Towards My Wonderland

When you feel low, think that this norm of standardized life, namely mechanical, is for those heartless. The forerunners' aphorisms have already tarnished, now just soot of rust. When you feel sort of cast out, think the notion of only-this-life and building it up is like adding further junks to be attached to then. Yes, adding junks isn't like a scavenger's desperate means to do so. The former junks sparkle. That's the magic you're after. I am leaving far, far away to a place infested only with wild sweet potatoes called dhoma in Tibetan.

Boston Tibetan Truthful Public Talk Episode 17: A Case Study

So proud of you Lama Tseta to come out and speak up so for our root-Guru and us all. Your sense of nationalism and unshakable faith in His Holiness the Dalai Lama is highly appreciated.

But for me the whole prospect, through Lama Tseta being within the loop of renegades for nearly 19 years (if since 1997) and the ghoulish doings, speaks of nothing other than the highlighting one note: CPC, the mafia party with the mounting hypochondria of Party's health, has never had a thought for the future of the nation and her people's welfare. I mean for Chinese people, then how possible for us.Take the so conspicuous examples of serious environmental degradation in China (why not in Tibet) to dispossession of her own peoples.

How it has worked and reacted in settling our issue at hand as per Middle Way Policy's such shocking appeasements as to save Tibetans and Tibet? They have never given real ears and thoughts to our genuine readiness and empathy. We can learn it from it. They have instructed the handful of hypnotized renegades (so sadly a few figures of spiritual titles and learning backgrounds) that His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama is their core enemy to be expunged. That's not a joke. It can be learned by viewing the footage, the hit-list of four to five.

Given the huge sacrifice or concession offered, not as a quid pro quo, then the question is how they treat us and our issue at hand? They think they don't need anything further. They don't care at all about the truth and the will of the people. Telling a white lie is rooted in their culture, and so snooping over and closing in over an individual's life.

The punch line is that is there really a constructive prospect for our still enlivened spirit in settling our issue through dialogue? In settling such issue as per our such huge, huge sacrifice for the urgent cases to be resolved first, the other side, the oppressor, the nations state with such fancy dream to be super power, should at least have one true face. I think so. But they behave like a caprice rather than a nation state with the beacon of justice as the highest authority.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama did publicly declare that he had lost hope in relying on or dealing with Chinese government or leadership. It is many years back. So he has recommended the new, yet desperate, means to approach Chinese people, virtually dumb, coward money-making machines but with some vanity of knowing this and that. It has been carrying on for years.

My voice: isn't it the time to seriously look into our stand and policy towards Chinese government? The money is being pushed into through channel after channel. Can we ever be robust and resilient holding on to the same static stand like there isn't a single means ahead? Can there be more like Lama Tseta even after being in the secret world for 19 years? I think it can be so hard. Who else did so? Why those older Lamas with far wider spiritual learning  backgrounds plus titles couldn't do so? Can we be immune ever?
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More reliable, informative, exhaustive piece:
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/china-dalailama/

A Streak of Light

Reading Tsering Wangmo Dhompa's A Home in Tibet, Portrait of a Lama, one of the ending chapters, said as the 'maiden' literature work by a Tibetan woman, and doing so with the suspended breaths as to have the utmost effect in being able to reconstruct a glimpse of the notorious Cultural Revolution's pallor marked by intensive adversity, starvation, struggle sessions to re-education sessions, I came to this conclusion despite her surviving oldest relative, the uncle monk's taciturnity to virtually slipping away into yonder thought-world: George Orwell's 1984, published in 1949, could be reckoned now and then through his terse narration over days in terms of telling again and again that the world outside is 'evanescent' despite seemingly well-ordered, the sudden commissioning to excavate trench after Mao's death for an impending unknown enemy to the mode of keeping every head in a reeling mania by secondly galvanizing into a desperate spree that one yields to when in desperation. Then their means of Socialist Transformation was just borrowed one, a copycat's game tested on the mass of Chinese and Tibetan. And the question arises naturally who was the real sinner in the first place to lay out such monstrously cruel examples for torturing human by human—ranging from the sterilization of female reproductive organ to the systematic overpowering mode of racial assimilation in keeping the figure down to down?

