That’s tricky, since there are a lot of believing Catholics who, say, want married priests. Should the pope listen to them?
Sure, he should listen.
But there’s no vote.
I’m attempting to convey the Buddhist concept of impermanence. I opine that until you get that, you can’t grasp the Buddhist concept of reincarnation.
Not sure. Bear that in mind. I’d bet, “Something in between” though. Easy money as it spans a wide area.
I’ve encountered more than one implicit claim that the Chinese made it much worse.
Any source saying that any place is a land of justice and happiness is obviously suspect. I have read this. Reviews:
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/23/review-the-14th-dalai-lama-a-manga-biography/
The 14th Dalai Lama: A Manga Biography | All About Manga The 14th Dalai Lama: A Manga Biography by Tetsu Saiwai | Goodreads
Look the Chinese communists were practicing imperialism during the 1950s: there was every reason for them to pull out the stops propaganda wise. And Parenti is a credulous writer.
Wiki: [INDENT]Emerging with control over most of mainland China after the Chinese Civil War, the People’s Republic of China incorporated Tibet in 1950 and negotiated the Seventeen Point Agreement with the newly enthroned 14th Dalai Lama’s government, affirming the People’s Republic of China’s sovereignty but granting the area autonomy. Subsequently, on his journey into exile, the 14th Dalai Lama completely repudiated the agreement, which he has repeated on many occasions. [/INDENT] Of what worth is a 1950s promise of autonomy from Beijing? Negative propaganda is a given.
IIRC, he says he remembered a few things when he was a kid, not much more. That was when he was speaking to a Western reporter though, and I’m paraphrasing from old memories anyway.
Here’s an official interview. I’ll add emphasis: [INDENT]
Another thing that happened, which my mother remembers very clearly, is that soon after I arrived in Lhasa, I said that my teeth were in a box in a certain house in the Norbulinka. When they opened the box, they found a set of dentures which had belonged to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. I pointed to the box, and said that my teeth were in there, but right now I don’t recall this at all. The new memories associated with this body are stronger. The past has become smaller, vaguer. Unless I made a specific attempt to develop such a memory, I don’t recall it. [/INDENT] Me too!
Not a practicing Buddhist. I studied Buddhism for 2 semesters in college, which is nothing. I own a little less than a foot of Buddhist texts. I can imagine myself joining a Buddhist temple, but a Unitarian church would be more likely.
But that’s a philosophical question you are posing. My rough understanding is that continuity is explained by some philosophers as involving memory, though Oliver Sachs would disagree. Buddhists, as I understand it, would invoke karma, which I would translate here as causal chains and legacy. I opine that the Buddhist take is superior to conventional wisdom in some ways (it’s more thought out for one thing), though I’d ultimately go with a philosophical treatment if I could put my hands on one. Your question touches on consciousness which is a pretty open topic in philosophy and science for that matter.
I perceive Francis as a traditionalist. Jesus didn’t talk about abortion to the exclusion of everything else.[sup]1[/sup] Same with Francis. I perceive piety.
What tickles me is not that Francis is a liberal (he’s not) but rather that we actually have a Jesuit pope. Typically, Jesuits were kept in reserve as shock troops, and subjected to a tight leash.
Francis also has a degree in chemistry, so we sort of have a scientist in place. Holy Illuminati!
[sup]1[/sup] Well, actually Jesus didn’t talk about abortion at all. Or gay marriage.
I don’t think so, my friend. The Tibetan idea of continually recurring lamas is basically heresy as far as the buddhist concept of impermanence is concerned. Regardless, once you claim that your former encarnation was enlightened you can’t compare it to me at 6 years old.
I think the “threat” that Buddhism is supposed to “cure” is very weak. Dialog:
A: Your this wisp of impermanent nothingness, barely held together, barely even the same thing day after day!
B: Cool, I’ll just tough it out for the next 60 years or so, then I’ll be dead, and that will be it. Just make the most the most of it, I guess.
A: Oh no no noooo! You’ll be reincarnated and have to keep going through this for eTERniTEEEeeeeeEEee.
It’s just not much of a gun to the head, and don’t think people really take it seriously any more. That doesn’t mean that reincarnation isn’t true (I think some form of it probably is), but I don’t think the Wheel of Samsara is something to solve per se. I also don’t think Buddhism has the solution.
Manga biography?
I’d need a stronger ad hominem with some proof before I start doubting what seem like basic facts in what he wrote. Tibet sounds as though it was an extremely backward country, and there is no doubt the lamas were in control. In the first place, they should have sticking with religion and not running a country.
I’ve read a lot about Buddhism, and I lived in a country for eight years that theoretically has a high percentage of Buddhists: Japan. The religion and its various sects don’t come off well in the 20th century. They supported nationalism, the invasion and subjugation of China, and WWII. And that stuff down in writing, in published documents, like newspaper editorials and whatnot. There’s no question about it. Today, Buddhism is dead in Japan: I met literally one person who said he’s a practicing Buddhist.
