Tag: Dalai Llama

Music’s Intelligentsia: Great Music. Great Minds

If there’s an area of life I’ve neglected, it’s music. Music, like reading, exercising, learning new skills, nurturing friendships, takes time.

It isn’t that I don’t have time. It’s more that I often squander it, unheeding Thoreau’s maxim, “Time is the stream I go fishing in.”

It wasn’t always this way. When I was young, I took a transistor radio nightly to bed, solaced by music into deep slumber.

Like my daily quest to learn Italian, I want to be more fluent in music’s idiom. I still don’t know how to listen to classical music with understanding.

I’ve been told Brahms helps you relax, sleep better. I need him for when I awake to night’s stillness, the indifferent stars, my mind ablaze with anxious thoughts.

Jazz, with its pulsating, sensual immediacy, its impromptu genius, I like, but don’t listen to enough.

The same with the vast tapestries of other music.

I can’t sum up what I’ve lost through my disconnect.

Musicians themselves can be great company, fellow pilgrims in life’s journey.

Until today, I hadn’t known that the eclectic David Bowie kept a list of his 100 favorite books. I’ve gone over that list. Oh, my god! These books, none of them airport reads, should be on everyone’s lists. They’re now on mine.

There are others like him, musical geniuses who have wrestled with life’s vagaries, the meaning of it all, how to live it fully, its sorrows and its griefs.

There’s Patti Smith, Rimbaud and Baudelaire enthusiast, Gifford Series lecturer at Yale, recipient of France’s Legion d’Honneur.

Joni Mitchell, lover of Yeats, Rilke, and the modernists poets.

Sting, who studied English literature, devotee of Shakespeare, philosophy and political theory.

Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize for Literature.

Maggie Rogers, a new voice for me, her sultry songs guaranteed to shake your hips to their beat. Rogers took time out to learn life’s purpose, enrolling at Harvard Divinity School, earning her master’s. Like Bowie, she keeps a booklist, owns a first edition of Virginia Woolf’s To a Lighthouse—“The best thing I own.”

So many others: Cohen, Morrissey, Mingus, Baez. Others still.

Why should I be surprised? Musicians are artists engaging life; their music, poetry.

Like the psalmist’s harp, it touches the Soul.

rj

Tibet’s Tragedy: A Culture Teetering into Oblivion

_90482485_28344675572_e210e10c4e_bThe horror began with the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1949. In the decades since, Chinese oppression has continued relentlessly, with several hundred thousand Tibetans having been executed, tortured or imprisoned.

Commenting after her recent release, one survivor informs us that “Chinese officials used different torture instruments on me to break my spirit…to make me denounce his Holiness and the aspirations of my people. My fellow political prisoners and I were subjected to electric shocks from batons and prods…I spent weeks in solitary confinement. This torture and mistreatment started when I was just a child of thirteen and continued through most of my life in prison.”

I knew that the Chinese regime had signaled out Buddhists in Tibet to denigrate its culture as one effort among others to suppress their identity and, with it, their desire to be a free people.

Of an original 6,254 monasteries that existed before the Chinese invasion, just 13 remain fully intact, the others either destroyed or severely damaged.

A few days ago, I finished reading Stephen Batchelor’s fascinating book, Confessions of an Atheist Buddhist. Batchelor had converted to Buddhism as a young man and was formally ordained as a monk in 1974, and knows both the Tibetan language well and the woes of Buddhism, Tibet’s ancient faith.

He recalls visiting Lhasa in 1984. While the Potala Palace remains, it’s now a museum. Few traces of Buddhism, in fact, remain in this city once filled with Buddhist shrines and ubiquitous prayer flags.

From the Potala, you can glimpse what remains of the nearby Sera Monastery. 3000 monks lived there in 1959, the year of the Tibetan uprising. Now, only 100 lamas remain, all of them elderly.

Twenty miles east of Lhasa lies the Ganden Monastery, founded in the 14th century. Sadly. the infamous Red Guards ordered the local people to dismantle it, stone by stone. Once the residence of some 5,000 monks, only a scattering of aged monks remains.

Chinese persecution of Tibetan Buddhists continues unabated even beyond Tibet proper. In June 2016, the PRC mandated that half of the world’s largest Buddhist conclave, the Tibetan Buddhist Institute at Larung Gar, with its estimated 40,000 monks and nuns in Szechuan, be razed and its numbers reduced to 3,500 nuns and 1500 monks.

According to Radio Free Asia, expelled monastics must sign a pledge to “uphold the unity of the nation and not to engage in behavior opposing government policy in the area.”

Last month (December 6, 2016), the Tibetan government-in-exile asked the UN to intervene.

Meanwhile, the European Parliament on December 15, 2016, adopted a resolution condemning the destruction of the community.

Here at home, President Obama hosted Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama in both 2010 and 2014, giving verbal support for the preservation of Tibet’s culture, while subsequently restating the U. S. position that Tibet is part of the People’s Republic of China.  (He did not meet with the Dalai Lama in the Oval Office.)

China views the Dalai Lama as a separatist, however, and hence a threat to government hegemony, even though the Dalai Llama has never advocated independence..

Meanwhile China is pressing forward with resettling thousands of Chinese in Tibet and plans to build a second railway into the country to expedite commerce and tourism in particular.

Since 1990, China has relocated more than 2 million nomads into barrack settlements under the guise of protecting grazing land.

9-7-15_nomads_before_after_thumbnailIn urban areas, new schools are being built with Mandarin the primary language of instruction.

Though most of Tibet remains overwhelmingly Tibetan, an estimated 17% of Lhasa’s population is now Chinese.

In short, the Chinese have been following the Soviet formula of resettling volatile areas such as Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, where a large Russian population now resides.

There are a few Westerners who argue that reports of Chinese repression have been exaggerated.

I have more faith in Amnesty International, which relies upon documentary evidence. In its 2014 report, it concluded that “ethnic Tibetans continued to face discrimination and restrictions on their rights to freedoms of religious belief, expression, association and assembly.”

We are now into 2017, and while the world largely goes its own way, Tibet’s fate continues to deter towards extinction of its culture as the Chinese People’s Republic recent ordnance demolishing Larung Gar clearly demonstrates in its strident callousness.

Since 2011, American International has documented 131 self-immolations in protest of Chinese incursions upon its way of life.

—rj