I think this has the quote wrong?
Pretty sure it’s “suck my tongue”
He’s unfortunately the public face of Buddhism to the common person in the West, but I always have to go out of my way to emphasize how he’s really just a drop in the ocean. He’s not even the spiritual head of his own school, just the political figurehead for the exile government.
I studied at a Kagyu-Nyingma monastery and he never gets mentioned at all. His relevance to the average Buddhist who isn’t Tibetan is really quite low, and even many Tibetan practitioners don’t think of him as an authority, but just another teacher they may or may not be familiar with.
Someone practicing Zen or Chan or Pure Land, or anything else outside of that sphere doesn’t regard him at all except on an individual level.
Edit: I know he tries to sell Buddhism to the average Westerner who is influenced by Facebook posts, so pithy quotes like this are his style. But the Gelug school is literally the debate school that practices reductio ad absurdum in the courtyards to suss out what is true. So it’s always a little sad to see that and the rest of the philosophy de-emphasized.
I studied at a Kagyu-Nyingma monastery
Thats so cool, is there any ancient and forbidden knowledge you learned there which you’d want to share with us?
Lol, no. I just mentioned it to point out that even the other Tibetan schools don’t really have much to do with the Dalai Lama. His picture isn’t hung up anywhere.
I used to think that if I ever wanted to leave everything behind, I’d go be a monk somewhere. But then I started falling asleep during lectures because they were being live translated from Tibetan into English and it’s hard to concentrate when someone is speaking a language you don’t know but you have to listen to them respectfully like you have a clue what it is they’re saying.
The biggest lesson I learned was the value of community and I sort of understood why people congregate to churches and things. Everyone around me had the same baseline assumptions of what they should be doing to better themselves and to support each other, so it felt really significant to progress along that path together. These were people that traveled from all over the world to come to this spot to learn from authentic teachers, so they were also much more genuine than the meditation bros you’ll find many places in the West. I hope to find that same community of socialists irl when I am in a position to do so.
If it were possible, I’d fly every Western Buddhist somewhere like that so they can experience the culture shock between their perception of commodified versions of Buddhism presented here and how much logic and philosophy is actually involved. It isn’t just good vibes and sitting on a meditation cushion. There’s mountains of texts written about epistemology, ethics, logic, etc. And it’s not static, there’s been many advancements in thought over the last decade. Such as how we now know that both Mahayana and ‘Theravadin’ (they weren’t called that back then) Buddhists existed in the same monasteries in the past and no longer think that Mahayana was a later development, but competing schools of thought that developed in conversation with each other.
There’s not really too many ‘secret teachings’ or anything. Even the things that are supposed to be ‘secret’ are really just things you’re supposed to be trained by a teacher on first so that you do them properly. It’s not a gatekeeping thing, but a “hey maybe you shouldn’t meditate in front of corpses to contemplate death without first appropriately contextualizing this action and mentally preparing yourself so that you don’t develop mental health issues” thing.
EDIT: Oh, yeah, that time also turned me vegan. The monastery only served vegan food. Meat has been big in Tibetan culture for a long time, but even long-dead masters had problems with it and monasteries forbidding meat is becoming more and more widespread. There’s lots of texts about animal rights and their place in Buddhist ethics as well.
Fascinating, thank you for the writeup!
So how do you prepare yourself mentally to contemplate death in front of a corpse?
But then I started falling asleep during lectures because they were being live translated from Tibetan into English and it’s hard to concentrate when someone is speaking a language you don’t know but you have to listen to them respectfully like you have a clue what it is they’re saying.
As far as I know, Tibetan is one of the hardest languages to learn, if not the hardest (with Polish being the other one). Its “orthographic depth” is all fucked because it’s kept the same spelling for most of its words since 620 AD, with some spelling reforms around 800 AD. It’s like if English had everything written in Latin, but pronounced like we already do (example: “finally” being spelled “ad ultimum”). So not only is it in a family already difficult for outsiders, there’s no way to learn the spelling except by memorizing specific words, which also makes looking up words difficult.
Arabic has a similar life story to Tibetan, where it was spread and kept alive through religious texts (the Koran). But unlike Tibetan, Arabic has localized and standard updates to its writing. Vowels, for example, weren’t originally written in the Arabic used in the Koran. Modern Arabic has vowels inserted to make it easier to read (that is what all those , ’ ` -looking things are in Arabic script, those are vowels). Tibetan hasn’t done this.
It’s one of the challenges of improving literacy among Tibetans. A lot of them are like “Have you seen this shit? It may as well be Greek.”
The other day, after I claimed that china isn’t a historically expansionist or militarist country, I was told “what does the dalai lama have to say about that?”. Holy shit people are dumb. Like, ask the pope what he thinks about the genocide in Palestine instead, genius.
The idea of China invading the country at the request of the Tibetan Communist Party, crushing the Lamas, freeing the slaves, and iirc they had to do it twice because the Lamas tried to start shit again, would never penetrate, would it?
I remember a Chinese person slapping down some of this bullshit saying that 98% of Tibetans speak Tibetan and asking the American how many native americans spoke an indigenous language.
and asking the American how many native americans spoke an indigenous language
And this is why libs invented ‘that’s just whataboutism’
There’s also just the fact that Tibet diplomatically rejoined with China right after the end of the Civil War and only decided to split a decade later, after much work had been done to improve conditions for the serfs and this lead to an outraged aristocratic class trying to breakaway to maintain power. It’s very roughly like calling the US expansionist for invading the Confederacy.
A question for them would be “what does the Dalai Lama have to say about Nepal having peasant slaves into the 20th century and why do all the Bhuddist Temples have to be gilded in gold?”
Isn’t Nepal governed by a communist party? Why would they allow that?
Sorry I know basically nothing about Nepal I am a little baby.
The Maoist uprising only occurred within the last 20 years, starting around 1996 and the monarchy was abolished in 2006. There were a lot of concessions made for this to happen and restrictions put on the most militant Maoists to re-integrate them into society and work with them through political processes instead of further violence. They’ve been ruled by a Democratic coalition government for a while that includes a few different communist groups. But they aren’t a wholly socialist country and there’s still elements of monarchism and things like that.
As other posters have said yeah the communist uprising and now coalition state have outlawed slavery and sought restitution from the Monastery system for it, outlawed the monarchy, and additionally the quality of life significantly went up especially child and maternal health. Also don’t feel bad about asking questions leftists love answering questions
“The evil colonialism of the US North preventing slavery without the consent of the South” - probably something an Amerikkkan has said before
Back when I used to make the mistake of browsing through quora, this was absolutely the kind of cope that was popular amongst americans.
Didn’t he just tell some kid to suck on his tongue like a year ago?
r/thedeprogram seems like the mirror universe version of r/chapotraphouse. Instead of the sub being more based than the showrunners, they’re less based.
It’s pretty easy to explain though, and not really chapo but GenZedong, that sub got harsh struggle sessions about imperialism and religion, and when it was banned, based people went to Lemmygrad while centrists and clerical socialists went to deprogram (good advice: don’t engage on deprogram about religion, while they are some people with correct takes there, you can more often read takes like the defence of tongue sucking or absolute nuclear takes that you can’t become marxist without religion or that religion is inherently materialist).
I’ve seen his kindness and it shouldn’t be around kids
