An Exhortation to the American Church Regarding the Washington, DC Visit of the Dalai Lama
July 6-16, 2011
“A blind man cannot guide a blind man can he? Will they both not fall into a pit?” (Luke 6:39)
By James C. Stephens
Monday, July 4, 2011
Day after tomorrow, an ancient tantric Buddhist ritual attended by 100,000 zealous Buddhist devotees of the Dalai Lama will be initiated within the gates of Washington, DC, the capital of the free world to which much of the world looks for inspiration.
The XIV Dalai Lama of Tibet and his Tantric shamans will perform ceremonies from July 6-16 which they believe will transform the designated area into the Kalachakra Palace initiating disciples into Tibet’s global Shambhala Empire and indoctrinating them into the mysteries of their kingdom including the prophecies of a Buddhist war against the followers of Mohammed, Abraham, Mani and Jesus, the evil snake religions according to their faith.
In 1970, I was a young naïve and idealistic student who began to practice Buddhism. For fourteen years, I was radically committed to establishing Buddhism in America. During that time, I rose in the leadership ranks of the youth division within the Beverly Hills chapter of the No. 1 Headquarters of a Japanese Buddhist Sect, known at the time as Nichiren Shoshu Soka Gakkai. We were as close to the center of the radical student movement as you could possibly get. During my college days, I converted over 54 Americans into Buddhism and was actively involved in propagating Buddhism seven days a week. I was a member of the TCD and later the Soka Group dedicated to protecting the President and General Director, as well as the members of the organization. I also was a member of Daisaku Ikeda’s pride and joy, The Brass Band weekly reciting late President’s Toda’s Precepts for Youth which included the determination “to march over the bodies of your taiten (fallen away) members.” After many study exams, I graduated the Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist Study Academy.
However, my objective for this particular blog is not to speak of my 14 year pilgrimage as a radical Buddhist to the Christian faith. My desire presently is to disclose my credentials as a Buddhist insider so that you know where I’m coming from. I stand as a Christian who was formerly an American Buddhist who does sincerely repent of my complicity as a student leader who conscientiously helped establish the foundation for the present explosion of Buddhism in America. A faith I have come to believe is an idolatrous and dangerous path that leads to eternal death and damnation.
I bear no malice towards Buddhists. Nonetheless, I stand as a witness against the Buddhist system that keeps them in bondage and against those Christians from various streams that seem to believe that you can incorporate Buddhist elements of meditation into our Christian praxis.
In 1984, my Buddhist wife and I were both saved after an intense pilgrimage which earnestly began after the Jonestown massacre which coincided at around the same time as San Francisco Mayor Diane Feinstein opened the Golden Gate to the relatively unknown god-king of Tibet. Shortly after she awarded the Key to the City of San Francisco to the Dalai Lama, Mayor Tom Bradley in Los Angeles followed suit.
As a Buddhist, I had worked as a summer intern for Mayor Bradley’s Office and our Japanese American Buddhist sect already had a working history with the Mayoral office. Prior to Bradley’s election, we performed as a Brass Band for LA Mayor Sam Yorty at the LA County Museum of Art and also dressed up in Santa Claus uniforms to play Christmas Carols for various institutions caring for underprivileged children.
Fast Forward to 2011. Over the last several years, it came to my attention that a number of my old Buddhist compatriots have passed away, while some of my members have risen in leadership. One of my members, Danny Nagashima is now the General Director of the Soka Gakkai Buddhist sect in America comprised by some 500,000 members.
Over the years, I have shared my faith with many of the members including Danny during one of the outreaches we ventured on at the Anaheim Convention Center. In 1989, we first began reaching out to Tibetan Buddhists when the XIV Dalai Lama came to Los Angeles to conduct the Kalachakra Ceremony in Santa Monica, California. At that time, there were no security stations, no apparent secret service. I heard him speak at the Shrine Auditorium across the street from the University of Southern California. It was the first time I’d heard him. As a former Buddhist leader, I understood his well developed peace rhetoric and followed his broken Indian English. I was not taken by his message. However, I could understand how Americans who had not been exposed to Eastern religion could be taken in by his charismatic personality and message of peace. Indeed “distance lends enchantment to the view.” He is a masterful communicator and like a good guest did not at the time offend his hosts.
But, he has an agenda and unbeknownst to me at the time, was funded by the CIA and paid an annual stipend of $100,000 as part of its special PsyOps (Psychological Operations) warfare against Communist China which was recently disclosed through documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and posted on Shugden Dorje’s website, an adversarial Tibetan sect opposed by the Dalai Lama. At the time, President Kennedy’s annual salary was $25,000.
