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Rolf Alfred Stein [R.A. Stein]
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Accessed: 8/6/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

Rolf Alfred Stein (13 June 1911 – 9 October 1999) was a German-born French Sinologist and Tibetologist. He contributed in particular to the study of the Epic of King Gesar, on which he wrote two books, and the use of Chinese sources in Tibetan history. He was the first scholar to correctly identify the Minyag of Tibetan sources with the Xixia of Chinese sources.

Stein was born in Schwetz (now Świecie, Poland) to a family of Jewish origin in 1911. As a young man, Stein became interested in the occult, and it was from there that his interest in Tibet began.

He received his first degree in Chinese from the Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen at the University of Berlin in 1933. He fled to France the same year. He obtained degrees from l'École nationale des langues orientales vivantes in Chinese (1934) and Japanese (1936). In Paris he studied Tibetan with Jacques Bacot and Marcelle Lalou. He became a French citizen on 30 August 1939. Stein spent the Second World War in French Indo-China, working as a translator and where he was taken prisoner by the Japanese. He completed his doctorat d'État in 1960 on the Gesar epic.



Stein was a professor at the École pratique des hautes études, Ve section (Religions de la Chine et de la Haute Asie) from 1951 until 1975. He was a professor at the prestigious Collège de France from 1966 until 1982. He died in 1999. He was married to a Vietnamese lady from the highlands and adopted a daughter of Vietnamese-French descent.

Among Stein's most notable students were Anne-Marie Blondeau, Ariane Macdonald-Spanien, Samten Karmay, Yamaguchi Zuiho, and Yoshiro Imaeda.

Samten Gyeltsen was born in 1936 in Sharkhog, eastern Tibet. He received religious training in Dzogchen meditation from his uncle. He completed his studies in the Bon monastery in 1955, obtaining the degree of geshe, and left with a group of friends to Drepung Monastery, a Gelug gompa near Lhasa. The monastery was known for its high philosophical training.

After leaving Drepung due to the difficult political situation, Samten moved to Nepal and later to India. After working for some time in Delhi, he was invited to England by David Snellgrove under a Rockefeller fellowship. Upon moving to Europe, he assumed the surname Karmay. He studied under two mentors, Snellgrove and Rolf Stein, who both recognized Samten's knowledge of Tibetan texts. He earned an M. Phil degree at the SOAS, University of London.

In 1980 he moved to France, where he entered the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (National Centre for Scientific Research). During his time there, he was awarded with the CNRS Silver Medal for his contribution to Human Sciences. A number of Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines was dedicated to him in November 2008. He also held the post of the President of the International Association of Tibetan Studies between 1995 and 2000, being the first Tibetan to be elected to the post. In 2005 he was a visiting professor at the International Institute for Asian Studies, under the sponsorship of Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai (""Society for the Promotion of Buddhism"").

-- Samten Karmay, by Wikipedia

Yoshiro Imaeda (Japanese: 今枝 由郎 Hepburn: Imaeda Yoshirō, born 1947) is a Japanese-born Tibetologist who has spent his career in France. He is director of research emeritus at the National Center for Scientific Research in France.[1]

Born in Aichi Prefecture, Imaeda graduated from the Otani University Faculty of Letters, where he studied with Shoju Inaba, under whose advice he pursued graduate studies in France, where he earned his Ph.D. at Paris VII. He began work at the CNRS in 1974. Between 1981 and 1990, he worked as an adviser to the National Library of Bhutan Bhutan. In 1995, he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and has also held a visiting appointment at Columbia University.

His research has focused on Dunhuang Tibetan documents, but he has also translated the poems of the VI Dalai lama, and produced a catalog of Kanjur texts.

-- Yoshiro Imaeda, by Wikipedia

Works of Rolf Stein

• 1939 "Leao-tsche", T'oung Pao, XXXV: 1-154
• 1939 "Trente-fois fiches de divination tibétaines", Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, IV : 297-372
• 1941: “Notes d'étymologie tibétaine.” Bulletin de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient, XLI: 203–231
• 1942 "Jardins en miniature d'Extrême-Orient, le Monde en petit", Bulletin de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient (Hanoi, Paris), XLII: 1-104 [publ. 1943]
• 1942 "A propos des sculptures de bœufs en métal", Bulletin de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient (Hanoi, Paris), XLII: 135-138 [publ. 1943]
• 1947 "Le Lin-yi, sa localisation, sa contribution à la formation du Champa et ses liens avec la Chine", Han-hiue, Bulletin de Centre d’études sinologiques de Pekin, II : 1 -335
• 1951 "Mi-nag et Si-hia, géographie historique et légendes ancestrales", Bulletin de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient (Hanoi, Paris), XLIV (1947–1950), Fasc. 1, Mélanges publiés en l'honneur du Cinquantenaire de l'École Française d'Extrême Orient
223-259
• 1952 "Chronique bibliographique: récentes études tibétaines", Journal Asiatique, CCXL : 79-106
• 1952 "Présentation de l'œuvre posthume de Marcel Granet: 'Le Roi boit,'" Année Sociologique, 3e série : 9-105 [publ. 1955]
• 1953 "Chine", Symbolisme cosmique et monuments religieux, Musée Guimet, Catalogue de l'exposition, Paris : 31-40
• 1956 L'épopée tibétaine de Gesar dans sa version lamaïque de Ling, Paris, Annales du musée Guimet, Bibliothèque d'études, LXI
• 1957 "L'habitat, le monde et le corps humain", Journal Asiatique, CCXLV : 37-74
• 1957 "Architecture et pensée religieuse en Extrême-Orient." Arts asiatiques IV : 163-186
• 1957 "Les religions de la Chine", Encyclopédie française. Paris, tome 19 : 54.3-54.10
• 1957 "Le linga des danses masquées lamaïques et la théorie des âmes", Lieberthal Festschrift, Sino-Indian Studies V, 3-4, ed. Kshitis Roy. Santiniketan : 200-234
• 1958 "Les K'iang des marches sino-tibétaines, exemple de continuité de la tradition", Annuaire de l'École pratique des Hautes Études, Ve section, Paris, 1957-58 : 3-15
• 1958 "Peintures tibétaines de la vie de Gesar", Ars Asiatique, V, 4 : 243-271
• 1959 Recherches sur l'épopée et le barde au Tibet. Paris: Bibliothèque de l'Institut des Hautes Études chinoises, XIII.
• 1959 "Lamaïsme", Le Masque, Catalogue de l'exposition, décembre 1959-septembre 1960, Musée Guimet. Paris: Éditions des Musées nationaux: 42-45.
• 1961 Les tribus anciennes des marches sino-tibétaines. Paris: Bibliothèque de l'Institut des Hautes Études chinoises, vol. XV.
• 1961 Une chronique ancienne de bSam-yas : sBa-bzed, édition du texte tibétain et résumé français. Paris: Bibliothèque de l’Institut des Hautes Études chinoises, Textes et Documents.
• 1961 "Le théâtre au Tibet." Les théâtre d'Asie. Paris: CNRS : 245-254
• 1962 Civilization Tibetain
• 1962 "Une source ancienne pour l'histoire de l’épopée tibétaine, le Rlans Po-ti bse-ru" Journal Asiatique 250: 77-106.
• 1963 "Remarques sur les mouvements du taoïsme politico-religieux au 1 Ie siècle après Jésus-Christ." T'oung Pao 50.1-3: 1-78.
• 1963 "Deux notules d'histoire ancienne du Tibet." Journal Asiatique 251: 327-333
• 1964 "Une saint poète tibétain." Mercure de France, juillet-aout 1964 : 485-501
• 1966 "Nouveaux documents tibétains sur les Mi-nag / Si-hia", Mélanges de sinologie offerts à Monsieur Paul Demieville. Paris: Bibliothèque de l’Institut des Hautes Études chinoises, XX, vol. 1: 281-289
• 1966 Leçon inaugurale, Collège de France, Chaire d’étude du monde chinois: Institutions et concepts. Paris: Collège de France.
• 1968 "Religions comparées de L'Extrême-Orient et de la Haute-Asie", Problèmes et méthodes d'histoire des religions. École pratique des Hautes Études, Ve section — Sciences Religieuses. Paris: Presses universitaires de France: 47-51
• 1969 "Un exemple de relations entre taoïsme et religion populaire." Fukui hakase shôju kinen Tôyô bunka ronshû. Tôkyô : 79-90
• 1969 "Les conteurs au Tibet." France-Asie 197: 135-146.
• 1970 "Un document ancien relatif aux rites funéraires des Bon-po tibétains." Journal Asiatique CCLVIII: 155-185
• 1970 "La légende du foyer dans le monde chinois." Échanges et communications: Mélanges offerts à Claude Lévi-Strauss, reunis par Jean PouUon et Pierre Miranda. The Hague: Mouton. 1280-1305
• 1971 "Illumination subite ou saisie simultanée, note sur la terminologie chinoise et tibétaine." Revue de l'histoire des religions CLXXIX: 3-30.
• 1971 "La langue zan-zun du Bon organisé", Bulletin de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient LVIII: 231-254
• 1971 "Du récit au rituel clans les manuscrits tibétains de Touen-houang." Études tibétaines dédiées à la mémoire de M. Lalou. éd. Ariane Macdonald, Paris, A. Maisoneuve : 479-547
• 1972 Vie et chants de 'Brug-pa Kun-legs, le yogin, traduit du tibetain et annoté. (Collection UNESCO d’œuvres représentatives). Paris: G.-P. Maisoneuve et Larose
• 1973 "Le texte tibétain de "Brug-pa Kun-legs", Zentralasiatische Studien 7:9-219
• 1973 "Un ensemble sémantique tibétain: créer et procréer, être et devenir, vivre, nourrir et guérir", Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies XXXVI : 412-423
• 1974 "Vocabulaire tibétain de la biographie de 'Brug-pa Kun-legs", Zentralasiatische Studien 8 : 129-178
• 1976 "Préface." Choix de documents tibétains conservés à la Bibliothèque nationale complété par quelques manuscrits de l'India Office et du British Museum. Ariane Macdonald et Yoshiro Imaeda. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, tome 1: 5-8
• 1977 "La gueule du makara: un trait inexpliqué de certains objets rituels." Essais sur l'art du Tibet. éd. par Ariane Macdonald et Yoshirô Imaeda. Paris: A. Maisonneuve: 53-62
• 1978 "À propos des documents anciens relatifs au phur-bu (kïla)." Proceedings of the Csoma de Kôrôs Memorial Symposium. éd. L. Ligeti. Budapest: 427-444
• 1979 "Religious Taoism and Popular Religion from the Second to Seventh Centuries", Facets of Taoism: Essays in Chinese Religions. ed. H. Welch and A. Seidel, Yale University Press: 53-81
• 1979 "Introduction to the Gesar Epic", The Epic of Gesar. 25 vol., Thimpu: Bhutan, vol.1: 1-20.
• 1980 "Une mention du manichéisme dans le choix du bouddhisme comme religion d'Etat par le roi Khri-sron lde-bstan", Indianisme et Bouddhisme, Mélanges offerts à Mgr Etienne Lamotte. Louvain-La-Neuve: Publications de l’Institut Orientaliste de Louvain, 23: 329-338
• 1981 "Bouddhisme et mythologie. Le problème", Dictionnaire des mythologies et des religions des sociétés traditionnelles et du monde antique (sous la direction de Yves Bonnefoy), Paris, Flammarion, vol. 1 : 127-129
• 1981 "Porte (gardien de la) : un exemple de mythologie bouddhiste, de l'Inde au Japon", Dictionnaire des mythologies et des religions des sociétés traditionnelles et du monde antique. (sous la direction de Yves Bonnefoy), Paris, Flammarion, vol. 2 : 280-294.
• 1981 "Saint et Divin, un titre tibétain et chinois des rois tibétains." Numéro spécial — Actes du Colloque international (Paris, 2-4 octobre 1979) : Manuscrits et inscriptions de Haute-Asie du Ve au Xe siècle. Journal Asiatique, CCLIX, 1 et 2 : 231-275.
• 1983 "Tibetica Antiqua I: Les deux vocabulaires des traductions indo-tibétaines et sino-tibétaines dans les manuscrits Touen-Houang", Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême Orient LXXII: 149-236.
• 1983 "Notes sur l’esthétique d'un lettre chinois pauvre du XVIIe siècle", Revue d’esthétique, nouvelle série n° 5, Autour de le Chine: 35-43.
• 1984: "Allocution", Les peintures murales et les manuscrits de Dunhuang (Colloque franco-chinois organisé à la Fondation Singer-Polignac à Paris, les 21, 22 et 23 février 1983) ed. M. Soymie, Paris, Éditions de la Fondation Singer-Polignac : 17-20.
• 1984 "Quelques découvertes récentes dans les manuscrits tibétains." Les peintures murales et les manuscrits de Dunhuang, Paris, Éditions de la Fondation Singer-Polignac : 21-24.
• 1984 "Tibetica Antiqua II: L'usage de métaphores pour des distinctions honorifiques à l’époque des rois tibétains", Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême Orient LXXIII: 257-272.
• 1985 "Tibetica Antiqua III : À propos du mot gcug-lag et de la religion indigène." Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême Orient LXXIV: 83-133
• 1985 "Souvenir de Granet", Etudes chinoises IV. 2 : 29-40
• 1986 "Tibetica Antiqua IV : La tradition relative au début du bouddhisme au Tibet." Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême Orient LXXV: 169-196.
• 1986 "Avalokitesvara / Kouan-yin, un exemple de transformation d'un dieu en déesse." Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie II: 17-80.
• 1987 Le monde en petite : jardins en miniature et habitations clans la pensée religieuse d'Extrême-Orient. Paris, Flammarion.
• 1987 "Un genre particulier d'exposés du tantrisme ancien tibétain et khotanais." Journal Asiatique CCLXXV. 3-4 : 265-282.
• 1988: "Tibetica Antiqua V : La religion ingene et les bon-po dans le manuscrits de Touen-houang", Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême Orient LXXVII: 27-56
• 1988 "La mythologie hindouiste au Tibet", Orientalia Iosephi Tucci memoriae dicata. Rome: Istituto italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente : 1407-1426
• 1988 "Grottes-matrices et lieux saints de la déesse en Asie Orientale", Paris Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême Orient CLI, 106 p
• 1988 "Les serments des traités sino-tibétains (8e-9e siècles), T'oung Pao LXXXIV : 119-138
• 1990. "L’Épopée de Gesar dans sa Version Écrite de l’Amdo" in Skorupski, T. (ed.) 1990. "Indo Tibetan Studies: Papers in Honour and Appreciation of David L. Snellgrove's contribution to Indo-Tibetan Studies" Buddha Britannica, Institute of Buddhist Studies. Series II. Tring. 293-304.
• 1990 The World in Miniature: Container gardens and Dwellings in Far Eastern religious Thought. trans. Phyllis Brooks. Stanford University Press. (translation of Stein 1987)