Though physical adversity was far worse than in 1984, the effects of psychological electrification bears resemblances going through such inhuman atrocities in subduing an individual's dignity over years on daily basis. For being an ordained one he had gone longer and more intensive sessions and hard labors instead of Collective Farming. But for being an ordained with the firm ground of monastic learning he had survived sane. The silver lining had proven for him, our pride, in coming out so despite being reluctant and seemingly carried away like the still existing effects of the inexplicable tortures.

But my romance with the book is for the love between the mother and her only daughter. Finding of her mother losing a twin back in Tibet came as a jolt to me as my own late mother had lost a twin (sons) in Tibet. Brooding over them was similarly so complex and private. I love the book by which I can see a streak of light arching afar.

Infinity, Illumination, Freedom

Wealth even savages do have;

Valor even animals are endowed with.

Yet so rare in this cyclic realm is

To speak with undoubting veracity.

Thus, for the merit of knowledge

Do pursue and care despite even life;

The one, who doesn’t pursue so,

Is as silly as an animal.

__ Lord Nagarjuna (Healing Drops)  

A Working Wile

One is one’s own savior;

One is also one’s detractor—

In committing right or wrong

One is one’s eyewitness.

__Lord Buddha

My Own Impressions on the Day

Europe Stands With Tibet: Peace March and Rally in Paris on 14 March, 2015

You're always there, the pacifier without soul but still with the strong presence of their honed motives. It speaks after all by gripping each heart to stop being tormented for a moment by the habitual heightened insecurity in form of sensitivity, aloofness saved by desperate hubris or pride, holding on to non-recognized but self-serving prejudices to rawness secondly camouflaged. 

A moment to remember: A luck-shot I take it so given those faces familiar to speaking something that I don't know. And so the rawness I can vividly see in form of alacrity on a handful faces not in the picture. But we gather so, yes, 'we'... My rawness and insecurity, as I find, observe theirs, those a few handful ones'. Funny thing it's, isn't it? In short, life is just a stage, a dream long enough to shed such load upon load like punishing oneself. The sky is overcast, unexpectedly nippy, bladder-filling.

Palais de Chaillot: The esplanade that represents Freedom and Human Rights--the piazza, the ramp, with the historic tower in the backdrop, the healer as per my own conviction, where hearts come for the same, where the uprooted, displaced and dispossessed ones come to vent in their own ways before being sucked in by the chore to follow right away. La Paix is at stake. It's the time of flexing muscles, succumbed to the desperate arm-race to be 'super power'. We are just performers to regale those onlookers but a few snub-nosed ones seem to take it seriously. But it's the reserved place for us to vent like those youths mimicking rap music with the expressed submissiveness. Yes, why not, they have an issue too for doing so. 

English speakers in different accents, posers with their compact dressing kits and real-looking shooting cameras can be found there despite the weather. Every step with it in the sight seems to be for acting out like before one's dear dumb mother who just grins agreeably. Braving against the chill by changing into different bright white satin outfits, a young girl poses for her two crews, a middle-aged couple. The poses rather odd but her every acted out, back-curved and chest posing, movement is favored with nods and clicks.

Yes, It's Questionable

The fateful nation and her people diaspora and within: Tibet and Tibetans, the game of obeisance, the high hope of a Tibetan in the West to be

taken so, as per the smiling image and dedication of His Holiness the Dalai Lama for the far-reaching global issues ranging from ‘universal responsibility’ to ‘warm-heartedness’. The game is risky for a Tibetan in the West, especially for a newcomer with such high hope that isn’t so much an illusion as one’s hold or belief of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s globally accepted popularity, among the top 10 globally loved people. But to be taken so is like wishing to be cuddled by everyone as per our firm hold of ‘mother sentient being’. And how is it once the primary motive is detected as ‘self-interest’, far worse than an accidental rebuff when one finds oneself in a quandary for being unable to speak the foreign language ‘guttural accent’ even after years? I have found the illusion is still mounting high as per those ones who have gone so far as carrying a smiling portrait of His Holiness the Dalai Lama visibly in a folder to be taken so just by seeing the image. And such act, thought out by one and readily imitated by many without the means of communication, is really foul for being bound with just self-interest—then what about wasting one’s hours in a day (thanks for Wechat and facebook) rather than spending an hour for learning the language.

