Dalai Lama: Conflicting Philosophies of World Religions

All religions are pointing to the same 'thing'. The source of your being.

reply to post by Itisnowagain


That's a bit like saying 'All religions are just different paths that take/lead us up the same mountain'.
In order for you to say that with any strength of conviction and integrity, you would need to be in a position where you are capable of observing the mountain from a birds eye' point of view, to perceive said paths converging or going up the same mountain.
Are you/do you?

reply to post by DJW001

Originally posted by DJW001
reply to post by Jay-morris

 

You may slag China off, but you are again ignorant if you think America is perfect and peace keeper of the planet. The iraq war was illegal, and was nothing to do with helping the people. If thats the case, why dont they go into other countries, say N korea. Why is it always the mddle east?

Did I say the invasion of Iraq was legal? No. Did I say America was perfect? No. Are you saying the Chinese invasion of Tibet was legal? Are you saying it was only done to help the Tibetan people? Your hypocrisy is blatant; you condemn American imperialism while lauding Chinese imperialism.

Like i showed you in the other thread, the tibet and china situation is complicated. I linked you to evidence that proved that there are arguments on either side outside of china, sonething you ignored too.

You try and and use iraq as an example, which is a complete joke!

You said that america gave tibet freedom fighters money to help free tibet. These were the same people who unslaved, tortured and starved most of the tibetan people. Were these freedom fighters fighting for there freedom? No, because they had no freedom.

Time and time again you ignore my points. You answer a question with a question. Pretty much what you did in the other thread.

I have never once said that china is perfect, but unlike you, i know other countries are not perfect, including my own.

Yes, china has done terrible things, no one denies that, but so have countries like america and england japan, germany etc

And i have never said that china done it just to help the tibetan people. Not once did i say that. I said i was glad that someone stepped in and got rid of the disgusting dictatorship, that was the lama rule. If it was not china, then it would have been another country like britain.

You are ignorant if you think the tibetans were free before chinese rule. The only tibetans who were free were the holy men, the rest were nothing to them.

And like the poster i replied to earlier. Just goes to prove my point that alot of these "free tibet" hang alongs have no clue about the history of tibet, and the only history of tibet they know, is the fantasy version the west throws out.

reply to post by Jay-morris

You are ignorant if you think the tibetans were free before chinese rule. The only tibetans who were free were the holy men, the rest were nothing to them.

Why do you keep presuming to read my mind? Tibet was a feudal land. It was no different than medieval Germany. Monasteries and Barons each controlled their own little slice of land, treating the peasants as they wished. Some cared about their people, others didn't. Some were sincere in their religious vocation, others weren't. There was a Holy Roman Emperor and a Pope they were supposed to be responsible to, but those authority figures didn't hold much sway in daily business. Famine and disease were rife, witches and heretics burnt, and yet people still think that was a peaceful and romantic time. Humanity has spent most of its history in similar conditions. What I don't understand is what you personally have against the Dalai Lama. Is it because the Chinese find him an embarrassment? Remember, they initially tried to co-opt him, and brought him to Beijing for "re-education." If he is so evil, why would they do that? Why not try him for his crimes against humanity, then and there? Or were they hoping that his co-operation would lend a veneer of respectability to their illegal occupation?

Originally posted by DJW001
reply to post by Jay-morris

 

You are ignorant if you think the tibetans were free before chinese rule. The only tibetans who were free were the holy men, the rest were nothing to them.

Why do you keep presuming to read my mind? Tibet was a feudal land. It was no different than medieval Germany. Monasteries and Barons each controlled their own little slice of land, treating the peasants as they wished. Some cared about their people, others didn't. Some were sincere in their religious vocation, others weren't. There was a Holy Roman Emperor and a Pope they were supposed to be responsible to, but those authority figures didn't hold much sway in daily business. Famine and disease were rife, witches and heretics burnt, and yet people still think that was a peaceful and romantic time. Humanity has spent most of its history in similar conditions. What I don't understand is what you personally have against the Dalai Lama. Is it because the Chinese find him an embarrassment? Remember, they initially tried to co-opt him, and brought him to Beijing for "re-education." If he is so evil, why would they do that? Why not try him for his crimes against humanity, then and there? Or were they hoping that his co-operation would lend a veneer of respectability to their illegal occupation?