References

• Obituary at Tibet.ca
• Biography at the École française d'Extrême-Orient. (in French)
• Rolf Alfred Stein official website

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David Snellgrove
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/7/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

David Snellgrove
Snellgrove in London, May 2011
Born: David Llewellyn Snellgrove, 29 June 1920, Portsmouth, Hampshire, England
Died: 25 March 2016 (aged 95), Pinerolo, Italy
Residence: Lusernetta, Italy
Citizenship: United Kingdom
Known for Study of Tibet
Scientific career
Fields" Tibetology
Institutions: School of Oriental and African Studies
Website: http://www.dlsnellgrove.com

David Llewellyn Snellgrove (29 June 1920 – 25 March 2016) was a British Tibetologist noted for his pioneering work on Buddhism in Tibet as well as his many travelogues.

Biography

Snellgrove was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, and educated at Christ's Hospital near Horsham in West Sussex. He went on to study German and French at Southampton University. In 1941 he was called up to do his military service as a member of the Royal Engineers. He attended the Officers Cadet Training Unit in the Scottish seaside town of Dunbar, and was commissioned as an infantry officer. Thereafter he attended various intelligence courses and further training at the War Office in London, from where he requested a posting to India.[1]

Snellgrove arrived in Bombay in June 1943, and travelled cross-country to Calcutta. He was stationed at Barrackpore, some way up the Hooghly River. A few months after beginning his posting he contracted malaria and was sent to the military hospital at Lebong, just north of Darjeeling. It was while he was at Lebong that he began his future life's calling by purchasing some books about Tibet by Charles Bell as well as a Tibetan Grammar and Reader.[2]

Snellgrove returned to Darjeeling, from where he sometimes went on leave to Kalimpong. On one of these visits he took a young Tibetan into his personal employ in order to have someone with whom to practice speaking Tibetan. He also travelled in the small Himalayan state of Sikkim, and on one such visit he met Sir Basil Gould, who was then the British Representative for Tibet.[2] Inspired to work in Tibet, in 1946 after he left the Army he sat the entrance exams for the Indian Civil Service. This was the first time the exams had been held since the start of the war, and the last time they were ever held. Although he passed the exams, he was not able to take up an appointment in India. Having already begun to study Tibetan, he resolved to find a university where he could further his studies. However, as no university offered courses in Tibetan at that time he was convinced by Sir Harold Bailey that a sound knowledge of Sanskrit and Pali would be beneficial, so he gained entry to Queens' College, Cambridge in October 1946. While at Cambridge, he converted to Roman Catholicism, in part through the influence of his friend Bede Griffiths.



In 1950, after having completed his studies at Cambridge, he was invited to teach a course in elementary Tibetan at the School of Oriental and African Studies University of London.[3] He was Professor of Tibetan at SOAS until his retirement in 1982.

Snellgrove's research subsequent to his retirement was focused increasingly upon the art history of South East Asia. He died on 25 March 2016 in Pinerolo, Italy.

Bibliography

Books and articles

• Snellgrove, David. (1956) Buddhist Morality. IN: Springs of Morality 239-257.
• Snellgrove, David. (1957) Buddhist Himālaya : travels and studies in quest of the origins and nature of Tibetan religion. Oxford: B. Cassirer.
• Snellgrove, David (1958). Note on the Adhyāsayasamcodana Sûtra. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 21: 620-623.
• Snellgrove, David. (1959) The Notion of Divine Kingship in Tantric Buddhism. The Sacral Kingship (E.J. Brill, Leiden).
• Snellgrove, David. (1960) Cultural and Educational Traditions in Tibet. Science and Freedom 14: 26-33.
• Snellgrove, David. (1961) Shrines and Temples of Nepal. Arts Asiatiques 8 fasc. 1, pp. 3–10; fasc. 2, pp. 93–120.
• Snellgrove, David. (1961) Himalayan Pilgrimage : a study of Tibetan religion by a traveller through Western Nepal. Oxford: Bruno Cassirer.
• Snellgrove, David. (1966) For a Sociology of Tibetan Speaking Regions. Central Asiatic Journal 11: 199-219.
• Snellgrove, David. (1967) Four Lamas of Dolpo. Oxford: Bruno Cassirer.
• Snellgrove, David. (1967) The Nine Ways of Bon: excerpts from gZi-brjid. London: Oxford University Press.
• Snellgrove, David. (1969) Cosmological Patterns in Buddhist Tradition. Studia Missionalia 87-110.
• Snellgrove, David. (1970) Sanctified Man in Mahāyāna Buddhism. Studia Missionalia (Rome) 55-85.
• Snellgrove, David. (1971) Buddhism in Tibet. Shambhala (Occasional Papers of the Inst. of Tibetan Studies) no 1, 31-44.
• Snellgrove, David. (1971) Indo-Tibetan Liturgy and its Relationship to Iconography. Mahāyāna Art after 900 A.D. 36-46.
• Snellgrove, David. (1971) The End of a Unique Civilisation. Shambhala (Occasional Papers of the Institute of Tibetan Studies) no 1, 3-6.
• Snellgrove, David. (1972) Traditional and Doctrinal Interpretation of Buddhahood. Bulletin of the Secretariat for Non-christian Religions (1970) 3-24.
• Snellgrove, David. Two Recent Studies in Buddhism. Heythrop J. 13 no. 3, 307-315.
• Snellgrove, David. (1973) Buddhist Monasticism. Shambhala (Occasional Papers of the Institute of Tibetan Studies) no 2, 13-25.
• Snellgrove, David. (1973) "Śākyamuni's Final 'nirvāṇa.'" Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 36: 399-411.
• Snellgrove, David. (1974) In Search of the Historical Sākyamuni. South Asian Review 7: 151-157.
• Snellgrove, David & Tadeusz Skorupski (1977), The Cultural Heritage of Ladakh, Warminster: Aris & Phillips.
• Snellgrove, David. (1979) A Description of Muktinath, the Place of Promenade, Ku-tsab-ter-nga, Mount Mu-li, the Guru's Hidden Cave and the Sna-ri Lord (text translation). Kailash 7: 106-128.
• Snellgrove, David. (1980) The Hevajra Tantra: A Critical Study, Oxford University Press (London).
• Snellgrove, David. (1980) The Nine Ways of Bon: Excerpts from Gzi-brjid Edited and Translated, Prajñā Press (Boulder).
• Snellgrove, David. (1982) Buddhism in North India and the Western Himalayas: Seventh to Thirteenth Centuries. IN: D. Klimburg-Salter, ed., The Silk Route and the Diamond Path UCLA Art Council, 64-80.
• Snellgrove, David. (1988) "Categories of Buddhist Tantras." G. Gnoli & L. Lanciotti, Orientalia Iosephi Tucci Memoriae Dicata, Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente. vol. 3 pp. 1353–1384.
• Snellgrove, David. Indo-Tibetan Buddhism: Indian Buddhists & Their Tibetan Successors, Shambhala Press (Boston 1987), 2 volumes (pagination continuous).
• Snellgrove, David. Multiple Features of the Buddhist Heritage. T. Skorupski, ed, The Buddhist Heritage (1989) 7-18.
• Snellgrove, David. Places of Pilgrimage in Thag (Thak Khola). Kailash 7 (1979) no. 2, pp. 70 ff. (75-170?). Dkar-chag.
• Snellgrove, David. (1981) Himalayan Pilgrimage, Prajñā Press (Boulder).
• Snellgrove, David. Review of Meyer, Gso-ba Rig-pa. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 46 pt. 1 (1983) 172-174.
• Snellgrove, David. (1987) Indo-Tibetan Buddhism: Indian Buddhists and their Tibetan successors. London: Serindia.
• Snellgrove, David. (1996) Borobudur: Stûpa or Mandala? East and West 46 no 3-4: 477-484.
• Snellgrove, David. (2001) The Relationship of Buddhism to the Royal Brahmanical Cult in the Khmer Empire. IN: R. Torella, ed., Le parole e i marmi (Rome).
• Snellgrove, David. (2000) Asian Commitment : Travels and Studies in the Indian Sub-Continent and South-East Asia. Bangkok: Orchid Press.
• Snellgrove, David. (2001) Khmer Civilization and Angkor. Bangkok: Orchid Press.
• Snellgrove, David. (2004) Angkor, Before and After : a Cultural History of the Khmers. Bangkok: Orchid Press.
• Snellgrove, David. (2006) Religion as History, Religion as Myth. Bangkok: Orchid Press.
• Snellgrove, David. (2008) How Samten Came to Europe. Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines 14: 1-6.
With Hugh Richardson
• 1968 A Cultural History of Tibet. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Reviews

