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MAITRI BUDDHIST NEWSLETTER
May 2017

“Trying to run away is never the answer to being a fully human being. Running away from the immediacy of your experience is like preferring death to life.”
 Pema Chodron
 
   “Many people have found in Buddhism—and in its suspicion of mental and intellectual abstractions—a practical way to resist the “power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages, and political slogans.” But such is the hold of secular ideologies in the modern West that a mainstream intellectual invoking Buddhism would more often than not provoke the kind of derision reserved for anything vaguely religious or spiritual. It is a grim reflection on the life of the mind in the new century that while apparently respectable intellectuals recycle selective historical “facts” and line up to serve the manipulators of reality in the widespread trahison des clercs, a subtle moral philosophy such as Buddhism cannot speak its name in the public sphere.”

 
Pankaj Mishra, The disappearance of the spiritual thinker, Tricycle , Spring 2007, pp. 62 – 67.

 “. . . Buddhist thinkers from Shakyamuni on have presented their counterculture through rigorous debate and dialogue with the religious and scientific traditions of each civilization which has hosted them. Seeing the Vajrayāna through Tibetan eyes, then, involves comparisons with the world history of spirituality and science. “
 
Joseph Loizzo, Vajrayāna Buddhism In Tibetan Perspective. A Spiritual Science of Civilized Happiness.

THE LIFE OF FREDA BEDI  [HERE] 

H.H. THE 16TH KARMAPA IN LONDON

The Tantric View of Life as A New language

“Thousands of people may live in the world but we cannot call it a fellowship until they know each other and have sympathy for each other. A true community is a place where truth and wisdom are its light, and where the people know each other and trust each other and have things in common, and where there is a harmonious organisation. In fact, harmony is its life and its happiness and its meaning.”
 
Mahaparinirvana Sutta Maitri:  South African Buddhist Quarterly, No. 7, Cape Town, 27th March 1979
 
“The art form of the future is the group. The intelligence and benevolence we need can only come from the group, from associations of men and women seeking to struggle against the impulses of illusion, egoism and fear.”

Jacob Needleman,  The American Soul
[HERE]

"Everywhere on earth there are people of our kind. That for a small part of them, I can be a focal point, the nodal point in the net, is the burden and the joy of my life."
 
Hermann Hesse, private letter, 1955.

           
The cycle of existence is of unknown origin. No beginning is known for the beings who run and move (from one existence to another), hindered (to recognize their true Being) by their lack of intrinsic awareness and fettered by the craving (for continued existence). For this reason, frustration has been experienced for a long time; pain and decay have been experienced and the cremation ground has been filled.”
 
46 - Pali Cannon: Samyutta-nikaya, Pali Text Society Edition, N II, 179

Herbert V. Guenther:

    “It is my conviction that Tantrism in its Buddhist form is of the utmost importance for the inner life of man and so for the future of mankind. If the life of the spirit is to be invigorated, there must be a new vision and understanding, and there is hardly anything of such value as the study of the Buddhist Tantrics. For Tantrism is founded on practice and on an intimate personal experience of reality, of which traditional religions and philosophies have given merely an emotional or intellectual description, and for Tantrism reality is the ever-present task of man to be.” 

 Herbert V. Guenther, The Tantric View of Life, Shambhala Pub;ications, Boulder & London, 1976, p.ix.

This was written in 1976. More recently, Joseph Loizzo writes:

 
“With their literature encoded in symbolism and their practice veiled in secrecy, India’s diverse Tantric traditions have provoked an array of speculative readings by modern Indian and Western scholars. This is an ideal time to explore the philosophy of the Buddhist Tantras, since the last decade has witnessed a renaissance in Tantric scholarship based on unprecedented access to Vajrayāna Buddhist traditions preserved in Tibet. Viewed from the Tibetan perspective, the Tantras appear not as a fossilized curiosity but as a living paradigm of contemplative science and civilization.”

 
Joseph Loizzo, Vajrayāna Buddhism in Tibetan Perspective. A Spiritual Science of Civilized Happiness, p.2.


“The second basic theory of Kālacakra physics expands on the physicalist insight that the bodies of animate beings emerge from the inanimate matter of the world and so tend to mirror the patterns and rhythms of their environment. Expressed in the dictum, “as without, so within,” this theory of macrocosm-microcosm nonduality is elegantly formulated in the interweaving of Kālacakra astrophysics and psychobiology.” 

 
Joseph Loizzo, Kālacakra and the Nālandā Tradition: Science, Religion, and Objectivity in Buddhism and the West, p.359


  “. . . Buddhist thinkers from Shakyamuni on have presented their counterculture through rigorous debate and dialogue with the religious and scientific traditions of each civilization which has hosted them. Seeing the Vajrayāna through Tibetan eyes, then, involves comparisons with the world history of spirituality and science. “

Joseph Loizzo, Vajrayāna Buddhism In Tibetan Perspective. A Spiritual Science of Civilized Happiness.

