‘Twice I almost hated the Chinese.’

Sudhir Kakar recalls a dialogue with Dalai Lama in 1994 in the introduction to his book Mad And Divine,  Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World. 

During the dialogue Kakar gave the orthodox psychoanalytic view which finds something wrong with a person if he cannot hate. ‘No, no!’ the Dalai Lama exclaims. Stating that this is not true of Buddhist psychology, he proceeds to tell a story of a friend, a spiritually advanced lama who was incarcerated in a prison in Tibet and tortured by the Chinese. After many years the lama manages to escape and reach Dharamsala.

‘How was it?’ the Dalai Lama asks his old friend about the long years of imprisonment.

‘Oh, twice it was very bad,’the lama replies.

‘Were you in danger of losing your life?’ the Dalai Lama express his concern.

‘No.Twice I almost hated the Chinese!’

The psychoanalyst then proceeds to explain that spiritual transformation is not a once for ever achievement even in case of enlightened spiritual masters and saints. It remains constantly under threat from the darker forces of the psyche. One is never not human-‘Twice I almost hated the Chinese.’

Kakar examines the lives of Osho, Gandhi and the Buddhist saint Drupka Kunley in the book.

"The spirit when it soars often pulls up the psyche in its wake."

The one on Rajneesh, Childhood Of A Spiritually Incorrect Guru: Osho, concludes thus:
“Today, as we gain a more intimate knowledge of lives of saints and spiritual masters than was provided by hagiographies, we can say that the spirit when it soars often pulls up the psyche in its wake. But we also know that the spirit never completely escapes the gravitational pull exerted by the forces of narcissism, aggression and desire in the psyche. What may be essential for our gaze, however, is to attend to the vision of the spirit’s soaring, not the oft-repeated tragedy of its fall.”