• Snellgrove, David (1951). The Book of Chao by W. Liebenthal. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 13, No. 4 (1951), pp. 1053–1055
• Snellgrove, David (1952). Mi-la Ras-pa by Helmut Hoffmann. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1952), pp. 396–399
• Snellgrove, David (1954). Tombs of the Tibetan Kings by Giuseppe Tucci. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1954), p. 200
• Snellgrove, David (1954). The Śatapañcāśatka of Mātṛceṭa by D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1954), pp. 199–200.
• Snellgrove, David. (1954). An Introduction to Tantric Buddhism by Shashi Bhusan Dasgupta. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1954), pp. 178–179
• Snellgrove, David (1954). Manuel élémentaire de tibétain classique (méthode empirique) by Marcelle Lalou. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1954), pp. 198–199
• Snellgrove, David (1954). Deux traités grammaticaux tibétains and Morphologie du verbe tibétain by Jacques A. Durr. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1954), pp. 179–182
• Snellgrove, David (1956). Tibetan Folksongs from the District of Gyantse by Giuseppe Tucci. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1956), p. 204
• Snellgrove, David (1956). The Na-khi Nāga cult and Related Ceremonies by J. F. Rock. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1956), pp. 190–191
• Snellgrove, David (1958). Ancient Folk-Literature from North-Eastern Tibet (Introductions, Texts, Translations and Notes) by F. W. Thomas. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 21, No. 1/3 (1958), pp. 650–651
• Snellgrove, David. (1958). Oracles and Demons of Tibet: The Cult and Iconography of the Tibetan Protective Deities by René de Nebesky-Wojkowitz. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 21, No. 1/3 (1958), pp. 649–650
• Snellgrove, David. (1958). Thirteen Tibetan Tankas by Edna Bryner. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 21, No. 1/3 (1958), pp. 677–678
• Snellgrove, David (1959). L'épopée tibétaine de Gesar dans sa version lamaïque de Ling by R. A. Stein. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 22, No. 1/3 (1959), pp. 596–597
• Snellgrove, David (1959). Die tibetischen Handschriften und Drucke des Linden-Museums in Stuttgart by R. O. Meisezahl. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 22, No. 1/3 (1959), p. 621
• Snellgrove, David (1959). Preliminary Report on Two Scientific Expeditions in Nepal by Giuseppe Tucci. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 22, No. 1/3 (1959), pp. 377–378
• Snellgrove, David (1959). Mediaeval History of Nepal (c. 750-1480) by Luciano Petech. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 22, No. 1/3 (1959), p. 378
• Snellgrove, David (1959). Le parler de l'Amdo: étude dialecte archaïque du Tibet by Georges de Roerich. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 22, No. 1/3 (1959), p. 621
• Snellgrove, David. (1961). Nepal: A Cultural and Physical Geography by Pradyumna P. Karan, William M. Jenkins. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1961), pp. 156–159
• Snellgrove, David. (1962). The Large sutra on Perfect Wisdom, with the Divisions of the Abhisamayālaṅkāra. Part I by Edward Conze. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 25, No. 1/3 (1962), pp. 376–377
• Snellgrove, David (1963). La civilisation tibétaine by R. A. Stein. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 26, No. 3 (1963), pp. 671–672
• Snellgrove, David. (1983). gSo-ba riq-pa, le système médical tibétain by Fernand Meyer. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 46, No. 1 (1983), pp. 172–174
• Snellgrove, David. (1985). Tibetan Thangka Painting: Methods and Materials by Janice A. Jackson, David P. Jackson. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 48, No. 3 (1985), pp. 580–582
• Snellgrove, David (1988). Il mito psicologico nell' India antica by Maryla Falk. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 51, No. 2 (1988), pp. 362–365

References

1. "David Snellgrove interviewed by Sara Shneiderman and Mark Turin in Torre Pellice, Piedmont, Italy, on 20th September 2004". Retrieved 27 April 2010.
2. Skorupski, Tadeusz (1990). Indo-Tibetan studies: Papers in Honour and Appreciation of Professor David L. Snellgrove's Contribution to Indo-Tibetan Studies. Tring: Institute of Buddhist Studies. pp. 2–3. ISBN 978-0-9515424-1-5.
3. "Tibetan Studies at SOAS". Retrieved 27 April 2010.

External links

• Professor David Snellgrove, Tibetologist – obituary The Telegraph, 18. April 2016.

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Basil Gould
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Accessed: 8/7/19

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Basil Gould and the Tibetan Prime Minister–Lonchen Langdun–sitting in the British Political Officer's residence called Dekyi Lingka


Basil Gould as photographed by Ernst Schäfer in 1938.


Basil Gould with Ernst Schäfer-German expedition to Tibet in 1938.

Sir Basil John Gould, CMG, CIE (29 December 1883[1] – 27 December 1956) was a British Political Officer in Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet from 1935 to 1945.[2]

Known as "B.J.", Gould was born in Worcester Park, Surrey, to Charles and Mary Ellen Gould.[3] He was educated at Winchester College and Oxford University. He joined the Indian Civil Service in 1907.[4]

Gould was a British Trade Agent in Gyantse, Tibet from 1912 to 1913.[5][6] In 1912, the Dalai Lama asked that some "energetic and clever sons of respectable families" should be given "world-class educations at Oxford College, London". The Indian government decided that Gould, who was about to go on leave back to England, should guide the four young boys (known as the "Four Rugby Boys") on their journey to the United Kingdom and assist them during their first few weeks in England in April 1913.[7]

Gould married Lorraine Macdonald Kebbell (1898–1935) when back in England on leave from India on 14 September 1921. They had two sons.[8]

In 1926 Gould was posted to the British Legation in Kabul, Afghanistan. He was subsequently assigned to Kurrum, Malakand and Waziristan and finally in 1933 to Baluchistan. His wife Lorraine died in Baluchistan in 1935.[8]

In August 1936, Gould led a delegation to Lhasa to negotiate with the Tibetan government on the possibility of the 9th Panchen Lama's return to Tibet. Gould also discussed British military aid to Lhasa. Gould inquired about the creation of a British office in Lhasa, but the Tibetan government rejected this. Gould eventually departed Lhasa, but left behind his commercial representative, Hugh Richardson, who had been previously stationed in Gyantse. Richardson was equipped with a radio so Richardson could maintain contact with the British.[9]

Gould married his second wife Cecily, the daughter of Colonel C. H. Brent-Good, of Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight. Gould had one son with Cecily.[4]

In 1940, Gould attended the installation ceremonies of the 14th Dalai Lama in Lhasa, Tibet.[10] Gould brought a gift of a Meccano set for the young Tenzin Gyatso.[11] In 1941, Gould was knighted by King George VI. In 1945, the British Mission under Gould helped to start a school in Lhasa, but it was soon closed under pressure from Tibetan religious authorities.[12]

He died in Yarmouth in 1956, two days before his 76th birthday.[2]

Publications

• The jewel in the lotus: Recollections of an Indian political, Basil John Gould, Chatto & Windus, 1957.
• Tibetan language records, Basil Gould, Tharchin, 1949
• Tibetan Word Book, Sir Basil Gould, C.M.G., C.I.E., and Hugh Edward Richardson, Oxford University Press, 1943
• Report on the Discovery, Recognition and Installation of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, B. J. Gould, New Delhi, 1941.
• The Discovery of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, B. J. Gould, The Geographical Magazine, volume 19, October 1946, p. 246-258.

References

1. Surrey, England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1912
2. "Obituary: Sir Basil Gould – Authority on Tibet". The Times. The Times Digital Archive. 28 December 1956. p. 9.
3. 1901 England Census
4. "Obituary: Sir Basil Gould, C. M. G., C. I. E.", F. M. Bailey, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 123, No. 2 (Jun., 1957), pp. 280-281.
5. Gould also visited Tibet in 1936, 1940 and 1941.
6. Tibetan Histories: A Bibliography of Tibetan-Language Historical Works, Dan Martin, with contributor Michael Aris, Serindia Publications, 1997, ISBN 0-906026-43-1
7. The History of Tibet, Alex Mackay, Routledge, 2003, ISBN 0-7007-1508-8
8. Lorraine Gould Collection, Lorraine Macdonald Gould, Reference code: GB165-0407, Dates of creation of material: 19-25 Dec 1928, Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford.
9. (8) The Demise of the 13th Dalai Lama and Huang Musong's Entry Into Tibet Archived January 7, 2005, at the Wayback Machine, Wang Jiawei and Nyima Gyaincain, Chapter VI: Tibet is Not an Independent Political Entity During the Period of the Republic of China, in The Historical Status of China's Tibet, China Intercontinental Press, 1997.
10. Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital, 1936-1947, Clare Harris, Tsering Shakya, Serindia Publications, 2003.
11. Kundun: A Biography of the Family of the Dalai Lama, Mary Craig, Counterpoint Press, 1998, ISBN 1-887178-91-0
12. Tibet and the United States of America: An Annotated Chronology of Relations Since 1900[permanent dead link], Ken Herold.

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Harold Walter Bailey
by Wikipedia
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During 1936–37 he studied Pahlavi, another ancient Iranian language, with Sir Harold Bailey at Cambridge University. Zaehner thereafter held Prof. Bailey in high esteem.[5] He then began work on his book Zurvan, a Zoroastrian Dilemma, a study of the pre-Islamic religion of Iran.[6][7]

-- Robert Charles Zaehner, by Wikipedia

Sir Harold Walter Bailey, FBA (16 December 1899 – 11 January 1996), who published as H. W. Bailey, was an eminent English scholar of Khotanese, Sanskrit, and the comparative study of Iranian languages.

Life

Bailey was born in Devizes, Wiltshire, and raised from age 10 onwards on a farm in Nangeenan, Western Australia, without formal education. While growing up, he learned German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and Greek from household books, and Russian from a neighbour. After he grew interested in the lettering on tea-chests from India, he acquired a book of Bible selections translated into languages with non-European scripts, including Tamil, Arabic, and Japanese. By the time he had left home, he was reading Avestan as well.

In 1921 he entered the University of Western Australia to study classics. In 1927, after completing his master's degree on Euripides, he won a Hackett Studentship to Oxford where he joined the Delegacy of Non-Collegiate Students, later St Catherine's College. There he studied under Frederick William Thomas.[1]

After graduating with first class honours in 1929, Bailey was appointed as Parsee Community Lecturer in the then London School of Oriental Studies. In 1936 Bailey became Professor of Sanskrit (succeeding E. J. Rapson, who had held the post since 1906) and a Fellow at Queens' College, Cambridge;[1] he was succeeded at SOAS by W. B. Henning. During World War II he worked in the Royal Institute of International Affairs.[2]

Bailey retired in 1967. After his death, he left his enormous library to the Ancient India and Iran Trust in Cambridge.

Work

Bailey has been described as one of the greatest Orientalists of the twentieth century. He was said to read more than 50 languages.

In 1929 Bailey began his doctoral dissertation, a translation with notes of the Greater Bundahishn, a compendium of Zoroastrian writings in Middle Persian recorded in the Pahlavi scripts. He became the world's leading expert in the Khotanese dialect of the Saka language, the mediaeval Iranian language of the Kingdom of Khotan (modern Xinjiang). His initial motivation for the study of Khotanese was an interest in the possible connection with the Bundahishn.[1] He later passed his material on that work to Kaj Barr.[3]

He was known for his immensely erudite lectures, and once confessed: "I have talked for ten and a half hours on the problem of one word without approaching the further problem of its meaning."[4]

Selected publications

• Codices khotanenses, Copenhagen : Levin & Munksgaard, 1938.
• Zoroastrian problems in the ninth-century books, Oxford : The Clarendon press, 1943.
• Khotanese texts, Cambridge : The University Press, 1945
• Khotanese Buddhist texts, London : Taylor's Foreign Press, 1951.
• Sad-dharma-puṇḍarīka-sūtra [the summary in Khotan Saka by], Canberra : Australian National University, Faculty of Asian Studies, 1971.
• Dictionary of Khotan Saka. Cambridge University Press. 1979. 1st Paperback edition 2010. ISBN 978-0-521-14250-2.
• The culture of the Sakas in ancient Iranian Khotan, Delmar, N.Y. : Caravan Books, 1982.

Honours and awards

Bailey was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1944, and subsequently a member of the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish Academies. He received honorary degrees from four universities including Oxford; served as president of Philological Society, the Royal Asiatic Society, the Society for Afghan Studies, and the Society of Mithraic Studies; and chaired the Anglo-Iranian Society and Ancient India and Iran Trust. He was knighted for services to Oriental studies in 1960.[5][6]

References

• British Academy Review - memoir
• British Academy Review - centenary
• St Catherine's College Oxford
• Encyclopaedia Iranica biography and bibliography by John Sheldon
• "In Honour of Sir Harold Bailey". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. 33 (1). 1970. JSTOR i225483.
• "Obituary: Sir Harold Bailey 1899-1996", Nicholas Sims-Williams, George Hewitt, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 60, No. 1 (1997), pp. 109–116. JSTOR 620774

Notes

1. Brockington, J. L. "Bailey, Harold Walter". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/60739.(Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
2. C. Edmund Bosworth (27 December 2001). A Century of British Orientalists, 1902-2001. Oxford University Press. p. 33. ISBN 978-0-19-726243-6. Retrieved 24 October 2012.
3. Obituary, The Independent, 12 January 1996.
4. C. Edmund Bosworth (27 December 2001). A Century of British Orientalists, 1902-2001. Oxford University Press. p. 42. ISBN 978-0-19-726243-6. Retrieved 24 October 2012.
5. "No. 41909". The London Gazette (Supplement). 1 January 1960. p. 2.
6. "No. 41953". The London Gazette. 12 February 1960. p. 1081.

