Tibet
I just got done reading this book “Seven Years in Tibet”, by Heinrich Harrer. I believe it must be the original edition or close to it. The book is copyright 1953, and it seems Harrer only left Tibet in 1951 or so.
It is pretty good. I would recommend it. Briefly what happens is this Austrian mountain climber named Heinrich Harrer is caught in British India at the start of World War Two. He is captured and taken to a prison camp for enemy nationals. He eventually escapes with a few other Germans and Italians, and sets off to cross the Himalayas and seek asylum in Tibet. But Tibet is supposed to be closed to foreigners. So he has to sneak in. He is denied asylum by lower officials, but determines to go right to the top and ask the highest levels of government for asylum personally.
But to do this he has to cross Tibet in the middle of winter. By the time he reaches the Tibetan capital with his friend they have no money and they have had no shelter and little food quite a long time. The quote below depicts their arrival in the capital.
In time, Harrer and his friend come to provide valuable services to the Dalai Lama’s government because they are the only disinterested persons in the country with a working knowledge of the outside world. Harrer becomes a kind of confidant and teacher to the young Dalai Lama.
In some ways it reminds me of the account of Cabeza de Vaca’s travels through the southern part of the US which can be found on the Project Gutenburg website. I do not have the current link for that.
In the unlikely event anyone has ever read that book, you may recall that Cabeza de Vaca is essentially marrooned in Florida with a few other of his men. They attempt to reach the Spanish settlements in Mexico, but in the course of doing that they lose everything and are first captured by the local Indians and later live among them freely.
Although Cabeza de Vaca comes among the Indians as an outsider with neither status nor possessions he goes on to become respected as kind of priest.
As he quotes the Indians when he finally returns to Spanish civilization:
“Conferring among themselves, they replied that the Christians lied: We [referring to Cabeza de Vaca and his friend] had come from the sunrise, they from the sunset; we healed the sick, they killed the sound; we came naked and barefoot, they clothed, horsed, and lanced; we coveted nothing but gave whatever we were given, while they robbed whomever they found and bestowed nothing on anyone. “
There is no exact equivalent quote in Harrer’s book, but the overall thrust is very similar.
One quote gives a feel for it:
“Dead tired and half starved we sat on the ground by our bundles, indifferent to what might befall us. We only wanted to sit, to rest, to sleep.
The angry cries of the crowd suddenly ceased. They had seen our swollen and blistered feet, and, openhearted simple folk as they were, they felt pity for us. A woman began it. She was the one who had implored us to leave her house. Now she brought us butter tea. And now they brought us all sorts of things- tsampa, provisions, and fuel. “
And we know that before this they had nothing, while afterwards they went on to move in the highest circles of Tibetan society.
In both cases the men also provide a last written account of a society on the verge of being over-run and essentially destroyed by outside invaders.
Both these stories also bear out a couple of quotes from the Gospel I get a lot of mileage out of
“Look at the birds: they do not plant seeds, gather a harvest and put it in barns; yet your Father in heaven takes care of them!” [Matthew 6:26]
and
“And if someone takes you to court to sue you for your shirt, let him have your coat as well.” [Matthew 5:38-40]
It is also interesting to read Harrer’s account of Tibet, seen “from the bottom up” as it says in the preface, in light of another book published much more recently, but dealing with a much further away period in Tibetan history.
The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity by Martin Palmer details the forgotten history of Christianity in Asia before the arrivals of the Europeans.
It has a small section concerning Tibet as follows:
“The final destination on this journey through the territories of the Church of the East, and perhaps the most unexpected, is Tibet. It is unclear exactly when Christianity reached Tibet, but it seems likely that it had arrived there by the sixth century. The ancient territory of the Tibetans stretched farther west and north than present-day Tibet, and they had many links with the Turkic and Mongolian tribes of Central Asia. To this day, Tibetan Buddhism is the form practiced in Mongolia. It seems likely that Christians first entered the Tibetan world around 549, the time of a remarkable conversion to Christianity of the White Huns. These greatly feared nomadic warriors of the region, who had extensive links with the Tibetans, sent a delegation to the patriarch of the Church of the East in 549 asking for a bishop because they had been converted. No one, then or now, is quite sure how they were converted or by whom, but the Church sent a bishop and the White Huns formed one of the most loyal Christian communities for many centuries.
Tibet in the sixth to eighth centuries AD was not Buddhist but Shamanic. The ancient folk religion of Bon dominated and continued to be the major popular expression of Tibetan religion into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Buddhism only begins to enter Tibet in the late eighth century, where for hundreds of years it was limited to the elite classes. Buddhism took hold more widely much later, in the first half of the second millennium.
A strong Church existed in Tibet by the eighth century. Patriarch Timothy I (727-823), head of the Church of the East, wrote from Baghdad in ca. 794 of the need to appoint another bishop for the Tibetans, and in an earlier letter of 782 he mentions the Tibetans as one of the most significant communities of the Church. The Church’s bishopric is assumed to have been in Lhasa, were it is likely to have been active as late as the thirteenth century, prior to the popular extension of Buddhism.”
How well this fits with what Harrer says. See the quote directly following, fo example. According to what he writes of the Potala Palace it would appear to have been built during the period of supposed Christian influence in Tibet, and we know also from Harrer that Tibetans were more wide-ranging at that time, and could well have come into contact with Christianity outside their own country and brought it back or it could have been brought in from the outside.
Elsewhere in the book he writes how the Dalai Lama himself was actually born to ethnic Tibetans living in China, which bears out the above statement that Tibetans formerly occupied a larger area than what was under Tibetan control, since at the time he wrote virtually no Tibetans left the country, and virtually no one else entered it.
Further evidence can be found from the observations of early European travellers from the 16th century onwards who noted that Buddhist practices in central and east Asia seemed inexplicably similar to Christian pratices.
