CALVIN AND THE DALAI LAMA

Though  separated  in  its  origin  by  a  little  more  than a century —Gendun Drup, the first Dalai Lama (1391-1474) and Calvino (1509-1564)— and the actual characters by roughly half a millenium, both are present today through their followers.

And they represent spiritual attitudes and beliefs that —beyond their evident cultural differences and even opposed visions of the world and history and humanity’s place in them— do not share but the idea of trascendence and their conviction of its decissive influx on reality.

But nowadays they may be taken as tokens of different realities with one significant detail though: one of them pretends and aspires to impose on the other —and also on anyone not sharing their faith— their own rules and principles. Chatting a little, even superficially, with anyone supporting either of the two creeds shall promptly discover which one is the bully, even taking the term in its most spiritual of senses.

Both are entitled to the utmost respect, inasmuch as it be reciprocal.

The behaviour of christian churches considered as world institutions has traditionally been of despect towards other faiths in general, with some highly spiritual though rare exceptions, patronizing alien faithfuls as needing teaching and conversion to be saved.

Salvation is also mostly a christian concept not shared by all of the wonderfully rich panoply of faiths and creeds which men have chosen to believe in throughout known history.

So are we arrived to this situation in which the holy head of one of these faiths is condemned and anathematized for a gesture judged within the most strict norms and precepts of other faith and culture and within a context framed by today’s ideas of correctness in the closed cultural circle of those who judge and sentence him, circle that it is more than ever necessary to recall, it is not universal.

By the way, this convict happens to be an ostentatious enemy of China’s “Empire du Milieu”, already alert and disquiet in its endeavour to recover Taiwan under its domain and affirm itself as a unanimously recognized and honoured world power, at the same time that its moderation is dearly needed considering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the declared support the so called Western World is giving to the latter.

And this archenemy and victim of China’s communism and appropiation some seventy years ago, happens to dwell in India that has since offered him sanctuary. And India is the other world power (with China they sum up roughly two fifths of the population of the planet) whose support or at least not hostility is also needed.

And the christian world, ripped by questionings and accusations worth of a hot medieval Council only that they nowadays display themselves throughout any sort of communications media and distorsions plus a conception of the world and reality and human beings no deeper than that which a liquid crystal screen is able to provide.

And this humanity that has been capable of massive extermination of armenians, jews, gypsies, ukrainians (not now, under Stalin), kurds, uyghurs, rohingyas to name a selected few, is howling scandal at an old man publicly holding a child in his arms and asking him to touch his tongue with the child lips.

Where is the dark perversion, if not in the beholder’s eye?

Juan José Santander

In Madrid, after Navratri, during Ramadan, passed the Catholic and the Jewish Easter, on the Eve of the Ortodox one.

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