Our government has long been allied with the Dalai Lama in a shadow war with China providing him open doors into innumerable university arenas and into our hallowed halls of government.
So why is their silence on the Hill? In the press? More particularly, why little critical reflection? Can we blame it on our naiveté about foreign affairs? A Shangri-La Enchantment? Are the clever manipulations of the Dalai Lama alone to blame? Frankly, he’s doing exactly as he has been trained to do for centuries by the Tibetan Buddhist doctrine of upaya, or “skillful means” (roughly the Tibetan equivalent to the West’s Machiavellian principles).
Empires come and go. We are young, as many civilizations go. We’ve grown fat, like Jeshrun in the Old Testament and forgotten God who enabled us to become a great nation. We’ve grown greedy, lazy in our thinking, watered down our founding values. We’ve forgotten our Fathers and Mothers. We’ve forgotten to think critically.
Although all has not been lost, we are at a juncture requiring a critical re-examination of our foundations. If we cross this pluralist “Rubicon” without engaging in a Great Debate, many fear that the speed of our decline as a nation will only accelerate.
I personally do not savor the study of Buddhism as I did in my days as a young Buddhist radical. I would much rather be delving deeper into the study of God’s Holy Scriptures which have given me so much comfort and joy. At the same time, I see the danger as only a physician who sees the signs of a degenerative disease. I have seen many Christians, missionaries and academics included who have been enamoured by Buddhism. Some have fallen. By God’s grace, I have seen through years of assiduous Buddhist practice that “There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end leads to death.” I’ve seen too many of my Buddhist friends die lately. Friends I loved dearly.
Let’s pray that out of the 100,000 initiates attending the Kalachakra Ceremony in Washington, DC that many will come to the realization as I did, that we cannot save ourselves through following the Buddha. Even the Dalai Lama has said, “I am not perfect.” And yet, we follow One who is the Complete Perfection. One who has no sin in His mouth. No sin in His heart. One that provided the Perfect Sacrifice on our behalf. Yeshua Ha’Moshiach.
Those who truly profess faith in Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Yeshua Ha’Moshiach are not on trial here. However, those who profess faith and naively think they can have it both ways, are standing on a precipice.
Jesus said, “Why do you call Me, Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say? Everyone who comes to Me, and hears My words, and acts upon them, I will show you whom he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid a foundation upon the rock; and when a flood rose, the torrent burst against that house could not shake it, because it had been well built.
But the one who has heard, and has not acted accordingly, is like a man who built a house upon the ground without any foundation; and the torrent burst against it and immediately it collapsed and the ruin of that house was great.” (Luke 6:46-49).
Our nation is at risk. While I have great faith in YHWH, I also believe that His judgments are righteous altogether and true. I have heard politicians of late confess that their personal morals and values are not of account when considering same sex marriage. Rather, they believe that it behooves them to follow the will of the people. This is a grievous mistake they make.
America was not founded as a democracy, but a Republic whose “scheme of representation takes place” in order “to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens” “whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations” of a cabal of a few individuals or the tyranny of the majority rule. “Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves (pure democracy), convened for the purpose.” (http://lexrex.com/enlightened/Federalist/fed10.htm paraphrased Federalist Paper #10).
On May 9, 2011, the Dalai Lama was awarded the Hart Foundation Award for Global Leadership at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. At the end of his acceptance speech before a select crowd of 2,500 including former US President George W. Bush and his wife Laura, he made a bold statement which he repeated three times. “I am a Marxist and proud to say it in a capitalist country.” Immediately, the entire crowd applauded. There was no explanation, no refinement. Pure and simple, “I’m a Marxist.” Almost immediately, the emcee for the event, stood up and abruptly, but tactfully interrupted saying, “We promised to get all the students back to class before the end of the day, so we want to thank the Dalai Lama for speaking today. Thank you very much.”
In The American Hour: A Time of Reckoning and the Once and Future Role of Faith by Os Guiness, he asked, “Has some more acceptable source of faith taken their (Judaeo-Christianity’s) place or is no faith necessary now because Americanism has assumed a religious character of its own and become the unspoken religion of the American people?”
Denis Brogan wrote that if God was to be replaced in American experience, “what was to replace Him? Could anything replace Him but ‘Democracy” made into an object of worship, or business, or success! Nobody knew; nobody knows yet.”
I recall speaking to Gideon, the student leader of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students in Hong Kong in 1995 as he faced the 1997 Hong Kong Handover. I asked him, “Do you fear persecution?”
His response was unexpected, “No. Persecution is the sign of a healthy church. What I fear is materialism.”
America’s days as a proud materialistic peacock are over. It is something we must come to terms with. We cannot however, just bury our heads in the sand like the ostrich who tramples her young. We also cannot replace our faith with the goddess of democracy which the Dalai Lama so often refers to. What is democracy without faith in God?
Guiness wonders if “the result, at best, is a confused and undiscriminating America that in area after area has exchanged excellence for eclecticism, serious questing for truth for an endless stockpiling of uncertain perspectives.”
His conclusion? As political scientist Glenn Tinder has noted, “A nation that does not dare to make moral judgments is surely living under the shadow of nihilism.”
We are facing “a crisis of cultural authority.” Guiness contends that “every generation must cultivate and guard the sources of its cultural authority because no free republic is more than two or three generations away from the possibility of such a decline.”
He suggests that “American self-reliance without God cannot be sufficient without God…A realistic view of history and American society suggests that not even the United States can defy gravity. Every great nation is also a nation within time and under the sentence of death.”
G.K. Chesterton called America’s “ultimate test”—a crisis of reality. “Men will more and more realize that there is no meaning in democracy if there is no meaning in anything; and that there is no meaning in anything if the universe has not a centre of significance and an authority that is the author of our rights.” Above all, it points beyond itself toward the biblical insistence on the empty nothingness of idols and on the glory (or weight) of God as the only “real reality: in all the universe.”
Guiness argues, “Respecting the right to believe anything is a matter of freedom of conscience; believing anything anyone believes is right is plain stupidity.”
The Williamsburg Charter seems to have at least provided the ground rules for discussion, dialogue and debate in our pluralistic society. It states,
“The right to argue for any public policy is a fundamental right for every citizen; respecting that right is a fundamental responsibility for all other citizens. When any view is expressed, all must uphold as constitutionally protected its advocates rights to express it. But others are free to challenge that view as politically pernicious, philosophically false, ethically evil, theologically idolatrous, or simply absurd, as the case may seem to be. Unless this tension between peace and truth is respected, civility cannot be sustained.”
The civil public square does not aim at the harmony promulgated by Confucian ideals, but one of mutual respect, wherein each faith may argue its ideals without threat of force. Tragically, in our present society, our government seems to be supporting the Dalai Lama’s agenda and fiscally acting as his herald, which is contrary to the separation of Church and State. The playing field is not even.
So “what happens when the body politic no longer lives up to the Republic’s founding standards?” Senate Chaplain Barry Black said something towards the end of his article that struck me as I’ve wrestled with the implications of those who profess Marxism as an ideology which has historically ended up persecuting anyone who practices a religion contrary to its tenets.
He said, “I’ll take a rough Elijah who’s looking about the political scene and saying: “God, now they’re saying that Baal is the one who sends the rain. Show Yourself strong. Stand up and do something.
Chaplain Black continued, “James 5 says, “One man, just like us, shut up the heavens for three-and-one-half years.” That’s what we need in our pulpits. That’s what we need in our churches. That’s what we need in our legislative and executive branch.”
Guiness addresses the need for that one who stands in the gap. “For the person who has faced the challenge of the hour, evasion is out of the question. If the task of the mind is to understand, and the task of the understanding is to help us engage with reality, then the man or woman who understands must set about reconciling ideas and reality.”
“We should not take the word gap casually.” The LORD is looking for His people to stand in the gap. “As far as the human mind can see, only the presence of a person can break the chain of uninterrupted forces. Only because of us is there an interval in the ceaseless continuum of time. Only if we stand is there a space. Only as we fight is it held open. Only when we prevail can we break up the flow of history and direct its course with human significance. In short, the present moment is a gap in time that we work to shape even as it works to shape us. This means that, for human beings, time and history are always a battlefield and never a home.”
That’s who we need in our nation now. Gatekeepers standing in the gap in every arena of society. Earnestly, contending for the faith delivered to the saints.” That was my heart cry in the middle of the night when I wrote Trumpeter’s Lament. That’s been my call in the Red Alert on the Kalachakra Ceremony about to be conducted in Washington, DC. http://www.worldviews101.com/.
If there was ever a moment in time when the nation needs a dissenting prophetic voice, it’s now.
As “knights of faith” we must always keep our eyes fixed on the Author and Finisher of our faith, Yeshua Ha’Moshiach, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, King of Kings, our Messiah and Master.
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