tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32671574.post13001236575799557..comments2024-03-22T14:47:42.501+02:00Comments on Tibeto-logic: Homicide, Forced Suicide, Vengeance and the GhostUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32671574.post-9940996757741786142016-11-19T12:33:34.961+02:002016-11-19T12:33:34.961+02:00I just had to share an interesting thing I noticed...I just had to share an interesting thing I noticed on the internet. I saw that Dharamsala just released a brief video about the Shugden controversies, and wanted to see it, so I did a video search for the title, "Shugden Protesters: Allegations vs Facts." I got three hits, all of them leading to videos of that exact same title with the identical length of 12 minutes and 57 seconds. Only one hit led me to the Dharamsala video. Two of the search results led instead to a pro-Shugden video posted by previously nonexistent Youtube accounts with the names "Michael Brown" and "Vera Liebowitz." You can check this out for yourself, I just thought it remarkable how quickly this counterfeit video could be produced and posted, and just how eager the Shugdenites are to counteract and contradict Dharamsala. Evidently that Shugden Geshe is still laboring under the delusion that he can leverage a hostile takeover of the Gelugpa school with the help of Beijing (as we noted above, Reuters published proof of Beijing's support).Danhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10453904366382251766noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32671574.post-54282912802831671902016-03-20T15:47:45.534+02:002016-03-20T15:47:45.534+02:00It's interesting to note that already in Decem...It's interesting to note that already in December, apparently in reaction to a Reuters exposé ("China Co-opts a Buddhist Sect in Global Effort to Smear Dalai Lama," Dec. 21, 2015) of the Chinese hand sustaining it over the years, the international Shugden movement that sponsored all those demonstrations against His Holiness the Dalai Lama essentially closed shop, shut down (it became official on March 10, 2016 when even their website was taken off the internet; I did check and it's really, really not there, not even in the Wayback Machine). I hope they have learned their lessons, and will now aim their ire at fundamentalist and exclusivist adherents of threatening spirits everywhere. With all that goes on in that area today we have no chance to breathe a sigh of relief even if one seems justified in this case. We'll end with an aspiration prayer for tolerance, reconciliation, and peace.Danhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10453904366382251766noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32671574.post-54508229008941405892015-10-01T21:02:08.523+03:002015-10-01T21:02:08.523+03:00The Ole Man strikes again ... with nothing but a s...The Ole Man strikes again ... with nothing but a small medicine bag and a blanket!<br /><br />Always glad to hear when things are going well (and always looking forward to more about Padampa),<br /><br />Best regards from the Short PersonShort Person. :)noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32671574.post-68111072517286518392015-09-30T20:38:53.523+03:002015-09-30T20:38:53.523+03:00Dear S.P.,
It's like you have ESP. I can alw...Dear S.P.,<br /><br />It's like you have ESP. I can always count on you to check up on me, can't I? To tell the truth, I haven't been feeling all that great, let alone inspired enough to blog. A death in the family can do that to a person. It could have to do with the not very inspiring blog you see above, on such a horrendous topic I should have saved for Halloween. You may not believe me, but a vampire sent in a comment. I would have posted it, except that they included a phone number for people who might want to be initiated into (vampire type) immortality. Even if it's real vampire business, which I very much doubt, I'm not going to supply anyone with a business contact number or address in the comments section, as part of the general policy of keeping the blog non-commercial.<br />I do want to get back to Padampa. Today I had a few bad signs on my way to the postoffice (a black cat, and a poster with Buddha's image laying on the sidewalk that had been torn in two; I did pick it up and put it in a more respectful place), but they were entirely counteracted by the good sign of receiving in the mail a new translation of Padampa's Tingrian Couplets. <br />Yours,<br />DDanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10453904366382251766noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32671574.post-60976734936291563832015-09-30T19:49:48.887+03:002015-09-30T19:49:48.887+03:00Just checking in. Are you okay?Just checking in. Are you okay?Short Personnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32671574.post-54911707318138853042015-08-03T21:23:06.531+03:002015-08-03T21:23:06.531+03:00Dear HA, Freud's primal scene is a scenario ma...Dear HA, Freud's primal scene is a scenario made up by himself, although not from whole cloth. He took bites from myths to use in it. And of course Catholics detest this part of Freud, feeling with probable justice that it is aimed in their direction since he implicates a ritual that looks so much like the mass. <br /><br />I loved the scene in the movie Habemus Papam, where the priest says to the psychoanalyst, "You can have an unconscious, or you can have a soul... but you can't have both!"