A Bit More Detail

• JSTOR Daily looks at how Buddhism came to the United States, first brought by immigrants and then embraced as an alternative by the avant-garde.


• JSTOR Daily looks at the influence of the French Resistance on the playwriting of Samuel Beckett, himself a member of the underground.


• JSTOR Daily looks at the many different metaphors used to try to illuminate Brexit.


• JSTOR Daily notes that seal-watching boat expeditions need to give the seals more privacy, to avoid overstressing them and exposing them to the risks of fatigue.


• JSTOR Daily looks at how letter-writing, as a literary form, has been so strongly associated with women and the feminine.

• Guardian Cities reports on how prices for land in Ontario are propelling a Mennonite migration to Prince Edward Island.


• Peter Rukavina takes a look at the regularity, or not, of the street grids of major Island communities.


• Civil wedding ceremonies on PEI are starting to outnumber religious ones. CBC reports.


• A heritage log cabin in Charlottetown, dating back to the mid-19th century, is being torn down by its owner for wanting of funding to help preserve it. CBC reports.


• Construction of the Great Enlightenment Buddhist Institute Society's headquarters, in the eastern PEI community of Heatherdale, is being slowed down by construction and other issues. CBC reports.

• Architectuul has an extended long interview with architect Dragoljub Bakić, talking about the innovative architecture of Tito's Yugoslavia and his experiences abroad.


• Centauri Dreams remarks on how the new maps of Pluto can evoke the worlds of Ray Bradbury.


• The Crux answers an interesting question: What, exactly, is a blazar?


• D-Brief links to a study suggesting that conditions on Ross 128 b, the second-nearest potentially habitable planet, are potentially (very broadly) Earth-like.


• Dangerous Minds shows how John Mellencamp was, in the 1970s, once a glam rocker.


• The Finger Post shares photos from a recent visit to Naypyidaw, the very new capital of Myanmar.


• Gizmodo explains how the detection of an energetic neutrino led to the detection of a distant blazar, marking yet another step forward for multi-messenger astronomy.


• JSTOR Daily reports on the now-overlooked writer of supernatural fiction Vernon Lee.


• Language Log makes an argument that acquiring fluency in Chinese language, including Chinese writing, is difficult, so difficult perhaps as to displace other cultures. Thoughts?


• Lawyers, Guns and Money suggests that the decline of the neo-liberal world order is needed. My main concern is that neo-liberalism may well be the least bad of the potential world orders out there.


• Lingua Franca takes a look at how Hindi and Urdu, technically separate languages, actually form two poles of a Hindustani language continuum.


• The Map Room Blog links to a unique map of the London Underground that shows the elevation of each station.


• Rocky Planet notes that the continuing eruption of Kilauea is going to permanently shape the lives of the people of the Big Island of Hawai'i.


• Window on Eurasia notes that the Buddhists of Kalmykia want the Russian government to permit a visit by the Dalai Lama to their republic.


• Writing at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Livio Di Matteo notes that the Trump demand NATO governments spend 4% of their GDP on defense would involve unprecedented levels of spending in Canada.

• Hundreds of parrots in a Surrey sanctuary are still waiting for permanent homes. Global News reports.


• NPR reports on how many Uighurs in China find success through their racially mixed appearances, as models.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer explains the rationale behind the Jones Act, with its stiff shipping charges for Puerto Rico.


• The Chinese Buddhist fangsheng ritual, involving the release of captured animals into the wild, has issues. The Guardian reports.


• Tyson Yunkaporta's essay takes a look at the appeal of SF/F, and post-apocalyptic fiction, for indigenous peoples.

Prince Edward Island is becoming home to a growing number of Buddhist nuns, who say the Island is a comfortable place for them to practise their spirituality.

Four years ago, 13 Buddhist nuns moved to the Island from Taiwan. Today, there are 134 at their home on the Uigg Road in eastern P.E.I.

In the next couple of years, they hope to attract about 100 more and move to a new building that will be modelled after a traditional Chinese temple.