External links

• Encyclopedia Iranica, Bailey, Harold Walter by John Sheldon

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Harold Walter Bailey
Persons of Indian Studies
by Prof. Dr. Klaus Karttunen
February 2, 2017

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

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BAILEY, Harold Walter. Devizes, Wiltshire 16.12.1899 — 11.1.1996. Sir (1960). British Indo-Iranian Scholar, Famous Specialist of the Khotan Saka. Professor in Cambridge. Son of Frederic Charles Quinton B. (1869–1952) and Emma Jane Reichardt (1871–1962). Born in England, he moved with his parents in 1910 to start a farm in Western Australia. Studied classical philology at University of Western Australia in Perth (B.A. 1924, M.A. 1927), in 1926-27 also Tutor in Latin there. With a scholarship studied from 1927 Sanskrit and Avesta under F. W. Thomas at Oxford (B.A. 1929, M.A.), also Armenian. In 1933 D.Phil. dissertation on the Bundahešn. In 1929-36 Parsee Community Lecturer in Iranian Studies at S.O.A.S., University of London. From 1936 Professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge (Rapson’s successor). During the war worked 3 years in Foreign Research and Press Service, mainly reading Armenian and Albanian newspapers. In 1967 emeritus. From 1944 Fellow of the British Academy. Knighted 1960. Hon.dr. of University of Western Australia 1963, A.N.U., Oxford, and Manchester. He lived to an advanced age and lost much of his eye-sight, but with some technical help he continued working until his last year.

HWB is known as the great scholar of Khotanese Saka, but his wide interests also included Avesta and Pahlavi, Ossetic, Armenian, Caucasian, Gandhārī, Gypsy, and Tocharian. At Cambridge he taught Vedic, Sanskrit, Pāli and Prākrit. He started collecting the Khotan Saka Dictionary from 1934, also freely giving his ms. notes open to his students, until the monumental work was published in 1979. After Khotanese Texts VII he no longer worked on Saka, but on Pahlavi and Caucasian. The Bundahešn edition he prepared remained incomplete.

In Australia, he started his career with a M.A. thesis on religion in the dramas of Euripides. He was a bachelor concentrating most of his time to scholarship. He left chess, because it interrupted research, but continued playing violin. He was a tee­totaler and almost vegetarian. In 1978 he founded with others the Ancient India and Iran Trust in Cambridge, in 1981 moved to its house and left his enormous personal library to it. He travelled in Iran in 1932, then only two short visits in 1968 and 1975. He travelled much in Europe and paid several visits to Australia, visiting on way Sri Lanka and India and once Japan. Among his many students were Brough, Emmerick, Gershevitch, Dresden, K. R. Norman, and Zaehner.

Publications: diss. The Iranian recension of the Pahlavi Bundahesh: a philological and critical treatment of the text with transl. MS. Oxford 1933.

– a great number of articles on Khotanese Saka, on Iranian, occasionally also on Sanskrit, in BSOAS and other journals, in Festschrifts etc., since 1930, e.g. “Ttaugara”, BSOS 8:4, 1937, 883-921; “Recent work with Tocharian”, TrPhilSoc 1947, 126-153; “The Staël-Holstein Miscellany”, AM N.S. 2, 1951, 1-45 (Khot.).

– The Content of Indian and Iranian Studies. Inaugural Lecture. Cambridge 1938.

– Zoroastrian Problems in the Ninth Century Books. 235 p. Oxf. 1943, 2nd ed. 1971.

– Codices Khotanenses. Copenh. 1938; “The Khotan Dharmapada”, BSOAS 11, 1945, 488-512 (ed.); Indo-Scythian Studies being Khotanese Texts. I–III. 257+134+140 p. Cambr. 1945, 1954, 1956; I–III. 2nd ed. 1969; IV–V. 192+?? p. Cambr. 1961, 1963; VI. (Prolexis to the Book of Zambasta) 463 p. Cambr. 1967; VII. Cambr. 1985; Khotanese Buddhist texts. 157 p. L. 1951, 2nd rev. ed. 1981; Saddharma-puṇḍarīka-sūtra: the Summary in Khotanese Saka. 47 p. Canberra 1971 (ed.).

– Saka Documents. 96 pl. Corpus Inscr. Iranicarum, Portfolios i–iv. L. 1960-67; Text vol. 129 p. L. 1968.

– Dictionary of Khotanese Saka. 559 p. Cambr. 1979.

– The Culture of the Sakas in ancient Iranian Khotan. 121 p. Columbia Lectures on Iranian Studies 1. Delmar 1982.

Sources: *M. Bénisti & M. Strickmann, Buddhist Studies Review 13, 1996, 76-78; *A.D.H. Bivar, JRAS 6, 1996, 407-410; R.E. Emmerick, Pr.Br.Acad. 1998, 309-349 (with photo, additional bibliography and further biographical sources); *I. Gershevitch, VDI 1990:4, 208-216; *G. Gnoli, E&W 46, 1996, 491-493; *N. Sims-Williams & G. Hewitt, BSOAS 60, 1997, 109-116 with photo; Who’s Who 1983; short note in IIJ 2, 1958, 164; Bibliography by R.E. Emmerick & D.M. Johnson, BSOAS 33:1 (= H.W. Bailey Fs.), 1970, ix-xiv, with photo; Bio-bibliogr. de 136 savants. 1979, 33-35; Wikipedia. Personal meeting in July 1995.

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Alfred Korzybski
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Alfred Korzybski
Born Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski
July 3, 1879
Warsaw, Vistula Country, Russian Empire
Died March 1, 1950 (aged 70)
Lakeville, Connecticut, U.S.
Alma mater Warsaw University of Technology
Spouse(s) Mira Edgerly
Scientific career
Fields Engineer, philosopher, mathematician

Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski ([kɔˈʐɨpski]; July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950) was a Polish-American independent scholar who developed a field called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and more encompassing than, the field of semantics. He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and the languages humans have developed, and thus no one can have direct access to reality, given that the most we can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality. His best known dictum is "The map is not the territory".

Early life and career

Born in Warsaw, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, Korzybski belonged to an aristocratic Polish family whose members had worked as mathematicians, scientists, and engineers for generations. He learned the Polish language at home and the Russian language in schools; and having a French and German governess, he became fluent in four languages as a child.

Korzybski studied engineering at the Warsaw University of Technology. During the First World War (1914-1918) Korzybski served as an intelligence officer in the Russian Army. After being wounded in a leg and suffering other injuries, he moved to North America in 1916 (first to Canada, then to the United States) to coordinate the shipment of artillery to Russia. He also lectured to Polish-American audiences about the conflict, promoting the sale of war bonds. After the war he decided to remain in the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1940. He met Mira Edgerly,[1] a painter of portraits on ivory, shortly after the 1918 Armistice; They married in January 1919; the marriage lasted until his death.

E. P. Dutton published Korzybski's first book, Manhood of Humanity, in 1921. In this work he proposed and explained in detail a new theory of humankind: mankind as a "time-binding" class of life (humans perform time binding by the transmission of knowledge and abstractions through time which become accreted in cultures).

General semantics

Korzybski's work culminated in the initiation of a discipline that he named general semantics (GS). This should not be confused with semantics. The basic principles of general semantics, which include time-binding, are described in the publication Science and Sanity, published in 1933. In 1938 Korzybski founded the Institute of General Semantics in Chicago.[2] The post-World War II housing shortage in Chicago cost him the Institute's building lease, so in 1946 he moved the Institute to Lakeville, Connecticut, U.S., where he directed it until his death in 1950.

Korzybski maintained that humans are limited in what they know by (1) the structure of their nervous systems, and (2) the structure of their languages. Humans cannot experience the world directly, but only through their "abstractions" (nonverbal impressions or "gleanings" derived from the nervous system, and verbal indicators expressed and derived from language). These sometimes mislead us about what is the truth. Our understanding sometimes lacks similarity of structure with what is actually happening.

He sought to train our awareness of abstracting, using techniques he had derived from his study of mathematics and science. He called this awareness, this goal of his system, "consciousness of abstracting". His system included the promotion of attitudes such as "I don't know; let's see," in order that we may better discover or reflect on its realities as revealed by modern science. Another technique involved becoming inwardly and outwardly quiet, an experience he termed, "silence on the objective levels".

"To be"

Many devotees and critics of Korzybski reduced his rather complex system to a simple matter of what he said about the verb form "is" of the general verb "to be."[3] His system, however, is based primarily on such terminology as the different "orders of abstraction," and formulations such as "consciousness of abstracting." The contention that Korzybski opposed the use of the verb "to be" would be a profound exaggeration.

He thought that certain uses of the verb "to be", called the "is of identity" and the "is of predication", were faulty in structure, e.g., a statement such as, "Elizabeth is a fool" (said of a person named "Elizabeth" who has done something that we regard as foolish). In Korzybski's system, one's assessment of Elizabeth belongs to a higher order of abstraction than Elizabeth herself. Korzybski's remedy was to deny identity; in this example, to be aware continually that "Elizabeth" is not what we call her. We find Elizabeth not in the verbal domain, the world of words, but the nonverbal domain (the two, he said, amount to different orders of abstraction). This was expressed by Korzybski's most famous premise, "the map is not the territory". Note that this premise uses the phrase "is not", a form of "to be"; this and many other examples show that he did not intend to abandon "to be" as such. In fact, he said explicitly[citation needed] that there were no structural problems with the verb "to be" when used as an auxiliary verb or when used to state existence or location. It was even acceptable at times to use the faulty forms of the verb "to be," as long as one was aware of their structural limitations.

Anecdotes

One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he interrupted the lesson suddenly in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. "Nice biscuit, don't you think," said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies." The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to vomit, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. "You see," Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter."[4]

William Burroughs went to a Korzybski workshop in the Autumn of 1939. He was 25 years old, and paid $40. His fellow students—there were 38 in all—included young Samuel I. Hayakawa (later to become a Republican member of the U.S. Senate), Ralph Moriarty deBit (later to become the spiritual teacher Vitvan) and Wendell Johnson (founder of the Monster Study).[5]

Influence

Korzybski was well received in numerous disciplines, as evidenced by the positive reactions from leading figures in the sciences and humanities in the 1940s and 1950s.[6]

As reported in the third edition of Science and Sanity, in World War II the US Army used Korzybski's system to treat battle fatigue in Europe, under the supervision of Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, who went on to become the psychiatrist in charge of the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.

Some of the General Semantics tradition was continued by Samuel I. Hayakawa.

See also

• Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture
• Concept and object
• E-Prime
• Institute of General Semantics
• Robert Pula
• Structural differential

References

1. Don Shelton (July 13, 1954). "20C - American Miniature Portraits: Korzybska, Mira Edgerly - portrait of three sisters or a triptych?". American-miniatures20c.blogspot.com. Retrieved June 28, 2016.
2. "The Institute of General Semantics » History". Generalsemantics.org. Retrieved June 28, 2016.
3. Alfred Korzybski, Selections from Science and Sanity, 2010.
4. R. Diekstra, Haarlemmer Dagblad, 1993, cited by L. Derks & J. Hollander, Essenties van NLP (Utrecht: Servire, 1996), p. 58.
5. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on October 7, 2011. Retrieved December 21, 2011.
6. "Notable Individuals Influenced by General Semantics". The Institute of General Semantics.

Further reading

• Kodish, Bruce. 2011. Korzybski: A Biography. Pasadena, CA: Extensional Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9700664-0-4 softcover, 978-09700664-28 hardcover.
• Kodish, Bruce and Susan Presby Kodish. 2011. Drive Yourself Sane: Using the Uncommon Sense of General Semantics, Third Edition. Pasadena, CA: Extensional Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9700664-1-1
• Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity, foreword by Edward Kasner, notes by M. Kendig, Institute of General Semantics, 1950, hardcover, 2nd edition, 391 pages, ISBN 0-937298-00-X. (Copy of the first edition.)
• Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, Alfred Korzybski, Preface by Robert P. Pula, Institute of General Semantics, 1994, hardcover, 5th edition, ISBN 0-937298-01-8. (Full text online.)
• Alfred Korzybski, Collected Writings 1920-1950, Institute of General Semantics, 1990, hardcover, ISBN 0-685-40616-4
• Montagu, M. F. A. (1953). Time-binding and the concept of culture. The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 77, No. 3 (Sep., 1953), pp. 148–155.
• Murray, E. (1950). In memoriam: Alfred H. Korzybski. Sociometry, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Feb., 1950), pp. 76–77.

External links

• Works by Alfred Korzybski at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Alfred Korzybski at Internet Archive
• Alfred Korzybski and Gestalt Therapy Website
• Australian General Semantics Society
• Institute of General Semantics

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Vienna International School
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/8/19

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When I first arrived in Vienna, I had left Gesar in Boulder. He stayed at the Court with Pat because I didn't know if my living situation in Europe was going to be stable enough for him. It was difficult for him to be separated from me. He used to ask Pat to call me so that we could talk on the phone. He was quite concerned about when he could join me. After about six months, I found a nice house to rent, with a garden with plum trees and a beautiful lawn.

When I moved into my little house in Vienna, on Roterdestrasse, I arranged for Pat to bring Gesar over to live with me. (By this time Jeanine had returned to the United States.) Pat and her new husband, Tom Adducci, both lived in the house with us. Soon after Gesar arrived, I took him to a performance at the Spanish Riding School, which he loved. It gave him some idea of what his mother was doing all this time in Vienna.