<br /><br />There are civilizing processes at work in a number of Tibetan Buddhist practices (not just rituals). They make use of the raw materials of human nature. I personally believe they result in better human beings overall (there are exceptions). And I think in many cases the goodness goes quite deep. I don't need to tell you, but a lot of Tibetans have very clear ideas about what they are up to when they do these practices and don't need people like Freud or Bloch or whoever coming along treating their religious culture as if there were huge blanks there that would require their help filling them in.<br /><br />Yours, D<br /><br />Danhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10453904366382251766noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32671574.post-60432134767069513942015-08-02T11:10:36.504+03:002015-08-02T11:10:36.504+03:00Hi Dan,
I think you’re right about the influence ...Hi Dan,<br /><br />I think you’re right about the influence of Freud’s primal scene, but Girard focuses on the importance of mimetism. Once the first stone is thrown, the rest of the mob follows automatically, almost mindlessly. That’s in the case of a stoning, but the « first stone » could be anything justifying (sacred) violence. I think the mob lynching scene is the most dramatic and literal way of presenting the phenomenon, but the main idea is there. <br /><br />You may be right that Bloch’s and Girard’s theories are too general and that not all rituals are derived from violence, but when I think of many Tibetan rituals (on the top of my mind abhicāra, destructive magic, summoning to action etc. but also specific tormas) the link seems quite obvious, the violence is hardly hidden, but… it’s for a good reason the public opinion can find itself in (common denominator: “enemy of the Dharma”). Coming to think of it, except for impulsive actions, isn’t violence always for a good reason in the mind of the perpetrator? In order to repair some injustice from his point of view, to set something straight that is crooked. Isn’t that sense of justice somehow sacred?<br /><br />What I find interesting in the case of Rabjampa is the way it is done, and that points towards sacred violence, or which the perpetrators want to connect to the sacred. Sure, nowadays we’d rather talk about political murder, state interests, lobbying etc. But as I see it, the sacred has always been mixed up with politics. Even more so if the violence was carried out in the great Temple, a public place. They could have slit Rabjampa’s throat in an ambush, or strangle him discretely, make it look like an accident etc. but didn’t. Were they perhaps inspired by dPal gyi rdo rje for their use of arrows, and did they want to somehow associate their act with the (by that time) “generally approved” (if we try to avoid sacred) killing of Langdarma? Wouldn’t that be a way of ritualising the murder and showing it was of the same nature? I haven’t seen the details of the background. Apparently, the murderers were expelled, not judged and/or executed, except that “the Lha khang chen mo of the See was handed over”. Was that the normal way of dealing with murder in Tibet? A genuine question, not rhetorical. E.g. I read somewhere that murderers were expelled in ancient Indian times for a period of twelve years, before being readmitted to society?<br /><br />BTW I wasn’t referring to the Middle-Eastern scapegoat or redemption rituals, but rather thinking along the terms of Girard’s mimetism and the first stone, that removes the bolt from any moral consideration and gives free way to violent action. Of course, there is a secular (mi sde) and a religious (lha sde) side to that sort of justice, and the religious side (God, karma etc.) is never in the hands of humans. As for the “displacement of sin”, I do think some form of it can be found in Tibetan rituals, in its use of effigies, to which negativity can be transferred before the destruction of the effigy. Is that a Buddhist idea? Probably not, the rituals are likely to go way back, to some primal scene :-). On the other hand, if merit can be displaced in Buddhism, logically demerit ought to be transferrable too, but it isn’t in orthodox Buddhism (if that exists…).<br /><br />Looking forward to your blog on the Tibetan scapegoat and it’s links to Iranian New Year rituals.<br /><br />I have been a bit longwinding and don’t want to take up all the space. If you like we can do this privately.<br /><br />JoyHridayarthahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10713264962804395563noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32671574.post-16789998758332967412015-08-01T16:09:28.954+03:002015-08-01T16:09:28.954+03:00Hi H.A.,
