Altruistic World Online Library

Tibet Society: Our Story
by tibetsociety.com
Accessed: 9/1/19

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-- Tibet House US, by tibethouse.us

-- Tibetan Friendship Group, by tibet.org

-- Obituary: Sir Algernon Rumbold, by John Billington

The girl named Karen, she had a book that supposedly was based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was written by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, or later, Ram Dass -- right? The classic story of the 60s, I suppose. And I was so curious because of the extraordinary experience I had, that I wanted to find the original Tibetan Book of the Dead. So I went to this esoteric bookstore in London and I asked, “Do you have the Tibetan Book of the Dead?” They said, “Oh, no, no, it’s out of print. It’s been out of print for a while. But wait a minute, we have a used copy of another book in that same series that was edited by Evans-Wentz, it’s called ‘Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines.’ Would you be interested in that one?” And I said, “Okay, Let me have a look.” So I ended up buying this used copy of this book, “Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines.”

And it turned out it was all about the six yogas of Naropa, about which previously I knew nothing at all. And it somehow seemed really fascinating to me....

And actually, the book also said that, “You can’t hope to attain enlightenment unless you connect with a realized master in the practice lineage.” So then I was thinking, “Well, how on earth am I going to do that, because Tibet is on the other side of the planet, and I’m here in London, and I have no connection with anything to do with that.” But I began making the aspiration in my mind, “May I connect with a realized master in the practice lineage.”...

So one day in my mind I was making this aspiration, and I had this sudden thought come to my mind, “Go to the phone book and look up ‘Tibet.’” And I thought, “That’s crazy. What’s that going to do?” And I thought, “Yeah, yeah, but what have you got to lose?” So I went to the phone book, and I looked up “Tibet.” Now in London, there’s 12 million people, the phone book is in four volumes, but I looked up in the “T’s,” and there was only one entry that began with the word “Tibet.” And that was “The Tibet Society of the United Kingdom.”

So I saw that, and noted down the address -- I think it was 58 Eccleston Square -- and I didn’t think of phoning. I thought, “Well, I’ll go in person to see what happens.” ...

[S]o I got in the car, and I knew where Eccleston Square was, and I managed to find a parking place ... And it was sort of a Victorian townhome. And I went up the steps and there was a brass plate that said, “Buddhist Society.” And I thought, “Ha, that’s a good sign.” And underneath it it said, “Tibet Society.” So I pressed that bell push, the buzzer sounded, the door opened, and I went in.



And there was an arrow pointing down to the basement. So I went down to the basement, full of anticipation that there was going to be something very esoteric -- I was sure about that – “Tibet Society!” And there was this middle-aged English woman with her hair in a bun, typing away on an old manual typewriter, looking at me at the top of her glasses and saying, “How can we help you?” And I said, “Well, tell me about the Tibet Society.” And she said, “Oh, it’s a charitable organization, raising money for Tibetan refugees in India. Would you care to make a donation?” I thought, “This is crazy.” And I think I gave her 10 shillings, and I was about to leave, thinking that this was a total waste of time. And at that moment, a young woman came in the door, and she kind of pulled me aside and she said, “If you don’t mind me asking, ‘what are you doing here’?” I said, “Well, it’s really hard to explain, but I’m really interested in the teachings of the Kagyu order of Tibetan Buddhism.” She said, “Oh, you know there are two Tibetan lamas in this country, and they belong to that Kagyu order.” And then she reached into her purse and she pulled out a photo, and she pointed to the one on the left and she said, “That’s Trungpa. That’s the one you want to meet.” I said, “Yes. Okay.” And then she proceeded to give me the address and phone number. They were living in Oxford....

And I rushed home, and I phoned the number in Oxford, and asked to speak to Venerable Trungpa, and someone with a weird foreign accent said, “Oh, he no here right now. Better you write to him.” And then they gave me an address of some place called Biddulph in Staffordshire, Biddulph Old Hall in Staffordshire.

-- Richard Arthure on Meeting Chogyam Trungpa, by The Chronicles of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

The Tibet Society was founded shortly after his Holiness left Tibet in 1959 by a number of philanthropic souls in the UK, including Francis Beaufort-Palmer and Hugh Richardson. Initially, they had nowhere to house it, but Christmas Humphreys suggested that they come to Eccleston Square, where they set up their office in the basement.

-- The 90th Anniversary of The Buddhist Society 1924–2014, by The Buddhist Society

We've been having a bit of re-organise here in the office and, with kind help from volunteers Carole and Neil, we have unearthed some fascinating documents and photos dating all the way back to Tibet Relief Fund's beginnings in 1959. One such photo was of Francis Napier Beaufort-Palmer, the founder and first chairman of Tibet Relief Fund.

Mr. Beaufort-Palmer was a remarkable man with a strong sense of social justice and was particularly motivated by helping people in small countries who suffered at the hand of foreign powers. Following news of the Dalai Lama's escape from Tibet, in April 1959 he wrote a letter to The Times suggesting that a society be set up to support Tibet. In July, a further letter was sent to The Times informing readers that the newly formed Tibet Society had opened a "Tibet Relief Fund" to bring practical relief to Tibetan refugees; from this Tibet Relief Fund was established. Now, over 50 years later, our work covers a broader brief including projects inside Tibet.

Francis [Napier] Beaufort-Palmer was Chairman of Tibet Relief Fund for 15 years and remained a trustee until he died ten years later in 1984.

TIBETAN REFUGEES

Sir. – Recent devastating events in Tibet caused over 15,000 Tibetans to cross the perilous Himalayas into India. It may be a long time before these unfortunate people can safely return to their overrun country. Our own consciences should allow us neither to neglect nor forget them.

