Tod Und Unsterblichkeit Im Buddhismus. Über Die Buddha Natur

by Dalai Lama XIV, Peter. Michel

In THE BUDDHA NATURE the 14th Dalai Lama talks, for the first time, about his ideas of the Self in Buddhism. He explains how Buddhist teachings differentiate between the person and the eternal soul.

This book gives an insight into Buddhism for Christians, and an insight into Christianity for Buddhists.

Genres: Buddhism

Paperback

First published February 1, 1997

About the author

Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso (born Lhamo Döndrub), the 14th Dalai Lama, is a practicing member of the Gelug School of Tibetan Buddhism and is influential as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the world's most famous Buddhist monk, and the leader of the exiled Tibetan government in India.

Tenzin Gyatso was the fifth of sixteen children born to a farming family. He was proclaimed the tulku (an Enlightened lama who has consciously decided to take rebirth) of the 13th Dalai Lama at the age of two.

On 17 November 1950, at the age of 15, he was enthroned as Tibet's ruler. Thus he became Tibet's most important political ruler just one month after the People's Republic of China's invasion of Tibet on 7 October 1950. In 1954, he went to Beijing to attempt peace talks with Mao Zedong and other leaders of the PRC. These talks ultimately failed.

After a failed uprising and the collapse of the Tibetan resistance movement in 1959, the Dalai Lama left for India, where he was active in establishing the Central Tibetan Administration (the Tibetan Government in Exile) and in seeking to preserve Tibetan culture and education among the thousands of refugees who accompanied him.

Tenzin Gyatso is a charismatic figure and noted public speaker. This Dalai Lama is the first to travel to the West. There, he has helped to spread Buddhism and to promote the concepts of universal responsibility, secular ethics, and religious harmony.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, honorary Canadian citizenship in 2006, and the United States Congressional Gold Medal on 17 October 2007.

Reviews

[Mesoscope · Rating 2 out of 5]

This short book consists of a series of interviews with the Dalai Lama conducted by Peter Michel, a rather unsophisticated Christian with an extremely superficial knowledge of comparative religion. He apparently believes that the Dalai Lama answers for a vague and comprehensive way of mysticism that encompasses not only his own actual tradition, but figures as far flung as Krishnamurti and Lama Govinda.

Let me just pause for a moment to admire the fecklessness required for anyone to challenge the Dalai Lama with a quotation from Lama Govinda, a German eccentric and at-least-partial charlatan with all the claim to legitimacy of Madame Blavatsky. It's an important metric indicating just how out of his depth Michel is.

I have some sympathy for his repeated attempts to prompt the Dalai Lama to take structural similarities between Tibetan Buddhist doctrine and other religious traditions more seriously. The Tibetans are rather obstinate on this point as a rule, I believe in part because their philosophical tradition is far more systematic than the European tradition in describing things as "the same", "different", or "related".

But when Michel wouldn't take no for an answer and pushed on the same points again and again, he increasingly appeared to me to simply be obstinate, and not terribly bright.

This is not the first "east-west" encounter I've read that was ruined by the complete lack of preparation on the part of the western interlocutor, who is at sea with respect to basic points of doctrine that could have been clarified by just a bit of introductory reading. "The Monk and the Philosopher" also comes to mind.

If anyone comes to this book looking primarily for HHDL's treatment of Buddha nature, I would refer them to his excellent "Dzogchen" instead.

[PMP · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vaclav Havel's foreword, quoting a Zen master, aptly sums up the difficulty of this book: "Words are but an imperfect tool, however we don't have a better one."