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Monk Wirathu’s 969 quotes the
Dalai Lama’s Kalachakra
A group of American
Buddhists has launched an English-language website promoting the 969
movement of the Terror-Monk Wirathu in response to the negative western
media surrounding the ultra-nationalist Buddhist campaign in Burma. (See
Time article: Buddhist
Terror) On this Website the violence against Muslims is justified through the
Kalachakara-Tantra and the Shambhalah Prophecy and quotes parts of it to
explain the position of their violence. Here a part of the text, cited to
support the 969 movement, which mentioned also the Dalai Lama:
“The Kalachakra is a Tibetan
Buddhist doctrine on the cycles of time. In addition to being a text,
meditation practice, and initiation ritual, Kalachakra is a prophecy for
the victory of the Buddhist religion in a war with Islam.
Beginning in 712AD and
continuing through 1030AD, India
was subject to massive annual invasions from Muslims who eventually
conquered and destroyed much of the cultural heritage of India. In a final desperate act
to annihilate Buddhism, in 1193, Nalanda
University which was
home to the greatest center of learnings in the East was destroyed, with
thousands of monks beheaded. The destruction of the temples, monasteries,
centres of learning at Nalanda and northern India to be responsible for the
demise of ancient Indian scientific thought in mathematics, astronomy,
alchemy, and anatomy. Much of what modern scholarship of Buddhist studies
puzzles over today was contained in the manuscripts and minds of those who
were lost during this calamity. However as the Kalachakra Tantra shows, the
war between Dhamma and Islam is not over, nor is it. The prophecy includes
detailed descriptions of the future invaders as well as suggested ways for
the Buddhist teachings to survive these onslaughts.
The Dalai Lama has stated that
the public exposition of this tantra is necessary in the current degenerate
age. The initiation may be received simply as a blessing for the majority
of those attending, however, many of the more qualified attendees do take
the commitments and subsequently engage in the practice.”
Herre clearly the Kalachakra is
identified as a text about Buddhism versus Islam. Ex-Tibetan Buddhist Chris
Chandler makes the following comment: “969′s monk/leader Wirathu and
his Burmese death squad, where Muslims are being persecuted and macheted to
death in the name of this Theravadin Buddhism of ‘compassion and
’peace’ is also influenced by the Dalai Lama’s Kalachakra
prophecy, and its views on ‘liberation’, Quotes by the Dalai Lama and
the on Kalachakra prophecies were on Wirathu’s website,
but since taken down.“
Sources:
Monk Wirathu’s 969 quotes the Dalai Lama’s Kalachakra – in:
http://zenpundit.com/?p=29028
American Buddhists Promote 969 Movement With Website – in: http://www.irrawaddy.org/latest-news/american-buddhists-promote-969-movement-with-website.html
Lifton’s Thought Control Criteria and the Cult of Tibetan ‘Buddhism’
– in: http://www.extibetanbuddhist.com/
Burma’s Buddhist Pogroms
by Angus Cargill
The surprise appearance of Nobel Peace Prize winner and
prominent Buddhist Aung San Suu Kyi at Burma’s annual armed forces day celebration,
together with the racially-inspired pogroms that have swept Burma over the
past few months, incited in many cases by the rhetoric of Buddhist monks,
have once again called into question the credentials of Buddhism as the
religion of peace. In what seems to be a policy coordinated between
Buddhist clergy and the military dictatorship, and unopposed by Burmese
pro-democracy campaigners, attacks by mobs acting with “brutal efficiency”
and incited by the “incendiary propaganda” of Buddhist monks, according to UN envoy Vijay
Nambiar, have
driven thousands of ethnic Rohingya from their homes into refugee camps in
Burma or abroad. Mosques have been demolished, homes destroyed and
Muslim-inhabited neighborhoods razed to the ground with the encouragement
of Buddhist monks, who have held demonstrations calling for the expulsion of
all members of the Muslim minority from Burma.
Burma’s President Thein Sein spelled
out the ultimate aim of the campaign last July, when he called for the
expulsion of all Rohingya from Burma, or their confinement in
refugee camps. Speaking to UNHCR High Commissioner
Antonio Guttierez, he said that it was “impossible to
accept the illegally entered Rohingya, who are not our ethnicity” and
mooted sending the group to a third country or UN administered camps.”
“Illegally entered,” in this context refers to the exclusion of all
Rohingya from Burmese citizenship by successive constitutions, which left
them off the list of 130 ethnic groups defined as Burmese citizens.