The Indian Government has manfully coped with this addition to its own problems at home. In this country we are bound in honour to help relieve needs of the Tibetan refugees, because from 1905 to 1947 there was a special relationship between Tibet and the United Kingdom – a relationship handed on to the new India.

On balance we think it wisest to concentrate chiefly on collecting money which can be used for the benefit of the refugees, not least in the purchase of necessary antibiotics and other medicaments. The Tibet Society has opened a Tibet Relief Fund for which we now appeal in the hope of a generous response. Donations should be sent to the address below or direct to the National Bank Ltd. (Belgravia Branch), 21 Grosvenor Gardens, S.W.I.

Thubten Jigme Norbu; F.M. Bailey; Birdwood; J.D. Boyle; [Indian Foreign Secretary Sir] Olaf Caroe; Clement Davies; A.D. Dodds-Parker; Peter Fleming [Master of Deception: The Wartime Adventures of Peter Fleming, by Alan Ogden]; Thomas Moore; [Esmond Harmsworth, 2nd Viscount Rothermere] Harmsworth; Marco Pallis; Hugh E. Richardson; Francis Napier Beaufort-Palmer, Chairman; Major J.C.W. Napier-Munn [Tac HQ Calcutta (Advanced HQ ALFSEA)], Hon. Secretary; D.C. Nicole, Hon. Treasurer, The Tibet Society.
The Tibet Relief Fund, 58 Eccleston Square, S.W. I., Letter to the Times, July 31, 1959, p.7./quote]

-- The Founding of Tibet Relief Fund, Tibet Matters, Issue 17, Autumn 2013, by Tibet Relief Fund

Tibet Society is the world’s first ever Tibet support group. The Society was founded in 1959, within weeks of the flight of the Dalai Lama from Tibet following the uprising against China’s occupation. Today, the organisation continues to work actively for the freedom of the Tibetan people and their right to self-determination.

All the founders of Tibet Society had personal knowledge of an independent and free Tibet, having either lived in Lhasa or had direct dealings with the Tibetan government.

Hugh Richardson, the British Representative in Tibet, was among the dignitaries who greeted the young Dalai Lama when, in 1939, aged just four, he first entered Lhasa. Heinrich Harrer, when in Lhasa in the 1940s, coached the Dalai Lama in English and maths. Robert Ford, who remained Vice President until his death in 2013, was captured and imprisoned for five years by the invading Chinese army in 1950 when serving as radio officer to the Tibetan Government. Well known High Court Judge and founder of the Buddhist Society, Christmas Humphreys, first met the Dalai Lama in 1956.

Our Board


PEMPA LOBSANG
CHAIRMAN

Pempa Lobsang is the former Chairman of the Tibetan Community in Britain. Pempa is an active member of the Tibetan community and having served on the council for the community for over 7 years, he has intimate knowledge of the workings of the Tibetan community and is well placed to represent the views of the community and contribute to the work of The Society to benefit all Tibetans. Pempa is an alumnus of the Pestalozzi Children’s Village and a qualified accountant by profession. He currently works for an insurance company in the City as a Senior Accountant. He is also a keen footballer and is part of the London Tibetan Football Club.


FREDRICK R HYDE-CHAMBERS
HONORARY PRESIDENT

Fredrick ‘Riki’ Hyde-Chambers is the former chairman of the Tibet Society of the UK and Hon President of the Tibet Relief Fund. He currently serves as a council member. He has been involved in the campaign for justice for Tibet all his adult life and has authored three books on Tibet: ‘Lama’ a novel published in seven countries; the ‘Mouse King’ with Yeshe published by Puffin’ ‘Tibetan Folktales’ with Audrey Hyde-Chambers published by Shambhala Publications. Professionally, he served for many years as Director of the Industry and Parliamentary Trust, receiving the OBE for services to Industry and Parliament, and is currently the Executive Chairman of Enterprise and Parliamentary Dialogue International which works in countries in transition, with a particular focus on Georgia and Africa. He is also Chairman of the Buddhist Chaplaincy Support Group.


DALHA TSERING
COUNCIL MEMBER

Dalha Tsering is the current Chairman of the Tibetan Community in Britain.

Our Contributors

JENNY JAMES
Newsletter Editor

Jenny has been a valued member of the Tibet Society for the last 30 years and in early 2018 decided to increase her support by producing a monthly Society newsletter. This ties in nicely with her role as Editor of Contact Magazine – a digest of Tibetan news and issues – which is published in India and online and is an excellent way to read the latest news about Tibet. Jenny is a regular visitor to McLeod Ganj, the seat of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile and residence of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, which keeps her up to date with what is going on in the Tibetan exile world. She lives in Shropshire.

*****************

Parliamentary Exchange Advocacy

Tibet Society is dedicated in its work to support Tibetan democracy and to offer opportunities for Tibetans to advocate directly to UK policy-makers and parliamentarians. To further this aim, the Society formed an innovative Parliamentary Exchange Programme.



Tibet Society has been running the exchange programme since 2007, and in addition to Tibetan MPs visiting Westminster, UK MPs have travelled to Dharamsala to observe the processes of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile and forge a stronger understanding between British and Tibetan parliamentarians.

2019 Parliamentary Exchange Programme

Keep your eyes peeled for the Parliamentary Exchange planned for the early half of 2019!

2018 Parliamentary Exchange Programme

A cross-party delegation of MPs from the three largest parties in the UK travelled to the seat of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile in Dharamshala, northern India from 26-29 September 2018.

