Dalai Lama at centre of Buddhist brouhaha

Dalai Lama

BEIJING - China has accused the Dalai Lama of sabotage and provoking religious conflict after Tibetan monks stormed a monastery near Lhasa and attacked statues of a deity denounced by the exiled leader.

A group of 17 lamas burst into a chapel in Gandan Monastery and tore down two clay statues of protective deities, claiming they were "evil spirits", and began fighting with six worshippers at the scene in March, the Xinhua news agency reported.

The publication of a story about religious dissent in Tibet is a rare event in Chinese media. But the Beijing Government clearly wants to use the incident as a way of criticising the Dalai Lama, the most senior figure in Tibetan Buddhism, whom many Tibetans regard as a god-king.

The Dalai Lama, 70, fled the capital Lhasa in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule, nine years after communist troops entered the remote, Himalayan region.

Lhasa mayor Norbu Dunzhub yesterday accused the Dalai Lama of masterminding religious conflict.

"It is by no means an isolated and accidental event," he said. "At face value, it is an internal affair within a monastery, but on a fundamental level, it was provoked by the Dalai clique whose purpose is to arouse conflict between different sects of Tibetan Buddhism, thus sabotaging the unity of Tibet."

Police were mobilised to prevent crowds of Buddhists from going to the monastery.

There are more than 1700 places of worship and 46,000 Buddhist monks and nuns in Tibet.

At issue is a complex matter of doctrine between the Dalai Lama and the much smaller Dorje Shugden stream of his Gelugpa school of Tibetan Buddhism. The row has been going on for four centuries.

In the 1970s, the Dalai Lama warned his followers not to worship Shugden, saying it was detrimental to spiritual health and to the cause of the Tibetan people.

In 1996, the Dalai told his followers to reject the deity, calling it a divisive offshoot of Buddhism. Shugden supporters - Tibetan and foreign - say the Dalai Lama's ban is a violation of religious freedom.

Norbu said it was the Dalai Lama and his supporters, not the Chinese authorities, who were restricting religious freedom because of his hard line on the deity.

The Chinese Government has long condemned the Dalai Lama as a dangerous separatist who wants to declare independence for 2.7 million Tibetans.

Supporters of the Dalai Lama, who won the Nobel peace prize in 1989, insist he stopped calling for independence back in 1988, and is a moderate who preaches a "middle way, which seeks autonomy for Tibet within China".

- INDEPENDENT