well-established purpose”? Maintaining social order
in a church-state (Clark, 1980).
The early twentieth-century, Viennese-born explorer Joseph
Rock minced even fewer words:
“One must take for granted that every Tibetan, at least in
this part of the world, was a robber sometime in his life,” he
sardonically observed of the Goloks [tribe]. “Even the lamas
are not averse to cutting one’s throat, although they would
be horrified at killing a dog, or perhaps even a vermin”
(Schell, 2000).
The caliber of monks today has not, it seems, radically improved: