c. 1996 Religion News Service

DHARAMSALA, India (RNS)-When the Dalai Lama seeks insights into the future, he consults his oracle, a medium who wears an elaborate costume and headpiece that together weigh more than 100 pounds. The use of oracles, on the face of it, would appear to show that the mystical side of Tibetan Buddhism still flourishes.

But the Dalai Lama’s oracle, who lives in this Himalayan foothill town, is one of the few surviving relics of a mystical tradition of occult and magic that had been a major facet of Tibetan Buddhism for hundreds of years. A quiet revolution now taking place has led to major reforms in the nature of Tibetan Buddhism, the role it accords Buddhist nuns, Buddhist burial practices, and an end to the emphasis on the supernatural.

For centuries, an aura of mystery and wonder permeated Tibet, a Buddhist holy land, with its”Lamaist Rome”in Lhasa, whose borders were sealed and guarded to prevent foreigners from entering.

When the Chinese annexed Tibet in 1951, they extinguished a theocracy that had existed since Buddhism began there more than 1,300 years ago. If the power of the lamas was destroyed, the 110,000 Tibetans who followed the Dalai Lama into exile have continued to exert a powerful influence abroad.

The Dalai Lama, from his northern Indian base in Dharamsala (known as”mini-Lhasa”), is respected around the world as an authority of Tibetan Buddhism. By contrast, the religious heads who remained in Tibet lost their influence in the eyes of the West-seen as no more than figureheads in Chinese-organized committees.

As such, the influence of Tibetan Buddhism inevitably tilted to India, where the Dalai Lama has lived at Dharamsala for more than 35 years. Tibetan prayer flags flutter from buildings, and prayer wheels dominate the center of the town. His pronouncements carry great authority, and every year Westerners, including movie stars such as Richard Gere, flock to north India to hear the Dalai Lama’s discourses on religion.

For this reason, experts have followed with keen interest the changes taking place in Tibetan Buddhism within the exiled community in India. Those changes include a waning in influence for the mystical side of the religion.”A reformation in Tibetan Buddhism has been taking place in the last 30 years,”said Dawa Norbu, a professor in the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.”The lamas had wielded similar power to the cardinals and bishops in medieval Europe. But, as China said, Tibet got left behind with the march of modern world history,”said Norbu, a Tibetan exile himself.”In an age of science, where the emphasis is on Western rationality, it was not possible for the religion to keep to its old ways.” The mystical side of Tibetan Buddhism has gradually been phased out.”Magic used to happen, and there were Dalai Lamas in the past said to have occult powers; but the current Dalai Lama doesn’t involve himself with that,”said Tenzin Topgyal, deputy secretary of the Department of Religion and Culture of the Central Tibetan Administration of the Dalai Lama.”The Dalai Lama does not believe that talk of the supernatural or magic is a good way of promoting Buddhism. Magic powers can be used to harm others. Buddhism is against that.” He said other changes in tradition among the exiled community include burial practices.”In Tibet, when someone dies, the custom is to leave the body as food for vultures and other birds. But here in India we don’t follow that practice, and instead burn the body. We changed our custom to respect local feelings.” The reformation is also bringing about an emancipation for women, a concept unheard of in tradition-bound Tibet. Ani Gomchen, 89, the oldest Buddhist nun in Dharamsala, fled from Tibet after the Chinese invaded in 1949. Dressed in an ochre robe, her head shaved, she sipped buttered tea and recalled her former homeland as a place where”women always had to work. There was no time for anything else.” Gomchen is too old to share in the changes, but hundreds of other nuns who fled Tibet are part of a new education experiment in Dharamsala. In 1991, 65 Buddhist nuns fled as a group from Tibet, making the dangerous winter crossing along narrow passes in the Himalayas. Arriving in India with frostbite and snow-blindness, they have become part of the genesis of a pioneering project that aims to give them the educational opportunities Gomchen never had.

The Tibetan Nuns’ Project, which is receiving much of its funding from America, is creating housing for the exiled nuns, but has also gone further. An institute of dialectics has been established for the nuns where highly ritualistic debates are interspersed with hand clapping. It is being run along the lines of philosophic dialectics held by monks in monasteries.”What is taking place is revolutionary,”said Philippa Russell, a British Buddhist who helped set up the project.”The older male Tibetan community here doesn’t approve, but everyone is watching with interest. The nuns are also getting an advanced education, with a modern curriculum with modern subjects. This is pioneering work encouraging the nuns to develop mentally.”(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL TRIM TO END)

Lobsang Dechen, a nun who is a guide for the project, said the Dalai Lama had personally approved the idea that the nuns should be intellectually challenged.

Norbu said the Dalai Lama has been able to carry out the changes because of his enormous charisma.”The Dalai Lama used to say that there are too many rituals and the religion is too bound up with monasteries and doing too much inessential to Buddhist teachings,”he said.”Instead, he focused on the religion’s kind-hearted message of compassion.”

MJP END MURPHY