I remember one quote from some Jesuit missionary that he thought Satan had gone through Asia and instituted Buddhism as a kind of corrupt form of Christianity to mislead the people and keep them from wanting to convert, since it was so similar to what they were doing already.
For this we could also find support in Harrer’s book, where he is constantly referring to “monks” and “nuns” and “monasteries” and “cloisters” and “abbots” and so on and so forth. The whole of Tibet was over-run with monasteries, which bear at least a passing resemblance to Christian monasteries, even to the rule that monks should be celibate and not have anything to do with women. Even to the issue of homsexuality is there a resemblance.
A further bit of reading along the same lines is the account of the travels of Mar Rabban and Mar Markos, two monks from the vicinty of Beijing who travelled to the Middle East in the 1300’s. It seems they lived at the time of the decline of the Christian church in Asia. But the echoes of that church were still tehre by the time the Europeans started coming to Asia a few hudnred years later, thereby giving the above Jesuit pause to comment.
Here is a quote from the preface of the story of the two Chinese monks:
“THE present. volume contains a complete translation of the Syriac History of the two Nestorian Chinese monks, Bar Sawma of Khan Balik (Pekin) and Markos (Mark) of Kawshang. This remarkable document is of great interest and importance, for it contains a mass of information about the Il-Khans of Persia and their dealings with the Mongol Christians which is found nowhere else. It describes very fully the events which brought about the downfall of the Nestorian Church in China, Central Asia and 'Irak al-Ajami, and as the statements in it are those of a contemporary eye-witness of the events which he describes, they are of very special value.”
http://www.aina.org/books/mokk/mokk.htm
and you can read the straight story here
http://www.nestorian.org/history_of_rabban_bar_sawma_1.html
So anyway, that is enough of that.
There was also a movie version starring Brad Pitt which came out sometime in the 1990’s. It was not bad, but having read the book now, I can see it bears very little resemblance to what actually happened.
==Quotes form ‘Seven Years In Tibet”==
Pg. 170- I became more and more convinced that Tibet’s great days belonged to the past. There is a stone obelisk dating from AD 763 which bears witness to my theory. It records the fact that in that year the Tibetan armies marched to the gates of the Chinese capital and there dictated to the Chinese the terms of peace, which included an annual tribute of fifty thousand bales of silk.
And then there is the Potala Palace, which must date from Tibet’s days of greatness. No one today would think of erecting such a building. I once asked a stonemason who was working for me why such buildings were no longer put up. He answered indignantly that the Potala was the handiwork of the gods. Men could never have achieved anything like it. Good spirits and supernatural beings had worked by night on this wonderful building. I found in this view another instance of the indifference to progress and ambition which characterized the attitude of the men who dragged tree tunks.
Pg. 191- After a short time in the country, it was no longer possible for one to thoughtlessly kill a fly, and I have never in the presence of a Tibetan squashed an insect which bothered me. The attitude of the people in these matters is really touching. If at a picnic an ant crawls up one’s clothes, it is gently picked up and set down. It is a catastrophe when a fly falls into a cup of tea. It must all costs be saved from drowning as it may be the reincarnation of one’s dead grandmother. In winter they break the ice in the pools to save the fishes before they freeze to death, and in the summer they rescue them before the pools dry up. These creatures are kept in pails or tins until they can be restored to their home waters. Meanwhile their rescuers have done something for the good of their own souls. The more life one can save the happier one is.
Pg. 195- In former times the rainfall in Lhasa must have been much heavier. There used to be great forests, which must have made for rainier and cooler weather. The deforestation of centuries had done its work in the provinces. Lhasa itself, with its meadows and groves of willows and poplars, was a green oasis in the treeless valley of Kyichu.
Pg. 196-7- When a man has several wives, his relations with them are different from those that prevail in a Moslem harem. It is common practice for a man to marry several daughters of a house in which there is no son and heir. This arrangement prevents the family fortune from being dispersed. Our host tsarong had married three sisters and had obtained permission from the Dalai Lama to take their family name.
In spite of the frequently unusual relationships created by these alliances, broken marriages are not commoner in Tibet than with us. This is largely due to the fact that these people are not inclined to let their feelings run away with them. When several brothers share the same wife, the eledest is always the master of the household and the others have rights only when he is away or amusing himself elsewhere. But no one gets short measure as there is a superfluity of women. Many men live a celibate life in monasteries. There is a cloister in every village. The children of irregular alliances have no right to inherit, and all the property goes to the children of the legitimate wife. That is why it is not so important which of the brother’s is the father of the child. The great thing is that the property remains in the family.
Pg. 217- So I lived alone, and my independence proved a great advantage when subsequently I came into close contact with the Dalai Lama. The monks would probably have disapproved still more of our meetings if I had been married. They live in strict celibacy and are forbidden to have anything to do with women. Unfortunately, homosexuality is very common. It is even condoned as giving proof that women play no part in the life of those monks who indulge in it.
Pg. 237- One of the seven groups of actors, the Gyumalungma, is famous for its parodies. It was the only group which I was really able to appreciate. One could not but be astonished at their frankness. It is a proof of the good humor and sanity of the people that they can make fun of their own weaknesses and even of their religious institutions. They go so far as to give a peroformance of the oracle, with dance and trance and all, which brings down the house. Men appear dressed as nuns and imiate in the drollest fashion the fervor of women begging for alms. When monks and nuns begin to flirt together on the stage, no one can stop laughing and tears roll down the cheeks of the sternest abbots in the audience.
Pg. 257- In Tibet, as in most other places, beggars are a public nuisance. While I was building my dam the government determined to put the sturdy beggars to work. They rounded up the one thousand beggars of Lhasa and picked out seven hundred men who were fit for employment. These were put on the job and received food and pay for their work. On the next day only half of them turned up and a few days later they were all absent. It is not lack of work or dire necessity that makes these people beggars, nor, in most cases, bodily infirmity. It is pure laziness. Begging offers a good livelihood in Tibet and no one turns a beggar from the door. And if a beggar only gets some tsampa and a penny or so from each client, the produce of two hours “work” suffices to keep him going for the day. Then he sits idly by the wall and dozes happily in the sunshine.
