Godspeed, Dalai Lama, to Dharamsala

Dalai, the name given the head lama of the Yellow Hats by the Mongols, means “Sea,” which implies measureless profundity or at least incomparable wisdom of a lama, who is a “superior man.” Such a person should have been wise enough to foresee that his trek to Taiwan this time would cause us “inconveniences” that he professed to avert.

As a matter of fact, the Dalai Lama wrote President Ma Ying-jeou on learning that Typhoon Morakot had struck Taiwan, leaving hundreds of people dead and swamping almost a third of the island in floodwaters and mudslides. He didn't ask to come, but seven Democratic Progressive Party mayors and magistrates in hard-hit southern Taiwan did the asking for him.

The opposition party's local chief executives, led by Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu who had had a successful Chinese tour promoting the World Games that her city hosted, believed the Dalai Lama's visit was a clever trick to kill two birds with one stone to further weaken the weakened President Ma. They forced Ma to grant the Vajrayana Buddhist pope an entry visa. They were convinced Ma would be damned for denying the Dalai the visa and condemned by the Chinese, if the visa was granted. Moreover, they believed the prayer tour would help them win in local elections in December.

They bet their bottom dollar that Ma would refuse to let the Dalai come. To their surprise, however, Ma readily agreed to welcome the Dalai Lama in order just to boost his sagging approval ratings, which plummeted to a record low 16 percent at one point as the rescue and evacuation operations in Morakot's aftermath floundered.

Granted the visa, the Dalai Lama had to come. The one-time theocrat is globe-trotting to champion his Tibetan irredentism. His craving for restoring his papacy in Tibet — though the craving or tanha is the cause of human misery all Buddhists are taught to get rid of by the four Noble Truths that the Gautama Buddha revealed — may have tampered with his profound wisdom, compelling him to accept the politically motivated invitation to come for the publicly proclaimed “humanitarian and religious” reasons.

The inevitable result is that the Dalai isn't welcome as much as he was on his two previous tours of Taiwan. In fact, many people here did not welcome him. He was heckled by a few people who wanted him to go back to Dharamsala. Taoist and Buddhist adherents as well as Christian faithful do not think the prajna paramite masses he said were adequate or suitable for the flood victims, almost all of them Catholics. Buddhists in Taiwan are Mahayanists, not tantric Vajrayana followers. They, along with the Taoist majority, do not think tantric mantras and mudras would bring peace to the dead as well as the living. They are not pleased because they believe their priests can do a much better job than the Dalai, who could have stayed in Dharamsala and said as many masses as he pleased for the people of Taiwan.

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