Where
Rohingya continue to live, ghettoes have already been established. An article in today’s Democratic
Voice of Burma
stated that “Sittwe’s Muslim quarter, Aung Mingalar, which is
home to some 7,000 people, has been cordoned off by police since June and
residents who venture outside risk being arrested or beaten…. “We hardly
have any food provisions,” Mohammed Rafi from Aung Mingalar told DVB. “We
don’t even have any doctors to cure us when we are ill. Nor are we allowed
to go outside for treatment.”
No statement has been made criticizing any of
these events by any Buddhist leader, including the other Buddhist recipient
of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Dalai Lama.
In neighbouring Sri Lanka, a country which prides itself as having
preserved one of the earliest and purest forms of Buddhism, even more
bloodthirsty ethnic conflict with the Hindu Tamil minority led to massacres
at the end of the civil war in 2009 which left at least 30,000
dead and, according to the Sri Lankan Catholic
Bishop Joseph Rayappu, 146,679
unaccounted for. Sri Lankan Buddhist monks have been equally
prominent in fanning the flames of ethnic and religious tension there,
leading demonstrations in 2002 which prevented a peaceful settlement to the
civil war, assassinating Prime Minister S.W.R.D Bandaranaike in 1959 for
making concessions aimed at reconciliation with the Tamils (1), and most
recently storming
a mosque which they claimed was on ancestral Buddhist territory. The
Japanese Zen Buddhist leadership, according to the Zen priest Brian
Victoria, writing in “Buddhist Warfare,” a collection of essays published
by the Oxford University Press in 2010, displayed “fervent if not fanatical support of
Japanese militarism.” (2)
The first formal European convert to Buddhism,
Helena Blavatsky, who took Buddhist vows in Sri
Lanka in 1880, was a rabid anti-Semite, translations
of whose books were the first in Germany to bear the swastika,
and whose Theosophical Society laid the foundations for the foundation of
the Nazi Party in 1920. So what could the reason be for such vicious
racially inspired violence breaking out in these three Buddhist countries,
between them accounting for a substantial majority of Buddhist worshippers
in the world today? Coincidence? Well, maybe, but consider a few
thought-provoking facts. Early European Buddhists were almost exclusively
anti-Semitic and deeply racist promoters of the myth of the “Aryan master
race,” which they believed had followed a religion similar to Buddhism. The
philosopher Schopenhauer, who was the first European to call himself a
Buddhist as well as being a rabid and offensive anti-Semite, the
anti-Semitic composer Wagner, even the SS leader Himmler were all serious
students of Indian and Buddhist philosophy. The first formal European
convert to Buddhism, Helena Blavatsky, who took Buddhist vows in Sri Lanka
in 1920. Her protégé, Anagarika Dharmapala, was the chief ideologist of Sri
Lankan nationalism, and in his writings and speeches preached a militant
race theory that praised the “Aryan” Buddhist Sinhalese and denigrated the
other races of Sri Lanka,
including the “shylock-like” Muslims. From 1911 until the 1950s the “Island
Hermitage” of German, Croatian and British monks in Sri Lanka was led by
the German monk Nyanatiloka, who refused to ordain one of his fellow monks
because he was Jewish and during wartime internment chose the “Fascist “
section of his prison camp over the “Democratic” section, and two of its
prominent British members joined after reading the writings of the Italian
fascist Julius Evola, another scholar of Buddhism, who was also a member of
the SS research branch, the “Ahnenerbe.” The writings of the first European
Buddhist monk, Allan Bennett, who was ordained in Burma, show a deep obsession
with the racial aspects of Buddhism, but this connection with European
racism seems to have borne even more sinister fruit in the 1930s with the
rise of Burmese Nationalism. According to the German historian Hans Berndt
Zoellner, U Saw, the third pre-independence Prime Minister of Burma from
1941-1942 , translated Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” into Burmese, and published it
in his newspaper. The Austrian Professor Volker Zotz (3), who cites
Zoellner, also quotes a saying popular in Burmese nationalist circles
during World War II. “Germany
and Japan,
come safely to us, because you are of the Sakya race,” Sakya referring to
the Buddha’s clan name.
If the conflicts in Burma and Sri Lanka are set to
continue the marriage made in hell between Asian Buddhism and European race
theory, of which Nazi Germany was not the only, but by far the worst
example, then they may be even more difficult to solve than we have thought
up to now.
Footnotes:
(1) Patrick Peebles, 2006,
History of Sri Lanka, Greenwood, USA.
(2)
Buddhist Warfare p 111.
(3)
Volker Zotz: Swastika und Hakenkreuz. Vortrag. München 22. Oktober 2012
The author was formerly a lecturer in the
Tibetology Department of Minzu University in Beijing,
and is currently lecturer for the Northern Consortium of UK Universities. His
translation of the biography of Nagtsang Nulo from Tibetan into English is
due to be published by Duke University Press next year.
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