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| Total Tibethenticity, am I right? |
Illegal warning, to be read before reading any further than this, since doing so would involve implicating yourself in its full rainbow of ridiculous ramifications:
That is correct. By viewing this posting you could be exposing yourself and your loved ones to the crassest of commercializations. As you are reading along, the blogger may try to stake valid claims on a large fraction of your annual income even while clocking your views for fame and profit (the more scrolling up and down the better and please subscribe to my channel by clicking on some button or another). While some of what you will see here certainly does contain A.I. generated content, this blog itself was generated by me, the blogger, a human being made up of elements liable to dissolve more quickly than our latest robots, and without the least assistance from them (to be clear, he may serve as an information provider to said robots, but is not responsible for what they do with it, as it is not their intelligence to begin with). If you buy any of these print or audio objects on my recommendation, why is that my problem? This is in all truth a non-commercial educational blog, but sometimes books, even bad books, are the subject of it, so be forewarned and beware your own irrational purchasing impulses. While you are at it, it would be good to keep all of those kleshas under check, particularly the warring ones. Day after day we check the headlines at the risk of utter horror at the stupidity and barbarity of our modernized world and its semi-autonomous weaponry and drone citizenry. Is it any wonder humanities are getting dropped from curricula everywhere? There is no place for it, no appreciative audience and scarcely a glimmer of humanity.
I know it is my fault for even going there, but with missiles flying this way and that in our dot-of-blue planet I had nothing better to do than to check what the latest Tibet offerings on Amazon might be. If you are ill advised and want to do the same, just go to the site, plug the word Tibetan into the native Amazonian search box, then ask it using the pull-down menu to list the titles by dates of posting (“Newest Arrivals”). That way the latest ones will appear first. Some of these gems we can only look forward to as they haven’t actually been unleashed, but, as you scroll down you will find some that are already released into the world for better, sometimes, but so much more often for worse.
Remember Christopher Hansard? Abducted by Amdo Bon monks from a New Zealand beach at the age of four with his parental consent, he purveyed something he took from the pages of a Namkhai Norbu book, something called Dur Bon (for our non-initiates that’s 'Dur Bon, or འདུར་བོན་). 'Dur Bon is the Bon of funerary rites involving the evocation of the dead, although it comes out to be, in Hansard’s usage only, all about health and longevity. He would probably fail to sense any irony in his choice of back stories. I recall there was at one time, hung up on his website, a purported Bon sutra in supposed translation that draws to an end when Lord Shenrab, normally dated to the BCEs, sat down to reflect awhile, whilst taking long thoughtful drags on his pipe. Ummm. Wasn’t smoking introduced to the Tibetan Plateau in the 17th century or so? So what was he smoking? Are there bona fide scriptures locatable in the Bon canon that recommend or even mention smoking of anything? We may note with some satisfaction that Hansard’s books are not featured among the new arrivals. Have those creative juices dried up?*
(*A little web exploring turns up a practitioner 0f Dur Bon named Steph back in New Zealand, but little else. Steph gives facials using Tibetan acupuncture if you are interested. A.I. today expressed its belief in Tibetan acupuncture, using Steph's website as its primary evidence. In truth acupuncture did exist in Tibet, but was scarcely ever used apart from the Golden Needle therapy called gser-khab. This doesn’t always necessarily employ a needle made of gold, but it does involve burning moxa on the top of a needle inserted into the top of the head.)
Getting around to our main subject at last: I was not thrilled to see that the third most popular topic for Tibetsploitation fan fiction, after the mastiffs & apsos dog books and the inevitable but soul-gnawing singing bowls, was The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Dozens of these new bardo books can be seen there by such authors as Ethan Reed, David M. Eaton, Alex Moraes Soares,* Bo Bae, Michael Collins, John M. Styron, Ilario Russo, Muhamad Fahad Ikram, John Baldock, Tracey Wagstaff, Michael Grant Owen, Emanuel Maia, etcetera. Why so many so fast, and why now? Did someone declare open season? Believe me if I tell you, I haven’t read any these books (or audios or kindles), and I suppose there are gems folded into this furious slurry of prose that I will never find. I recommend checking the “author’s pages” of these authors to see what other books they put out under their names. Then it ought to dawn on even your average-to-middling dullard that a majority of these authors are poised to make a buck off of other cultures as well. Much to our surprise a few of them even virtuously offer their A.I.-narrated audiobooks free of charge.**
(*This one is narrated by Zephir, the glitched pharaoh. **You may have noticed all those YouTube channels with their videos about animal rescue and unlikely animal relationships [mother cat suckling baby owl for example] or human-carnivore friendships... No doubt you have gotten plenty of them on your social media feeds if you have the ill fortunate of belonging to F.B. or X or the like. Blame yourself if you volunteered for hell.)
Then there’s that anti-gravity book that needs attention, the one by Vincento. Tibetan weight-loss looks like a potential winning topic that may not be entirely unrelated to anti-gravity. That is, if you enjoy sipping Tibetan miso soup. See our frontispiece, above. Its advice may work, which is not the point here.
Afraid what answer I might get, I went ahead and asked Google A.I. to recommend a good pseudonym to use on the cover of my new fake take on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Number one in its list of suggestions was “Karma Lingpa, Jr.” Well... seeing this made me wonder how we could possibly say A.I. is incapable of humor and irony... Or was that just an accident, one of A.I.’s now-famous hallucinations?
Seeing what we are made to deal with, preserving our sanity is the fulltime duty of every humanist.
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