Pg. 313- In the summer of that year the Dalai Lama returned to Lhasa and the Tibetan families who had fled to India also went back to their homes. I had the experience of seeing the Chinese Governor-General of Tibet passing through Kalimpong on the way to take up his post at Lhasa. until the autumn of 1951 the whole of Tibet was occupied by Chinese troops and news from that country was scanty and unclear. As I write these concluding lines many of my fears have been realized.
There is famine in the land, which cannot feed the armies of occupation as well as the inhabitants. I have seen in European papers photos of enormous posters bearing the picture of Mao Tse-tung stuck up at the foot of the Potala. Armored cars roll through the Holy City. The loyal ministers of the Dalai Lama have already been dismissed and the Panchen Lama has made his entry into Lhasa with an escort of Chinese soldiers. The Chinese have been clever enough to recognize the Dalai Lama as the official head of the government, but the will of the occupying power is paramount.
314- My heartfelt wish is that this book may create some understanding for a people whose will to live in peace and freedom has won so little sympathy from an indifferent world.
============
A former campaign worker for U.S. Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., was sentenced in federal court today to three years and one month in prison for stealing more than $412,000 from the senator.
Roger D. Blevins of Elsmere was accused of raiding Biden’s re-election fund to pay for dates with, and buy lavish presents for, performers on a gay pornographic Web site.
http://www.delawareonline.com/updates/FormerBidenstaf.html
Two former New York City police detectives face a federal court hearing in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Friday after being indicted on murder charges for allegedly acting as hit men for the Mafia more than 20 years ago.
According to the indictment from a federal grand jury in Brooklyn that was unsealed Thursday, Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito routinely passed confidential law enforcement information to the mob and killed rival gangsters
http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/03/11/police.slayings/
[Every time you think they have hit the bottom of the bad idea barrel, they come out with something even worse.]
Marine Corps Gen. James Jones, NATO's top commander in Europe, said he's heard growing informal discussions at senior diplomatic levels in recent weeks about a possible NATO force for an Israeli-Palestinian accord.
http://rense.com/general63/sdu.htm
Even Newt Gingrinch says they have gone too far.
· House Republicans waste time. Two-thirds of their time is spent on bills that name post offices and congratulate sports teams. This allowed less time for the substantive legislation the House considers. Rep. McGovern:
"The House has become a place where trivial issues are debated passionately and important issues not at all."
· "Emergency" meetings and late-night sessions discouraged Members and the press from participating in the legislative process. These were driven by Republican Members of the Rules Committee.
· House Republicans repeatedly embarrassed the House by granting blanket waivers to conference reports and rushing them through the House before Members could read them. The 108th Congress was repeatedly ridiculed for the special-interest provisions Republican leaders stuck into conference bills, such as the infamous "Hooters" subsidy and the provision allowing Congressional staffers to snoop on American citizens’ tax returns
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5487
"Our enemy's metric is protracting conflicts to 3,000 days or more," he said. "Prolonged insurgency, death by a thousand cuts, is their answer to 'shock and awe.' "
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/latimests/20050311/ts_latimes/iraqwarcompelspentagontorethinkbigpicturestrategy&cid=2026&ncid=1480
US stocks, bonds, dollar fall after trade data
http://www.reuters.co.za/locales/c_newsArticle.jsp;:4232abbb:c322e6a2d7ec2b?type=businessNews&localeKey=en_ZA&storyID=7882992
During the night, Nichols approached a woman as she was entering her suburban Atlanta apartment and introduced himself as a wanted man, authorities said.
"It's my understanding that he had told her, 'If you do what I say, I won't kill you,'" Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Vernon Keenan said.
The woman either escaped or was allowed to leave and called 911. A SWAT team gathered outside and Nichols turned himself in after watching the manhunt on television, Gwinnett County Police Chief Charles Walters said.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050312/ap_on_re_us/courthouse_shooting
The Los Angles Times reports: “He confronts some countries with purported evidence of attempts to acquire nuclear and biological weapons, then he tries to persuade allies to support U.S. efforts to isolate them. ‘John Bolton has been totally unapologetic about his radical prescription for dealing with the proliferation threat,’ Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has said. ‘The main problem is that it hasn’t worked anywhere.’”
http://www.gnn.tv/headlines/1379/Move_Up_the_Date_For_Armageddon
[Now they invent this crime of identity theft, and then they leave you holding the bag over it.
And then their solution is more video cameras. I read this article once about vandals in Rome. it talked about how their solution was to put up security cameras facing different monuments, even if there was no one to watch what they saw. It said the Romans have a superstitious belief that security cameras can ward off crime.
Now suppose they did have security cameras in this DMV out there. What are the chances the cameras would have been facing a random point on the wall which would one day have car smash through it?]
Paul Masto, assistant special agent in charge of the U.S. Secret Service office in Las Vegas, said the agency was investigating. He urged those affected to take precautions against identity theft.
"That's the juicy stuff - the dates of birth, the Social Security numbers," Masto said. "They have that information. There's nothing we can do about that."
...
North Las Vegas police were following several leads in the DMV case, department spokesman Officer Tim Bedwell said. He said the initial investigation was hampered by the lack of video surveillance.
Lewis said she was seeking federal and state funds to install cameras at DMV offices throughout Nevada.
Police said thieves smashed a vehicle through a back wall of the office and escaped before police arrived a half-hour later.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nevada/2005/mar/11/031110432.html
[This is a sign of economic cannibalism. This one company wants to make money. To do so they have to impose a cost on the computer owner and also disrupt business for all these banks down in NZ. The same thing should be happening other places as well, but probably isn’t. This is one of the many signs of a sick [as in illness], perverted [as in not going down the correct path] global economy.]
