Dharma smugglers, karma programmers

More about Lama Bidiya Dandaron and his “Black Notebook”

Recently, Gorky published an article by Alexey Strizhov dedicated to the Buryat lama Bidiya Dandaron and his book “The Black Notebook,” which, among other things, sets out the concept of “social karma.” This article came across to an independent researcher of eastern spiritual systems, Mikhail Matrekhin, who decided not so much to argue as to supplement the observations of his colleague on contemplating the black rocks of the Dharma.

All of us, since February 24, 2022, have found ourselves in the face of advancing barbarity, violence and lies. In this situation, it is extremely important to preserve at least the remnants of culture and support the values ​​of humanism - including for the sake of the future of Russia. Therefore, the editors of Gorky will continue to talk about books, reminding our readers that there is still a place for thought and fiction in the world.

Disgust for everything that is detached from life and disappears into sounds is the fundamental property of people who have turned into machines, into robots. That’s why they can be controlled by any mediocrity, any fool.

B. D. Dandaron. Black notebook

A person’s life is a series of actions that he performs in a certain environment. When a person dies, actions continue to live, becoming partly other people, and partly the objective environment.

Approximately this idea underlies the Buddhist theory of reincarnation, according to which no one is actually reincarnated: simply after the death of a person as an active agent and the disintegration of his consciousness, the total sum of his actions (“karma”) forms new agents in a new environment who make new choices.

In popular speech, this thought takes the form: “life is a series of unknowingly mischievous things,” which pessimistically emphasizes the decisive role of fundamental ignorance in this entire process, and the focus of the statement shifts to the area of ​​epistemology. After all, “ignorance” (that is, “ignorance”, avidyā ) is not only a lack of knowledge about what consequences specific actions will lead to in the future and what past actions determine the present, but also a significant limitation on doing at least some meaningful choice and generally be an autonomous agent creating his own will.

All the depth and tragicomic nature of this concept was felt best of all in Russian literature by Daniil Kharms in the short story “Connection”:

Philosopher!

1. I am writing to you in response to your letter, which you are going to write to me in response to my letter, which I wrote to you.

2. One violinist bought himself a magnet and took it home. On the way, hooligans attacked the violinist and knocked off his hat. The wind picked up the hat and carried it down the street.

3. The violinist put the magnet on the ground and ran for his hat. The cap fell into a puddle of nitric acid and decayed there.

4. Meanwhile, the hooligans grabbed the magnet and disappeared.

5. The violinist returned home without a coat and hat, because the hat had rotted in nitric acid, and the violinist, upset by the loss of his hat, forgot his coat on the tram.

6. The conductor of that tram took the coat to a flea market and exchanged it there for sour cream, cereal and tomatoes.

7. The conductor’s father-in-law ate too many tomatoes and died. The corpse of the conductor's father-in-law was placed in the mortuary, but then they mixed it up and instead of the conductor's father-in-law they buried an old woman.

8. A white pillar was placed on the old woman’s grave with the inscription: “Anton Sergeevich Kondratiev.”

9. After eleven years, this pillar was eaten away by worms, and it fell. And the cemetery watchman sawed this pillar into four parts and burned it in his stove. And the cemetery watchman’s wife cooked cauliflower soup on this fire.

10. But when the soup was ready, a fly fell from the wall directly into the pan with this soup. The soup was given to the beggar Timofey.

11. The beggar Timofey ate soup and told the beggar Nikolai about the kindness of the cemetery watchman.

12. The next day, the beggar Nikolai came to the cemetery watchman and began to ask for alms. But the cemetery watchman did not give anything to Nikolai and drove him away.

13. The beggar Nikolai became very angry and set fire to the cemetery watchman’s house.

14. The fire spread from the house to the church, and the church burned down.

15. A lengthy investigation was carried out, but the cause of the fire could not be established.

16. A club was built on the site where the church was, and on the opening day of the club they held a concert, at which a violinist performed, who lost his coat fourteen years ago.

17. And among the listeners sat the son of one of those hooligans who knocked the hat off this violinist fourteen years ago.

18. After the concert they went home in the same tram. But on the tram that was following them, the driver was the same conductor who had once sold a violinist’s coat at a flea market.

19. And so they are driving late at night through the city: in front are the violinist and the son of a hooligan, and behind them is the carriage driver, a former conductor.