When he was four-and-a-half [end of 1977], Gesar enrolled in kindergarten at the British Diplomatic School in Grinzing, a very nice area of Vienna. Although his school was conducted in English, he also learned German during his time in Vienna. I think this was a positive time in Gesar's life. He found it exciting to live in Europe. However, the other children sometimes teased Gesar on the bus to school. They called him Quasar, and then they called him Gay-sar. For the winter, I bought him a Russian-style fur hat, and he looked very cute in it. The kids would steal his hat and throw it around the bus.

-- Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa, by Diana J. Mukpo with Carolyn Rose Gimian

Vienna International School
Location: Vienna, Austria
Coordinates: 48°14′41.45″N16°25′54.74″ECoordinates: 48°14′41.45″N 16°25′54.74″E
Type: Private
Established: 1959
Faculty: 174
Grades 1-12 (ELC 4-5, ELC 5-6)
Enrollment: 1400
Average class size: 17-24
Student to teacher ratio: 1:8.3
Campus type: Suburban
Color(s): Blue/White
Athletics conference ISST, SCIS, DVAC, CEESA
Mascot: Panthers
Website: http://www.vis.ac.at

Vienna International School (VIS) is a non-profit international school in Vienna, Austria. The school was built to accommodate the children of United Nations (UN) employees and diplomats when the UN decided to locate one of its offices in Vienna (at the Vienna International Centre), and it remains affiliated to the UN. About 50% of students are children of UN employees and receive education grants, while much of the remaining students are children mainly of embassy staff and company staff. The school has an enrollment of 1700 students, from pre-primary to twelfth grade.

History

International Community School

The first English language medium school in Vienna was set up in August 1955 as the International Community School. Previously, it had been the 'British Army School' in Schönbrunn barracks and catered for the children of the British occupying forces in Vienna. The Austrian State Treaty signed in May 1955 resulted in the occupying forces leaving Austria, so the school transformed into the International Community School under the patronage of the British, American and Indian Missions.

It opened on 1 September 1955 in the 18th district of Vienna. By the end of the year, 150 students between the ages of 3 and 15 years attended the International Community School. Soon the building proved too small for the expanding school, which moved into the 19th district. By 1959, 300 children represented 25 different nationalities in ICS. However, most of the children were American or Canadian, so the British and Indian Embassies started a separate British style school in 1959, the English School, while the ICS changed into the American International School.

English School

The English School moved into Grinzinger Straße 95, a premises found with the help of the British Ambassador, Sir James Bowker, the legal advisor at the Embassy Walter Rhodes, and Vienna's Deputy Lord Mayor, Hans Mandl. The English School quickly expanded and was visited by the British Minister of Education in 1961. Some of the first staff of the International Atomic Energy Agency sent their children to the English School in 1959. The school year 1961-62 saw the introduction of William Kirk as director. In May 1969, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip visited the English School on a state visit to Vienna. In 1974, some families of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) started sending their children to the school.

Vienna International School

In September 1977, Maurice Pezet was invited by the Austrian Government to start the project of developing a Vienna International School on the model of the Geneva and New York United Nations Schools in preparation for the expansion of the United Nations to Vienna. {Vienna is one of the four headquarters of the UN, along with New York, Geneva and Nairobi. The Vienna International Centre (UNO City) is leased to the United Nations for 1 Austrian schilling (7 euro cent) per year.} It was anticipated that there would be two years of preparation for the small existing English School to be incorporated into the school development plan for the Vienna International School (VIS).

The Vienna International School officially opened its doors on 11 September 1978 to pupils of 60 nationalities. Primary and Secondary were accommodated on Grinzingerstrasse and Kindergarten was located on Heiligenstädter Strasse. A part of Secondary moved briefly to Zollergasse and then Schloss Pötzleinsdorf. A year later, Secondary School moved to Peter-Jordan-Straße, where it remained until the custom built present campus was opened in September 1984 with Maurice Pezet as Director. The then Chancellor, Dr Bruno Kreisky had initiated the idea of a new, specially built school and the campus was entirely funded by the Austrian Government. Dr. Kreisky employed Maurice Pezet, formerly associated with the UN School in New York (UNIS), to manage the project and he became the first Director of the new Vienna International School. Dr. Kreisky was present at some of the opening events at the VIS. The new building was constructed in the 22nd District, two U-Bahn (underground) stops from the VIC, and opened in September 1984. It is located on Straße der Menschenrechte, two hundred metres away from the U1 Kagran underground station and the Donau Zentrum Shopping Mall.[1]

Facilities

The school is divided into 3 wings. A Primary and Secondary area, an administrative wing and a separate building for Pre-Primary.The school also has an outdoor ecology area. Facilities include:

• 5 gyms
• 1 Theater (The William Kirk Theatre)[2]
• 2 well-stocked libraries (one for primary school, and one for secondary school)
• Numerous computer labs and a wireless network to support work on laptops for Secondary students.

Outside facilities include:

• Artificial turf field
• 2 grass courts
• 1 large paved court
• 380 meters Athletic track
• 3 playgrounds

Modernizations

The school is recently undergoing a refurbishment project, modernizing many parts of the campus. These have included (list not complete):

• Construction of students study lounges 2012
• Theatre renovation project 2013
• Major investment in bathroom facilities 2010 - 2013
• Upgrading of 6 science labs with a donation from Borealis, July 2008.
• Preparing an adjacent field to be used for PE lessons, July 2008.
• Establishing a pond, May 2010
• Upgrading of 2 computer labs, April 2009
• Refurbishing the athletics track, May 2008.

School Day

The school day starts at 8:30 for Primary 8:27 for Secondary and ends at 14:55 for the Primary school and at 15:15 for the Secondary school. For Grade 11/12, some subjects last until 16:00. In the Secondary school, there are 8 periods per day, each 40 minutes long, with 3-minute intervals to get to class to class, a 20-minute break at 10:00 and a 45-minute lunch break from 12:20-13:05. Grades 6-8 have separate lunch breaks than 9-12. Grades 6-8 have lunch breaks from 12:21- 13:04 and 9-12's have lunch breaks from 13:04-14:49. The Primary School has 7 periods a day, with a rough 1-hour lunch break at 11:40- 11:45 and a 20-minute break at 10:00-10:20.

Academics

VIS offers all three programs of the International Baccalaureate (IB) - International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme (IBPYP), International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme (IBMYP) and the IB Diploma Programme (IBDP). The school has offered the IB Diploma programme since 1984.

Accreditation

The school has an IB World School. It is also accredited by the Council of International Schools (CIS).

Graduation requirements and courses

For the IB Diploma, students must select one each from the following groups. The following subjects were offered at VIS as of 2015:

Group 1: Language 1

• English A Literature HL & SL
• English A Language and Literature HL & SL
• German A Literature HL & SL
• German A Language and Literature HL & SL
It is also possible to study a privately taught mother tongue as Group 1 language at HL or SL

Group 2: Language 2

• English B HL & SL
• German B HL & SL
• German ab initio SL
• French B HL & SL
• Spanish B HL & SL

Group 3: Individuals and Society

• Economics HL & SL
• Geography HL & SL
• History HL & SL
• Psychology HL & SL
• Information technology in a global society (ITGS) HL & SL

Group 4: Experimental Sciences

• Biology HL & SL
• Chemistry HL & SL
• Physics HL & SL
• Design Technology HL & SL
• Computer Science HL & SL
• Environmental Systems and Societies SL (transdisciplinary course)

Group 5: Mathematics

• Mathematics HL & SL
• Mathematical Studies SL

Group 6: The Arts

• Music HL & SL
• Theatre HL & SL
• Visual Arts HL & SL
• Film HL & SL

Rather than taking an arts course, students may opt to take another subject from Groups 1 to 5 as their 6th subject

Camps & trips

Additionally to one-day excursions starting in Pre-Primary, the school offers yearly whole-grade camps from Grades 2-9 and specialized trips from Grade 10-12.

• Grade 2: Applehof
• Grade 3: Annaberg
• Grade 4: Illmitz
• Grade 5: Radstadt "Ski Week"
• Grade 6: Hallstatt
• Grade 7: Wagrain "Ski week"
• Grade 8: Wagrain
• Grade 9: Murau
• Grade 10: French: Champagne-Ardenne, Humanities: Mauthausen
• Grade 11: Spanish: Barcelona, French: Paris, Biology/ESS: Lunz am See, Drama: London, Art: Venice

School magazine

The school magazine is called the Spotlight. It is published four times yearly, with additional issues for student council elections or other special events. A primary school magazine known as The Mole was also started under the guidance of secondary students during the 2012-2013 academic year.

Famous visits

• March 2012: Ernst Fuchs, one of the founders and member of the "Vienna School of Fantastic Realism"
• 19. May 2009: Jane Goodall
• 15. June 2009: Sr. Lucy Kurien, founder of MAHER

Famous alumni

• Salam Pax
• Tobias Ellwood, Foreign Minister, United Kingdom

Athletics

Sports

VIS offers the following teams during the year,[3] in addition to other sports:

• Season 1: Soccer, HS Volleyball, Cross Country
• Season 2: Basketball, Alpine Skiing, Swimming, Sr Rugby
• Season 3: Golf, Softball, Track & Field, MS Volleyball, MS & Jr Rugby, HS Tennis

Conferences

VIS participates in the following athletics conferences:

• Danube Valley Athletics Conference (DVAC)
• International School Sports Tournament (ISST)
• Sports Council of International Schools (SCIS)
• Central and Eastern European Schools Association (CEESA)

In addition to this, VIS traditionally organizes the annual Hauser Kaibling Race in Haus im Entstal between international schools in Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

Charity

The school has a strong engagement in local and global charital events. One of its main charities is Maher.

2004 Tsunami Disaster Response

The school responded to the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and focused their efforts on helping to rebuild a school in Indonesia which had been hit hard by the disaster.

Fairtrade

VIS also operates a Fairtrade group aiming to promote the purchase of products that tries to guarantee a better return and quality of life for farmers in lesser economically developed countries.

Alumni

There are multiple alumni pages. These include:

• a reunion section on the website
• a dedicated website
• a Facebook page

Scouting

Vienna International School is the home of Vienna International Scout Group 88 (German: Wien 88-Internationale Pfadfindergruppe). The Scout group is affiliated to Boy Scouts and Girl Guides of Austria. It is one of a few English-speaking groups in Vienna but the only one within the Austrian Scout Association which is part of the world associations (WAGGGS and WOSM). It was founded in 1980 and was offered as an afternoon free time activity to pupils and students of the VIS of primary and secondary level first. Over the years children from other bilingual schools around joined in. Meanwhile, the scouting meetings happen offsite but the VIS still supports the group and the volunteer leaders team.

References

1. VIS School History
2. http://www.vis.ac.at/show_content2.php?s2id=40
3. "VIS Competitive Sports Programme". VIS Website. Vienna International School. Archived from the original on 3 April 2013. Retrieved 13 February 2013.

External links

• Official website
• Scouting Group Site

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Ashoka Mukpo
by linkedin.com
Accessed: 8/8/19

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Ashoka Mukpo
Journalist
Brooklyn, New York
About
Journalist and researcher currently working as a staff reporter at the ACLU. Formerly freelance in West Africa - experience in documentary news production and investigative reporting, background in human rights research and advocacy. Publication list includes narrative feature writing, breaking news, and analysis pieces. Fieldwork experience across West Africa, research and advocacy contract work for aid and peace-building organizations including the United Nations, International Alert, Action Aid, and others.

Research Consultant - International Development and Peace-building Policy
Dates Employed 2013 – Present
Employment Duration 6 yrs
Freelance field researcher and program evaluation consultant for international aid organizations, including the United Nations, International Alert, Action Aid, Education International, and others. Specialization in conflict dynamics, livelihood mapping, agriculture, and natural resource management. Experience designing and executing field research in remote/challenging areas, running focus group discussions, and carrying out stakeholder interviews with government officials, community leaders, and local organizations to map impact of aid programming among different groups at various socio-political levels. Practical familiarity with conflict analysis tools, baseline research, gender analysis, and OECD DAC Criteria for evaluations. Specialization in West Africa.

Investigative Researcher
Company Name Sustainable Development Institute
Dates Employed Sep 2012 – May 2014
Employment Duration 1 yr 9 mos
Location Monrovia, Liberia
• Worked as investigative researcher and project manager for Liberian watchdog organization that publicizes corruption and abuse in mining, plantation expansion, and logging projects.
• Worked closely with Silas Siakor, winner of the 2005 Goldman Environmental Prize.
• Covered community rights and corporate governance in the oil palm, forestry, oil, and mining sectors.
• Led field investigations to rural areas, compiled findings into briefing papers and advocacy reports.
• Managed M&E for multiple projects and supervised small team of staff members
• Acted as media contact for Western journalists.
• Led rapid-response missions.