Its like talking to a brick wall sometimes. I posted evidence
about why i dont like the delia lama (which you ignored) i
posted histiric evidence on what tibet was really like, which
you said was chinese propaganda, but then changed your
mind when you realised the sources were not from china lol

why would they not try the delia lama? Well, its obvious!
What do you think would happen? So many people are brainwashed
by the bs the west has said about tibet and the lama, that they
would not stand a chance. Even you have ignored the evidence i
have posted, and you still have the nerve to ask me why i don't
like him!

bookmarked
2nd line

Originally posted by ManjushriPrajna
youtu.be...

It saddens me to see constant bickering between religions, or non-religious people attacking religion. It's more wise to understand that diversity of religion is as vital as diversity of other things, philosophy, etc.. We need that diversity, because despite how outwardly different we are, we are all inherently the same thing.

In the video, the Dalai Lama said, "Faith towards one's own tradition, and respect to all traditions."

We, as a collective mankind, must work towards harmonious peace with each other no matter how different.

'Compassion means having the knowledge that all people are doing the best they can, knowing what they know.'

Not one of us has the market cornered on 'correct.'

Originally posted by clemo
The Dalai Lama sounds like the name of a newspaper to me and he's about as significant in my life as said paper. Religion is how YOU want to live life

let me correct you. what you are talking about is spirituality. religion is when you believe in a set parameter on set beliefs according to your RELIGION. religion sets your standards, spirituality is the standard you set.

Originally posted by theubermensch
I wish the Dalai Lama would shut the hell up.

I really hope your joking!

The Dali Lama is the highest form of a benevolent spiritual leader, in our world today!

Originally posted by Redeemer
reply to post by borntowatch

 

Look up "serfdom in tibet" on wikipedia if you want to see how this just goes in circles. I don't feel like quoting the article and maybe this isn't worth my time either but I am pretty sure that China isn't the great liberator that they claim to be.

Is that it, is that your whole answer to the evidence listed??
I suggest you READ THE REFERENCES listed in the second blog.
Thats how you research an article.

Hmmm, dont think this is worth my time.
68 references in the second article and you still question the BURDEN OF PROOF
Notes:

Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, (University of California Press, 2000), 6, 112-113, 157.
Kyong-Hwa Seok, "Korean Monk Gangs Battle for Temple Turf," San Francisco Examiner, 3 December 1998.
Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2006.
Dalai Lama quoted in Donald Lopez Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998), 205.
Erik D. Curren, Buddha's Not Smiling: Uncovering Corruption at the Heart of Tibetan Buddhism Today (Alaya Press 2005), 41.
Stuart Gelder and Roma Gelder, The Timely Rain: Travels in New Tibet (Monthly Review Press, 1964), 119, 123; and Melvyn C. Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama (University of California Press, 1995), 6-16.
Curren, Buddha's Not Smiling, 50.
Stephen Bachelor, "Letting Daylight into Magic: The Life and Times of Dorje Shugden," Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 7, Spring 1998. Bachelor discusses the sectarian fanaticism and doctrinal clashes that ill fit the Western portrait of Buddhism as a non-dogmatic and tolerant tradition.
Dhoring Tenzin Paljor, Autobiography, cited in Curren, Buddha's Not Smiling, 8.
Pradyumna P. Karan, The Changing Face of Tibet: The Impact of Chinese Communist Ideology on the Landscape (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 64.
See Gary Wilson's report in Worker's World, 6 February 1997.
Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 62 and 174.
As skeptically noted by Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La, 9.
Melvyn Goldstein, William Siebenschuh, and Tashì-Tsering, The Struggle for Modern Tibet: The Autobiography of Tashì-Tsering (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1997).
Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 110.
Melvyn C. Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet 1913-1951 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 5 and passim.
Anna Louise Strong, Tibetan Interviews (Peking: New World Press, 1959), 15, 19-21, 24.
Quoted in Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 25.
Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 31.
Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 175-176; and Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 25-26.
Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 113.
A. Tom Grunfeld, The Making of Modern Tibet rev. ed. (Armonk, N.Y. and London: 1996), 9 and 7-33 for a general discussion of feudal Tibet; see also Felix Greene, A Curtain of Ignorance (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), 241-249; Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet, 3-5; and Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La, passim.
Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 91-96.
Waddell, Landon, O'Connor, and Chapman are quoted in Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 123-125.
Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon, 52.
Heinrich Harrer, Return to Tibet (New York: Schocken, 1985), 29.
See Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, The CIA's Secret War in Tibet (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2002); and William Leary, "Secret Mission to Tibet," Air & Space, December 1997/January 1998.
On the CIA's links to the Dalai Lama and his family and entourage, see Loren Coleman, Tom Slick and the Search for the Yeti (London: Faber and Faber, 1989).
Leary, "Secret Mission to Tibet."
Hugh Deane, "The Cold War in Tibet," CovertAction Quarterly (Winter 1987).
George Ginsburg and Michael Mathos Communist China and Tibet (1964), quoted in Deane, "The Cold War in Tibet." Deane notes that author Bina Roy reached a similar conclusion.
See Greene, A Curtain of Ignorance, 248 and passim; and Grunfeld, The Making of Modern Tibet, passim.
Harrer, Return to Tibet, 54.
Karan, The Changing Face of Tibet, 36-38, 41, 57-58; London Times, 4 July 1966.
Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 29 and 47-48.
Tendzin Choegyal, "The Truth about Tibet," Imprimis (publication of Hillsdale College, Michigan), April 1999.
Karan, The Changing Face of Tibet, 52-53.
Elaine Kurtenbach, Associate Press report, 12 February 1998.
Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon, 47-48.
Curren, Buddha's Not Smiling, 8.
San Francisco Chonicle, 9 January 2007.
Report by the International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet, A Generation in Peril (Berkeley Calif.: 2001), passim.
International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet, A Generation in Peril, 66-68, 98.
im Mann, "CIA Gave Aid to Tibetan Exiles in '60s, Files Show," Los Angeles Times, 15 September 1998; and New York Times, 1

It is a good thing when a thread intended to call attention to a decent notion like religious tolerance becomes a venue for what one might loosely call scoffers.

I don't think it helps a discussion of religious tolerance if the intolerant don't show up and contribute, or if the sceptics or if those who have been burned by religion don't come into the discussion. At least they are serious enough about the topic to tell people what they think.

It is important for religious people to avoid creating little communities of agreement, where everyone is nice to one another, and where the sometimes rough voice of dissent is never heard.

We live in an intolerant world, but we can begin the spread of tolerance by learning to tolerate the intolerant. It's a good idea, that works. Those are the kind of ideas that people pick up on.

No one here is suggesting that China are the moral good guys.
All that is being suggested is Tibet and the Dali Lama are not the wonderful superheroes the West and US media made them out to be.
How is it you have turned the lie completely around on us. The facts are simple and condemn the Buddhists.
Tibet was a feudal system oppressing the people and the Buddhists were the royalty who lived of their hard work.

Its not about China, its not about religion its not about who is right and wrong. Its history and its a fact.

Originally posted by borntowatch
All that is being suggested is Tibet and the Dali Lama are not the wonderful superheroes the West and US media made them out to be.

I agree with this. The popular press is not the place to get an understanding of any society on the planet, let alone one as little known as Tibetan society.

Tibet was a feudal system oppressing the people and the Buddhists were the royalty who lived of their hard work.

This part of the post I don't agree with. It might be a case of the popular press again, but demonizing Tibet and Buddhism, instead of deifying them.

Its not about China, its not about religion its not about who is right and wrong. Its history and its a fact.

Feudal systems don't always oppress the people. The United States is evolving into a feudal society and actual oppression of the people is increasing, both economic and military, but most people in the United States would not consider themselves oppressed. I'm pretty sure the same thing could be said for feudal Tibet.

Of course, the general economic level was lower and the standard of living was much lower. However, no matter where the society is, it is very rare for the elite controllers of the society to share the hardship of the poorest citizens. I can't think of a country where that has been done.

Another point that could be made is that everyone in Tibet, except for a small minority was Buddhist, which is to say that Buddhism was not either the basis nor the means used to oppress others. Buddhism is a system of inner spiritual awakening. It has nothing to do with economics, with social systems, or with the use of military means to control situations.