20. They travel and do not know what the connection is between them, and they will not find out until their death.

Such a deep insight into the essence of the concept of karma is not surprising, since Kharms was a lover of Buddhist metaphysics and regularly visited the “Buddhist pagoda” until he was repressed after the lamas:

“Kharms, being Orthodox, was very interested in Buddhism. This largely came from his father Ivan Pavlovich Yuvachev, who had a small collection of Buddhist icons, which after his death was transferred to the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism in the Kazan Cathedral.

According to Marina Malich, in Kharms’s room there hung the famous Buddhist mantra “Om mani padme hum,” which he perceived as a “holy and very powerful spell.” In addition, he had many books on Buddhism, which he apparently perceived as an important source of occult knowledge along with Kabbalah. (A. A. Kobrinsky. “Daniil Kharms”)

Why did Dandaron go West?

The story of Bidiya Dandaron is not very well known to the general public, both in the former USSR and in the West. This story, meanwhile, is full of fascinating details that would be enough for several books and films.

It all started with the creation in April 1919 of the theocratic Buddhist state “Kodunai erhij balgasan” on the territory of Buryatia, which was supposed to become the second Tibet, but did not. To resist both the Red Army and the White Guard, the Buryat Balagat did not have sufficient political will (which is usually expressed in military resources to carry out coordinated violence).

The unfulfilled Balagat theocracy had a leader - the Buryat yogi Lubsan-Sandan Tsydenov, a bright and controversial personality . After Tsydenov was detained by the OGPU in 1921, exiled to Novo-Nikolaevsk and his imminent death, the remaining Balagat enthroned the young Bidiya Dandaron as their spiritual leader.

Shortly before his last arrest, Tsydenov managed to recognize this boy, the son of his closest assistant, as the rebirth of Jayag Lama, the abbot of a Tibetan monastery, who was interested in bringing Buddhism to the West, repeatedly visited the territory of Buryatia and became Tsydenov’s teacher. The logic of this desire of Jayag Lama suggested to yogi Tsydenov that the son Bidiya, born to his associate Dorzhe Badmaev, was the one who would continue the work of both Jayag Lama and Tsydenov himself.

After Tsydenov’s death, the young Soviet government quickly resolved the Balagat issue, but young Bidiya Dandaron constantly remembered his destiny. And how can one not remember: at school in his native Kizhinga he was constantly bullied - they called him “heir” and beat him. Dandaron’s family eventually had to move first to Kyakhta, and then the grown-up Dandaron went to study in Leningrad. He only managed to enroll in the Faculty of Aviation Instrumentation, but Bidiya attended lectures at the Oriental Faculty of Leningrad State University, communicated with the Buryat diaspora and Russian orientalists. It is possible that Dandaron could have met Kharms briefly - quite in the spirit of the above-mentioned story.

When the dull and strict pendulum of souls began to swing - the flywheel of Stalin's repressions - a denunciation was received against Dandaron. Young Bidiya was convicted of “conducting active counter-revolutionary nationalist work under the slogan of uniting the yellow races in order to prepare an armed struggle against Soviet power, separating the Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic from the USSR and creating a unified state of the Mongolian races, recruiting students in military and civilian universities youth into the cells of the underground pan-Mongolian nationalist party."

Streaming service suffering

Dandaron was sent to a camp for ten years, and the fellow countrymen who reported him were given almost the same terms. Here I would like to note another important point from the Buddhist theory of karma: the connection of individuals through action is more important than the individuals themselves. “Karmic retribution” has nothing to do with justice, just as the water cycle in nature or the law of conservation of energy has nothing to do with “justice.” First of all, it is the action that unites individuals into a system of relationships that is important. Lifetime retribution within this system is not inevitable, the executioner can die peacefully in old age in the circle of his loving family - and completely different consciousnesses will have to deal with the consequences of his actions, not knowing why karmic streaming based on the executioner’s tag cloud generates bloody content for them.

Executioners and victims can still change places during life, and then again - and this will continue until someone breaks this connection. How the executioners of Stalin's time became victims of the web of connections they wove is known, but as long as this web itself exists, more and more victims will fall into it, to whom more and more new executioners will come. Nothing personal - just a functional script in which there will always be actors to fill vacant positions.

