Copped the Bronze, Digging for Gold

First of all, massive respect to the monks and laypeople of the Zenkoji Temple in Nagano, Japan. They summoned the moral courage to withdraw the temple location as the starting point for Beijing's tainted torch relay when it reaches Japan on April 26.

"'There has been a lot of talk about the Tibet issue and the public opinion is heightening,' [the temple secretariat] said. 'We are Buddhists just like them. We hear words of concern from many people every day.'"

I hope to have on-the-scene reports from friends in Canberra, Australia after April 24.

From the home front comes the first, very minor disturbance in Ulaanbaatar, as authorities here have arrested visiting Tibetan lecturer T. Galsan for allegedly spraypainting "Free Tibet" in red letters on the Chinese Embassy walls, and throwing photographs of Chinese police brutality into the compound. The article also includes an unconfirmed report that Mr. Galsan's brother was among those killed by Chinese police during the March riots in Lhasa.

In happier developments I got an, um, well, ego-boosting email this morning. Seems there's a handsome new blog directory called simply blogged.com. They wrote in the inform me that DODR had been reviewed by their editors and they gave it a cumulative rating of 8.5 (out of 10, not 100, they hastened to add). I thought, "Oh no, here it comes. They want me to pay for higher placement or something." But no, all they wanted was for me to put their little linked widget in one of my side-columns. While modesty prevents that, you're welcome to see the page they've reserved for DODR, and review and rate the proceedings your own self. I know I'm supposed to be fully detached from such things, but I do put a fair amount of work into this blog, and I was pretty tickled to see it rated 48th out of 3,272 in the general "Religion & Spirituality" category and 3rd out of 92 among Buddhist blogs (to be fair, a good chunk of the blogs listed are still unrated). Seems pretend piety and smart-alecky wordplay is in high demand these days.

Finally, I want to introduce a new, irregular feature to DODR. I read an awful lot, and language and the odd details it sometimes conveys delight me. It's also an ongoing pleasure to share delight, so I offer the debut of:

Quotes to Savor

These two quotes are culled from Thomas Laird's marvelous volume entitled, The Story of Tibet: Conversations with the Dalai Lama, which I'm re-reading in order to keep clear about the truth of the many centuries of Tibetan/Chinese/Mongol/Manchu relations, as a counterweight to the deplorable distortions being force-fed to the Chinese public by their lovely government's propaganda machine (case in point: day before yesterday, the New York Times reported on the construction-in-progress of a Beijing museum solely dedicated to its version of Tibetan "history"). Anyway, Laird's whole book is a gem, but I love these bits, about Tibet's early Anglo-American relations:

"The viceroy in India, George Nathaniel Curzon, tried to establish direct contact with Tibet's true ruler, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, but his letters, much to Curzon's annoyance, were returned unopened. Worse, some were returned, apparently unopened but filled with dried dung."

"Prior to World War II, America's only contact with Tibet had been the purchase of white yak tails, from which Santa Claus beards were made."

Comments

[Sangye]

Took a quick look at blogged.com (ah, but you already know I did, don't you?) It's well done. I clicked on the blog listed next to yours called "Dharma the Cat's Blog, Philosophy with Fur." The blog is subtitled "On the rocky road to Nirvana with a Buddhist cat, a novice monk and a mouse hell-bent on cheese." It's a hoot, but also really interesting. Thanks for the giggle.

[june calender]

Laird is not fully informed. American connection with Tibet began in 1935 with a visit by C.Seydam-Cuttings of the National History Museum to Lhasa and he returned [with wife] in Aug 1936. At the same time an American, Theos Bernard was spending the summer in Lhasa at the invitiation of the Kashag and the Regent. When Bernard left he carried a letter to Franklin Rossevelt from the Regent expressing hope the two countries could be friends. Bernard was called the first "white lama" and lctured across the US showing motion pictures he had taken in Tibet where he visited all the monasteries, he was a student at Columbia , wrote his Ph.D. thesis on hatha yoga and sutided Buddhist while in Lhasa. So there were American" connections" of a sort before WWII.

[Ariel]

I'm reading "The Dragon in the Land of Snows" as a way to bone-up on Tibetan history. Have you read it? It's very good -- written by a Tibetan emigre. I'm about 300 pages in and I can't escape the feeling that from 1949-1951 when the US, brittain, India, and the UN might have had some real hope of keeping the Communists out of Tibet, they turned their backs and pretended it wasn't their/our responsibility.
And sorry to voice this as well, but beyond giving the Dalai Lama a fancy piece of metal and pciture with the president what have we (Americans) really done to aid Tibet that has been of any real substance?