A true follower of the Tathagata does not found his trust upon austerities or rituals, but believes in the giving up the idea of self and relies wholeheartedly on amitabha, the unbounded light of truth, says Paul Carus in The Gospel of Buddha.
This column begins on a sad note─ the demise of Kehnpo Jigme Phuntsok. Like many of us in exile, life in Tibet is second hand information to me or even third or fourth.
The revival in exile of Tibetan opera or Ache Lhamo first took place in the early sixties, in Kalimpong, in Northern India. A frontier town that borders Tibet, Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal
When the Dalai Lama greeted 2004 with an appeal to settle the insoluble Ayodhya issue, it seemed that here at last might be a peacebroker acceptable to all sides.
The Tibetan struggle needs to be freed from the strangleholds of general apathy and deficiency of democratic culture within the movement, argues Tenzin Tsundue.
Tibet may have been encroached upon by crass modernity,but only in the towns. Elsewhere, it is essentially unchanged, and remains a deeply mysterious, still forbidding land.
We were close to the sacred city of Lhasa when finally I saw it: the legendary Potala with its golden domes and white and deep-red palaces. Here, at last, was the holy of holies; the fabled Shangri-la that was for so long off-limits to travellers from the West.
A rather surprising announcement was made recently by Zhuang Cong Sheng, a senior official of the United Front Work Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.
If you are a Buddhist you may want to try this, but you would be wise to exercise a degree of caution. Jump from an aircraft at 12,000 feet and adopt the Lotus position. Make sure you have a parachute on.