Rt Hon Tim Loughton MP (Conservative), Hon Kerry McCarthy MP (Labour) and Hon Chris Law MP (Scottish National Party) met His Holiness the Dalai Lama and President of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, Dr Lobsang Sangay, to discuss the human rights situation in Tibet.



The three delegates also had a session with the Speaker of Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile, Ven Khenpo Sonam Tenphel, as well as a session with Dhardon Sharling, Secretary of the Department of Information and International Relations, who was able to bring them up to date on the situation inside and outside Tibet, especially in relation to the international community whose support is so vital to the Tibetan cause.

The group took the opportunity to meet civil society groups who do so much for the Tibetan cause, and also visited cultural institutions which aim to preserve Tibetan culture, including the Norbulingka Institute, the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives (LTWA) and the Tibet Museum. Such institutions are crucial to document, preserve, research, exhibit and educate Tibetans and non-Tibetans on all matters related to Tibet’s history, culture and present situation.

Our 2009 Parliamentary Exchange Programme

In 2009, Tibet Society invited four Tibetan MPs to visit Westminster, giving them the chance to learn about British parliamentary processes first hand. In June 2009 Dolma Gyari, Ngawang Lhamo Kanang, Tsetan Norbu and Gyalrong Dawa Tsering formed a delegation from the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile. As part of our Parliamentary exchange programme the MPs were in the UK to undertake a series of engagements and workshops. The busy schedule included workshops on media skills, devolution, the role of a modern MP, committee work and parliamentary scrutiny, plus observing Prime Minister’s Questions and an evidence session of the Scottish Affairs Committee. Importantly, the delegation also had opportunities to advocate for the Tibetan cause, and did so in meetings at the Foreign Office with the China & Hong Kong Desk and Asia Research Group; at Parliament with members of the Foreign Affairs Committee; with MPs at an All Party Parliamentary Group for Tibet meeting and with the public at the Centre for Reconciliation and Peace. The delegation also met informally with peers such as Baroness Harris of Richmond, Lord Steel and Lord Alton and Chinese democracy activists in Westminster, and met with Tibet Society members at a reception at the Houses of Parliament. A lively question and answer session gave members of the Tibetan community a chance to put their views across to the MPs.

*****************

Tibet Society Attends Parliamentary Reception to Mark ‘The Future of Tibet, Heartland of Asia’ Exhibition at the Scottish Parliament



On 6 March, Tibet Society attended a Parliamentary Reception at the Scottish Parliament to mark the Exhibition ‘The Future of Tibet, Heartland of Asia’. The exhibition will run from 4-8 March 2019 in the Garden Lobby of the Scottish Parliament with the aim of raising awareness about the situation in Tibet and the importance of the region to the global environment.

It reception was hosted by Linda Fabiani MSP, Speaker of the Parliament, in conjunction with the Scottish Centre for Himalayan Research.

The chair of the CPGT, Hon Linda Fabiani MSP, welcomed a four-member Tibetan Parliamentary delegation to the Scottish Parliament and expressed her support and that of her Parliamentary colleagues in the Cross Party Group to the issue of Tibet.

The Tibetan delegation, lead by the Deputy Speaker, Acharya Yeshi Phuntsok, are visiting the UK from 4-12 March and will be participating in a range of events to mark the 60th anniversary of the Tibetan National Uprising of 1959.



In his address to the Parliamentary reception, Acharya Yeshi Phuntsok called for the continued support of MSPs towards a peaceful resolution of the Tibet issue. The Deputy Speaker highlighted that after 60 years of Chinese occupation, Tibetans inside and outside of Tibet continue to fight tirelessly for their human rights and freedoms. He raised the case of Tibetan language advocate, Tashi Wangchuk, who is currently serving a 5 year prison sentence for simply calling for Tibetan language education in schools.

The exhibition raised awareness about the importance of the Tibetan plateau to the entire planet. The Tibetan Plateau is widely known as the Third Pole because it contains the largest reserve of fresh water outside the polar regions. Ten of Asia’s largest rivers begin in Tibet, including the Yellow river and Yangtze river in China, the Irrawaddy river in Myanmar, the Ganges, which flows through India and Bangladesh, and the Mekong river, which spans through 6 different countries over the course of almost 5,000 km.

When addressing the gathering, The Representative of the Office of Tibet in London, Mr Sonam Frasi said ‘The future of Tibet to the whole world is far more important than is recognised. Tibetans have preserved and looked after the plateau’s ecology for centuries. Tibetans have observed an ethical preservative approach to the mountains, lakes, rivers, its flora and fauna… [but] over the past 60 year, China has continuously exploited the natural resources of Tibet.”

Tibet needs protecting, not just for Tibetans, but for the environmental health and sustainability of the entire world. Governments must heed the warning or the risk to our planet may be catastrophic.



Hon Patrick Harvie MSP and leader of Scottish Green Party & his Green Party colleague Hon Ross Greer; along with Hon Maureen Watt MSP and Hon Angus MacDonald, both from the Scottish National Party, also attended the Parliamentary reception.

Tibet Society, Free Tibet and other Tibet support groups also attended the event.

Pestalozzi International Village
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/1/19

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I ended up staying in England for many months trying to get the whole thing sorted out. I kept thinking that it would just be a few more days, a few more weeks, and then Osel would be able to be with us. I had to go through several hearings with Maurice, trying to arrange to have Osel released to me. Eventually, we arranged for him to leave the Woodmans and go to the Pestalozzi Village in the south of England. We knew that Osel would be in a good setting there while we worked out the legal problems.