Senior Associate
Company Name Human Rights Watch
Dates Employed Apr 2006 – May 2009
Employment Duration 3 yrs 2 mos
Location Greater New York City Area
• Logistical support provided to two units within Human Rights Watch: one that operated as a rapid response team to crises and humanitarian emergencies, and another that focused on conditions inside prisons in the United States
• Drafted letters, op-eds, and policy briefing papers.
• Proofread reports up to institutional publication quality.
• Designed a mechanism for responding to prisoner mail, successfully found representation for a number of inmates facing egregious abuses.

Education
London School of Economics and Political Science
Degree Name Masters in Public Administration
Field Of Study Political Economy
Dates attended or expected graduation 2011 – 2012

Columbia University - School of International and Public Affairs
Degree Name Masters in International Affairs

Field Of Study Human Rights and International Conflict Resolution
Dates attended or expected graduation 2010 – 2011

Licenses & Certifications
AKE International
Hostile Environment Training
Issuing authority AKE International

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Is Human Rights Watch Too Closely Aligned With US Foreign Policy?: It has ignored repression by regimes close to Washington and dismissed criticism—by Nobel laureates—of its conflicts of interest.
by Mark Weisbrot
The Nation
September 23, 2016

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Supporters of Dilma Rousseff demonstrate after she was stripped of the country’s presidency by a Senate impeachment vote in São Paulo, Brazil. (Cris Faga / NurPhoto via AP Images)

Human-rights organizations are supposed to defend universal principles such as the rule of law and freedom from state repression. But when they are based in the United States and become close to the US government, they often find themselves aligned with US foreign policy. This damages their credibility and can hurt the cause of human rights.

Recent events in Latin America have highlighted this problem. On August 29, the Brazilian Senate removed the elected president, Dilma Rousseff, from office, even though the federal prosecutor assigned to her case had determined that the accounting procedures for which she was being impeached did not constitute a crime. Moreover, leaked transcripts of phone calls between political leaders of the impeachment showed that they were trying to get rid of Dilma in order to protect themselves from investigations into their own corruption.

Michel Temer, who has already been banned from running for office because of campaign finance violations, replaced an elected president who had committed no crime. Everything about the process was political—and now the new government is trying to implement a right-wing agenda that was defeated in the last three presidential elections.

HRW didn’t offer the slightest criticism of the impeachment process against Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

Part of that right-wing agenda is a close alliance with the United States and its Cold War strategy of “containment” and “rollback” with respect to the left governments in Latin America. And that is where Human Rights Watch, the most prominent US-based human-rights organization—its Americas Division in particular—comes in. HRW abstained from offering the slightest criticism of the impeachment process; even worse, the executive director of its Americas Division, José Miguel Vivanco, was quoted in the Brazilian media—on the day that the Brazilian Senate voted to permanently oust the president—saying Brazilians “should be proud of the example they are giving the world.” He also praised the “independence of the judiciary” in Brazil. Sérgio Moro, the judge investigating the political corruption cases, has been far from independent. He had to apologize in March for leaking wiretapped conversations to the press between former president Lula da Silva and Dilma; Lula and his attorney; and between Lula’s wife and their children.

Vivanco also appeared to endorse the political persecution of Argentina’s former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, while praising her replacement, the right-wing, US-backed Mauricio Macri. “An institution gains credibility when it is able to confront whoever it may be,” he said, referring to the current prosecution of Fernández. Of course, investigations into corruption of any government official, including a former president, can be perfectly legitimate. But Fernández, her former finance minister, and the former head of the central bank have been indicted for conducting what any economist knows is nothing more than a normal central-bank operation. This is clearly a case of trying to remove from politics a leftist former president who, together with her predecessor and late husband, Néstor Kirchner, presided over an enormous increase in living standards over a period of 12 years. This kind of political repression should be a serious concern for human-rights organizations, but there has not been a word about it in Washington.

Of course, all of this behavior aligns closely with US foreign policy in the region; for example, the Obama administration has clearly demonstrated its support for the Brazilian coup. On August 5, Secretary of State John Kerry met with the acting foreign minister of Brazil and held a joint press conference with him about the positive future of US-Brazilian relations. By making these joint statements and acting as if this was already the actual government of Brazil, when the Brazilian Senate had not yet decided the fate of the elected president, Kerry made it clear where the US government stood. The State Department had already sent a similar signal in May, just three days after the Brazilian lower house voted to impeach Dilma.

And President Obama made very clear his preference for the new right-wing government of Argentina, with the Obama administration lifting its opposition to loans from multilateral organizations that it had imposed during the prior left government, which of course contributed to the country’s balance-of-payments problems.

When asked why HRW hadn’t issued any statement about the Brazilian impeachment, Vivanco responded:

We don’t get involved in critiquing impeachment proceedings and other local political developments, except when they pose a significant threat to human rights and the rule of law. So, for instance, we denounced the coup d’état that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in 2009, as well as the one that briefly ousted President Hugo Chavez in 2002. But the situation in Brazil is not like these. Whether one agrees with the outcome or not, this [is] a political process occurring in a country with an independent judiciary capable of determining whether the laws governing that process are being respected.

But the impeachment process raised very serious questions about the independence of Brazil’s judiciary, as well as the rule of law, as noted above and elsewhere. And when the Honduran military overthrew President Zelaya, HRW’s Americas Division did very little. It posted a few statements on its website in the months following the coup, but these were largely pro forma. HRW has access to the most important US media, in opinion and news, and can usually place effective, high-profile op-eds when it chooses to make the effort. Yet, in the months following the Honduran coup, there was nothing in the media from HRW. And HRW, unlike the OAS, the UN, and the rest of the world, never called for the restoration of the democratically elected president. During this time, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worked successfully to prevent Zelaya from returning to office (which she admitted in her 2014 book).

When the Honduran military overthrew President Zelaya, HRW’s Americas Division did very little.

Although it sometimes denounces human-rights violations by pro-US governments, the Americas Division of HRW has also at times ignored or paid little attention to terrible crimes that are committed in collaboration with the US government in this hemisphere. Some of the worst examples include the overthrow of the elected government of Haiti in 2004, after which thousands were killed and officials of the constitutional government were jailed.

The OAS also has a checkered history with regard to human rights—it even played a significant role in the ouster of Haiti’s elected president in 2004 and reversed Haiti’s 2010 election results at the behest of Washington. But the OAS’s Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued a statement in September expressing its concern over Dilma’s impeachment, and the OAS secretary general—a staunch US ally—issued a detailed denunciation, in much stronger terms, when the impeachment process began. All this is in sharp contrast to Vivanco’s statements on behalf of HRW’s Americas Division.

HRW has repeatedly and summarily dismissed or ignored sincere and thoroughly documented criticisms of its conflicts of interest. These include letters from Nobel laureates, former high-ranking UN officials, and scholars asking HRW to “bar those who have crafted or executed U.S. foreign policy from serving as HRW staff, advisors or board members,” or even to bar “those who bear direct responsibility for human rights violations” from participating on the boards of directors of independent human rights organizations like HRW.

Governments that commit human-rights abuses—and this includes just about every government in the world—often attack Western human-rights organizations or their (sometimes US-funded) domestic allies as tools of Western governments. This helps them degrade the legitimate struggle for human rights and even rally nationalist support for authoritarian governments, or for abuses committed by democratic governments. It is therefore vitally important that human-rights organizations stick to their avowed principles and defend human rights without regard to the objectives of US foreign policy.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC, and president of Just Foreign Policy. His latest book is Failed: What the "Experts" Got Wrong About the Global Economy (2015, Oxford University Press).

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Transmuting Blood and Guts: My Experiences in the Buddhist Military: Why did a conscientious objector choose to join a Buddhist military organization? Kidder Smith looks back on his time with the Vajra Guard.
by Kidder Smith
Tricycle
Summer 2001

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-- A Zen Nazi in Wartime Japan: Count Dürckheim and his Sources—D.T. Suzuki, Yasutani Haku’un and Eugen Herrigel, by Brian Victoria

-- Buddhism and Disasters: From World War II to Fukushima, by Brian Victoria

-- Corporate Zen in Postwar Japan, Chapter Eleven, [Excerpt] from "Zen at War", by Brian Daizen Victoria

-- D.T. Suzuki, Zen and the Nazis, by Brian Daizen Victoria

-- Other Zen Masters and Scholars in the War Effort, Chapter Nine, [Excerpt] from "Zen at War", by Brian Daizen Victoria

-- The Emergence of Imperial-State Zen and Soldier Zen [Chapter Eight], [Excerpt] from "Zen at War", by Brian Daizen Victoria

-- The Formation and Principles of Count Dürckheim’s Nazi Worldview and his interpretation of Japanese Spirit and Zen, by Karl Baier

-- The Postwar Zen Responses to Imperial-Way Buddhism, Imperial-State Zen, and Soldier, Zen, Chapter Ten, [Excerpt] from "Zen at War", by Brian Daizen Victoria

-- Was It Buddhism? Chapter Twelve, [Excerpt] from "Zen at War", by Brian Daizen Victoria

-- Zen as a Cult of Death in the Wartime Writings of D.T. Suzuki, by Brian Victoria

The author’s great-grandfather, Wilbur Eliot Wilder, who began a family lineage of military involvement © Kidder Smith

It was an unanticipated homecoming for me, addressing a West Point audience on military matters a few years ago. My original connection to the United States Military Academy runs through my great-grandfather, class of ’77, who’d gone on to win the Congressional Medal of Honor for action against a Native American uprising in the Southwest. His son, my grandfather, graduated from the Academy in 1907; his only son, my uncle, went from Harvard to military intelligence in Korea, and from there to the CIA. But I became Buddhist soon after leaving high school, and I graduated from college as a conscientious objector, refusing the draft because of religious opposition to war of any kind. Yet, paradoxically, it was Buddhism that brought me back to West Point.

In 1975 I began studying with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan meditation master who, in addition to retreats, schools, and monasteries, had his own military organization. This was the Dorje Kasung, or Vajra Guard, a group based on Buddhist principles of nonaggression—no one was armed, and we didn’t even practice the martial arts. Instead, this military was a means by which Trungpa Rinpoche taught dharma to a self-selected subset of students.

The very notion of a Buddhist military is itself rife with paradox. Yet this is an army whose aim is victory over aggression, rather than victory through warfare. Its fundamental principles respect the Buddhist precept against taking life, but they also respect all people and things. Instead of focusing on combat, then, this army is a form of Buddhist practice. Like all Buddhist practice, it is a form of mind training.

The Boulder guru keeps a household protection squad, known as the Vajra Guard. They are the Beefeaters of Buddhism. When the guru goes out in public, so do they. (In between times, they meditate.) The rumor is, they're armed with M-16's. Others say it's submachine guns....

Q. You've said you've lately been pretty upset over this whole issue. Did you go to see Trungpa specifically because of this?

[Allen Ginsberg] Well, I was blowing my top a few weeks ago, so I went to see him. I said, "What happens if you ask me to kill Merwin?" That was my idea.

Q. You shouldn't put ideas in his head.

A. It was in my head, so why shouldn't I? I mean, the whole point is that that's precisely what you should consider.

Q. If you make a test out of it--

A. Ah.

Q. Was he reassuring?

A. Yeah. Well, he was somewhat reassuring. He was sitting there really sweet, actually. I'd gone to see this monster.

Q. This what?

A. Well, I'd built up this monster in my head. And he explained what -- "I was just talking about my roots, with Dana." But I'd built up this monster. That was my paranoia, the kind that builds up in precisely this kind of situation.

Q. So rather than dispel that situation by making a clear statement on it to his disciples, he feels that they should just work their way through it by themselves?

A. No. When I went to see him I asked him exactly that question. You see, the nature of the teaching and the teaching methods is such that it's very hard. How do you talk about Vajrayana teachings in public? It's very hard to do. And it's made even more difficult by the American situation, where everything is slowly coming out anyway.