What Is Dream Yoga and How Do You Do It? By Andrew Holecek, April 21, 2016. Adapted from Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming (Sounds True, 2016).  Andrew Holecek completed a traditional three-year retreat under the direction of Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche and is the author of The Power and the Pain, Preparing to Die, and Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid DreamingArticle online [HERE

APOLOGY TO THE NAGA REALM  [HERE]

ASTROLOGY AND DIVINATION
Longchenpa’s Bardo Aspiration   - Erik Pema Kunsang  [HERE]

Interview with Dr Nida Chenagtsang on Tibetan Tantra and Medicine  [HERE]

Ester Bianchi, The Tantric Rebirth Movement in Modern China: Esoteric Buddhism Re-Vivified By The Japanese And Tibetan Traditions, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, Vol. 57, No. 1 (2004), pp. 31-54
 
Ancient Anatomical Drawings in Tibet, The British Medical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2600 (Oct. 29, 1910), pp. 1361-1362

 
Per-Arne Berglie, To Tell the Future by Using Threads — and Some Reflections on Tibetan Divination, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, Vol. 43, No. 2/3 (1989), pp. 171-176
 
Alexander Berzin, An Introduction to Tibetan Astronomy and Astrology, The Tibet Journal, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring 1987), pp. 17-28
 
Charles Burnett, East (and South) Asian Traditions in Astrology and Divination as Viewed from the West, Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident, No. 35, Les Astres Et Le Destin Astrologie Et Divination En Asie Orientale / Stars and Fate Astrology and Divination in East Asia (2013), pp. 285-293
 
Geoff Childs, Michael Walter, Tibetan Natal Horoscopes, The Tibet Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Spring 2000), pp. 51-62
 
Michael Erlewine, Tibetan Astrology, The Tibet Journal, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Summer 2012), pp. 31-72
 
Herbert Franke, The Taoist Elements in the Buddhist Great Bear Sūtra (Pei-tou ching), Asia Major, Third Series, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1990), pp. 75-111

HERBERT V. GUENTHER @ WIKI

Herbert Guenther, Three, Two, Five   [ HERE]

Dreams Come True
[HERE]

Siegbert Hummel, The sMe-ba-dgu, the Magic Square of the Tibetans, East and West, Vol. 19, No. 1/2 (March-June 1969), pp. 139-146
 
Berthold Laufer, Bird Divination among the Tibetans (Notes on Document Pelliot No. 3530, with a Study of Tibetan Phonology of the Ninth Century), T'oung Pao, Second Series, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1914), pp. 1-110

Michael J. North, A Mongolian Manual of Astrology and Divination, The U.S. National Library Of Medicine [ONLINE HERE]

Charles Ramble, The Assimilation of Astrology in the Tibetan Bon Religion, Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident, No. 35, Les Astres Et Le Destin Astrologie Et Divination En Asie Orientale / Stars and Fate Astrology and Divination in East Asia (2013), pp. 199-232

Tulku Thondup, The Terma Tradition of the Nyingmapa School, The Tibet Journal, Vol. 15, No. 4, Shakabpa Memorial Issue: Part I (Winter 1990),pp. 149-158

Giuseppe Tucci, Oriental Notes: I The Tibetan «White-Sun-Moon» And Cognate Deities,  East and West, Vol. 14, No. 3/4 (September-December 1963), pp. 133-145


Chinese and Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism edited by Yael Bentor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Meir Shahar, Tel Aviv University
 Bringing together leading authorities in the fields of Chinese and Tibetan Studies alike:

Chinese and Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism engages cutting edge research on the fertile tradition of Esoteric Buddhism (also known as Tantric Buddhism). This state of the art volume unfolds the sweeping impact of esoteric Buddhism on Tibetan and Chinese cultures, and the movement's role in forging distinct political, ethnical, and religious identities across Asia at large. Deciphering the oftentimes bewildering richness of esoteric Buddhism, this broadly conceived work exposes the common ground it shares with other Buddhist schools, as  well as its intersection with non-Buddhist faiths. As such, the book is a major contribution to the study of Asian religions and cultures. Contributors are: Yael Bentor, Ester Bianchi, Megan Bryson, Jacob P. Dalton, Hou Chong, Hou Haoran, Eran Laish, Li Ling, Lin Pei-ying, Lü Jianfu, Ma De, Dan Martin, Charles D. Orzech, Meir Shahar, Robert H. Sharf, Shen Weirong, Henrik H. Sørensen, and Yang Fuxue and Zhang Haijuan


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