XPost: alt.philosophy.zen, alt.religion.buddhism.tibetan, talk.r   
   ligion.buddhism   
   From: peter.terpstra7@gmail.com   
      
   Chinese Government Links to Shugden Protests   
      
   Senior NKT members acting as spokespersons for the various ‘front   
   organizations’ they have created to promote the Shugden issue have   
   repeatedly denied any   
   relationship with Chinese authorities in Beijing, declaring such allegations   
   to be “entirely false” and “the propaganda of the Dalai Lama’s   
   camp”. However, when   
   one investigates, it soon becomes clear that there exists a well established   
   relationship between the Chinese Government, Dolgyal and New Kadampa Shugden   
   devotees who are organizing the protests..   
      
      
   Chinese interest in the Shugden issue actually goes back to the early 19th   
   century, at a time when the Manchu Imperial  Court wielded considerable   
   influence in   
   Tibet. After consulting the spirit’s oracle on a number of important issues,   
   Emperor Daoguang instructed that Shugden be officially referred to as “The   
   Guardian of   
   the Doctrine of the Yellow Hats” [the Dalai Lamas' Gelugpa order]. It might   
   even be said therefore that Chinese oligarchs were involved in initiating   
   Shugden’s   
   recent rise to prominence in the contemporary Tibetan religious world.   
      
   Tibetan suspicions that the Chinese were developing an unhealthy interest in   
   Shugden in the current period arose in 1996 when the Dalai Lama announced that   
   Tibetan government-in-exile oracles had suggested “Dolgyal relates to   
   Chinese deities.” One long standing oracular deity, Pehar, even went so far   
   as to suggest   
   through his trance medium that Shugden was intent upon “delivering Tibet   
   into the hands of the Chinese.”   
      
   In February 1997 came the grisly murder of the Dalai Lama’s close friend and   
   associate Geshe Lobsang Gyatso and his two students, alleged by Indian police   
   investigators to be at the hands of Shugden devotees. The identified   
   individuals slipped back over the Chinese border and were escorted back to   
   their home   
   villages within Tibet by the Chinese authorities, though those very same   
   Chinese authorities were subsequently “unable to locate” them in response   
   to an Interpol   
   arrest warrant. (See The Dalai Lama and the King Demon, for full   
   documentation).   
      
   Soon after, in September 1998, Time magazine Asia confirmed Beijing was   
   actively recruiting disgruntled Tibetan Shugden worshipers to spy on and   
   create dissent   
   within the exiled Tibetan community. And in March 1999, the Los Angeles Times   
   reported that, at the same time as the Chinese Government was destroying   
   mainstream Buddhist temples and statues of Tibet’s patron saint,   
   Padmasambhava, it was simultaneously dedicating large amounts of Government   
   funds to the   
   rebuilding of Shugden monasteries and temples throughout the Tibetan plateau.   
      
   Further evidence of increasing Chinese interest in the dispute was the 2004   
   meeting between Chinese Government officials and a Shugden oracle at a small   
   monastery in Chinese-controlled Tibet. At the meeting, documented in an   
   academic paper on monastic politics by Hillman, the corporeal host to the   
   deity entered   
   into trance: oracles normally only enter into trance for the purposes of   
   consultation. Why the representatives of a thoroughly irreligious political   
   regime should want   
   to communicate with Shugden remains a mystery, though this event would   
   certainly seem to confirm the assertion made by the Dalai Lama’s oracles   
   that Dolgyal   
   Shugden was working with the Chinese.   
      
   Nevertheless, while these occurrences demonstrate a Chinese Government wish to   
   involve itself in Tibetan religious and political affairs via the Shugden   
   issue,   
   they do not, at first glance at least, demonstrate any relationship between   
   NKT Shugden devotees in the West organizing protests and the Chinese   
   government’s   
   parallel campaign to defame and undermine the reputation of the Dalai Lama.   
      
   First indications of a developing relationship between the NKT and China came   
   in the early 2000s, not long after the first anti-Dalai-Lama demonstrations,   
   when   
   devotees began translating Kelsang Gyatso’s study manuals into Chinese after   
   receiving permission to distribute them throughout China. The translations were   
   conducted in an air of great secrecy behind closed doors at the NKT’s   
   Manjushri Centre headquarters, though why such secrecy should be necessary is   
   not clear.   
      
   Further evidence linking the New Kadampas to Beijing emerges when one    
   examines several letters sent by the early NKT ‘front organization’, the   
   ‘Western   
   Shugden Society’ [WSS].  Kelsang Gyatso, founder of the NKT, identified   
   himself as the seniormost “representative” of the WSS in 2008 when he   
   “personally   
   organized” demonstrations against the Dalai Lama during tours of the US, UK   
   and Australia. Senior WSS figures who acted as signatories to these letters   
   were   
   his closest students and invariably, as with all such demonstrations that have   
   taken place since 1996, WSS demonstrations were always populated overwhelmingly   
   by members of the NKT.   
      
   A number of these WSS letters gave as their return address the offices of the   
   Delhi-based, “Dorje Shugden Devotees Charitable and Religious Society”   
   [DSDCRS], clearly identifying said offices as their base in the East.   
      
   The DSDCRS has an unfortunate history, its members having openly issued   
   threatening letters to well known Shugden critic Gen Lobsang Gyatso shortly   
   before   
   his brutal murder in 1997. More ominously, in the days preceding his death,   
   his killers took a taxi from Manjnu Ka Tilla where the DSDCRS is based.   
   Ordering   
   their driver to follow a car occupied by Lobsang Gyatso, police tracked a call   
   the killers made during the journey and established it was to the home of   
   DSDCRS   
   General Secretary, Chime Tsering.   
      
   Following the murder, the police wrestled a bag from the deceased Lobsang   
   Gyatso’s petrified  hands taken from one of his assailants. It contained   
   DSDCRS   
   documents which justified the use of violence and bloodshed in silencing   
   opposition to Shugden. Police investigators subsequently uncovered pictures of   
   the killers   
   posing together with a smiling DSDCRS Secretary .   
      
   DSDCRS officials themselves have been courting India and Nepal-based Chinese   
   diplomats regularly since 1998;  guest of honor at their 2001 ‘Millennium   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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