Q. Undoubtedly all this is coming out.

A. The point I guess that most struck me was -- you see, Merwin was free to leave or free to stay. Trungpa encouraged him to stay, and went out of his way to put himself in danger, in a sense. So I don't know what the rights and wrongs of it are, but I find more and more my consideration of it is not so much that Trungpa was wrong, but that he was indiscreet. So I say to myself, he was indiscreet. And then I realize what a shitty viewpoint that is. You know, that's a political viewpoint. And you know, the worst charge I have against him is he was indiscreet, and put me in a situation where I have to be here and explain it and go through all of this scandal. As if I haven't had enough with L.S.D. and enough with fag liberation, now I've got to go through Vajrayana, and pretty soon they're going to have articles in Harpers by idiotic poets that I never hired to begin with! About Merwin whose poetry I don't care about anyway! With Ed Sanders freaking out and saying it's another Manson case! Because Ed's paranoia, actually -- Ed has a large quotient of paranoia too. Anything that reminds him of secrecy -- he's been all his life studying black magic and Aleister Crowley and playing around with all that on the sidelines. I mean, getting into the Manson thing, and then getting into Vajrayana and Trungpa and Merwin, is just sort of made for Ed Sanders. And all of Ed's paranoia. And it's made for my paranoia, because half the time I think, "maybe Trungpa's the C.I.A., and he's taking over my mind." Much less all the poets, who want the supreme egotism of poetry -- that poetry should be the supreme individualistic reference point, that nobody should be above the poets, and that if anybody is they'll get the American Civil liberties Union after them! The poets have a right to shit on anybody they want to. You know, the poets have got the divine right of poetry. They go around, you know, commit suicide. Burroughs commits murder, Gregory Corso borrows money from everybody and shoots up drugs for twenty years, but he's "divine Gregory." But poor old Trungpa, who's been suffering since he was two years old to teach the dharma, isn't allowed to wave his frankfurter! And if he does, the poets get real mad that their territory is being invaded!

And then I'm supposed to be like the diplomat poet, defending poetry against those horrible alien gooks with their weird Himalayan practices. And American culture! "How dare you criticize American culture!" Everybody's been criticizing it for twenty years, prophesizing the doom of America, how rotten America is. And Burroughs is talking about, "democracy, shit! What we need is a new Hitler." Democracy, nothing! They exploded the atom bomb without asking us. Everybody's defending American democracy. American democracy's this thing, this Oothoon. The last civilized refuge of the world -- after twenty years of denouncing it as the pits! You know, so now it's the 1970's, everyone wants to go back and say, "Oh, no, we've got it comfortable. Here are these people invading us with their mind control."

And particularly, most particularly, people who suck up to Castro and Mao Tse-Tung. That's the funniest part. All the people, even myself who'd had all sorts of hideous experiences with Marxism. Or who put up with Leroi Jones. It's never questioned, you'd never publicly question that -- write an article about Leroi Jones in Harpers! You know, pointing out the contradictions in his democratic thought. Or anybody's, for that matter.

So, yes, it is true that Trungpa is questioning the very foundations of American democracy. Absolutely. And pointing out that the whole -- for one thing, he's an atheist. So he's pointing out that "In God we trust" is printed on the money. And that "we were endowed with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." That Merwin has been endowed by his creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Trungpa is asking if there's any deeper axiomatic basis than some creator coming along and guaranteeing his rights.

Because one of the interesting things that the Buddhists point out is that there's always a sneaking God around somewhere, putting down these inalienable rights. Urizen is around somewhere. And they're having to deal not only with the Communists, and the fascists, and the capitalists, they also have to deal with the whole notion of God, which is built right into the Bill of Rights. The whole foundation of American democracy is built on that, and it's as full of holes as Swiss cheese.....

Q. You read for us some of the poems to the aggressive deities, the ones Merwin didn't like. They had lines like, "as night falls, you cut the aorta of the perverter of the teachings," and "you enjoy drinking the hot blood of the ego."

A. Right. So he didn't like "drink the hot blood of the ego."

Q. Or, "cut the aorta of the perverter of the teachings"?

A. That would be Chogyam Trungpa if he was perverting the teachings.

Q. Trungpa would get his aorta cut?

A. Well, the aorta's the life-blood.

Q. So that's just metaphorical?

A. Oh, I suppose so. You might take it literally. Who knows. If I were Burroughs I would say, "of course it's literal."

-- The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, With a Copious Collection of Germane Documents Assembled by the Author, by Tom Clark

It was a flowering such as had never been seen before. Naropa University opened its doors. Every major city in the United States and Europe had a Vajradhatu meditation center and ambassadors were sent out from the Court of Shambhala. When the Prince gripped my arm for support he guided me through the halls, streets, and airports. His step was sure and firm. It was as if I were the crippled one instead of him. The Court was filled with activity.

In one week I had a schedule of over 150 volunteer servants: guards, drivers, cooks, cleaners, nannies, gardeners, servers, secretaries, shoppers, and waiters. All were wanting to participate in the flowering energy that filled the Court, which made it indeed seem to stretch over several miles with a park in the center on the top of a great circular mountain. What had been created was an openness where everything could be explored. We were encouraged to practice, study, and investigate our inner and outer worlds and examine any resulting pain or pleasure.

In the midst of this creative turmoil the Prince challenged me on my military propensities with a casual remark made into the bathroom mirror one morning.

"When we take over Nova Scotia, Johnny, you will need to attack some of the small military bases there."

''Attack military bases!" I said with surprise. "Me?"

"Well, not alone," smiled the Prince, still looking into the mirror examining his freshly brushed teeth. "You could have a commando unit of Jeeps and halftracks." He was looking at me in the mirror as he continued, "You had a halftrack once, didn't you?"

"Yes," I replied, remembering the olive drab army vehicle I owned at the farming school I once ran, seemingly a hundred years ago.

"Well?" the Prince's voice sounded.

My mind activated like a World War II movie as our intrepid band in Jeeps and halftracks raced along the curved snake-like back roads of Nova Scotia toward the unsuspecting enemy. My khaki wool uniform blended with the green countryside, I gripped the metal frame of the Thompson machine gun in my capable hands. On my head was the red beret bearing the Trident badge and the motto "Victory Over War." I smelled the engine oil fumes mixing with the flower perfumes of the country lane as we whipped along on our desperate mission. The sun glinted on our bayonets, or wait, perhaps it was night ...

"Well?" asked the Prince again.

"Oh, oh," was the reply, as I returned from the battle to the bathroom. "Yes, yes, Sir," I said. "We could do that."

"Good," continued the Prince. "You might have to kill one or two.

Kill one or two? What's that mean-kill one or two? was my silent response.

"But I thought we are not supposed to kill," I said, somewhat alarmed.

"Just a few resisters," said the Prince.

Resister, what the fuck is a resister? ran through my mind. Out loud I asked, "Resister? What kind of a resister?"

"Someone may resist enlightenment," stated the Prince.

"Oh, those. Well, yes, we could take care of them," I reassured him.

"Good, good," said the Prince, turning to leave the bath­room. As he opened the door he concluded with, "Well, Major Perks, perhaps you could put all of that together."

I spent the next several hours studying Army surplus catalogs and The Shotgun News. At the local gun store I picked up copies of Commando and SAS Training Manuals. I made a list of equipment and concluded that this "invasion" was going to be costly. I went to the Prince.

"Where will we get the money to organize this armed com­mando force, Sir?" I said, almost saluting.

"Perhaps we could steal the equipment," he suggested.

"Wow," I exclaimed. "You mean like a covert operation." The words and idea thrilled me.

"Exactly," said the Prince. ''And we need a code name for it." He contemplated for a moment and then said, "How about Operation Deep Cut?" As I turned the words over in my mind he continued, "Yes, what is needed here is a surgical strike."

I excitedly repeated the code name, "Operation Deep Cut, covert operation Surgical Strike." This was going to be worth killing just one or two!

"Yes," said the Prince with delight. "Buy some books on tactics and strategy. We should all study them. And you, Major Perks, will be in command." I could hardly wait to take my leave and get started on the campaign. I put on my military hat, saluted the Prince, and ran out of the room, tripping and falling down half the stairs in my haste. The Prince's head popped out of his sitting room doorway. ''Are you okay, Major?" he called down to me.

"Yes, Sir, fine, Sir. I just missed a step," I replied, pulling my uniform straight.

"Good," he said. "Jolly good, jolly, jolly good. Carry on, Major." I saluted again and rushed down the remaining stairs.

I could not wait to tell the other officers in the military about my secret mission. They were all amazed. "Have you told David yet?" was Jim's response. "Not yet," I replied. David was the Head of the Military, now that Jerry had dropped out. I could not fathom why the Prince had chosen David for this position. David was a very unmilitary, slight of build, a Jewish intellectual. He looked more like Mr. Peepers in a uniform -- nothing like Montgomery or Patton.

"I bet his balls shrivel up like raisins when I tell him about this," I scoffed. Indeed, David was quite alarmed at my description of "killing one or two resisters."

"Let me talk to Rinpoche before you do anything," he said anxiously, falling back in his chair.

"Okay," I said, adding with a tone of command, "go ahead, but it's all set. The Prince said so."

Later the Prince called me into his sitting room. I explained that David seemed hesitant about killing a few resisters.

"Oh, he's such a Jewish intellectual," said the Prince.

"Why, that's exactly what I think," I agreed.

"Really?" said the Prince, looking at me with curiosity. "Good, jolly good. You carry on, Major. I'll take care of David and tell him you have a free hand." I left hurriedly to tell the other officers the latest news on my secret commando operation....

Lady Diana, the Prince's wife, had confiscated his Scottish Eliot Clan kilt some months back because she felt he did not look good in Scottish regalia. It was rumored that the missing kilt was hidden at the mother-in-law's house.

"What we need is a practice run," said the Prince to me one morning. "Major, here's a job for your new commando group. We will invite Diana and my in-laws to the Court for dinner and while everyone is here your group will retrieve my kilt."

I saluted with a very big "Yes, Sir" and ran off to inform my comrades-in-arms.

The mother-in-law's house was situated in a small field near the edge of town. On the night in question we waited in our darkened limousine on a side road by the Court. There were four of us, dressed in black. We watched in nervous excitement as the mother-in-law's car pulled up to the Court. and the occupants entered the building. "Let's go," I commanded in a hushed military tone, and the driver sped toward our goal. Near the house he shut off the headlights and silently rolled to a stop in the shadows. We rolled out into the grass ditch and crawled on our bellies across the lawn. I pushed at one of the dining room windows. It opened and I was halfway through when Walter hissed, "The front door is open."

It was too late, however, as I was already pinned in the open window frame by the top window which had slid down on my back. My legs were dangling outside and my arms and head were inside the dining room. The others entered the dark house in a more upright fashion and hauled me through by yanking on my arms....

Triumphantly we returned to the Court. Dinner was finished and dessert was about to be served. I placed the kilt on a silver tray and presented it to the Prince and the seated guests. Lady Diana cried out laughingly "Oh no, Darling" to the Prince, who beamed and gave me the thumbs up sign. The other guests were delightedly amused.

In the following weeks we undertook other commando operations with odd code names: Operation Awake, Operation Blue Pancake, Operation Secret Mind, and Operation Snow White. "Why Snow White?" I asked the Prince. "Because she has to be woken up," was the reply. That made no sense to me. Why did you need to wake up a military operation when we were already totally awake and combat ready? I labeled the answer as crazy and added it to the collection.

During this time I started to have flashbacks to my childhood during the war. I had dreams of the bombing, the bodies in the yellow shrouds, the news footage of concentration camps. I began to feel confused about which was real, my remembrances of things past, the present military operations and the Court, or the future takeover of Nova Scotia. My uneasy feelings returned as did the panic attacks.

I did the same old stuff to avoid confronting any of it. I immersed myself in work, sex, entertainment, alcohol, and food. I knew I was okay, if only I could get myself together. I poured out my woes to the Prince, who was no help. In fact, he did not seem to understand at all and was quite unsympathetic. The more I freaked out the more demands he made on me....

"How are things going for the military encampment?" he asked....

-- The Mahasiddha and His Idiot Servant, by John Riley Perks

This year of building the kingdom:
Dealing with the four seasons,
Studying how millet grows
And how the birds form their eggs;
Interested in studying how Tampax are made,
And how furniture can be gold-leafed;
Studying the construction of my home,
How the whitewash of the plain wood can be dignified,
How we could develop terry cloth on our floor,
How my dapons can shoot accurately

-- First Thought Best Thought, 108 Poems, by Chogyam Trungpa

Trungpa Rinpoche was born in eastern Tibet in about 1939 and came to America by way of Oxford University, in 1970. He established a series of meditation centers across the United States and Europe and founded Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colorado. Though he died in 1987, the institutions he founded still flourish today under the direction of Shambhala International, based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His students have been in many ways a conventional church group—people who hold day jobs and share variously in the community’s religious activities, keeping the books, maintaining the mailing list, teaching or taking a class at a local center, doing a solo meditation retreat. Some might also participate in the military, wearing blue blazers and gray skirts or trousers as they drive visiting Tibetan monks to the airport, escort a teacher to a talk, or act as security guards at public events. Here their practice has been the basic firmness of good manners, rooted in alertness and thoughtfulness, ready to say “No, you may not” or “Of course I will.” As such, it is an extension of training in mindfulness, awareness, and kindness, from which also arises the confidence to resist being pulled away from one’s center.

