The Dalai Lama is Wrong

RISHON LEZION, Israel — Buddhism’s highest-ranking reli­gious fig­ure makes some con­tro­ver­sial state­ments:

The Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spir­i­tual and tem­po­ral leader, on Fri­day said sex spelt fleet­ing sat­is­fac­tion and trou­ble later, while chastity offered a bet­ter life and “more freedom.”

“Sex­ual pres­sure, sex­ual desire, actu­ally I think is short period sat­is­fac­tion and often, that leads to more com­pli­ca­tion,” the Dalai Lama told reporters in a Lagos hotel, speak­ing in Eng­lish with­out a translator…

Con­sid­ered a Bud­dhist Mas­ter exempt from the religion’s wheel of death and rein­car­na­tion, the Dalai Lama waxed elo­quent on the Bud­dhist credo of non-attachment.

“Too much attach­ment towards your chil­dren, towards your part­ner,” was “one of the obsta­cle or hin­drance of peace of mind,” he said.

When I was in high school and col­lege, I stud­ied many of the world’s reli­gions in my typ­i­cal, ado­les­cent, searching-for-the-truth phase. There are many tenents of Bud­dhism that I admire — chiefly, the moti­va­tion for con­stant, daily med­i­ta­tion and reflec­tion on one’s life, as well as the desire to reach for the eter­nal that resides out­side of the tem­po­ral, phys­i­cal world.

How­ever, Bud­dhism is also extremely self­ish. The entire goal is for the indi­vid­ual to reach Enlight­en­ment, and as the Dalai Lama him­self states, the method for doing so is to detach one’s self from the world and remove as much stress, desire, and anx­i­ety as possible.

Well, there are many things in the world that are worth car­ing about. The Dalai Lama states that “too much attach­ment towards your chil­dren… [is] one of the obsta­cle or hin­drance of peace of mind.” I am sorry, but I would not want to live in a world where peo­ple do not worry about their chil­dren. I am glad that my par­ents con­tact me when­ever there is a ter­ror­ist inci­dent here in Israel. If they did not do so, I would be extremely sad. Of course, the Dalai Lama would not know this because he has no chil­dren. (It is some­thing akin to Roman Catholic priests coun­sel­ing mar­ried couples.)

More­over, he states that “sex­ual pres­sure, sex­ual desire, actu­ally I think is short period sat­is­fac­tion and often, that leads to more com­pli­ca­tion.” Of course, dat­ing and mar­ried life can be stress­ful. But by aim­ing to remove all of the neg­a­tives from life, the Dalai Lama advo­cates the elim­i­na­tion of the pos­i­tives as well. Sex, love, and mar­riage — in the proper con­text — can be the most beau­ti­ful things in the world. (In mys­ti­cal Jew­ish thought, they are essen­tial for repair­ing a bro­ken world.) But, of course, the Dalai Lama does not know this because he has never been mar­ried. A cul­ture in which every­thing is neu­tral would be a world in which I would never want to live. In addi­tion, I find it hard to take this advice on remov­ing stress from a man who has lit­tle to worry about (except, per­haps, for Tibet). As a friend of mine in Boston once put it, “The Dalai Lama does not fly coach.”

Com­pe­ti­tion and stress are also impor­tant for soci­eties. Cap­i­tal­ism is one of the rea­sons that West­ern civ­i­liza­tion has cre­ated the high­est stan­dard of liv­ing the world has ever known. (Although, there are neg­a­tive sides to this.) If I owned a com­pany that employed peo­ple with strict, Bud­dhist men­tal­i­ties, I doubt that it would ever be suc­cess­ful. When com­pa­nies com­pete with each other, they will each try to make the best prod­uct and charge the low­est price — and the con­sumer wins.

Life con­tains its ups and downs, but that is not inher­ently good or evil; it is merely life. When one tries to change the nat­ural order of things, only bad things typ­i­cally result.