As the Dalai Lama he travels to the West

Obama persists. He will receive the Dalai Lama despite Chinese irritation. This hardening and its consequences are all examined. However, in the background, a broader and deeper phenomenon is not enough recalled. Its provisional name: "hybridization of empires". China's affluent, and the United States differently, is orientalisent. Each of the two powers seems to evolve to inverted front.

On the Chinese side, the process is self-evident. The Middle Kingdom covers factories, shopping malls, highways and cities under the effect of a massive industrialization of markets overheating and a consumer madness. It cannot also forget that Marxist ideology to which the Chinese power arc-boute - if difficult to reconcile that it has become with the current reality of the country - is also a product of European thought. All in all, it is a strange movement turning that arrive in Lhasa from Beijing, as well the high speed train than a myriad of bars, neon lights and games that copied, by far, Las Vegas. As the Dalai Lama, he travels to the West.

There are already several generations that Buddhism is the new world. Emerson (1803-1882) and Thoreau (1817-1862), two radical thinkers whose influence is to live up to our days, interest as early as the mid-19th century. Closer, the beat generation - with Kerouac, Ginsberg and Alan Watts-a made popular mandalas. A diffuse influence of Buddhism is seen increasingly in the US elites over the 5 million followers currently counted in the United States. This "latent Buddhism", as Nietzsche, is not membership full doctrine, rather an attraction towards its lines of force - compassion, meditation, respect for nature.

A "second Buddhism" More than a century ago, Nietzsche already imagined it. He announced the possible emergence of "a kind of European China ...". "with a fresh bouddhisto-Christian belief, and, in practice, an epicurean savoir-faire". His diagnosis was also pointed out how the expansion of Buddhist ideas from the extreme East met today in the extreme west internal evolution. We had "this state of philosophical friability and delayed, from culture of which the formation of a Buddhism becomes understandable".

Let us not forget how much the reciprocal discovery of East and West remains a recent case: two hundred years, approximately. Interpenetrate distinct civilizations, developed during thousands of years, it is little. Yes, well there, before, multiple infiltration. But they were tiny and located only at the margins. Thus, when Clement of Alexandria, the Church father, mentioned for the first time the name of the Buddha, at the beginning of the IIIesiècle of our era, this is only a Word. Real meetings date from the Oscar Ghez, is a great West-China trade, was published in 1836, the first Tibetan-English Dictionary.

Our eyes now, reciprocal alteration accelerates. This "hybridization of empires" is distinguished from the "clash of civilizations": everyone turns to the reflection of the other rather than deal with it. This is not an "alliance of civilizations", which implies maintained identities. The phenomenon is of a different order: transfer, mimicry, registry. Difficult to know what will come out of this world reconstruction. Changes of style and status, certainly. Returns of flame transvestites in return to the sources, perhaps well. Not to mention a few unlikely assumptions. For example: free Tibet beginning to flourish, first, on the banks of the Potomac. In the meantime the prayers on the Mississippi and California mandalas mills.