The Pestalozzi Village was established after World War II to care for orphans and refugees displaced by the war. In the 1960s, they began taking in Tibetan refugees, followed by refugees from other Asian and African nations. The first Pestalozzi Village was in Switzerland. The one in England was established somewhat later. They had different houses where residents of a particular nationality lived, and they provided an excellent education and loving care for the children there. There was a housemother and housefather for every residence. Osel was able to be with other Tibetans where he could speak his own language. Tibetan was still his main language at that time. Once Osel moved to the Pestalozzi Village, I was able to visit him regularly, and I would go down to see him as often as I could.

It took months to make these arrangements, and I stayed most of the time in London in Beauchamp Place with Francesca Fremantle, who generously shared her flat with me. She was a close student of Rinpoche's from Samye Ling who later spent time in the United States and taught at the University of Colorado and Naropa Institute. She and Rinpoche worked together on the translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. She's quite a brilliant scholar. She was incredibly kind to me during this difficult period.

Early in the fall, after his seminars were done at Tail of the Tiger, Rinpoche flew over for about a week. I was so glad to see him. He sometimes liked to cook, often quite unusual creations, and he cooked dinner one night at Francesca's. His peanut butter and lemonade soup would be a good example of his unconventional cuisine. In London, he cooked roast chicken basted in liquid vitamins for Francesca and me. I told him this was disgusting; he said I was too conservative in my thinking and simply needed to open my mind.

We visited Osel together at the Pestalozzi Village while Rinpoche was in England. The Woodmans had told Osel frightful stories about Rinpoche, so at that time, Osel was quite afraid of his father. It was heartbreaking.

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

This article contains content that is written like an advertisement. Please help improve it by removing promotional content and inappropriate external links, and by adding encyclopedic content written from a neutral point of view. (October 2012)

Pestalozzi International Village Trust
Abbreviation PIVT
Formation 1957
Legal status Charity
Purpose Providing Education to Academic minded scholars from low economy countries
Location
Sedlescombe, East Sussex, United Kingdom
Website http://www.pestalozzi.org.uk/

Pestalozzi International Village Trust (formerly called Pestalozzi Children's Village Trust) is an educational charitable organisation based in East Sussex, England.[1]

Overview

The Pestalozzi Children’s Village (German: Kinderdorf Pestalozzi) was established in Trogen, Switzerland, in 1946, after the Second World War, to accommodate and educate children from both sides of the war.[2] The concept soon spread to other countries, and in the UK the Pestalozzi Children Village was opened. The charity is named after a Swiss educationalist called Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi who believed in educating the heart, hands and head as a complete educational system. Pestalozzi Village initially offered children vocational courses to equip them with skills from agriculture to carpentry.

Today, Pestalozzi International Village UK sponsors students from developing countries to study the International Baccalaureate Diploma Course programme at Sussex Coast College Hastings, (formerly called Hastings College of Arts and Technology) in St Leonards-on-Sea. The village also sponsors different programmes overseas such as educational empowerment of Tibetans living in India also in Nepal. The charity relies on contributions from the public government bodies and individuals.

History

Pestalozzi International Village is an educational charity based in Sedlescombe, East Sussex, England. The charity was founded in the UK in 1957 to support the Pestalozzi Swiss Village in Switzerland.[3] The village was built on a 170-acre (0.69 km2) estate in Sedlescombe, UK and opened in 1959. 40 children between the ages of 10 and 18 from 15 European countries were accommodated and educated according to the principles of Swiss educationist called Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Children were educated in local schools in Hastings and St Leonards-on-Sea. In later years, the trust's focus has changed to providing educational opportunities for young people aged 16 to 19 who are academically bright but financially disadvantaged.

Educational programme

Pestalozzi Scholars study the International Baccalaureate at Sussex Coast College Hastings. They come from different countries, live and learn together. While in the village, scholars participate in other programmes such Pestalozzi Outreach educational programmes,[4] gardening, Ecolab and others.

Patron and management

HRH The Duke of Gloucester GCVO is the Patron of Pestalozzi International Village Trust. The village is headed by a Chief Executive Officer.

Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, KG, GCVO, GCStJ (Richard Alexander Walter George; born 26 August 1944) is the youngest grandchild of King George V and Queen Mary. He practised as an architect until the death of his elder brother placed him in direct line to inherit his father's dukedom of Gloucester, which he inherited, as the second duke, in 1974. He is a paternal cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, and currently 27th in the line of succession to the British throne as well as the first in line not descended from King George VI. He is also the senior male line descendant of three British monarchs: Victoria, Edward VII and George V....

He is Royal Patron of the UK branch of the charity Habitat for Humanity,[11] Royal Patron of the St George's Society of New York,[12] and President of The London Society....

The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester's official residence is at Kensington Palace in London.[15]...

The Duke is also patron of the Severn Valley Railway and the Pestalozzi International Village Trust. He is also a patron of the British Homeopathic Association, a charity dedicated to the study, research and promotion of homeopathy.[19]...

His Royal Highness Prince Richard Alexander Walter George, Duke of Gloucester, Earl of Ulster and Baron Culloden, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, Grand Prior of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem.

-- Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, by Wikipedia

References

1. “Pestalozzi International Village Trust” Archived 2008-09-21 at the Wayback Machine, ProfitNet, University of Brighton
2. “Pestalozzi Children Village at Trogen”, UNESCO
3. “A Short History”[permanent dead link], Pestalozzi International Village Trust
4. “Pestalozzi for Schools”, Pestalozzi International Village Trust

Industry and Parliament Trust
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/1/19

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The Industry and Parliament Trust (IPT) is a charity that works to promote the mutual understanding of Parliament and business. It works within the Parliament of the United Kingdom, the European Parliament and with organisations from all sectors of industry. It is non-partisan, non-lobbying and not-for-profit.

