[Buddha-l] Victor and Victoria Trimondi

[Richard Hayes]

On Jul 19, 2012, at 2:54 AM, Margaret Gouin <m.gouin at tsd.ac.uk> wrote:

> A friend recently sent me an extract from a book called 'The Shadow of the Dalai Lama' by Victor and Victoria Trimondi.
> All I've been able to find out on-line is that this couple is of German origin; the websites I've found are either run by them or their supporters. They appear to make a speciality of 'debunking' Tibetan Buddhism. At least some of their books are available online in English but only a couple, in German, on Amazon.

I don't know about them at all but am curious. Do they debunk all of Tibetan Buddhism, or do they specialize in slandering the Dalai Lama? About fifteen years ago I encountered several people in newsgroup discussions who wrote vicious accusations about the Dalai Lama, which gave all appearances of being scholarly. As Alex has observed, these people were quite articulate and very clever at debate. There was no such thing as having a reasonable discussion with them. It turned out they were NKT people. 

At about the same time I recall getting entangled with a few PhD candidates in history, who were studying in Canadian universities. They were from China. Their agenda was to make Tibetans look like savages who really needed the Chinese to civilize them, and they loved to point out the parallels between Chinese benevolence toward the savage Tibetans and North American benevolence toward the savage native peoples. They quickly turned anyone who took them on into sausage. 

Just hearing about Victor and Victoria Trimondi is making by flak wounds from previous wars throb. 

Richard Hayes