It's kind of a relief the first comm...Hi H.A.,<br /><br />It's kind of a relief the first comment comes from you and not from "Atisha's cook." Do you think the Minnesota dentist who killed Cecil will get made into a lion god? There would be some analogical logic if that were to happen, I think.<br /><br />I'm more familiar with Maurice Bloch (Prey into Hunter) than I am with Girard, but it seems as if he's strongly under the spell of Freud's 'primal scene' (in which the junior males collectively murder the senior male in order to get access to his females, and in their guilt make up religious acts like the eucharist where they share bits of the ancestor's body in commemoration of the original pact they made with each other). <br /><br />I know both Bloch & Girard regard violence as the most important stimulus for religious ritual in general, and have their own evidence and reasonings. For Bloch at least the retold myths are really all about legitimating continuing acts of domination and violence (and for this reason must be dispensed with by us moderns...). <br /><br />I don't think they are right enough about this to make general theories about the origins of religions. I'm not a Freudian, or a social scientist. I see other human emotions at work in religions and their rituals besides murderous hatred. OK, I have no problem seeing violent hatred as having to do with particular strains detectable in religious ritual, but there, too, isn't it a crucially important question what the ritual is meant to do with it: commemorating, celebrating, countering, mitigating or transmuting it?<br /><br />I'll have to go back and reread part of Conrad's thesis, but I think Rabjampa Sönam Özer was executed by arrow firing squad inside the Great Temple, beside a stairway, but even so there is no sign of 'sacral' or sacrificial motives on the part of the three political-types who did the shooting. It is just because that part of the story is so unclear, especially in the important matter of motives, that I think we have to be very cautious about placing thoughts inside their heads unless we have good evidence they were in there.<br /><br />Another 'problem' with a historical understanding of these stories is that they can be coopted to one side or the other in the very act of retelling them, foisting 'responsibility' off one side onto the other. In short, a blame game (assigning guilt instead of actually assuaging it). We must tread warily in these polemical battlefields.<br /><br />I don't think the 'scapegoat' complex, quintessentially Middle Eastern, is involved here, and neither is the 'sacrificed savior.' These Tibetan stories assuage collective guilt. They don't promise any banishment of sin (by displacing it onto an innocent creature that is bound to get lost), or redemption from sin (thanks to someone else's blood). <br /><br />I've long been contemplating a blog about the scapegoat complex in Tibetan culture, too, and I believe it is a different one that needs to be discussed on its own terms. A 'pagan' banishing rite, it has more to do with the annual agricultural cycle, and I believe it very likely connected from its birth with the Iranian New Year rituals involving counter-kingship (after all, part of a sacral kingship complex). Shades of the golden bough, but let's talk about that another time. I'll go read about the stoned beggar now. Thanks for your thinking.<br /><br />Yours,<br />D<br />Danhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10453904366382251766noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32671574.post-35520820554701657792015-08-01T11:18:36.465+03:002015-08-01T11:18:36.465+03:00The recurrent theme you describe makes me think of...The recurrent theme you describe makes me think of the French anthropologist René Girard (Violence and the sacred, La route antique des hommes pervers, Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair…) and his theory of scapegoating. For him a scapegoat is a broken idol, someone who was once idolised, fell in disgrace and became a scapegoat.<br /><br />In Je vois Satan tomber comme un éclair, he writes about the making of a myth and how a person portrayed as a monster, sacrified, becomes later an idol to be worshiped. The sacrificial victim is divinised. As an the example of this process and of a myth in making, he presents the miraculous stoning of Appolonius of Tyan, told by Philostratus. (http://holyhauntings.typepad.com/haunted_by_the_holy_ghost/the-first-stone-by-rene-girard.html). According to Girard, this is a myth in the making, because it isn’t finished. Usually the victim undergoes two transfigurations: first they have to be demonised in order to be killed/sacrificed by collective violence, after which they are transformed into an idol or an object of worship. For Girard this a universal phenomenon, not limited to a single culture.<br /><br />The beggar in the story of Appolonius of Tyan is stoned in front of the Averted god (Heracles). Rabjampa Sönam Özer was sacrified tied to a pillar next to the Great Temple of Sakya. A “victim” that is directly or indirectly sacrificed to a god, seems to become “sacred” by the same act. But somehow the new god keeps his double status of a god and a demon. He will be as bloodthirsty as the god he himself was sacrificed to. One seems to become a god in a similar way one becomes a vampire…<br /><br />I could imagine that his skin (Rabjampa Sönam Özer), is used as a reminder for him, of his own wretched demon past, like telling him “Remember where you came from. You have not always been a god. We know your dirty secret!” <br />Hridayarthahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10713264962804395563noreply@blogger.com