Its activities include:

• Fellowship programmes for Members of Parliament (MPs), Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), peers and senior parliamentary staff. Fellowships provide the opportunity to gain hands-on experience in one more companies through bespoke programmes of placements;
• Courses, seminars, panel discussions, lectures and events for policymakers, businesspeople and civil servants;
• Attachments for civil servants.

The Industry and Parliament Trust is based in Whitehall, London, close to the Houses of Parliament.

Fellowships

A quarter of the current House of Commons are Fellows of the Industry and Parliament Trust. Fellowships are open to all MPs, peers, UK MEPs and senior House Staff irrespective of their political party. Most Fellowships consist of 18 days over 18 to 24 months, and all programmes are explicitly educational and non-lobbying, intended to give parliamentarians a greater understanding of the issues facing business and the British economy.

High-profile IPT Fellows include:

• The Rt Hon David Blunkett MP
• The Rt Hon Andrew Stunell OBE MP
• The Hon Ed Vaizey MP
• Tom Watson MP
• John Whittingdale OBE MP
• The Rt Hon Baroness Fookes DBE DL
• The Rt Hon Baroness Jay of Paddington
• The Rt Hon Lord Martin of Springburn, former Speaker of the British House of Commons
• The Rt Hon Baron Mawhinney
• The Rt Hon Lord McFall of Alcluith
• The Rt Hon Lord McNally PC

Former MPs who are IPT Fellows include:

• Edwina Currie
• Jacqui Smith

List of current on-going Fellowships

All Fellows receive a cartoon upon completion of their Fellowship, an original copy of which is retained at the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent.[1]

Governance and secretariat

The IPT Board of Trustees includes six MPs and three members of the House of Lords. It also includes Brendan Keith, Clerk of the House of Lords, and Paul Evans, Principal Clerk of Select Committees.[2] The current chair of the trustees is Baroness Harris of Richmond and the Presidents are the Speaker of the House of Commons, The Rt Hon John Bercow MP, the Speaker of the House of Lords, The Rt Hon Baroness D'Souza CMG, and Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, The Rt Hon Chris Grayling MP.[3]

The Chief Executive is Nick Maher who began at the IPT in July 2011 having previously served in the Ministry of Defence on a team constructing a 'New Employment Model' for the Armed Forces. His predecessor was Sally Muggeridge, who served as Chief Executive for seven years.

The IPT employs thirteen members of staff, all based in Whitehall, London.

History

The IPT was founded in 1977 by the CEOs of 10 major British companies who sought to create dialogue between business and Parliament. It became a registered charity in 1983. The IPT has organised more than 600 Fellowship programmes since it was founded in 1977.[4]

When the IPT was set up, just 15% of MPs had any direct business experience.[5] Today that figure is around 46%. Needless to say there is still a substantial proportion of MPs without the necessary understanding of business.

In October 2009 the IPT commissioned a research project into the business experience of the Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPCs) who stood in the 2010 General Election. The research found that of the PPCs in winnable seats, less than half (48%) had any form of business management or financial services experience.[6]

Related organisations

The IPT has sister projects in Wales (Industry and National Assembly for Wales Association) and Northern Ireland (Northern Ireland Assembly and Business Trust). A Scottish project, the Scottish Parliament Business Exchange closed in 2016.

References

1. http://www.ipt.org.uk/Fellowships/Fello ... rtoons.htm
2. "Annual Report 2017" (PDF). Industry and Parliament Trust. 2017.
3. "IPT > About Us". http://www.ipt.org.uk.
4. http://www.ipt.org.uk/AboutUs/History.htm
5. Brook, Rosemary (1994). "The Industry and Parliament Trust: Contributing to better government and greater prosperity of UK plc". Journal of Communication Management. 4(1), 57-63.
6. "PPCs Business Backgrounds: An Analysis".

External links

• Industry and Parliament Trust

Enterprise and Parliamentary Dialogue International
International Affairs, London
by linkedin.com
Accessed: 9/1/19

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Overview

EPDI is an international professional network with thirty years of democratic experience in improving democratic consultation mechanisms, with the ultimate objective of informing economic policy and legislation for the benefit of the whole national economy.

It achieves its aims by:

• Strengthening democratic consultative mechanisms
• Forming transparent and effective relationships between enterprises, parliamentarians and civil society
• Devising national models, taking into account the national characteristics
• Facilitating different parties so they reach consensus without any actor losing any face
• Its ability to help different actors to grasp the realities of complex issues
• Its transparency and neutrality without any lobbying efforts or hidden agenda

Website http://www.enterpriseparliament.org/ Industry International Affairs Company size 2-10 employees Type Nonprofit Founded 2011
Enterprise and Parliamentary Dialogue International
14 Great College Street, London, SW1P 3RX, GB

The Dalai Lama
by The Central Intelligence Agency
Date: July, 1960?
Approved for Release: 8/14/2001

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THE DALAI LAMA

I. As a result of recent Tibetan developments Prime Minister Nehru in a dilemma, caught between widespread Indian sympathy for Tibetans and the need to conciliate Chinese Communists, whose military position on India’s border is now increasingly strong.

A. Nehru’s answer has been to maintain carefully limited Indian Government position of giving asylum to Dalai Lama and fellow refugees while avoiding any public support which would imply political sponsorship.

II. Dalai Lama, for his part, has felt his way cautiously towards a strong role as exiled political leader of his people.

A. Nehru has urged limitation to purely spiritual activities, but Dalai Lama has taken steadily stronger public as well as behind-the-scenes position in advocating Tibetan case both to the world at large and to the Governments of India and the United States.

B. To Nehru’s distress, on 20 June Dalai Lama came close to proclaiming government-in-exile when he said “Wherever I am, I am accompanied by my government, which the Tibetan people recognize as the Government of Tibet.”