It is precisely as such a self-fulfilling metascript that the mechanism of collective karma works, which Dandaron will write about in the “Black Notebook” during his third imprisonment: if the appropriate conditions are created, then the person who gets to play the required role is almost unimportant. The role of a dictator can simply be played worse or better, but the individual in history does not play a fundamental role (but random people do not become dictators). It is not the details that are important, but the architecture of the system itself. There is only one clarification on this matter, which allows us to break the script and is associated with the concept of free will.

Freedom for prisoners

“Free will” is a funny tautology, since the word “will” is synonymous with the word “freedom.” For the most part, human consciousness is so determined that it has almost no opportunity to perform truly independent actions that are not determined by subroutines of the psyche. As another lover of Buddhism (and poodles) Arthur Schopenhauer wrote on this topic, “man can do what he wishes, but he cannot will what he wishes.”

Therefore, the mechanism of collective karma described by Dandaron assumes the cumulative result of the complex interaction of millions of people connected by common ties, each of whom moves almost mechanically in accordance with a variety of internal algorithms. The general application of all multidirectional somnambulistic forces gives a single vector, which is collective karma. According to Buddhism, the entire set of karmic impulses and scripts is the content of one of the five aggregates in the structure of an individual, the aggregate of will, which determines consciousness.

In Buddhist soteriology, there is one general technique for gaining autonomy from prescribed scripts and turning consciousness back to a position controlled by the will - noticing in time the launch of an algorithm in one’s behavior, stopping it, reprogramming it. The first step in this process is refusing to act on an impulse and then analyzing that impulse. It is precisely the methods of analyzing mental processes and the skills of creating new volitional algorithms of behavior in a briefly opening window of freedom that are the main asset of the psychotechniques of Buddhism.

Bidiya Dandaron had the opportunity to truly master them during his second imprisonment in 1949 in the Bratsk ITL. Sent to the camp under the “people's” article of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR 58-10, Dandaron spends his time there together with a whole team of lamas of the Mongol monastery, captured after the defeat of the Kwantung Army, as well as with SA Gruppenführer Rigel, Polish journalist Woldemar Kokoschka and the secretary of the Kalinin regional committee, whose name history is silent.

As a result of the activities of this prison Buddhist group, Dandaron creates the manuscript “Neo-Buddhism”, which Kokoschka (the first to be released) then takes out of the camp, in the spirit of the “Diamond Hand”, hiding the sheets under bandages on his deliberately wounded hand. The manuscript, published in the West, according to reports from Dandaron’s students, returned to the author years later through monks from Sri Lanka, who allegedly presented this book to the university during their visit to the Buryat Institute of Social Sciences. A later version of the text was published under the title “Thoughts of a Buddhist.”

But that will come later, but for now in the camp Dandaron and the lamas give lectures on Buddhism to Europeans, and they themselves listen to lectures on the history of European philosophy. In particular, Dandaron re-appropriates Spengler's ideas: The Decline of Europe will significantly influence his Black Notebook. In general, the post-war Stalinist camp, full of repressed intelligentsia, becomes another university for Dandaron.

As Dandaron’s student, philosopher Alexander Pyatigorsky, reported , “remembering the camp, Dandaron often repeated that it was very useful for a Buddhist wandering from birth to birth to be born in Russia. And laughing, he added: “Notice that I say “Buddhist”, not “Buddhists” - this is a very significant amendment . ”

To the west, towards sunset

In 1956, Dandaron was released. He is rehabilitated, he meets Yuri Roerich, receives patronage in oriental studies, and the first European students begin to gravitate towards him. Thus, a circle is formed around Dandaron, studying Buddhist tantra, which is traditionally transmitted in secret. Secrets require silence, so the group moves to Ulan-Ude, where Dandaron finally got a job related to Buddhism. Here he initiates students into the complex philosophies and controversial methods of tantra. Ambiguous in what sense? Firstly, methods for reprogramming and transgression are individual for each person. Secondly, they often have asocial symbolism, which is not surprising for methods that are supposed to tear the cog person out of the mechanism of collective action and give him partial autonomy in return.

Therefore, the authorities would have every reason to stop the activities of the Dandaron circle if identified, since in all respects it could be considered a destructive religious group. To a partial observer, Dandaron as a teacher could indeed look no less dubious than some Aleister Crowley. And if religious life in the USSR as a whole required secrecy, then tantric religious life even more so. Just one tantric thangka depicting angry tantric deities in copulation and holding bowls filled with blood from skulls in their hands would be quite enough to be accused of religious obscurantism.