That doesn’t directly impugn the Tibetan Buddhists, but the state of Buddhism in Japan has certainly increased my cynicism about how the religion has been practiced.
That’s pretty lame, lama!
The question is whether authentic practice even exists anywhere in the US. Just to give one example, I read a book or two by Philip Kapleau, who was the Zen guru du jour back in the 70s, working in Rochester, NY. Back then (which I was looking back at from the perspective of the mid-80s, when I when through my Buddhist phase), American credulity made it possible for this guy to ply his trade. And I guess he was sincere enough, but it turns out he was from an unorthodox breakaway Zen sect in the first place. Something that wasn’t big or important or anything in Japan. And today in Japan, Zen itself isn’t big or important.
I think the Buddhist take was extremely sophisticated; I hesitate to use the present tense, as I don’t know if anyone actually believes in it any more. But it does have a lot of concepts that are still useful. I don’t think anyone really understands how the mind and consciousness work at this point.
There’s a lot to unpack there. I’m arguing that adults are very different people than they were when they were 6. And that Tibetan lamas, even enlightened ones, were presumably different in their previous lives.
Yeah, there’s that. Which is presumably part of the reason why lay Buddhists were more numerous than Buddhist monks at least in Hinayana systems. Most practitioners just wanted their next life to be a better one.
No idea. I honestly know very little about Buddhist practice.
Like many other mangas, it operated at a higher level than Western Superhero comics. But yeah. Manga. That’s all I got. After writing the last post I ordered this book from Amazon: Authenticating Tibet: Anne-Marie Blondeau, Katia Buffetrille, Donald Lopez: 9780520249288: Amazon.com: Books
Presumably that’s more definitive.
Ummm, the concept of a bodhisattva is widespread in Buddhism. That is, a being that has reached enlightenment and broken the cycle of death and rebirth, voluntarily chooses to return to point others to the way and risk that they themselves risk going back on the rebirth cycle. The Dalai Lama’s and other tulku’s aka Rinpoche’s are the embodiment of a bodhisattva.
The current DL was born 6 July 1935, was 15 when vested with temporal power, and fled to India in 1959.
FYI, Upthread, I referred to Tibet as a medieval theocracy. Which was not a literal statement…
Note many Buddhist thinkers ignore or downplay the reincarnation angle, and focus on cultivating the nonattachment angle, which most definitely can be a solution (to suffering at least).
Cool. Let me know how it goes. Feel free to PM me. I’m curious.
Yeah, there are even atheist/secular Buddhists, and I kinda wonder what the point is.
I know some people who mess around with secular Buddhism. They see it as a less-goofy form of Transcendental Meditation, without all the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi pseudo-quantum physics crapola.
I, too, don’t quite see the point: why keep any of the ties to the Buddha, if all you’re really carrying away is deep-breathing and focused thoughts?
Well I am a secular Buddhist, sort of, though I haven’t ever practiced Buddhist meditation for any extended time. Then again, I’m also a secular Keynesian, though a more accurate term might be Samuelsonian.
Tibet before the takeover
The Chinese Communists publish a booklet for tourists entitled, “100 Questions About Tibet”. There are a number of editions, the most recent of which is here. It provides the party line. A team of scholars published their answers in 2008.
Thankfully, most of book concerns Tibet after their 1912-1951 period of de facto independence, so there wasn’t too much to read.
Rule since 1950 has been heavy handed and incompetent. Maybe 15% of Tibetans make out ok, roughly the same proportion that possesses a secondary education. They benefit from the massive resources the Chinese center has poured into the region, including and especially the construction of a Himalayan railroad. Lots of Han Chinese have immigrated into the region, and party cadres receive hardship pay. Most of the Tibetan population is rural though, and they’ve been burdened by rising goods prices, at least as of the book’s publication. Bear in mind that things can change in China very rapidly.
At the time of the Chinese invasion, there were no great calls among Tibetans for such a takeover. The Chinese themselves made no claims that they were addressing a social injustice: they framed the situation as response to British and US imperialism. The idea of freeing Tibet from feudalism only arose during the mid to late 1950s: in the 1980s it was backwardness that was the preferred epithet.
The Chinese claim that before the takeover, “serfs worked under the supervision and whips of the serf-owners stewards” and that, “nobles built private jails in their manors”. Katia Beffetrille of Ecole practiques des Hautes Etudes in Paris considers such claims to be uncorroborated. There are 2 cases of atrocity during the era in question. A case of mutilation occurred in 1924: the official perpetrators were punished for this. Somebody was handed a sentence of eye-gouging (yikes!) for treasonous activities (whatever they were). While I don’t advocate such punishments, the fact was nobody living knew how to carry it out: it was not at all routine. The 13th Dalai Lama had apparently banned such punishments in 1913, along with the death penalty. Yes: the death penalty was abolished during Tibet’s independence era. Similar standards were not enjoyed by the Tibetan people after the takeover. Chinese prisons carry out torture and there were over 90 cases of suspicious deaths during the early 1990s.