C. Dalai Lama might have gone further, and sooner, had he been more certain of finding support elsewhere if his position in India became untenable.

D. He went as far as he did only after receiving assurances [through clandestine channels] from Washington that, if his position [did] in India became untenable, the U.S. Government would help him find other asylum.

1. Dalai Lama was urged in the same message to present his case to the world as strongly as possible while seeking to avoid a rupture of relations with the GOI.

III. On Tuesday (18 July) [DELETE] a message [DELETE] came from the Dalai Lama stating he hopes to obtain recognition for his government-in-exile from some nation, even though it be one with unimportant or no relations with the Government of India, in order to set a precedent.

A. Dalai Lama specifically requested U.S. Government assistance in obtaining such recognition.

B. He asked whether, if no government is willing to extend him recognition while he remains in India, the U.S. Government would recommend that he establish a government-in-exile elsewhere; and if so, where.

IV. At present, active study being given to: problems of presenting Tibetan case before the United Nations; to legal basis for doing so; and to means of finding a sponsor.

A. While no decision reached on any of these issues, it is clear that Dalai Lama will feel greatly let down if at least some of the Free World nations do not take an active role in presenting his case and in seeking some concrete action such as condemnation by the General Assembly.

B. Dalai Lama is well-educated in Tibetan terms; in our terms, however, [DELETE] while deeply patriotic [but] he is politically unsophisticated person who cannot be expected to comprehend complex issues which must be considered by various Free World governments in deciding their positions even in this clear-cut case of Communist wrongdoing.

V. There would be two possible bases for a case before the United Nations: A charge of Chinese Communist violation of the human rights provisions of the United Nations Charter, or a charge of violating the Genocide Convention – a United Nations agreement.

A. Probability of some from of action in the United Nations at least on Genocide basis is heightened by a 206-page report documenting genocide charges issued last Friday (24 July) by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) and submitted to the United Nations Secretary-General.

A history of acts of genocide. Following attempts by the Tibetan government to secure international support against the Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet, and in response to the widespread, systematic and targeted nature of the violence and physical destruction of the 1950s, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), a group of international legal scholars based in Geneva, produced two reports on evidence relating to the question of genocide in Tibet. Its 1960 report found that “acts of genocide had been committed in Tibet in an attempt to destroy the Tibetans as a religious group.”2

-- 60 Years of Chinese Misrule Arguing Cultural Genocide in Tibet, by International Campaign for Tibet, a Report by the International Campaign for Tibet, Washington, DC, Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, London. http://www.savetibet.org

VI. Unfortunately, the soundings [DELETE] taken in various Far Eastern countries indicate that, with the exception of the Governments of South Vietnam and the Republic of China, no Asian government is willing to take the lead in sponsoring the Tibetan case at the United Nations or in granting asylum to the Dalai Lama should he have to leave India.

A. South Vietnam is of course not a member of the UN. so could not be a sponsor; sponsorship by the Chinese Nationalists should be avoided if the Tibetan case is to have its fullest impact on Asians in general.

VII. Reasons for Asian unwillingness to act vary from country to country.

A. Burma does not wish to compound its difficulties with the Chinese Communists over Burma’s disputed northern border.

B. Reasons for Thailand’s foot-dragging are not entirely clear but involve among other factors the different form of Buddhism practiced there.

C. Moslem countries and the Catholic Philippines are not willing to take any initiative as long as the Buddhist countries remain on the side lines.

VIII. The lack of support by Asian governments has extended even to an unwillingness to offer the Dalai Lama official invitations to visit their countries.

A. Although the United States has informed the Dalai Lama that we consider an early visit to Asian capitals desirable, he has refused to do so except in response to an official initiative from one or more, probably feeling that an unofficial visit might cut the ground from under his claim to being the head of a government-in-exile.

B. He has, however, indicated willingness to send delegates representing him to countries which extend nonofficial invitations.

Part 1 of 3

Tibet House US: Overview
by Tibet House US
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-- Tibet Society, by tibetsociety.com

-- Tibetan Friendship Group, by tibet.org

"The CIA started Tibet House, using the Dalai Lama and his first ordained Western monk, [Robert] Thurman, now president of Tibet House in NYC, to do the job. Leila Luce is on the board of trustees of Tibet House, she is the wife of Henry Luce III, whose father founded Time and was an early supporter of the CIA, using Time magazine journalists as operatives. Mrs. Luce is also on the board of Tricycle. 'In 1992, she joined the board of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, for which she is also a consulting editor.' She has just been sued by her daughter and granddaughter for committing sexual abuses on her daughter and granddaughter."

-- Am Learning, aka Elsa Cloud (Victoria Barlow, Leila Luce's daughter)

Gyalo [Thondup, the Dalai Lama's brother] proved his abilities in another CIA-supported venture. Because the Dalai Lama had long desired the creation of a central Tibetan cultural institution, the agency supplied Gyalo with secret funds to assemble a collection of wall hangings -- called thankas -- and other art treasures from all the major Tibetan Buddhist sects. A plot of land was secured in the heart of New Delhi, and the Tibet House -- consisting of a museum, library, and emporium -- was officially opened in October 1965 by the Indian minister of education and the Dalai Lama. It remains a major attraction to this day.

-- The CIA's Secret War in Tibet, by Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison

PATRON’S VISION

Tibet House US was founded at the request of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who at the inauguration in 1987 stated his wish for a long-term cultural institution to ensure the survival of Tibetan civilization and culture, whatever the political destiny of the six million people of Tibet itself.

