Audio Postcard: Shoveling Gravel

Captured at a construction site between the Dragon Guest House and Shechen Monastery. The microphone was placed five meters from 2 two-man-teams shoveling gravel into baskets carried by porters. 22 November 08, approximately 15:00.

Click here to download the MP3 to your computer.

#

Book Review: Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste; Gail Omvedt, 2003

Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste is an exploration of the historical roots of Navayana, or New Buddhism, an Eastern Liberation Theology launched seemingly single-handedly by the father of modern India's constitution, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. The first of India's untouchables to rise to not only national but international prominence, Ambedkar was a double PhD from Columbia and the London School of Economics.

A tireless champion of civil liberties who began his political career as a labor activist, Ambedkar later came to stress the primacy of social, rather than economic, revolution. He believed untouchables would never claim their full rights until Hinduism, a system built on caste and the moral justification of oppression, was repudiated and replaced. It was precisely for this reason that Ambedkar tussled with Ghandi, who dismissed casteism as an unpleasant accretion that could be cut away while maintaining the romantic (and, according to Omvedt, historically suspect) idea of India as a Hindu nation.

In Buddhism Ambedkar discovered the perfect vehicle for reformation, a home-grown religion in which individuals practice rather than believe, in which individual inquiry is held in higher regard than devotion to gurus or sacred texts, a religion based on ethics rather than metaphysics. After several years of careful study, he came to the conclusion that contemporary Buddhism had become cut off, distant, and unresponsive to the common man and was unsuited for the purpose of liberating the underclass. What was most needed was a new school of Buddhism, a Buddhism for the modern world, a socially engaged Buddhism that worked for enlightenment and nirvana for all people in this lifetime on this world. And so he composed a Buddhist catechism that rewrote some of the fundamental ideas of the religion as it has been passed down over 25 centuries.

Scholars and clergy have questioned whether this is a real form of Buddhism, or something entirely different posing as Buddhism. It is just this question that frames Gail Omvedt's study, a survey of the history of Indian Buddhism in search of antecedents of Ambekar's most controversial reinterpretations. These include shifting karma from the individual to society, setting nirvana as the earthly goal of stilling the passions, and reimagining the purpose of the monastic as a social worker rather than a self-absorbed recluse.

A naturalized Indian scholar in Dalit studies, Omvedt's sympathies clearly lay with the oppressed, - with untouchables, laborers, the peasantry, women - as well as with those forces associated with their empowerment - with Buddhism over Brahmanism, with Ambedkar over Ghandi, rationalism over romanticism, modernization over traditionalization. She presents her case concisely in clear prose, demonstrating through her survey that Ambedkar's ideas are nothing new in the history of Indian Buddhism. Observing that millions of Indians today practice Navayana, Omvedt concludes there is “no way that any true Buddhist of any school can deny that this is a form of Buddhism.”

Read the publisher's book description here.

#

The earth in 1966

You may have heard about the lost, recovered and restored photos of Earth taken from a lunar orbiter in 1966. It's quite an amazing story, about a NASA employee who warehoused old data processing machinery the space agency was going to dispose of. She later got her hands on the data files from 1966 and with private money refurbished the equipment and the data in an abandoned McDonalds. You can read more about the project and view the results at Moon Views.

#

Movie Review: Thus I Have Heard: Teachings of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, 2001

In even the most cursory account of Tibetan Buddhism's journey to the West, one name sure to be included is that of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. One of the first wave of refugees from the 1959 Chinese invasion of Tibet, Chogyam studied at Oxford before making his mark in America. He remains a controversial character for having so thoroughly westernized himself, including taking a sixteen year old British wife, disrobing and practicing as a lay teacher, and developing a huge appetite for food, alcohol and women. Some called him a crazy sage, some called him just plain crazy. His legacy, though, makes him difficult to dismiss. His presence as he toured led to the appearance of hundreds of Buddhist centers in cities and towns across North America, his publishing outfit is now one the West's biggest, and Colorado's Naropa University was the first accredited Buddhist university in the United States.

Thus I Have Heard is a 60-minute collection of video clips - one television interview and four speeches - given to North American audiences in the 70's and 80's. It was issued in conjunction with an 8-volume set of his Collected Works, plus a 9-volume video set, published in 2001. The five selections in sequence are:

• Practicing the Lineage 1980 – an interview in which Chogyam discusses his early life and training
• Mediation Instruction 1974 – instructions for an introductory meditation course
• Sitting Practice is Your Breakfast 1976 – meditation as food to nourish the mind
• Surrendering Your Aggression 1975 – learning to let go of ego
• Creating an Enlightened Society 1982 – a call to work not only for personal enlightenment, but also for building enlightened societies

Having never seen video of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, this collection was a revelation. There are moments when his humor shines through, most often in his playfulness with language, or in a clever conceptualization, such as clinging to self as a kind of aggression. But he makes you work to get to those moments. His speech is slow and deliberate and his enunciation not always clear. And in at least one of these clips ("Sitting Practice is Your Breakfast") he appears inebriated. By the 1980's, when his lifestyle was having visible effects on body and mind, his “Creating an Enlightened Society” speech is almost embarrassing for its long, searching pauses.

From these clips it's hard to see today what made Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche so appealing. Certainly so throughly adopting the manners of his students and presenting his teachings in their own idiom won over large numbers. It also didn't hurt being one of the first generation of teachers. Having no one against which he could be compared put him in a league all his own.

For anyone wanting to sample the voice and manner of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche at various points in his career, there probably isn't a better place to start than Thus I Have Heard.

#

Movie Review: The Rainbow Body of the Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism; Dudjom Buddhist Association, 2001

.