The country's major banks have told hundreds of customers that from this morning, access to bank websites is blocked because of infection with a "spyware" program.
The spyware, created by US firm Marketscore, infects PCs when the user accesses certain websites.
...
Banks that have detected the hidden software have posted information on their websites saying what to do if customers have been blocked.
Customers with the snoop software on their PC may have to pay to get it removed.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=1&ObjectID=10114925
[This is kind of funny.]
Civil rights leader Martin Luther Junior was slain in the 1960s, shortly after making his famous "If I Had A Hammer" speech.
Moses was told by Jesus Christ to lead the people out of Egypt into the Sahaira Desert. The Book of Exodus describes this trip, including the Ten Commandments, various special effects and the building of the Suez Canal.
http://www.dribbleglass.com/Jokes/history.htm
House ethics rules prohibit registered lobbyists such as Abramoff from paying for a lawmaker's expenses. But the Preston Gates records state that Abramoff told his firm he paid $4,285.35 for the DeLays' stay at London's Four Seasons Hotel, plus $5,174.64 for the Hirschmanns' stay. He also reported spending $800 on transportation for the group between May 25 and May 29.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1802&ncid=1802&e=1&u=/washpost/20050312/ts_washpost/a28252_2005mar11
Senior Republicans in both the House and Senate are open to small reductions in farm subsidies, but they adamantly oppose the deep cuts sought by Bush to hold down future federal deficits.
The president wants to lower the maximum subsidies that can be collected each year by any one farm operation from $360,000 to $250,000. He also asked Congress to cut by 5 percent all farm payments, and he wants to close loopholes that enable some growers to annually collect millions of dollars in subsidies.
Instead, Republican committee chairmen are looking to carve savings from nutrition and land conservation programs that are also run by the Agriculture Department. The government is projected to spend $52 billion this year on nutrition programs like food stamps, school lunches and special aid to low-income pregnant women and children. Farm subsidies will total less than half that, $24 billion.
...
``Particularly in the House, the members are talking about taking all or most of it from nutrition,'' said Jim Weill, president of the Washington-based Food Research and Action Center. ``There isn't a way to do it that doesn't hurt, because the program's very lean and doesn't give people enough anyhow. The benefits are less than people need. The program's not reaching even three-fifths of the people who are eligible. And the abuse rate is very low and is going down further.''
...
According to Agriculture Department estimates, 78 percent of subsidies go to 8 percent of producers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4859802,00.html
[“That's my house and that's my car
That's my dog in my back yard
...
Who's that man, runnin' my life?”
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/tobykeith/whosthatman.html
That man is a perverted freak who either works for the goverment or has the government working for him.]
The CBS report said the colonel and the two lieutenant colonels are accused of committing adultery with a Navy nurse and a number of female civilian contractors.
CBS said the one-star general who is under investigation for alleged adultery was the deputy commander of the prison camp. The investigation began after a soldier who had been disciplined for adultery made accusations against the four officers.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=4&u=/ap/20050312/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/guantanamo_sex_probe
An article in the current Spectator captures the essence of the Lebanese events in the title of Mary Wakefield's piece: "A revolution made for TV." Ms. Wakefield, who "set off in search of the revolution," found instead a few thousand teenagers:
"'Out Syria! Out Syria! Out Syria!' cried the crowd. 'We're revolutionaries!' said my friend happily. But I felt a bit gypped. Everybody around me was young, good-looking, having fun, but that wasn't really what I had had in mind. Only 1,000 or so people? I thought it was the whole of Beirut. Why was everybody under 30? Even in the middle of the crowd, right at the front, it felt less like a national protest than a pop concert. Bouncers in black bomber jackets wore laminated Independence '05 cards round their necks, screens to the left and right of the platform reflected the crowd back at itself, and up against the Virgin Megastore wall were five plastic Portaloos. To the left of the main speaker, a man in a black flying suit with blond highlights, mirrored Oakley sunglasses, and an earpiece seemed to be conducting the crowd. Sometimes he'd wave his arms to increase the shouting, sometimes, with a gesture, he'd silence them. The upturned faces of the revolutionaries were bathed in white light from the TV arc lamps.
"Eventually I worked out what was bothering me. 'This whole thing is for the cameras,' I said to my friend. 'It's a television show.' 'Don't be so cynical,' she said. 'It's a celebration – they brought down the government, remember.'"
Well, not quite: the government resigned, true enough, after the opposition mobilized perhaps as many as 25,000 people in what was touted in the West as an expression of the Lebanese popular will. But when half a million turned out the next week in answer, carrying Lebanese flags amid portraits of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad and demanding that the West stay out of their internal politics, the old government was back in the saddle.
http://antiwar.com/justin/
http://www.antiwar.com/spectator2/spec617.html
[Not sure if I put this one in already.]
Being a former OSI agent and convicted child molester – the girl he raped was between the ages of 9 and 13 – Palmosina is going to spend the next 20 years “looking over his shoulder,” especially in the shower. Not an encouraging thought for the DB’s latest inmate to have.
At his court-martial, Palmosina admitted that in addition to the sex charges, he also mishandled classified information. One can only wonder what kind of a “job” he did – before he was exposed as corrupt – back when he was part of the “system” at OSI, putting both guilty and innocent behind bars without regard to justice.
http://www.militarycorruption.com/palmosina.htm
Why destroy the career of a good NCO over one mistake like this? Especially when Gen. Fiscus can “carry on” for more than ten years and repeatedly violate regulations against adultery, fraternization, and conduct unbecoming an officer.”
