Posts for Easter Sunday

Tibet again, but with a difference perhaps. On New Lines from a Floating Life: The Dalai Lama is a living treasure; on Floating Life Sans Words: How big is Tibet?

Later on Floating Life Sans Words I introduce you to some of our Surry Hills fauna. If you are arachnophobic, don’t look.

And as you will have noticed, there has been a total template change through all my WordPress blogs. The previous main template, I found, was slightly erratic in the “previous entry” link at the bottom, which could be very annoying for anyone doing searches. I trust the new templates are better for that.

The Dalai Lama is a living treasure

…as M found when, despite his having been brought up in Shanghai on the official Chinese line, he actually experienced the man personally over Christmas-New Year 1999-2000. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying became one of M’s landmark books; he has read it now both in Chinese and English. Similarly Master Fu back in 2000 at The Mine; he lived his early adolescence in Gansu Province, where his family had been “transferred” from Beijing after Tiananmen. In the course of that Master Fu, though Manchu/Han himself, became a Tibetan Buddhist. All kinds of accommodations are possible, a faith the Dalai Lama has adhered to for fifty years and more, but unfortunately 1) for a time, very early in the piece, the CIA apparently kept a listening post in Lhasa, which has not been forgotten and 2) China has always striven to secure its western outlands and 3) the current Chinese government is just as ruthless, if considerably less Communist in any real sense, as ever. The idea that the Dalai Lama is some kind of Buddhist Osama bin Laden is grotesque; the Chinese should have been persuaded to listen to his voice of moderation years ago. All would have benefited.