The Chinese characterize the old Tibet as a feudal society. Experts say, “Sort of”. Tibet was certainly poor as was much of Asia, and it was a peasant society, with limited use of money. Peasants had certain debt and taxation responsibilities which looked somewhat like serfdom. But geographic mobility was permitted after certain payments were made. In practice families were bound by these rules more than individuals, so for example pilgrimages during the time were common. And there was a legal system in place which permitted appeals. Finally the monastery system was porous, adding an egalitarian aspect to the proceeds.
That said, while the 13th Dalai Lama instituted reforms, he apparently received some pushback from the monasteries. And there were nobles running around, receiving payments from the peasants. So Tibet wasn’t exactly Shanghai-La. The 13th Dalai Lama was all too aware of the necessity of reforms and the inadequacy of his country’s attempts at the same at the time of his death.
Finally, I’ve only read a few pages on this subject. My knowledge of it is laughable and the above may contain howlers. Sorry: that’s all I got.
I wouldn’t blame those particular two problems on the Catholic Church alone, but on the Christian Bible, its many misinterpreters (particularly Saul/Paul, but many self-proclaimed leaders that are telling people they are going back to the fundamental teachings), and the devil’s bargain made between Christianity and Capitalism following the Huguenot/Calvinist split that has evolved into Protestantism. Once people, started thinking “there’s a God who rewards the most faithful of his capitalist followers by making them rich” the religious stigma against avarice and gluttony started falling away and erroneous logic rendered “If X is rich, she is good/appreciated by God; if Y is poor she is bad/evil/disfavored by God” and actions in pursuit of profit somehow became noble and elevated above reproach so long as profit was realized.
It seems to me this allegory could be used to condemn capitalism and many modern judicial systems (those that involve judge/jury, rule of precedent, evidence and advocate arguments, etc.) and Clint Eastwood & team explored this in The Enforcer. These are not perfect systems and don’t claim to be, but many people claim them to be perfect. Now if only we could stop calling the American Plutocracy a Democratic Republic…
I realize this is an example of a weak threat and it’s been countered by other people ahead of me. However, I thought it might be important to emphasize that the threat in the dialogue is the Hindu paradigm, which Buddhism is very explicitly trying to revolutionize. Zillions of scholars have already compared the Buddhist break from Hinduism to the Christian break from Judaism, so I won’t go deep into it here. I do think the root paradigms (Hinduism and Judaism) are pervasive enough in our world that their respective rebels (Siddartha Gautama and Jesus) had and still have a strong enough counter-message to those followers to be relevant – if only to those respective adherents. Then again, to those who are seeking (and, perhaps especially those who are/were not previously brought up in a Hindu or Jewish culture) there are a lot of different belief systems, both modern and time-worn, that are happy to offer satisfying answers and arguments. IMHO-in-a-nutshell: they’re all conceptual crutches for those who can’t handle the nihilistic fact that everything is just physics and chemistry.
Although I only spent a bit over a year in Japan, several of my ESL students were Buddhist priests, and one was the wife of a Buddhist priest. I also spent quite some time with the very advanced students in my ‘free conversation’ class talking about religion and its influence in daily and political life --discussions prompted by the Aum Shinriko incident in Tokyo and the Waco Bombing in Texas. The general scholarly view repeats the phrase, “We are Shinto when we’re alive and Buddhist when we die” to explain the rituals and services everyone seems to attend out of cultural habit (e.g. Shinto weddings, Buddhist funerals, various national holidays which were originally Emperors’ birthdays.*) but both religions had plenty of artifacts everywhere and my students generally agreed that their belief system(s) were pervasive but not as pronounced as they perceived Christianity and The Church to be in US American# lives.
While Zen had been introduced to Japan via China (mispronouncing the Chinese term, Ch’an – which was a mispronunciation of the term from India: Dhyana = breath, which some say refers to the gasp one does during a sudden realization such as “Hey, I know how to escape the cycle of rebirth!” and emphasizes the concept that everyone can find their own enlightenment and become a Bodhisattva) several other variants of Buddhism have been successful in Japan, including Nichiren, Ingen, and other variants from India, China, and India-by-way-of-China. The Dalai Lama does not represent all Buddhists in all sects any more than Jerry Fallwell represents all Christians or Herman Cain represents all Black people (even if you narrow that down to US Americans).
–G!
- And the lineage of the emperors essentially tracing back to Shinto deities.)
It’s ironic that my mother’s relatives in Japan are Episcopalian Christian and go to Church every Sunday, but don’t do anything else related to the Faith (they don’t even celebrate Christmas or Easter). They participate in Shinto and Buddhist celbrations, along with their peers, throughout the rest of the year.
. So Aeschines, are you blaming Catholicism for your hate filled views or is there going to be another thread about your parents?