And how about another offense? Try “favoritism” on for size. Not all of the generals’ partners were “victims.” Some, especially one obnoxious female major, who bragged in Germany that she was “close with Tom” and visited him for “intimate times” back in the Beltway, welcomed his advances. It was great for her career.
http://www.militarycorruption.com/fiscus3.htm
It is pretty good. I would recommend it. Briefly what happens is this Austrian mountain climber named Heinrich Harrer is caught in British India at the start of World War Two. He is captured and taken to a prison camp for enemy nationals. He eventually escapes with a few other Germans and Italians, and sets off to cross the Himalayas and seek asylum in Tibet. But Tibet is supposed to be closed to foreigners. So he has to sneak in. He is denied asylum by lower officials, but determines to go right to the top and ask the highest levels of government for asylum personally.
But to do this he has to cross Tibet in the middle of winter. By the time he reaches the Tibetan capital with his friend they have no money and they have had no shelter and little food quite a long time. The quote below depicts their arrival in the capital.
In time, Harrer and his friend come to provide valuable services to the Dalai Lama’s government because they are the only disinterested persons in the country with a working knowledge of the outside world. Harrer becomes a kind of confidant and teacher to the young Dalai Lama.
In some ways it reminds me of the account of Cabeza de Vaca’s travels through the southern part of the US which can be found on the Project Gutenburg website. I do not have the current link for that.
In the unlikely event anyone has ever read that book, you may recall that Cabeza de Vaca is essentially marrooned in Florida with a few other of his men. They attempt to reach the Spanish settlements in Mexico, but in the course of doing that they lose everything and are first captured by the local Indians and later live among them freely.
Although Cabeza de Vaca comes among the Indians as an outsider with neither status nor possessions he goes on to become respected as kind of priest.
As he quotes the Indians when he finally returns to Spanish civilization:
“Conferring among themselves, they replied that the Christians lied: We [referring to Cabeza de Vaca and his friend] had come from the sunrise, they from the sunset; we healed the sick, they killed the sound; we came naked and barefoot, they clothed, horsed, and lanced; we coveted nothing but gave whatever we were given, while they robbed whomever they found and bestowed nothing on anyone. “
There is no exact equivalent quote in Harrer’s book, but the overall thrust is very similar.
One quote gives a feel for it:
“Dead tired and half starved we sat on the ground by our bundles, indifferent to what might befall us. We only wanted to sit, to rest, to sleep.
The angry cries of the crowd suddenly ceased. They had seen our swollen and blistered feet, and, openhearted simple folk as they were, they felt pity for us. A woman began it. She was the one who had implored us to leave her house. Now she brought us butter tea. And now they brought us all sorts of things- tsampa, provisions, and fuel. “
And we know that before this they had nothing, while afterwards they went on to move in the highest circles of Tibetan society.
In both cases the men also provide a last written account of a society on the verge of being over-run and essentially destroyed by outside invaders.
Both these stories also bear out a couple of quotes from the Gospel I get a lot of mileage out of
“Look at the birds: they do not plant seeds, gather a harvest and put it in barns; yet your Father in heaven takes care of them!” [Matthew 6:26]
and
“And if someone takes you to court to sue you for your shirt, let him have your coat as well.” [Matthew 5:38-40]
It is also interesting to read Harrer’s account of Tibet, seen “from the bottom up” as it says in the preface, in light of another book published much more recently, but dealing with a much further away period in Tibetan history.
The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity by Martin Palmer details the forgotten history of Christianity in Asia before the arrivals of the Europeans.
It has a small section concerning Tibet as follows:
“The final destination on this journey through the territories of the Church of the East, and perhaps the most unexpected, is Tibet. It is unclear exactly when Christianity reached Tibet, but it seems likely that it had arrived there by the sixth century. The ancient territory of the Tibetans stretched farther west and north than present-day Tibet, and they had many links with the Turkic and Mongolian tribes of Central Asia. To this day, Tibetan Buddhism is the form practiced in Mongolia. It seems likely that Christians first entered the Tibetan world around 549, the time of a remarkable conversion to Christianity of the White Huns. These greatly feared nomadic warriors of the region, who had extensive links with the Tibetans, sent a delegation to the patriarch of the Church of the East in 549 asking for a bishop because they had been converted. No one, then or now, is quite sure how they were converted or by whom, but the Church sent a bishop and the White Huns formed one of the most loyal Christian communities for many centuries.
Tibet in the sixth to eighth centuries AD was not Buddhist but Shamanic. The ancient folk religion of Bon dominated and continued to be the major popular expression of Tibetan religion into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Buddhism only begins to enter Tibet in the late eighth century, where for hundreds of years it was limited to the elite classes. Buddhism took hold more widely much later, in the first half of the second millennium.
A strong Church existed in Tibet by the eighth century. Patriarch Timothy I (727-823), head of the Church of the East, wrote from Baghdad in ca. 794 of the need to appoint another bishop for the Tibetans, and in an earlier letter of 782 he mentions the Tibetans as one of the most significant communities of the Church. The Church’s bishopric is assumed to have been in Lhasa, were it is likely to have been active as late as the thirteenth century, prior to the popular extension of Buddhism.”
How well this fits with what Harrer says. See the quote directly following, fo example. According to what he writes of the Potala Palace it would appear to have been built during the period of supposed Christian influence in Tibet, and we know also from Harrer that Tibetans were more wide-ranging at that time, and could well have come into contact with Christianity outside their own country and brought it back or it could have been brought in from the outside.
Elsewhere in the book he writes how the Dalai Lama himself was actually born to ethnic Tibetans living in China, which bears out the above statement that Tibetans formerly occupied a larger area than what was under Tibetan control, since at the time he wrote virtually no Tibetans left the country, and virtually no one else entered it.
Further evidence can be found from the observations of early European travellers from the 16th century onwards who noted that Buddhist practices in central and east Asia seemed inexplicably similar to Christian pratices.
I remember one quote from some Jesuit missionary that he thought Satan had gone through Asia and instituted Buddhism as a kind of corrupt form of Christianity to mislead the people and keep them from wanting to convert, since it was so similar to what they were doing already.