Many of us were doubtless working through difficult relationships with power and hierarchy—why else had we been drawn to this military?

Since the late 1970s members of this military have been invited to apply for a week-long summer encampment held in the Colorado Rockies or the hills of rural Nova Scotia. About eighty of us attended in any year. The style of practice combined monasticism with a boy—or girl-scout outing: khaki uniforms where one would traditionally find robes, individual pup tents in the place of cells, bugles or bagpipes instead of church bells, and drilling in formation in addition to more traditional forms of contemplative practice.

My own motives for participating? The desire to get into the outdoors with good old friends and to satisfy my curiosity about this odd practice.

In early years we’d rise at 6:30, wash or shave in hand mirrors, eat breakfast from our mess kit, and sit in meditation—outdoors, on the ground, in our jungle boots—for an hour. One afternoon there was a wedding. Trungpa Rinpoche might give a talk in the evenings. Gradually, further Buddhist practice forms seeped through the encampment. In 1979 he introduced oryoki, the Zen style of eating from three nested bowls. Meals began with chants and were conducted in silence; formal hand gestures indicated when one wished more food. After eating, each soldier was served hot water with which to clean his or her bowls. Thus oryoki became our new mess kits. Later Shibata Sensei, a Japanese archery master, designed an outdoor shrine room for us, where the decorum of indoor meditation could flourish on the rugged earth.

But it was marching that distinguished the encampment from anyone’s previous experience of a meditation retreat or camping out in the woods. Much of the morning and afternoon, especially at first, was given over to the practice. It was real army drill. Our sergeant major was a white South African, trained in their army before becoming Buddhist and emigrating to North America. The physical movements, the commands, and our responses were as close to that form as we could manage.

Only a few of us had had previous military experience, and at first we weren’t especially good at drill. I in particular had difficulty getting my arms to swing right—they were always too tight or too loose, too controlled and stiff or too woggly. As a college freshman I’d been inducted by my Chinese teacher into the local ballet school’s Christmas production, which had a chronic shortage of males. As “court dancer” I’d walked through simple steps with a beautiful costumed young woman on my arm. Drill was less romantic, but as I mimicked the steps, it rather resembled klutzy open-air ballet.

The tone, though, was different from both ballet school and the conventional military. The sergeant would yell at me (“Peas in a piss-pot” and other bits of nifty foreign military slang). But it was not possible for him to insult or demean me, to soil the place—his authority was transparent, fictive, created by our participation in this creation of our teacher. So I worked hard to make drill beautiful, sharp, and powerful. If I didn’t get it right, it really didn’t matter very much. And if I did get it right—which by the end of the week I had somewhat accomplished—it didn’t matter very much either. Each way was equally perfect within that vast space, that expanse, unstated, unstatable, of which the mountain atmosphere was a tiny simulacrum.

From that space, we Buddhists say, arises dance, thought, compassion, mind, everything. It was the experience of that huge space that particularly marked and defined our activity, that distinguished our drill from that of other military organizations. It was the container, and also the foundation, and also the inseparable nature of these forms that we practiced and thus transformed.


The author’s teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, created the Vajra Guard, an unarmed Buddhist military group, in the 1970s. He is seen here surveying an encampment

And in the process drill became meditation. Sharp attention to the details of physical movement. A clear awareness of the expanse around them. As with meditation on the breath, such movements defined our attention only in the moment, disappearing as they occurred. However demanding the details, they did not fully occupy our minds, which remained precisely focused and widely opened—at once alert and relaxed. And nothing was accomplished, except mind arising unobstructedly within our activity. Thus meditation in action.

One of my reactions was to feel grounded in simplicity, nothing to gain or lose. I recalled the image of Fudo, the fierce, enflamed Zen deity whose name means “unmoving”—unable to be thrown off my seat, I was fully connected but at the same time imperturbable. No one could fuck with me. Nor had I any wish to fuck with anyone. At the same time this certainly wasn’t my power, neither originating from, nor located in, any familiar sense of myself. It was rather a quality that had become publicly and generally available due to our practice. Bound by attention to the forms of practice, each of us, relinquishing smaller aims, discovered that self-existent field of power.

Another reaction was wonderment, as when something seeming solid shows its transparent nature and an unexpected vista falls open before you: the dearness of all creatures, rocks and earth, the huge life-force of the waterless highlands of our midcontinent. Accompanying this was a light and generous absurdity. As Trungpa Rinpoche put it in the slogan he bestowed on his military: “If you can maintain your sense of humor and a distrust of the rules laid down around you, there will be success.” Absurd, but also most precise and dignified, the unfolding of our dance, no star performers, only movement, mountains, the power of gestures, a naked ritual with no reference point outside itself.

And so the military forms of my forefathers were purified and transformed. In that moment aggression became superfluous, untenable—I had lost all inclination to it. Nor could traditional military hierarchy find a purchase on me. It was a first step toward victory over war.

In chapter 2, "Sources of Bushido." Nitobe clarified the relationship between Bushido and Zen as follows:

I may begin with Buddhism. It furnished a sense of calm trust in Fate, a quiet submission to the inevitable, that stoic composure in sight of danger or calamity, that disdain of life and friendliness with death. A foremost teacher of swordsmanship, when he saw his pupil master the utmost of his art, told him, "Beyond this my instruction must give way to Zen teaching."3

Nitobe offered little detailed explanation of Zen teaching, but he did write that:

[Zen's] method is contemplation, and its purport, so far as I understand it, [is] to be convinced of a principle that underlies all phenomena, and, if it can, of the Absolute itself, and thus to put oneself in harmony with this Absolute. Thus defined, the teaching was more than the dogma of a sect, and whoever attains to the perception of the Absolute rises above mundane things and awakes "to a new Heaven and a new Earth."4

-- The Emergence of Imperial-State Zen and Soldier Zen [Chapter Eight], [Excerpt] from "Zen at War", by Brian Daizen Victoria

One sunny afternoon our squad was policing the camp — thirty people in a single rank, double arms’ length apart, searching the ground for cigarette butts and trash. The officer in charge, somehow displeased, yelled that we’d have to do this all afternoon if we didn’t do it properly, to which we responded that it was such a beautiful day it would indeed be wonderful to do so.

That response wouldn’t work in most other environments, military or not. Aggression is plenty real, gritty and full of sorrow, all around us. And victory over war means learning how to work with all of it.

We’d rise at 6:30, wash or shave in hand mirrors, eat breakfast from our mess kit, and sit in meditation—outdoors, on the ground, in our jungle boots—for an hour.

How well did we do? We learned, sometimes, to spot parts of our aggression, loud and raw against this background of space, and let it pop with an embarrassed twitch, dissolve. But like that officer, we weren’t always able to tune into the generosity of something large beyond thinking. Many of us were doubtless working through difficult relationships with power and hierarchy—why else had we been drawn to this military? Encampment was physically inconvenient, and some city guys never got used to sleeping on the ground in their clothes. Combined mild irritants enhanced our basic ego-tendencies, strengthening our habitual patterns and sometimes reconverting those military forms we thought we had transmuted. On one occasion Trungpa Rinpoche reviewed the troops, each of us standing stiffly at attention beside our pup tent as he walked round the camp circle. Gathering us together just after, he remarked, “It makes me sad that none of you soldiers was brave enough to smile when I walked past.” Thus while encampment intensified our neurotic reactions, it also provided a space in which these distortions of our true nature became apparent to all.

Trungpa Rinpoche also found ways to heighten our paranoia, and then release it. In Colorado our entire water supply rested in a large, wheeled tanker, hauled up creaking from the valley below. I was on sentry duty late one sagebrush-scented night, when a shout rattled through the camp: someone had cut the tanker’s hose, and four days’ water had flowed away. Had anyone spotted a lurker? Was a saboteur concealed among us? The whole camp was roused, soldiers fell out in uniform and stood at attention, while busy officers sought intelligence from the groggy night. Orders came from somewhere for drill. Then we were before Trungpa Rinpoche, presenting ourselves one by one for interrogation. As I approached him, I was given a splosh of Tabasco in my palm to lick as a kind of truth-oath. Then in his Oxford-accented tenor he asked me, “Kidder, did you cut the hose?” “No, sir!” I replied, and gave him a wet kiss on the cheek. And eventually we were all back to bed.

At some point in that goofy midnight exercise it occurred to me that only one person would have enjoyed cutting the hose: Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. It perfectly disrupted our normal sense of things, giving him and us the occasion for a joyful confusion, as soldiers sought earnestly for external enemies—a traitor? pranksters? militant pacifists?—only to find nothing there but the habits of our own mind. Still more, we met him eye to eye for a brief meditation interview, snatched out of our normal time for sleep. No perpetrator was ever identified, and nothing explained. It was left to each of us to figure out what had happened or to hear it from a friend, like the secret punch line of an intensely practical joke. And thus our paranoia was self-liberated.


Members of the Vajra Guard gather to celebrate the opening of a camp in the 1979s © Marvin Moore.

But other teaching situations demand other means. In the front lines of daily life, long after encampment ends, and long before it ever began, we are surrounded by great swirls of our own and others’ aggression. How to meet it? It’s essential to maintain forms of practice—forms of kindness and attention—so that our harmful impulses can find ways to be re-formed. I once asked a Buddhist friend why he thought Trungpa Rinpoche had instituted the military. “Well,” he said, “how would you work with X?”, naming someone widely regarded as an impossible asshole. Hence the creation of an institution that could accommodate not only someone like me, a mild-mannered college professor, in the full range of my X-rated manifestations, but that also possessed the widest emancipatory power, with practice forms capable of shaping people of varying temperaments, abilities, interests, even using an obsession with authority or violence as bait in the transformation of some men and women who might never bring dharma to their lives through any other means. But the military was much more than a means of working with the unworkable. It was a provocation of the full gamut of our karma, like tossing a vajra (Tibetan symbol of the indestructible and indivisible reality) into the aggressive heart of America.

There was no real Tibetan precedent for these military forms. Instead, they were Trungpa Rinpoche’s own response to the energy of this country, his reshaping of pieces of our past and present. What guides the teacher in his or her creation of form? Is there a set of ethical principles that might contain it? An early Indian text, the Digha Nikaya, offers a hint to why there isn’t. The following passage, from Wm. Theodore de Bary’s The Buddhist Tradition, describes the Buddha (referred to as “the monk Gautama”) in his relationship to five moral fields—taking life, theft, improper sexual relations, lies, and slander:

The monk Gautama has given up injury to life, he has lost all inclination to it; he has laid aside the cudgel and the sword, and he lives modestly, full of mercy, desiring in compassion the welfare of all things living.

He has given up taking what is not given, he has lost all inclination to it…

And so the text continues through sexual relations, lies, and slander.

He has lost all inclination. He desires in compassion. That’s all it says. There are no commandments or guarantees, no higher authority. The foundation of all Buddhist ethics, then, is only the propensities of Buddha-mind.

Ultimately this is your mind. Before we’re fully confident of this, though, before our own actions emerge unobstructedly from space, before we discover our own power to create form, how do we make choices? How do we decide if it’s good to join the military, or to follow our teacher’s commands? After all, the Tibetan Buddhist master is very much a guru, someone to whom the student in varying degrees entrusts his/her life. And this hierarchy can be as severe as that of any military.

There is no certainty within this relative truth, and we are stuck here several ways at once. We rely on our basic decency, yet we must also step out of habit. We learn to trust ourselves, yet we wonder if that self exists and how far it’s reliable. Our teacher is steeped in lovingkindness, but her compassion may sometimes seem opaque and therefore may not quite reach our hearts . From practice, we get hints of something hugely good, but in fragments. Gradually we may come to fully trust our guru, but how can we do this before we know his mind and ours is the same? This is relationship with a spiritual teacher. The military practice intensifies it, reminding us how much is at stake, and of the traditional efficacy and danger of the tantric path, which works not only with the milder forms of human life but also with the ungainly, the disturbing, with alcohol, sex, and, in this case, with raw aggression, turning that fierce energy into a means to free all beings.

Today I live in Maine, in a small town that shares its space with the vast and open runways of a naval air station. Among the moms and dads of my daughter’s friends are several military people with whom I feel a profound yet uncertain fellowship. I suspect that, like my great-grandfather, they may have found the American military ennobling. I wonder if it has also allowed them to purify their own aggression until, seeing through the disciplines of form, they can offer protection to all beings in need.

Kidder Smith teaches Chinese history at Bowdoin College, where he also directs the Asian Studies Program. He has written extensively on the military texts of ancient China and on issues of Buddhist practice.