If the Dalai Lama is suspected of being a pedophile, I don't buy it. Whatever the incident from a few days ago was, it was unguarded. If you have something to hide as far as children are concerned, you're more careful to hide it. Jimmy Savile was a rare exception and again, not one that I think is being repeated here.
But as far as being "along with Bill Gates and Bono, the first person of the Davos Holy Trinity," that's in a way more damning. Davos is where people with obscene amounts of money and power go to plan out how to inflict their will on the vast majority of the world's population. If you're a holy man among them, they should find your presence troubling.
And I'd say there's a definite tendency among Western Buddhists to take the wrong things from the practice. If they're looking for it, it gives them permission to act selfishly while maintaining a pose of righteousness, or to go along with things they should be fighting. Something has gone wrong in the translation.
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When Jer showed me the video of that encounter I must say I felt perplexed as well as somewhat disgusted. If telling the kid the kid to suck his tongue was suggestive of some bizarre sexual act it's one I'd never heard of before. Still, I just let it go as some childish silliness on the part of His Holiness and forgot it.
It appears not everyone reacted that way and it's become a thing about Buddhism and the Dalai Lama's position as the chief Buddhist in the world. That he became a sympathetic focus to the Western world is no surprise - had the Chinese not absorbed Tibet and had the Dalai Lama and his supporters not left the country in reaction I doubt we would have heard of him or of Tibetan Buddhism.
I agree with you that imagining the Dalai Lama to have any association with Davos is preposterous. The confusion about Buddhism, especially the Tibetan variety, has definitely arisen because of a narrow and naive undestanding. Seeing lithe young people traipsing around carrying their roll-up yoga mats is hardly inspiring. Buddhism I've learned is a very demanding religion so his conclusion that it's 'spiritual fluff' for some, not all, Western Buddhists rings very true.
Yeah, it was kind of an upsetting incident. It's possible that we're missing context, but the whole thing did end up looking unfortunate. Of course there's not much we can do except shrug and hope there's nothing more to it.
In the larger context yes, both he and Tibetan Buddhism have gotten a good deal more exposure because of China's takeover of Tibet. China has done a lot of things that make them the less sympathetic party on the world stage. Of course the leaders don't care about this, and are more concerned with using power in what they see as the national interest. as well as amassing more power. Of course there's also the issue where the more land and people you conquer, the harder it is to assimilate all of them.
The yoga mats are in many--although not all--cases an accessory in a trendy designer lifestyle. Even in the West I'm sure there are sincere practitioners who get something profound out of it. But at that scale it's not surprising some have more dubious motives and understandings.
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