For this we could also find support in Harrer’s book, where he is constantly referring to “monks” and “nuns” and “monasteries” and “cloisters” and “abbots” and so on and so forth. The whole of Tibet was over-run with monasteries, which bear at least a passing resemblance to Christian monasteries, even to the rule that monks should be celibate and not have anything to do with women. Even to the issue of homsexuality is there a resemblance.
A further bit of reading along the same lines is the account of the travels of Mar Rabban and Mar Markos, two monks from the vicinty of Beijing who travelled to the Middle East in the 1300’s. It seems they lived at the time of the decline of the Christian church in Asia. But the echoes of that church were still tehre by the time the Europeans started coming to Asia a few hudnred years later, thereby giving the above Jesuit pause to comment.
Here is a quote from the preface of the story of the two Chinese monks:
“THE present. volume contains a complete translation of the Syriac History of the two Nestorian Chinese monks, Bar Sawma of Khan Balik (Pekin) and Markos (Mark) of Kawshang. This remarkable document is of great interest and importance, for it contains a mass of information about the Il-Khans of Persia and their dealings with the Mongol Christians which is found nowhere else. It describes very fully the events which brought about the downfall of the Nestorian Church in China, Central Asia and 'Irak al-Ajami, and as the statements in it are those of a contemporary eye-witness of the events which he describes, they are of very special value.”
http://www.aina.org/books/mokk/mokk.htm
and you can read the straight story here
http://www.nestorian.org/history_of_rabban_bar_sawma_1.html
So anyway, that is enough of that.
There was also a movie version starring Brad Pitt which came out sometime in the 1990’s. It was not bad, but having read the book now, I can see it bears very little resemblance to what actually happened.
==Quotes form ‘Seven Years In Tibet”==
Pg. 170- I became more and more convinced that Tibet’s great days belonged to the past. There is a stone obelisk dating from AD 763 which bears witness to my theory. It records the fact that in that year the Tibetan armies marched to the gates of the Chinese capital and there dictated to the Chinese the terms of peace, which included an annual tribute of fifty thousand bales of silk.
And then there is the Potala Palace, which must date from Tibet’s days of greatness. No one today would think of erecting such a building. I once asked a stonemason who was working for me why such buildings were no longer put up. He answered indignantly that the Potala was the handiwork of the gods. Men could never have achieved anything like it. Good spirits and supernatural beings had worked by night on this wonderful building. I found in this view another instance of the indifference to progress and ambition which characterized the attitude of the men who dragged tree tunks.
Pg. 191- After a short time in the country, it was no longer possible for one to thoughtlessly kill a fly, and I have never in the presence of a Tibetan squashed an insect which bothered me. The attitude of the people in these matters is really touching. If at a picnic an ant crawls up one’s clothes, it is gently picked up and set down. It is a catastrophe when a fly falls into a cup of tea. It must all costs be saved from drowning as it may be the reincarnation of one’s dead grandmother. In winter they break the ice in the pools to save the fishes before they freeze to death, and in the summer they rescue them before the pools dry up. These creatures are kept in pails or tins until they can be restored to their home waters. Meanwhile their rescuers have done something for the good of their own souls. The more life one can save the happier one is.
Pg. 195- In former times the rainfall in Lhasa must have been much heavier. There used to be great forests, which must have made for rainier and cooler weather. The deforestation of centuries had done its work in the provinces. Lhasa itself, with its meadows and groves of willows and poplars, was a green oasis in the treeless valley of Kyichu.
Pg. 196-7- When a man has several wives, his relations with them are different from those that prevail in a Moslem harem. It is common practice for a man to marry several daughters of a house in which there is no son and heir. This arrangement prevents the family fortune from being dispersed. Our host tsarong had married three sisters and had obtained permission from the Dalai Lama to take their family name.
In spite of the frequently unusual relationships created by these alliances, broken marriages are not commoner in Tibet than with us. This is largely due to the fact that these people are not inclined to let their feelings run away with them. When several brothers share the same wife, the eledest is always the master of the household and the others have rights only when he is away or amusing himself elsewhere. But no one gets short measure as there is a superfluity of women. Many men live a celibate life in monasteries. There is a cloister in every village. The children of irregular alliances have no right to inherit, and all the property goes to the children of the legitimate wife. That is why it is not so important which of the brother’s is the father of the child. The great thing is that the property remains in the family.
Pg. 217- So I lived alone, and my independence proved a great advantage when subsequently I came into close contact with the Dalai Lama. The monks would probably have disapproved still more of our meetings if I had been married. They live in strict celibacy and are forbidden to have anything to do with women. Unfortunately, homosexuality is very common. It is even condoned as giving proof that women play no part in the life of those monks who indulge in it.
Pg. 237- One of the seven groups of actors, the Gyumalungma, is famous for its parodies. It was the only group which I was really able to appreciate. One could not but be astonished at their frankness. It is a proof of the good humor and sanity of the people that they can make fun of their own weaknesses and even of their religious institutions. They go so far as to give a peroformance of the oracle, with dance and trance and all, which brings down the house. Men appear dressed as nuns and imiate in the drollest fashion the fervor of women begging for alms. When monks and nuns begin to flirt together on the stage, no one can stop laughing and tears roll down the cheeks of the sternest abbots in the audience.
Pg. 257- In Tibet, as in most other places, beggars are a public nuisance. While I was building my dam the government determined to put the sturdy beggars to work. They rounded up the one thousand beggars of Lhasa and picked out seven hundred men who were fit for employment. These were put on the job and received food and pay for their work. On the next day only half of them turned up and a few days later they were all absent. It is not lack of work or dire necessity that makes these people beggars, nor, in most cases, bodily infirmity. It is pure laziness. Begging offers a good livelihood in Tibet and no one turns a beggar from the door. And if a beggar only gets some tsampa and a penny or so from each client, the produce of two hours “work” suffices to keep him going for the day. Then he sits idly by the wall and dozes happily in the sunshine.
