Aum hari hari - get yr togs off, Doug, or yr karma won't be worth shit,
ya hear me?
The Master
Douglas Barbour wrote:
> There's a terrific SF story by Walter Jon Williams, 'Prayers on the
> Wind,' (in The Good New Stuff [1999] among others), in which the 42nd
> Incarnation of a Bodhisattva takes the 'Short Path' -- which the
> representatives of a warlike alien species finds 'terrifying.'
>
> Might be interesting to read about, but I (I suppose like Merwin)
> would not like to be caught in front of any so-called master on that
> path....
>
> Doug
> On 11-Jul-05, at 10:05 AM, MJ Walker wrote:
>
>> The NY Times article I read says this:
>>
>> >>One thing Naone and Merwin shared was an interest in Buddhism.
>> Early in their relationship, they were invited to the Naropa
>> Institute in Boulder, Colo., a center for Buddhist studies where
>> Allen Ginsberg was teaching. Naropa was presided over by a Tibetan
>> guru, Chogyam Trungpa, a tireless drunk and womanizer. At a Halloween
>> party while Ginsberg was away, Trungpa ordered everyone to undress.
>> Merwin and Naone refused. Trungpa's bodyguards tried to batter down
>> the door to their room. "I was not going to go peacefully," Merwin
>> recalls. "I started hitting people with beer bottles. It was a very
>> violent scene." Trungpa's bodyguards stripped them, and the two
>> figures cowered together before the guru like a chastened Adam and
>> Eve.The incident came to be mythologized as "The Great Naropa Poetry
>> Wars." Naropa became an epitaph for an era, a paradigm of the
>> difference between two kinds of poetry -- between Ginsberg's
>> passionate, declamatory style and Merwin's restrained, Western
>> formalism. Despite what happened at Naropa, Merwin is still a
>> Buddhist. <<
>> The following link is fairly detailed -
>> http://www.strippingthegurus.com/stgsamplechapters/trungpa.asp .<>
>> Apparently Ginsberg later, though not present (as all seem to agree),
>> affirmed the guru-rightness of Trungpa's actions. Both Tom Clark and
>> Ed Sanders have apparently published reports on this bit of 60s (?at
>> least in spirit) Boys Behaving Badly - and apparently there is
>> correspondence between Ginsberg & Merwin on the subject. But who
>> shall scape whipping when that Great Scorer comes to mark against
>> his/her name? While Waiting for the End quite a few of the Boys - and
>> a Girl or two - behaved very Badly during the last century. And who
>> doesn't like to dish the dirt with the rest of the girls?
>> Martin
>
> Douglas Barbour
> 11655 - 72 Avenue NW
> Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
> (780) 436 3320
>
> NOT MUCH
>
> Not much you ever
> said you were thinking
> of, not much to
> say in answer.
>
> Robert Creeley
>
--
M.J.Walker - no webpage, no blogspot, no idea -
nobody dies, 'nothing happens', we call it music,
it is time rushing past the shabby portals of our ear
and I am just a terrible mistake.
Robert Kelly
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