Really, French wine must have been tasted and so her cheese, the two stuffs the longer fermented, the better. So I have so far despite still with the minimal knowledge. I am not hurt when I present my Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, which I have prepared over weeks, titled Un clin d’oeil au Tibet and have to face the handful of classmates’ rather sincere reactions this morning like seeing the way I have gleaned the web-based information as too readymade despite my own labor of arrangement, editing and adding extra texts. The learning point is from a black classmate named Christian from Uganda. Looking at him in modest dress, his blackness, the quadrangle head as of the flat temples and forehead, I had times of fancying that he looked like a black Hollywood actor whose name I don’t know (the one in Collateral with Tom Cruise as an accidentally and ill-fatedly bound hostage). Even though his French accent is so thickly blended with his native singsong accent, he speaks fluently. As per his fluency in spoken French he must have been in France for long but it’s hard to get the right information from his rather wavering self-introduction: like saying ‘married’ at one session and ‘single’ at the other. He is of medium frail build with strong body odor that I found once. I did also find one time he tried to rub the bare skin of his hand with mine as to test how I was to react. So I found he was so sensitive with the rawness or self-awareness that is stark different from mine; his is about racial equality and mine is of self-levied price of not finding a ground to stand on worsened by the communication defect but not sort of autism. His is as per my learning through reading VS Naipaul like that of a mimicry of what a black in US does, self-awareness and its manifestation as naïve as how a nouveau riche behaves. And this morning he first listens intently with a few questions. Once when it comes to the national flag Le Drapeau, he twists his eyes behind the narrow white glasses. He expressly says those things (snow lions, the burning jewel, the wishful jewel like yin yang) are ‘not essential’ as the long explanation, the text to be followed.

The worst thing happens when it comes to the national anthem L’hymne national. As he finds more words of Buddha and Dharma, he pushes up the bridge of his glasses twice.

“What, is Tibet, are all Tibetans Buddhists?” He says looking from side to side.

Our class teacher, Madam Franceline is seated next by him. She smiles and casts glances at me. It’s like saying she knows how Christian is. There was a time when he rather importunately held his ground like a wayward child. It was just about a kind of French cake. When Madam Franceline showed the picture of the cake we were talking about after googling it on her smart phone, he flatly disagreed and said it wasn’t the right stuff.

“No, almost 3% is Muslims, I think,” say I.

“Then what about only Buddha and Dharma,” says he and chuckles smugly.

I am at my wit’s end how to explain, not as to gloss over the fact with something to say. He is right. And I wonder about the case of Bhutan, the neighboring small country where maybe 20% or more are non-Buddhists. How is their national anthem written. And I search on internet and find the following translation in English:

The Thunder Dragon Kingdom

In the Thunder Dragon Kingdom, where cypresses grow

Refuge of the glorious monastic and civil traditions,

The King of Druk, precious sovereign,

His being is eternal, his reign prosperous

The enlightenment teachings thrive and flourish

May the people shine like the sun of peace and happiness!

‘The enlightenment teachings’ (Choe Sangye Tenpa, namely the religion, Buddha Dharma) are the overt words there too.

But the bespectacled Pakistani lady, one of the students, with bright complexion, who is bit chubby, comes to my rescue. She says it can be that it was written long time ago. And, yes, she is right, I presume. It could be written when every Tibetan was Buddhist. Is it so? Can the information on Wikipedia be relied on?

And the other case is about when learning about our hold of ‘mother sentient beings’ that every life, even of a tiny insect, is revered like killing an insect is a sinful act. They all laughed at the idea like it’s the funniest thing they have ever heard but Madam Franceline says it’s regarded so by a Tibetan. For the latter I can say they can laugh. But for the former I really can’t say that it can be left so.

The presentation is done like being able to shed a load. Now I am eager to see Christian’s presentation. I want to learn from his country.