Pg. 313- In the summer of that year the Dalai Lama returned to Lhasa and the Tibetan families who had fled to India also went back to their homes. I had the experience of seeing the Chinese Governor-General of Tibet passing through Kalimpong on the way to take up his post at Lhasa. until the autumn of 1951 the whole of Tibet was occupied by Chinese troops and news from that country was scanty and unclear. As I write these concluding lines many of my fears have been realized.
There is famine in the land, which cannot feed the armies of occupation as well as the inhabitants. I have seen in European papers photos of enormous posters bearing the picture of Mao Tse-tung stuck up at the foot of the Potala. Armored cars roll through the Holy City. The loyal ministers of the Dalai Lama have already been dismissed and the Panchen Lama has made his entry into Lhasa with an escort of Chinese soldiers. The Chinese have been clever enough to recognize the Dalai Lama as the official head of the government, but the will of the occupying power is paramount.
314- My heartfelt wish is that this book may create some understanding for a people whose will to live in peace and freedom has won so little sympathy from an indifferent world.
============
A former campaign worker for U.S. Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., was sentenced in federal court today to three years and one month in prison for stealing more than $412,000 from the senator.
Roger D. Blevins of Elsmere was accused of raiding Biden’s re-election fund to pay for dates with, and buy lavish presents for, performers on a gay pornographic Web site.
http://www.delawareonline.com/updates/FormerBidenstaf.html
Two former New York City police detectives face a federal court hearing in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Friday after being indicted on murder charges for allegedly acting as hit men for the Mafia more than 20 years ago.
According to the indictment from a federal grand jury in Brooklyn that was unsealed Thursday, Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito routinely passed confidential law enforcement information to the mob and killed rival gangsters
http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/03/11/police.slayings/
[Every time you think they have hit the bottom of the bad idea barrel, they come out with something even worse.]
Marine Corps Gen. James Jones, NATO's top commander in Europe, said he's heard growing informal discussions at senior diplomatic levels in recent weeks about a possible NATO force for an Israeli-Palestinian accord.
http://rense.com/general63/sdu.htm
Even Newt Gingrinch says they have gone too far.
· House Republicans waste time. Two-thirds of their time is spent on bills that name post offices and congratulate sports teams. This allowed less time for the substantive legislation the House considers. Rep. McGovern:
"The House has become a place where trivial issues are debated passionately and important issues not at all."
· "Emergency" meetings and late-night sessions discouraged Members and the press from participating in the legislative process. These were driven by Republican Members of the Rules Committee.
· House Republicans repeatedly embarrassed the House by granting blanket waivers to conference reports and rushing them through the House before Members could read them. The 108th Congress was repeatedly ridiculed for the special-interest provisions Republican leaders stuck into conference bills, such as the infamous "Hooters" subsidy and the provision allowing Congressional staffers to snoop on American citizens’ tax returns
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5487
"Our enemy's metric is protracting conflicts to 3,000 days or more," he said. "Prolonged insurgency, death by a thousand cuts, is their answer to 'shock and awe.' "
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/latimests/20050311/ts_latimes/iraqwarcompelspentagontorethinkbigpicturestrategy&cid=2026&ncid=1480
US stocks, bonds, dollar fall after trade data
http://www.reuters.co.za/locales/c_newsArticle.jsp;:4232abbb:c322e6a2d7ec2b?type=businessNews&localeKey=en_ZA&storyID=7882992
During the night, Nichols approached a woman as she was entering her suburban Atlanta apartment and introduced himself as a wanted man, authorities said.
"It's my understanding that he had told her, 'If you do what I say, I won't kill you,'" Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Vernon Keenan said.
The woman either escaped or was allowed to leave and called 911. A SWAT team gathered outside and Nichols turned himself in after watching the manhunt on television, Gwinnett County Police Chief Charles Walters said.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050312/ap_on_re_us/courthouse_shooting
The Los Angles Times reports: “He confronts some countries with purported evidence of attempts to acquire nuclear and biological weapons, then he tries to persuade allies to support U.S. efforts to isolate them. ‘John Bolton has been totally unapologetic about his radical prescription for dealing with the proliferation threat,’ Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has said. ‘The main problem is that it hasn’t worked anywhere.’”
http://www.gnn.tv/headlines/1379/Move_Up_the_Date_For_Armageddon
[Now they invent this crime of identity theft, and then they leave you holding the bag over it.
And then their solution is more video cameras. I read this article once about vandals in Rome. it talked about how their solution was to put up security cameras facing different monuments, even if there was no one to watch what they saw. It said the Romans have a superstitious belief that security cameras can ward off crime.
Now suppose they did have security cameras in this DMV out there. What are the chances the cameras would have been facing a random point on the wall which would one day have car smash through it?]
Paul Masto, assistant special agent in charge of the U.S. Secret Service office in Las Vegas, said the agency was investigating. He urged those affected to take precautions against identity theft.
"That's the juicy stuff - the dates of birth, the Social Security numbers," Masto said. "They have that information. There's nothing we can do about that."
...
North Las Vegas police were following several leads in the DMV case, department spokesman Officer Tim Bedwell said. He said the initial investigation was hampered by the lack of video surveillance.
Lewis said she was seeking federal and state funds to install cameras at DMV offices throughout Nevada.
Police said thieves smashed a vehicle through a back wall of the office and escaped before police arrived a half-hour later.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nevada/2005/mar/11/031110432.html
[This is a sign of economic cannibalism. This one company wants to make money. To do so they have to impose a cost on the computer owner and also disrupt business for all these banks down in NZ. The same thing should be happening other places as well, but probably isn’t. This is one of the many signs of a sick [as in illness], perverted [as in not going down the correct path] global economy.]