Lineage charts (in Tibetan/Chinese; English follow)

More lineage charts

Still more

Enough already

This hour-length documentary is a promotional film substantiating the lineage claims and educational work of Hong Kong lama Yeshe Thaye (Chan Kin-keung, David) of the Dudjom Buddhist Association. It begins at the beginning, with the birth, renunciation and enlightenment of the Buddha and continues on through to the introduction of Buddhism to Tibet and an account of the great masters of the Nyingma school, right down to Tibetan Rinpoche Kyabje Chadral Sangye Dorje, his Hong Kong disciple Guru Lao Yui Che, and Lao's student, Yeshe Thaye. This is followed by a summary of lama Yeshe Thaye's dharma activities in Hong Kong, and a 17 minute teaching by Kyabje Chadral Sangye Dorje Rinpoche (covering some of the most basic Buddhist formulas, such as cultivating virtuous actions and avoiding unvirtuous ones; that is, do good, don't do bad).


With the exception of the lecture, much of the film is made up of lama Yeshe Thaye's personal photographs from trips to India and Nepal, as well as video of seminars and meditation practice at his Hong Kong center. Surprisingly we never hear the voice of the film's subject, lama Yeshe Thaye. His image is there in photograph after photograph with his teachers or with his students, but we never hear from him directly. The film ends on a note of bad taste, a kitschy montage of Buddhist homilies (life is fleeting, we don't know when death will come, etc, etc.) in a garish melange of fonts and colors superimposed on flowers, waterfalls, clouds, and other scenes from nature and accompanied by anemic midi-melodies. Lama Yeshe Thaye is most certainly a sincere and well-meaning person. Unfortunately, his film is not so good. In fact, it's one you most definitely want to miss.


Copies of The Rainbow Body of the Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism (2001) can be found at various sites across the internet, as well as the website of the Dudjom Buddhist Association International Limited.

#

Movie Review: The Sacred Sites of the Dalai Lamas: A Pilgrimage to The Oracle Lake, 2007

The Sacred Sites of the Dalai Lamas: A Pilgrimage to The Oracle Lake is a 70 minute collection of home movies of a 2007 trip to Tibet dressed up as a feature documentary. There is some wonderful footage of the Tibetan countryside and numerous sacred sites, including temples, mountains, caves, and lakes. If you've never been to Tibet and know nothing about it, this film might serve as a good visual introduction to the culture and the landscape. The rest of us are left to wonder if the project was simply a clever means for recovering the expenses of what looks to be a rather financially substantial pilgrimage.

The film is narrated in flat, almost dispassionate tones by Steve Dancz, an American music professor, who along with a group of what appears to be around 15 other middle-aged Americans is led across Tibet by American Buddhist teacher Glenn Mullin and Bhutanese religious scholar Khenpo Tashi. Along the way Dancz relates the rather typical tourist reaction of wonder and surprise at being in Tibet, as well as reporting historical and contemporary spiritual claims of supernatural events. Most anyone who has traveled in the region has had similar reactions, and who when visiting a place for only a few hours, or even a few moments, is going to risk insulting the locals by asking if they really believe that walking around a pile of rock reciting a mantra has the power to affect meteorological conditions? Most of us just try to soak up the experience.

But if you are inclined to produce a commercial document of your visit, one that you want to share with the world, one that has the potential to inform and help people understand the relevance of your pilgrimage, it seems such a document is the appropriate occasion for questioning, for examining your experience, for evaluating the meaning of your journey. Perhaps for Dancz there was no need to question, in which case The Sacred Sites of the Dalai Lamas is an example of what you see is what you get. I'd like to think there's more going on, that Dancz was on deadline to finish the film, that perhaps producer Michael Wiese forced him to excise the more interesting observations, and that a more introspective book or film may be forthcoming

For anyone who might be looking for a video document of Tibetan landscapes and scared sites, this is a film worth checking out. For anyone hoping to learn about the Dalai Lamas, about Buddhism, about the meaning of pilgrimage, about the experience of ambition fulfilled, you would do better to look elsewhere.

#

Movie Review: Tantra of Gyuto (1974)

Tantra of Gyuto is a 50-minute feature documenting the 1974 London public performance of tantric rituals by a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks from Gyuto monastery. Produced by Snow Lion, one of the world's leading publishers of English texts on Tibetan Buddhism, the film maintains an air of objectivity and respect for the viewer, allotting ample to time to simply showing the monks doing their rites. The filmmakers follow the monks from their monastery in India as they prepare, and on through to their flight, arrival and performance in London. Unfortunately, we never have a chance to hear the monks speak for themselves, though we are treated to a short interview with a very young Dalai Lama, who appears to have been in London for the performance and discusses the propriety of public displays of tantric rituals. These are, it turns out, commonly conducted in public in their native context, ceremonies for blessing statues, paintings, sand mandalas and other sacred objects. In between the set-up and the performances, a brief overview of Tibetan history and Buddhism is presented, including some wonderful archival footage of the Tibetan countryside, Lhasa, and the Dalai Lama as he is examined on completion of his formal academic studies. This is a film worth adding to add to a Tibetan video collection, if you can find it. Though currently out of print, copies can be found circulating on the internet.

#

Six Heads

Better than one? Not when you have a cold.

I was sunning myself on the roof yesterday, drying up my sinuses and warming myself when I noticed my shadow. I got my camera and a few moments with Photoshop and - voila!

#

Audio Postcard: The Bells of Shechen Monastery, Kathmandu

Captured with the microphone placed outside my bedroom window, 18 November 08, approximately 05:00.

Shechen Monastery is where I study thangka, located a stone's throw from the Dragon Guest House.

Click here to download the MP3 to your computer.

#

1st Tara in Full Robes

Took a couple of days, but came out pretty good (I thought) for a first effort.






And here's my neighbor on the floor, Tsering, conferring with our teacher.

#