Whether due to conspiracy or something else, the Dandaron community existed for about seven years. It included many people who later became leading Buddhist scholars, translators and specialists in Buddhism: Andrei Donets, Linnart Mäll, Sergei Lepekhov, Farida Malikova, as well as the aforementioned Alexander Pyatigorsky.

Everything was going well enough until the students of Dandaron themselves began to “recondition” those around them. The main student, Alexander Zheleznov, attracted the attention of the state Leviathan. First, he began to carry out shock tests on potential candidates for joining the inner circle of Dandaronites:

“The last student of Bidiya Dandarovic was the Vilnius psychologist Antanas Danelius. On one of the first nights after arriving in Buryatia, Zheleznov and Myall gave Antanas an intense interrogation. At the same time, they themselves acted as KGB workers surrounding the Buddhist Teacher, and pretended that, knowing everything about Antanas, they were recruiting him. Zheleznov invented this provocation, and Myall gladly played along with him.” (V. M. Montlevich. Materials for the biography of Dandaron)

Such games in the scenario of the punitive state machine could not bring any good. During the next prank, Zheleznov and Myall went to “reason” with Peter Dambadarzhaev, a breakaway student of Dandaron, and started a fight with him. Dambadarzhaev's wife wrote a statement to the police, and the state's attention finally turned to Dandaron's group.

In 1972, a case was opened under Article No. 227 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (“Encroachment on the personality and rights of citizens under the guise of performing religious rituals”). All responsibility for the overly autonomous students fell on Dandaron. Interestingly, according to Buddhist scholar Andrei Terentyev, Dandaron was arrested following a complaint from a graduate student who accused him of performing “sexual rituals.”

At one time, graduate student Badmaeva was responsible for the public fund of the Dandaronites. During the investigation, she was subjected to hours of interrogation, and she eventually became a witness, but so unconvincingly that the accusations of “sexual mysticism” fell apart in court.

It is likely that anonymous denunciations against Dandaron’s group accumulated in the competent authorities for years, until they were finally given action: just recently, one such anonymous report on Dandaron for 1968 was discovered in a personal archive in Buryatia, which for some reason was not sent to purpose.

The denunciation campaign in the local press took place in the best traditions :

“The lamping Dandaron developed his criminal activity not only in Ulan-Ude, in Kingin, but also at the invitation of members of the group began to travel to Moscow, Leningrad, and Tartu. There he was completely dressed up, losing all shame (do what you want - who will know?), Pose a lama, focused as he wanted. After the “Sogshod”, as a rule, a booze lasted for several days. Not only drinking were organized, but dirty orgies were also arranged.

If you carefully look at the members of the Dandaron group, you can see that they all stand each other, dubious, suspicious personalities. They have neither conscience nor honor, they forgot their name and pride, have no idea about their homeland, their relatives, real tramps chasing a long ruble and capable of anything for the sake of money.

In fact, they do not believe in any Buddhism, but cover their dark things with religion. This group was formed from criminals. They deservedly ended up in the courtroom, because they were students of Dandaron, and became witnesses. ” (Translation of the article by M. Bulagaev “Bidia Dandaron and its Sogshod” from the newspaper “Buryaad Unen” of January 18, 1973)

“They pulled cynicism with each other. They could humiliate, insult, abuse, but at the same time wear a mask of respectableness. Dandaron became a criminal criminal, and played the role of an innocent sufferer in court. His minions played along with him.

Pyupishev, Aranov, Myall - people obliged to the state higher education openly demonstrated in court a disrespect for the laws by which our society lives. They justified the crime.

It was painful to realize that you were facing people who have taken advantage of the benefits of Soviet democracy, and now they pay for all the evil ingratitude.

Silver of gray hair we are used to counting the sign of honor. Dandaron melted him into dirty rubles. I drank rubles. The court verdict became a hangover. Heavy but fair.

Justice also demands to ask why such a fraudster and speculator for a long time was considered a researcher at the Institute of Public Sciences of the Buryat branch. ” (The feuilleton A. Subbotin “Conscience of Propia. About Dandaron and its“ Group ”” from the newspaper “Pravda Buryatia” of January 21, 1973)

By the sentence of the court, four students “only” were sent for forced psychiatric treatment, the rest were fired from the places of work with wolf tickets, but Dandaron was enclosed for the third time to the camp, from which he no longer left.

