The Dalai Lama: Priest and Politician
The mythology of the discovery of the divine child by the magi has been well told in
relation to the Dalai Lama and not only within the Tibetan community. Scorsese's film,
Kundun, underscores the point, adding to it the subsequent story of the young Dalai
Lama leading his people into exile, much as Jacob took his people down into Egypt.
In Kabbalah, Egypt represents the descent into materiality and the loss of memory of
man's spiritual origins. Happily, this did not happen to the Dalai Lama; his previous
twenty years of spiritual and philosophical training in Tibet ensured that he had a
steady basis of experience and faith on which to place the meaning of his exile.
He does, though, continually refer to the return to his Promised Land, that
mountain-locked country, Tibet, which is placed at the headwaters of Asia's largest
and most prized rivers. Whoever controls Asia's water inevitably controls Asia's
future life: a Buddhist inspired government with a respect for the interconnectedness
of all life might, in the long run, prove a better guardian than a Chinese Communist
government inspired by a very material dialecticism.
We are reminded of the biblical story of the four rivers which flow from Eden.
Kabbalistically, each of them is a source which waters a particular part of the
psyche. Where the soul is cut off from its source, deep mourning ensues and the Dalai
Lama, with Saturn in Pisces ninth placed in opposition to the Moon/Neptune conjunction,
is no stranger to mourning and suffering the depression which springs from the
separation from his Motherland.
There is no concept of the soul in Bhuddist philosophy, but the human condition
constantly refers to that point of confluence between experience of the outer world,
our psychological makeup and that sense of otherness which unites us all. This stage
in the development of consciousness we in the West call the soul.
Often the soulfulness expressed in mourning and depression is a recognition of the
separation we suffer when we cannot have material life fit our inner, idealised
picture of it. With Saturn placed in the conscious, other-directed ninth house, the
Dalai Lama is well placed to understand his people's suffering though the medium of
his own Piscean experience of it. Here is the priest who suffers with his people.
Crucial to an understanding of suffering as part of the Dalai Lama's life is the Kite
configuration in his birthchart, with the Moon/Neptune opposition to Saturn, slung
between the ninth Piscean and third Virgoan houses, though the cusps of both those
houses, Aquarius and Leo, ensure that the Dalai Lama retains a sense of both individual
and collective spiritual and intellectual development.
It is no surprise to find that he is a monk of the Gelug order, the most purely
philosophical in Tibetan Buddhism. The kite draws in the Sun on the Cancerian
Ascendant, but just in the twelfth house, and Jupiter in Scorpio fifth. All of these
represent the placement of the priest; equally, with the addition of the Cancer/Capricorn
Asc./Desc. Axis, all of them represent the politician. Together, they speak of exile
and mourning, interconnectedness and joy and, hopefully, the understanding that exile
can act as the hothouse for spiritual maturity.
Isobel Hickey once described the Saturn/Neptune aspects as the signature of the
practical idealist. In the Dalai Lama's chart, this is enhanced by the opposition's
house placement and sign - the involvement of Pisces and Virgo, both mystical signs,
within the ninth and third houses and their placements on the cusps of the tenth and
fourth houses. His experience of physical (Saturn), psychological (Moon) and spiritual
(Neptune) suffering are carried over very acutely into the roots of his being
(Virgo 4th house) and into his spiritual aspirations for himself and his perception of
world (Pisces 10th house).
With Pisces on the MC, he cannot avoid the archetype of the priest-politician being
projected into the world, even though his Cancerian Sun, just entering the 12th house,
might want to pull him back into periods of retreat and quiet meditation. Three
planets in Earth and a Capricorn Descendant ensure that he has enough practicality to
to put precepts into practice.
There is, however, a three-way pull in the chart. Practical idealism is strongly
emphasised; so is the need for retreat where he makes sense of the data he so
carefully and energetically gathers (Mercury in Gemini 12th trine Mars in Libra 4th).
But Saturn in ninth house Pisces further indicates that this is a man who longs to
travel, physically, emotionally and spiritually.
For him it is not an escape, but a necessity. Meeting up with foreign cultures
broadens the base of his own understanding of politics, people and spiritual systems,
at the same time that he delivers both his political and spiritual messages to the
world. It is part of his nature to express a deeply emotional benevolence towards
humankind and individuals (Jupiter in Scorpio 5th, trine Saturn, trine Sun, sextile
Moon/Neptune) while on his travels and openly imparting his messages. In many parts
of the world, the Dalai Lama is much loved and venerated in return.
This is not so in China, where he is hated and feared. Chinese Communism, with its
strong need to clamp down on religious expression in Tibet, on that "opium of the
masses", as Marx put it, views the Dalai Lama as a threat to the new, enlightened,
secular order it has imposed on the Tibetans. For the dogmatists among the Chinese,
the Tibetan religious leader's return to his native land would mean a return to the
feudal, politico-religious system which existed before his exile.
This is the fear of the shadow side of Saturn in ninth house Pisces, though it is not
the reality. Tibet, the Dalai Lama and China have moved on and modernised far too far
in the last forty years for that to happen.
China also picks up the personal shadow side of the Dalai Lama's chart in relation to
his Piscean Saturn; at one level, that massive country is the projection of his own
fears of the religious life.