“I feel that Tibetan culture with its unique heritage - –born of the efforts of many human beings of good spirit, of its contacts with Mongolian, Chinese, Indian, Nepalese and Persian culture, and of its natural environment -– has developed a kind of energy which is very helpful for cultivating peace of mind and a joyful life.

I feel that there is a potential for Tibet to help humanity, and particularly our Eastern neighbor, where millions of young Chinese have lost their spiritual values. In this way, I feel very strongly that Tibetan culture will have a role to play in the future of humanity.”

– His Holiness the Dalai Lama

MISSION AND HISTORY

Tibet House US is dedicated to preserving Tibet’s unique culture at a time when it is confronted with extinction on its own soil. By presenting Tibetan civilization and its profound wisdom, beauty, and special art of freedom to the people of the world, we hope to inspire others to join the effort to protect and save it.

Tibet House US is part of a worldwide network of Tibetan institutions committed to ensuring that the light of the Tibetan spirit never disappears from the face of this earth.

Tibet House US: The First 30 Years

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Tibetan History

HISTORICAL SUMMARY

The Tibetan people are uniquely adapted to live on the one million square mile Tibetan plateau, the highest land-mass in the world, averaging 14,000 feet in altitude.

Politically, Tibet is an ancient nation with a recorded history dating back to 127 B.C.E. After uniting the plateau into a single country, the Tibetan Empire reached its peak during the 7th and 8th centuries, conquering parts of Nepal and India, the Silk Route states, and briefly even T’ang China. The Tibetan kings imported Buddhism from India from the 6th to the 9th century, and became so devoted to its teachings of nonviolence and enlightenment that they neglected their military empire.

In the 13th century, Tibet surrendered to the Mongols to avoid an invasion and became a tributary to the Mongol Empire until 1368. During China’s Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Tibet was completely independent under three Tibetan ruling houses.

In 1642, the Great Fifth Dalai Lama created the Ganden government, with a unique monastic/secular-coordinated administration. This government demilitarized Tibet and officially formed it into a spiritual nation that supported Buddhist education above all, and was economically self sufficient.

In foreign affairs, the Dalai Lama became the mentor of the new Manchu emperor of Manchuria and China, and received worldly protection for Tibet, in exchange for his providing spiritual teachings to the Manchurians and maintaining the peace with the Mongolians and Uighurs.

In 1904, the British invaded Tibet, to impose trade upon the Tibetan government, and to prevent Tibet’s coming under the protection of Russia.

In 1949 and 1950, the People’s Liberation Army of the People’s Republic of China invaded the eastern provinces of Amdo and Kham.

In 1951, when world governments, including India, England, and the US, declined to confirm Tibet’s inviolate national status, the Chinese government imposed the so-called “17-point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet” on the Tibetan government and soon after marched unopposed into the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. Resistance to the Chinese occupation escalated, particularly in eastern Tibet, and Chinese repression increased dramatically.

By 1959, popular uprisings led to a massacre of Tibetans in Lhasa; His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was forced to flee to India for his safety, where he has lived in exile ever since with around 100,000 of his people. Since the invasion, an estimated 1.2 million Tibetans have been killed as a result of the Chinese occupation.

After escaping in 1959, His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama established a democratic government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India. In 1989, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his long-term efforts to resolve the Tibetan plight peacefully.

-- A Matter of Fact, by Alfred P. Rubin

-- "Tibetan Declaration of Independence": Proclamation Issued by His Holiness the 13th Dalai Lama in 1913

-- Tibet’s Declarations of Independence, by David A. McCabe

-- Declaration of Independence, by Wikipedia

-- State of the Union, by Wikipedia

-- Imperial cult, by Wikipedia

-- Divine Right of Kings, by Wikipedia

-- The Measure of All Things: Natural Hierarchy in Roman Republican Thought, A dissertation presented by Erika Lawren Nickerson

STATE OF THE DISUNION ADDRESS, BY THE 13TH DALAI LAMA [AKA THE 13TH DALAI LAMA'S DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AGAINST THE TYRANNY OF TIBET]

I, the Dalai Lama, most omniscient possessor of the Buddhist faith, whose title was conferred by the Lord Buddha’s command from the glorious land of India, speak to you as follows:

I am speaking to all classes of Tibetan people….

A few years ago, the Chinese authorities in Szechuan and Yunnan endeavored to colonize our territory. They brought large numbers of troops into central Tibet on the pretext of policing the trade marts…. the existing relationship between Tibet and China had been that of patron and priest and had not been based on the subordination of one to the other…. I am now in the course of driving out the remnants of Chinese troops from DoKham in Eastern Tibet.… the patron-priest relationship has faded ….

Except for special persons, the administrators of monasteries are forbidden to trade, loan money, deal in any kind of livestock, and/or subjugate another’s subjects….

The Tibetan government’s civil and military officials, when collecting taxes or dealing with their subject citizens, should carry out their duties with fair and honest judgment so as to benefit the government without hurting the interests of the subject citizens. Some of the central government officials posted at Ngari Korsum in western Tibet, and Do Kham in eastern Tibet, are coercing their subject citizens to purchase commercial goods at high prices and have imposed transportation rights exceeding the limit permitted by the government. Houses, properties and lands belonging to subject citizens have been confiscated on the pretext of minor breaches of the law. Furthermore, the amputation of citizens’ limbs has been carried out as a form of punishment. Henceforth, such severe punishments are forbidden…..

We are a small, religious, and independent nation….. To safeguard and maintain the independence of our country, one and all should voluntarily work hard. Our subject citizens residing near the borders should be alert and keep the government informed by special messenger of any suspicious developments. Our subjects must not create major clashes between two nations because of minor incidents.