The country's major banks have told hundreds of customers that from this morning, access to bank websites is blocked because of infection with a "spyware" program.
The spyware, created by US firm Marketscore, infects PCs when the user accesses certain websites.
...
Banks that have detected the hidden software have posted information on their websites saying what to do if customers have been blocked.
Customers with the snoop software on their PC may have to pay to get it removed.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=1&ObjectID=10114925
[This is kind of funny.]
Civil rights leader Martin Luther Junior was slain in the 1960s, shortly after making his famous "If I Had A Hammer" speech.
Moses was told by Jesus Christ to lead the people out of Egypt into the Sahaira Desert. The Book of Exodus describes this trip, including the Ten Commandments, various special effects and the building of the Suez Canal.
http://www.dribbleglass.com/Jokes/history.htm
House ethics rules prohibit registered lobbyists such as Abramoff from paying for a lawmaker's expenses. But the Preston Gates records state that Abramoff told his firm he paid $4,285.35 for the DeLays' stay at London's Four Seasons Hotel, plus $5,174.64 for the Hirschmanns' stay. He also reported spending $800 on transportation for the group between May 25 and May 29.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1802&ncid=1802&e=1&u=/washpost/20050312/ts_washpost/a28252_2005mar11
Senior Republicans in both the House and Senate are open to small reductions in farm subsidies, but they adamantly oppose the deep cuts sought by Bush to hold down future federal deficits.
The president wants to lower the maximum subsidies that can be collected each year by any one farm operation from $360,000 to $250,000. He also asked Congress to cut by 5 percent all farm payments, and he wants to close loopholes that enable some growers to annually collect millions of dollars in subsidies.
Instead, Republican committee chairmen are looking to carve savings from nutrition and land conservation programs that are also run by the Agriculture Department. The government is projected to spend $52 billion this year on nutrition programs like food stamps, school lunches and special aid to low-income pregnant women and children. Farm subsidies will total less than half that, $24 billion.
...
``Particularly in the House, the members are talking about taking all or most of it from nutrition,'' said Jim Weill, president of the Washington-based Food Research and Action Center. ``There isn't a way to do it that doesn't hurt, because the program's very lean and doesn't give people enough anyhow. The benefits are less than people need. The program's not reaching even three-fifths of the people who are eligible. And the abuse rate is very low and is going down further.''
...
According to Agriculture Department estimates, 78 percent of subsidies go to 8 percent of producers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4859802,00.html
[“That's my house and that's my car
That's my dog in my back yard
...
Who's that man, runnin' my life?”
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/tobykeith/whosthatman.html
That man is a perverted freak who either works for the goverment or has the government working for him.]
The CBS report said the colonel and the two lieutenant colonels are accused of committing adultery with a Navy nurse and a number of female civilian contractors.
CBS said the one-star general who is under investigation for alleged adultery was the deputy commander of the prison camp. The investigation began after a soldier who had been disciplined for adultery made accusations against the four officers.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=4&u=/ap/20050312/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/guantanamo_sex_probe
An article in the current Spectator captures the essence of the Lebanese events in the title of Mary Wakefield's piece: "A revolution made for TV." Ms. Wakefield, who "set off in search of the revolution," found instead a few thousand teenagers:
"'Out Syria! Out Syria! Out Syria!' cried the crowd. 'We're revolutionaries!' said my friend happily. But I felt a bit gypped. Everybody around me was young, good-looking, having fun, but that wasn't really what I had had in mind. Only 1,000 or so people? I thought it was the whole of Beirut. Why was everybody under 30? Even in the middle of the crowd, right at the front, it felt less like a national protest than a pop concert. Bouncers in black bomber jackets wore laminated Independence '05 cards round their necks, screens to the left and right of the platform reflected the crowd back at itself, and up against the Virgin Megastore wall were five plastic Portaloos. To the left of the main speaker, a man in a black flying suit with blond highlights, mirrored Oakley sunglasses, and an earpiece seemed to be conducting the crowd. Sometimes he'd wave his arms to increase the shouting, sometimes, with a gesture, he'd silence them. The upturned faces of the revolutionaries were bathed in white light from the TV arc lamps.
"Eventually I worked out what was bothering me. 'This whole thing is for the cameras,' I said to my friend. 'It's a television show.' 'Don't be so cynical,' she said. 'It's a celebration – they brought down the government, remember.'"
Well, not quite: the government resigned, true enough, after the opposition mobilized perhaps as many as 25,000 people in what was touted in the West as an expression of the Lebanese popular will. But when half a million turned out the next week in answer, carrying Lebanese flags amid portraits of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad and demanding that the West stay out of their internal politics, the old government was back in the saddle.
http://antiwar.com/justin/
http://www.antiwar.com/spectator2/spec617.html
[Not sure if I put this one in already.]
Being a former OSI agent and convicted child molester – the girl he raped was between the ages of 9 and 13 – Palmosina is going to spend the next 20 years “looking over his shoulder,” especially in the shower. Not an encouraging thought for the DB’s latest inmate to have.
At his court-martial, Palmosina admitted that in addition to the sex charges, he also mishandled classified information. One can only wonder what kind of a “job” he did – before he was exposed as corrupt – back when he was part of the “system” at OSI, putting both guilty and innocent behind bars without regard to justice.
http://www.militarycorruption.com/palmosina.htm
Why destroy the career of a good NCO over one mistake like this? Especially when Gen. Fiscus can “carry on” for more than ten years and repeatedly violate regulations against adultery, fraternization, and conduct unbecoming an officer.”
And how about another offense? Try “favoritism” on for size. Not all of the generals’ partners were “victims.” Some, especially one obnoxious female major, who bragged in Germany that she was “close with Tom” and visited him for “intimate times” back in the Beltway, welcomed his advances. It was great for her career.
http://www.militarycorruption.com/fiscus3.htm
posted by abu nakba at 3/12/2005 06:45:00 PM
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