Whether or not the Dalai Lama has struggled with this consciously is not known, but
he has publicly stated that there are times when he considers retiring. One of the
difficulties with the Tibetan system of mind training is that the children are chosen
and dedicated at a very young age to the religious life.
In one sense, they have little choice in the matter, though the Buddhist precepts of
re-incarnation, rebirth and karma would suggest that they do, though at a level beyond material life.
Kabbalists would agree with those precepts. In both traditions, self-realized masters
choose to come back to the world to help and aid suffering humanity in its struggle
to free itself from the wheel of rebirth.
Nevertheless, child lamas go through the same developmental patterns as all children;
they are trained to develop their latent conscious awareness and this takes time. The
higher Tibetan lamas are well aware of the need to train future religious leaders
from a very young age because they had failed with the sixth Dalai Lama.
Due to the politics operating between Tibetan monastic orders at the time, he was not chosen to
fill his post until the age of eighteen, after which time he became a poet as well as
something of a womaniser. He died in mysterious circumstances at a very young age,
though not until after his initiation as religious leader. All subsequent Dalai Lamas
started their training at a much younger age.
There are indications in the present Dalai Lama's chart, and in his life, that he,
too, had to struggle with some quite difficult personal characteristics in his early
years of training. The son of an angry and powerful father (Sun square Mars, square
Pluto), he also showed open displays of anger in his younger days.
This was the child who beat up his older brother on the journey from Taktser to Lhasa
just before his initiation as religious leader of Tibet. This was the young man who
gave his younger brother a severe bawling out and a box on the ears when, on a
delegation to China, the boy had pulled fish live from a fishpond and watched them
flop about on the grass, gasping for air. This was the man who let it be known in no
uncertain terms that he was mightily displeased when his older brothers disrobed as
lamas and married.
The indications are that he has learned, through the tests imposed by Buddhist
mind-training, to harness his somewhat wild energy and put it at the disposal of his
curious mind and into his service of the spiritual needs of others (Mars trine
Mercury, bi-quintile Saturn).
He has Pluto in the first house, in Cancer, never an easy placement for anyone, less
so in a spiritual leader when it squares his Mars. He may be well aware of the issues
of political power as an outspringing of the strength of his emotions, his strong
will and his sexuality. Celibacy is a pre-condition of life in the Gelug order to
which the Dalai Lama belongs, but there is a way that sexual libido can be channelled
in Buddhist training.
The Dalai Lama is familiar with the teachings relating to the higher tantras in the
Kalachakra mode of training. Some tantric trainings very deliberately call on the life
force inherent in the sexual libido to support spiritual development. This can be
worked through via a series of very detailed inner visualisations of the appropriate
deities and transmuted into a further refinement of consciousness and awareness; no
physical consort need be involved.
In some respects, this training, and consequent state of awareness, is similar to the
Kabbalistic notion of the unification of the Shekhinah, the Presence of God, with the
Godhead, as outlined in The Song of Solomon. We have no way of knowing whether the
Dalai Lama has personally worked with the tantric tradition in this form, nor need
we.
What is observable is that this is a man with an extremely incisive mind, whose
aspects to Mars indicate that he has the capacity for awareness of the positive and
negative issues connected with political power and who can, after a struggle, give
form and structure to his strong emotions in directing where that power is to be
applied. Strength of will and its application are second nature to both the priest
and the politician within him. That much we do know from his current words and deeds.
Four planets in Water and the Moon/Neptune opposition to Saturn indicate that he
probably struggled with the separation from his mother in his early years. He has
said that he felt very lonely in the first monastery to which he was sent. His older
brother reports that he cried for days when he first entered into the monastic life
and, later, often cried after his parents returned home from their infrequent visits
to him and his brothers.
The Dalai Lama has also said that, as a grown man, he was hurt to discover that he was
not his mother's favourite son. His first suffering of exile and loss, his separation
from his mother, is echoed in his later suffering in exile from Tibet. This is a Dalai
Lama who has experienced at first hand one of the tenets that underpin Buddhism - the
suffering of all sentient beings.
Yet he was the driving force behind recreating Tibetan communities, both religious
and secular, in India and, later, elsewhere. Tied emotionally to his Motherland and
strong sense of tradition, his powerfully creative Jupiter in the fifth and the trine
between Uranus and Venus, with Uranus also trining his Moon/Neptune, indicate a man
who can explore new ways of implementing those very spiritual values from which he
sprung, the pressure of exile forcing him to adapt and innovate.
Both traditionalist and moderniser, priest and politician, deeply emotional and
strongly intellectual, practical and an idealist, we have yet to see the Dalai Lama
emerge as a fully-fledged mystic. My Kabbalistic nose tells me that he is still in
practice, but he is not telling the outside world. My astrological instincts guide me
to the transit of Uranus over his Saturn in 2005 and 2006, the transit of Saturn over
his Moon/Neptune in 2007 and 2008 and the transit of Uranus over his MC in 2009 and
2010, by which time he will be seventy five.
Poignantly, by then, fifty of those years he will have spent in exile from his native
land. Hopefully, he will have reached an inner reconciliation with himself to the
point where all dualism, that inner sense of exile, the "going down into Egypt", ceases.
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