Sorry John,
I have a few comments to make on this posting, none
of them at all positive.
"In this age of broadcasting and newspapers, in which
the spoken
and the written word is multiplied a millionfold and
is
indiscriminately thrown at the public, its value has
reached such a
low standard"
None of those problems with darn pesky newspapers and
magazines and children's books in the mystical feudal
kingdom of pre-1950s Tibet, where only the ruling
elite of superstitious lamas and landlords had the
leisure time, let alone the education, to read and
write.
"it is difficult to give even a faint idea of the
reverence with which people of more spiritual times or
more
religious civilizations"
In the spiritual paradise of 'pure', pre-China Tibet
serfs, who made up the vast majority of the
population, regularly starved in large numbers because
of plagues of rats, which the Dalai lama and his
cronies insisted were made inviolable by their status
as 'reincarnations of the lice on Buddha'. Civilised,
huh. Give me Beavis and Butthead anyday.
"the word, which to them was the
vehicle of a hallowed tradition"
A hallowed tradition of oppressive superstitions
designed to keep the mass of the population in
servitude to a bunch of ovefed lamas and landowners,
who now weep for their people from comfortable exile.
A hallowed tradition which legitimised serfdom,
outright slavery, the subjugation of women, and
xenophobia. Here are some titbits, from a text I was
just reading today (reason why I sound so grumpy):
"These days, the Dalai Lama is "packaged"
internationally as a non-materialist holy man. In
fact, the
Dalai Lama was the biggest serf owner in Tibet.
Legally, he owned the whole country and everyone in
it.
In practice, his family directly controlled 27 manors,
36 pastures, 6,170 field serfs and 102 house slaves.
When he moved from palace to palace, the Dalai Lama
rode on a throne chair pulled by dozens of slaves.
His troops marched along to "It's a Long Way to
Tipperary," a tune learned from their British
imperialist trainers. Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama's
bodyguards, all over six-and-a-half feet tall, with
padded shoulders and long whips, beat people out of
his path. This ritual is described in the Dalai
Lama's autobiography."
and...
"The ruling serf owners were parasites. One observer,
Sir Charles Bell, described a typical official who
spent an hour a day at his official duties. Upper
class parties lasted for days of eating, gambling and
lying around. The aristocratic lamas also never
worked. They spent their days chanting, memorizing
religious dogma and doing nothing."
and...
"There are reports of women being burned for giving
birth to twins and for practicing the pre-Buddhist
traditional religion (called Bon). Twins were
considered proof that a woman had mated with an evil
spirit. The rituals and folk medicine of Bon were
considered "witchcraft." Like in other feudal
societies,
upperclass women were sold into arranged marriages.
Custom allowed a husband to cut off the tip of his
wife's nose if he discovered she had slept with
someone else."
and..
Lamaist superstition associated women with evil and
sin. It was said "among ten women you'll find nine
devils." Anything women touched was considered
tainted--so all kinds of taboos were placed on women.
Women were forbidden to handle medicine. Han Suyin
reports, "No woman was allowed to touch a lama's
belongings, nor could she raise a wall, or 'the wall
will fall.'... A widow was a despicable being, already
a
devil. No woman was allowed to use iron instruments or
touch iron. Religion forbade her to lift her eyes
above the knee of a man, as serfs and slaves were not
allowed to life the eyes upon the face of the nobles
or great lamas."
and check this out -
"Serfs could not use the same seats, vocabulary or
eating utensils as serf owners. Even touching one of
the master's belongings could be punished by whipping.
The masters and serfs were so distant from each
other that in much of Tibet they spoke different
languages."
I guess the 'great spiritual poetry' Jon is so
enamoured of was composed in the masters' language?
Please let's not turn our own very real
dissatisfaction with aspects of modern poetics and
society into a habit of idealising reactionary states
like the Dalai Lama's Tibet.
Cya
Scott
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If art can be called the re-creation and formal
expression of
reality through the medium of human experience, then
the creation of
language may be called the greatest achievement of
art. Each word
originally was a focus of energies, in which the
transformation of
reality into the vibrations of the human voice -- the
vital
expression of the human soul -- took place. Through
these vocal
creations man took possession of the world -- and more
than that:
he discovered a new dimension, a world within himself,
opening upon
the vista of a higher form of life, which is as much
beyond the
present state of humanity as the consciousness of a
civilized man is
above that of an animal...
Thus the word in the hour of its birth was a centre
of force and
reality, and only habit has stereotyped it into a mere
conventional
mean of expression...
In this age of broadcasting and newspapers, in
which the spoken
and the written word is multiplied a millionfold and
is
indiscriminately thrown at the public, its value has
reached such a
low standard, that it is difficult to give even a
faint idea of the
reverence with which people of more spiritual times or
more
religious civilizations approached the word, which to
them was the
vehicle of a hallowed tradition and the embodiment of
the spirit.
-- A. Govinda, Foundations of
Tibetan Mysticism
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"Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the moon? And how
could I try to doubt it? First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have
been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, nothing be
explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life... Philosophical
problems occur when language goes on holiday. We must not separate ideas from life,
we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must investigate the
application of words in individual language-games" - Ludwig Wittgenstein
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