"Canada has a great acceptance of different cultures and religions," said Yvonne, one of the nuns at what is called the Great Wisdom Buddhist Institute.

"It is a very good environment to practise and study here, that's why it will attract more nuns from other countries."

The majority are from Taiwan, but some are from Singapore, New Zealand, United States and Canada. The average age is 25.

P.E.I.'s Buddhist monks are opening the doors wide for their biggest-ever open house this weekend at their monastery complex in Little Sands.

The Great Enlightenment Buddhist Institute Society (GEBIS) has made the Island their home for the last eight years. They've built up a large compound of about a dozen buildings, which they've said is worth about $10 million, and still expanding. Hundreds of Asian monks study there year-round.

"This is just a way for us to make personal connections with Islanders," said Venerable Dan, GEBIS public affairs spokesperson.

"This weekend, the Mother's Day weekend, will be a perfect opportunity for us to open the door and welcome Islanders and friends to come in and get to know more about us."

Islanders can tour the facilities, which include a prayer hall for up to 500 monks adorned with gold-plated Buddha statues, and living accommodations where the monks bunk in austere, 10-man rooms.

They'll also show off some of their traditional handwork including drawing and intricate, colourful sculpture created from butter.

[T]he claim that metallic bowls have been used by Tibetan Buddhist monastics for centuries as musical instruments and ritual tools would seem to be widely accepted and generally known. To be sure, metal bowls and strikers of all shapes and sizes grace Tibetan refugee stalls, curio shops and New Age boutiques the world over. Here in McLeod Ganj, India, the Tibetan capital-in-exile, you can’t swing a prayer wheel without hitting a singing bowl for sale. A significant industry exists around the power of the bowls, and singing bowl sound healing masters today provide treatments, offer workshops, record CDs, and conduct live performances in countries all over the world. The association of resonant bowls with spirituality, and with Tibetan and/or Buddhist spirituality in particular, would seem to be firmly established.

As it turns out though, singing bowls’ supposed antiquity and Tibetan-ness is rather contentious. Academic consensus is that the ‘Tibetan’ singing bowl is a thoroughly modern and Western invention, and that singing bowls are really not Tibetan at all. Perhaps the easiest way to appreciate this (to return to my earlier Dad joke) is by noting that while there is indeed a Tibetan term for both standing and hand-held prayer wheels (maNi ‘khor lo/lag ‘khor) no specific term for ‘singing bowl’ exists in Tibetan. Standing or ‘resting’ bells – unsuspended bells that face upwards and which lack an interior clapper – exist throughout Buddhist Asia and have often served as temple gongs and as devices for marking the break between sessions in ritual or meditative activities (the Tibetan ritual bell or dril bu, a fixture of tantric Buddhist rites, often serves a similiar function). Tibetans have made various kinds of bowls (phor pa) for centuries, which they have used for storage, eating and drinking, and as containers for offerings on altars. Tibetans also make use of a number of traditional musical instruments for both religious and recreational purposes, and in both monastic and non-monastic ritual contexts the chanting of prayers and mantras is accompanied by the chiming, clashing, blasting, and beating of a vast array of specially-designed ritual instruments. Yet, as historian of Tibet Tsering Shakya has confirmed in no uncertain terms, there remains no credible historical evidence for Tibetans ever having used ‘resonating’ metallic bowls in any way that resembles how they are employed by self-avowed sound and ‘vibrational’ healers today.

So where does the idea of singing bowls’ Tibetan-ness come from then? Singing bowls don’t even get a mention in either Donald Lopez or Peter Bishop’s classic treatments of Tibet in the Western imagination. The bowls do however appear in Martin Brauen’s comprehensive survey of Western fantasies about Tibet, ‘Dreamworld Tibet/Western Illusions’ (2004). In contrast to the meticulous detail with which Brauen traces the origins of a host of other fantastical things connected to Tibet though, his comments on singing bowls are surprisingly brief and vague[.]

