The Dalai Lama claims he is preaching "peace" and "human compassion" and seeking benefits for the Tibetans when he shuttles around the world by air in designer outfits, picking up his accolades here and there.

 

But the self-claimed spiritual leader has obviously forgotten his identity, abused his religion and been playing too much politics.

 

On top of these, he has betrayed his home country and fellow Tibetans time and again since he fled in 1959 with the obstinate claim to separate Tibet from China.

 

All these have been done in the guise of religion.

 

Among his latest "developments" is a meeting with US President George W. Bush and a US congressional award. He compares the meeting with Bush to "a reunion of one family", still not realizing he has been a cats' paw once again.

 

The Dalai Lama has deliberately ignored the central government's message, which has been sent to him on various occasions, that he should give up his independence claim and all secessionist activities if he wants to return.

 

If the Dalai Lama, 72, really wishes to do anything beneficial to the 2.8 million Tibetans in his life, it's high time for him to stop playing politics and cheating people, the Westerners in particular, with his hypocritical "autonomy" claims.

 

He has obstinately sought "independence for Tibet" in the past 48 years and released a statement from India, pledging to "restore Tibet's free and independent status".

 

Apparently frustrated by China's stable development and by the infighting among exiled "pro-Tibet independence" groups, he has toned down his "independence for Tibet" claims since 1994.

 

In recent years, the Dalai Lama repeated he did not seek independence but instead sought a high degree of autonomy for Tibet within the framework of the Chinese Constitution.

 

His call for "true autonomy" is tantamount to an eradication of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet.

 

The Dalai Lama requested "true autonomy" over the proposed "Greater Tibet", a region extending to Tibetan-inhabited areas in the provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan. This is an obvious attempt to overthrow the system governing China's ethnic minority regions.

 

He has never renounced the "Tibetan Exile Constitution", an outlawed document similar to the "Future Tibet Constitution" drafted in 1963, which proclaimed the establishment of an "ethnically unified state led by the Dalai Lama".

 

The Dalai Lama has been trying to sell his independence message to overseas Tibetans and some innocent people in the West.

 

But those with insight will ultimately see through his hypocrisy.

 

His meeting last month with German Chancellor Angela Merkel not only infuriated the Chinese, but sparked discontent among the Germans as well.

 

German scholars and critics recently warned their countrymen that the Dalai Lama and his followers represent only a few Buddhists and it was therefore wrong to equate him to Buddhism.

 

An opinion piece on a major German newspaper, Die Welt, said the Dalai Lama stressed his absolute authority and concealed the dark side of his sect. "The international community apparently knows little of this -- that's why the Dalai Lama has been selling his so-called 'humanitarian value system' to the naive Westerners."

 

Such a system, the author said, never existed.

 

Germans who had been to Tibet rejected the Dalai Lama's anti-China rhetoric. Der Spiegel magazine published a letter to the editor on July 23 saying those who had recently been to Tibet found what the Dalai Lama had done was "ridiculous".

 

As a Tibetan Buddhist saying goes, "when an idiot takes an evil path no one questions it; when a man of wisdom does, he needs to find out why". The Dalai Lama should repent, mend his ways and stop abusing the power of religion.

 

(Xinhua News Agency' s commentary, October 17, 2007)