Lotus of the world

In his last conclusion, Dandaron wrote the Black Notebook as a result of his thoughts on socio-philosophical issues. In part, this work is echoing with the “rose of the world” Daniil Andreev, though Dandaron has less mysticism, more philosophy, but the general pathos is largely similar. After the preparation of the mechanisms of collective karma, Dandaron explains its vision of fundamental Buddhist principles - starting with the basic and ending with the justification of the tantric methodology with a support of the popular achievements of modern Western science.

Perhaps this is the first such text in the history of Buddhism in Russia, where a follower of traditional Vajrayana, who has received a western education, is trying to integrate Buddhist philosophy into the context of the Western paradigm of knowledge using comparative methods. The generation of lamas that left Tibet in 1959 went a similar way.

In the text of the Black Notebook, Dandaron's pessimism is visible about their own fate and fate of the world, but also the messianic optimism about the prospects of Buddhism in the West. From complex philosophical constructions, Dandaron descends to moralization, proceeds to the presentations of Buddhist legends and returned back to attempts to clarify his worldview. Some passages are relevant to this day:

There was the third - the middle path: not to touch anyone, but to engage in harmless craft, for example, art, or, hiding somewhere, enjoy the aesthetic contemplation of the beautiful. Those naive people who hoped there in art, not touched by the struggle and the meanness of motives, became on this path.

There were people who were disappointed in life, in the idea and fiercely hated all violence, meanness, atrocities and terror. In everyday life, they stopped seeing interesting and diverse. However, they still did not realize that they were dealing with state capitalism, with the monopoly, where the dictator is served by the whole government, law, judges, prosecutor, seal, art, all punitive bodies and the army. Nobody could say a word against the dictator.

Any arbitrariness created by a tyrant-dictator passed like a conveyor, because there was a dictatorship in the country, not tolerating any criticism, and at the head of the dictatorship-the despot itself.

The scientific and technological revolution, which has gripped the whole world, comes here. It does not smooth out, but exacerbates the vices organically inherent in the human society of exploitation and profit, but here the exploitation goes in an unheard of scale for the capitalist world, the private profit is intensified, going next to the bottomless state-monopoly profit. It is felt that all this leads to the death of both the world of capitalism and the world of socialism. People affected by Avidia see the explosions of atomic bombs, demographic explosions, a person’s loneliness in this hopeless and dying world, but look again in materialism, that is, in scientific and technological progress.

Connection of times

"Tantra" translated from Sanskrit - "thread, connection." This significance emphasizes the continuity of transmitting scripts of liberation from person to person. After the death of Dandaron in a schizo in 1974, his students in grain gather everything related to him, having survived the collapse of the USSR state makhina. The head of the group of former students of Dandaron until his death in Ulan-Ude in 1996 remains Zheleznov. Much of what the teacher passed on to the next generation will be embodied in their individual work. Pyatigorsk in the necrologist Dandaron wrote as follows:

“When the students began to appear-from Leningrad, Moscow, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Buryatia-he loved to say that it was not they who went to him in Ulan-Ude, and Buddhism goes to the west. And he said another thing, which, at first glance, seems amazing, but in fact is highly connected with the Buddhist spirit of relativism itself: it was Dandaron, who was so closely connected with the ancient traditional soil of northern Buddhism, who claimed that in Buddhism does not have a place, as there is no time, an era, and that Buddhism is wandering, not knowing the peoples, countries and climate, renaissance and decades, societies and social groups. This does not mean that Buddhism denies all this - Buddhism does not deny anything. This only means that Buddhism does not know this that this is not his business. ”

It is worth remembering this, standing on the ridge of the titans of national states or being in the bottomless mouth of corporations - because it is so easy to become part of their action. As the poet said, "the tusks of black rocks and the caves of the stupid grin - the man among the mountains is negligible." But we still have time to find our own autonomy from public karma and freedom from national guilt.

At least until the drone of transnational corporations and states standing at the top of the disconnected human hive will not call the AGI-Korolev life that will reign in this hive, uniting all of humanity in a single and non-alternative linear scenario.