In November of last year, the fourteenth Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso completed an extensive lecture tour of the USA. Of the thousands who showed up for the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s talks, one group arrived without fail to each of his events: crowds of mostly white protestors in Tibetan robes who came to boycott the religious leader. Brandishing placards and shouting slogans, they accused the Dalai Lama of being a hypocrite, a liar and a denier of religious freedom. Calling the leader ‘the worst dictator in this modern day’ and a ‘false Dalai Lama’, the demonstrators seemed to be channelling the most zealous of Chinese Communist Party ideologues. Yet these were no party cadres. Rather, they were converts to the Dalai Lama’s own school of Tibetan Buddhism. As representatives of the ‘International Shugden Community’ (ISC), the protesters came to highlight their grievances over the Dalai Lama’s opposition to a Tibetan deity known as Dorje Shugden, and the discrimination and human rights violations they claim the religious leader’s rejection of this being and its followers has engendered.

The ISC is a major mouth-piece for the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT), a sect of almost exclusively non-Tibetan converts to Tibetan Buddhism that currently spearheads the global pro-Shugden, anti-Dalai Lama agenda. On the surface, the NKT’s almost two decades-long global campaign against the Dalai Lama and his supporters – that is, the overwhelming majority of the ethnic Tibetan and Tibetan Buddhist global population – appears to be primarily about a dispute hinging on opposing theological positions within a single tradition. The Dalai Lama believes that Dorje Shugden is a dangerous demon masquerading as a benign deity, the NKT believes that the being is a bona fide Buddha. What I want to argue here is that the controversy, and specifically NKT’s involvement in it, points as well to the politics of race, appropriation, and privilege involved in conversion and new religious movements, and highlights ongoing tensions between ethno-nationalist and universalist impulses in the globalization of Tibetan Buddhism and culture.

The Dalai Lama and NKT converts are all members of the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism, in which at least since the 19th century, Dorje Shugden has been seen by some practitioners as a particularly potent ‘protector’ (in Tibetan Buddhism protectors are powerful, yet ferocious, egotistical spirits that have been ritually converted into defenders Buddhism). Although the Dalai Lama is technically not the highest spiritual authority in the Geluk school, his line’s historical political leadership of Tibet has made him one of the school’s most prominent figures. His dual role as a national leader and sectarian authority, however, has generated some tension, and historically the Dalai Lamas’ more inclusive, nationally orientated policies have clashed with the narrower sectarian priorities of some Gelukpa elites. Himself once a Shugden propitiator in accordance with his Geluk education in Tibet, the current Dalai Lama began to voice reservations about the spirit in the 1970s. Shugden’s reputation for ruthlessly punishing (and assassinating) prominent Gelukpa practitioners who engage with teachings from other schools has made the spirit iconic of a certain brand of Geluk supremacism. Such bias is in fundamental conflict with the Dalai Lama’s particularly non-sectarian vision of Tibetan Buddhism and a Tibetan nation in exile. Thus, to protect himself and the Tibetan people from what he sees as a dangerous demon, the Dalai Lama has prohibited those with ritual commitments to the spirit from attending any of his teachings, and has purged exile monastic and government posts of anyone associated with the being.

[. . .]

NKT members have made their quarantine into something of a virtue. NKT converts claim Tibetans have become too worldly and politically-focused to be worthy of functioning as custodians of pure Buddhist teachings. Though inji monks and nuns entering the NKT rely on a Tibetan guru, adopt Tibetan names, wear traditional robes and preserve lineage practices hailing from Tibet, any direct engagement with Tibetan politics or culture is denounced as retrogressive and unnecessary. The NKT’s philosophy is one of ‘one lama, one yidam (meditational deity), one protector’ in reference to their sole reliance on Kelsang Gyatso and his particular teachings, a stance distinctly odds with how Tibetan Buddhism has historically been practiced. Today, the NKT curriculum is based exclusively on Kelsang Gyatso’s texts, and ritual activity and teaching in NKT centres worldwide happens pretty much entirely in languages other than Tibetan.