Tibet's feudalism was in place before Buddhism arrived in the country. Buddhism didn't alter the system in place because Buddhism does not bear in its aims on social systems. Buddhism is directed to personal spiritual awakening.

Having said that, Buddhism in Tibet was the state church also, and in becoming the state church, opened itself to all of the developments social and political that one associates with state churches wherever they are found.

If oppression flowed in any way from the religious institutions of Tibet, that would constitute, not an example of Buddhism oppressing people, but rather an example of Buddhism failing to hold its own against the exigencies of power politics.

Originally posted by charles1952
reply to post by clemo

 

Religion is how YOU want to live life

That seems to be an unusual definition for "Religion." I must be misunderstanding you. That would make selfishness a religion, or risk-taking a religion. Could you put your definition a little differently, I'm not clear on this one.

As far as ignoring anyone, shouldn't you wait to hear what they have to say, first? What's the saying? "Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day." Why not consider his ideas?

Religion is a word used to describe a personal belief system.


From Jedi->Christian and every thing in between.

If someone lived a life of moral selfishness because they thought that was the way to live life (Basing morals around being selfish) and that was their belief system then that person is religiously selfish. In that, selfishness, is his religion.

Belief = Faith.

Faith does not mean you need to believe in a deity. Neither does the word Religion.

So in other words, Religion = Faith/Belief which is the moral rhetoric used to justify how any particular person(s) chooses to live.

I.E.

Religion is how YOU want to live life

The only absolute ubiquitous definition of the word.



This is inherently the reason why religion as a whole is bad. It's because people craft outlandish and ridiculous and unchallengeable rhetoric to justify their actions, instead of acting in an appropriate way because they truly know and understand without fault, why things are right and wrong.


ALL DEITY BASED RELIGION USES RELIGION AS A JUSTIFICATION OF MURDER.

Yes, even the christian God.

So thou shalt not murder, the commandment, should read; Thou shalt not murder unless the lord commands it.


Yet, when the lord commands it, he commits an act of hypocrisy, willing you to do what he demanded you to not do (because life is sacred and all men should be forgiven), except for this one time as he makes an exception to those not sacred enough who he chooses to not forgive.


Either we are all free and not oppressed and thou shalt never murder, or we only think we are free and not oppressed but we murder on occasion to silence dissent, to continue the oppression of those unaware.

reply to post by ManjushriPrajna


diversity of one religion is far superior to a diversity of many religions.


All multiple religions in the same area have ever done is fabricate war.

no no, ill say it again. religion is how you LIVE YOUR LIFE according to a set belief. spirituality(big difference) is how you should live your life. when youre religious you say, dont kill because its in the commandments. when youre spiritual you say dont kill, because you utterly believe and know, its just plain wrong. no writing for spirituality. a whole friggin misguided book on religion. see the difference?

Originally posted by mactheaxe
no no, ill say it again. religion is how you LIVE YOUR LIFE according to a set belief. spirituality(big difference) is how you should live your life. when youre religious you say, dont kill because its in the commandments. when youre spiritual you say dont kill, because you utterly believe and know, its just plain wrong. no writing for spirituality. a whole friggin misguided book on religion. see the difference?

Two Posts Up, I got you covered, and well more explained -- I think.

i see. well, you explained a little better and i will agree with you sir.

Originally posted by Gorman91
reply to post by ManjushriPrajna

 

diversity of one religion is far superior to a diversity of many religions.


All multiple religions in the same area have ever done is fabricate war.

And diversity among one religion will cause the same outcome, fabricated war.

Diversity in argument = non-agreement. Non-Agreement = The pretense of war.


The only thing this does, is POTENTIALLY, scale down the size of the war.

See Jewish vs Christian.

Essentially the same belief system with the same values, yet at odds over minor differences with major recourse in said disagreements.

Religions as a whole need to be kept to thyself. Philosophy is what needs to be public.

The philosophy of religion in general is largely the same. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

Who cares if the message came from jesus, mohammed, god, buddha, the message is true. Don't abuse people and no people will be abused.