Tibet, although thinly populated, is an extensive country. Some local officials and landholders are jealously obstructing other people from developing vacant lands, even though they are not doing so themselves. People with such intentions are enemies of the State and our progress. From now on, no one is allowed to obstruct anyone else from cultivating whatever vacant lands are available. Land taxes will not be collected until three years have passed; after that the land cultivator will have to pay taxes to the government and to the landlord every year, proportionate to the rent. The land will belong to the cultivator…..

Your duties to the government and to the people will have been achieved when you have executed all that I have said here.

-- State of the Disunion Address, by the 13th Dalai Lama

TIBETAN DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

The Manchu army sent troops to Tibet in 1909, prompting the 13th Dalai Lama to escape to India. However, as the Manchu dynasty succumbed to a Chinese revolution, Tibetans seized the moment and expelled the Manchu troops from Tibet. China’s provisional President, Yuan Shikai, sent a telegram to the 13th Dalai Lama, restoring his earlier titles. The Dalai Lama spurned these titles, replying that he “intended to exercise both temporal and ecclesiastical rule in Tibet.”

Then, the 13th Dalai Lama returned to Tibet and issued a proclamation to mark the restoration of Tibetan independence.

Tibetan Declaration of Independence
Proclamation Issued by His Holiness the 13th Dalai Lama in 1913

PROCLAMATION ISSUED BY H.H. THE DALAI LAMA XIII, ON THE EIGHTH DAY OF THE FIRST MONTH OF THE WATER-OX YEAR (1913)

Translation of the Tibetan Text

I, the Dalai Lama, most omniscient possessor of the Buddhist faith, whose title was conferred by the Lord Buddha’s command from the glorious land of India, speak to you as follows:

I am speaking to all classes of Tibetan people. Lord Buddha, from the glorious country of India, prophesied that the reincarnations of Avalokitesvara, through successive rulers from the early religious kings to the present day, would look after the welfare of Tibet.

During the time of Genghis Khan and Altan Khan of the Mongols, the Ming dynasty of the Chinese, and the Ch’ing Dynasty of the Manchus, Tibet and China cooperated on the basis of benefactor and priest relationship. A few years ago, the Chinese authorities in Szechuan and Yunnan endeavored to colonize our territory. They brought large numbers of troops into central Tibet on the pretext of policing the trade marts. I, therefore, left Lhasa with my ministers for the Indo-Tibetan border, hoping to clarify to the Manchu emperor by wire that the existing relationship between Tibet and China had been that of patron and priest and had not been based on the subordination of one to the other. There was no other choice for me but to cross the border, because Chinese troops were following with the intention of taking me alive or dead.

On my arrival in India, I dispatched several telegrams to the Emperor; but his reply to my demands was delayed by corrupt officials at Peking. Meanwhile, the Manchu empire collapsed. The Tibetans were encouraged to expel the Chinese from central Tibet. I, too, returned safely to my rightful and sacred country, and I am now in the course of driving out the remnants of Chinese troops from DoKham in Eastern Tibet. Now, the Chinese intention of colonizing Tibet under the patron-priest relationship has faded like a rainbow in the sky. Having once again achieved for ourselves a period of happiness and peace, I have now allotted to all of you the following duties to be carried out without negligence:

1. Peace and happiness in this world can only be maintained by preserving the faith of Buddhism. It is, therefore, essential to preserve all Buddhist institutions in Tibet, such as the Jokhang temple and Ramoche in Lhasa, Samye, and Traduk in southern Tibet, and the three great monasteries, etc.

2. The various Buddhist sects in Tibet should be kept in a distinct and pure form. Buddhism should be taught, learned, and meditated upon properly. Except for special persons, the administrators of monasteries are forbidden to trade, loan money, deal in any kind of livestock, and/or subjugate another’s subjects.

3. The Tibetan government’s civil and military officials, when collecting taxes or dealing with their subject citizens, should carry out their duties with fair and honest judgment so as to benefit the government without hurting the interests of the subject citizens. Some of the central government officials posted at Ngari Korsum in western Tibet, and Do Kham in eastern Tibet, are coercing their subject citizens to purchase commercial goods at high prices and have imposed transportation rights exceeding the limit permitted by the government. Houses, properties and lands belonging to subject citizens have been confiscated on the pretext of minor breaches of the law. Furthermore, the amputation of citizens’ limbs has been carried out as a form of punishment. Henceforth, such severe punishments are forbidden.

4. Tibet is a country with rich natural resources; but it is not scientifically advanced like other lands. We are a small, religious, and independent nation. To keep up with the rest of the world, we must defend our country. In view of past invasions by foreigners, our people may have to face certain difficulties, which they must disregard. To safeguard and maintain the independence of our country, one and all should voluntarily work hard. Our subject citizens residing near the borders should be alert and keep the government informed by special messenger of any suspicious developments. Our subjects must not create major clashes between two nations because of minor incidents.

5. Tibet, although thinly populated, is an extensive country. Some local officials and landholders are jealously obstructing other people from developing vacant lands, even though they are not doing so themselves. People with such intentions are enemies of the State and our progress. From now on, no one is allowed to obstruct anyone else from cultivating whatever vacant lands are available. Land taxes will not be collected until three years have passed; after that the land cultivator will have to pay taxes to the government and to the landlord every year, proportionate to the rent. The land will belong to the cultivator.

Your duties to the government and to the people will have been achieved when you have executed all that I have said here. This letter must be posted and proclaimed in every district of Tibet, and a copy kept in the records of the offices in every district.

From the Potala Palace.
(Seal of the Dalai Lama)
Source (and further reading):

Tibet: A Political History, Tsepon W.D. Shakabpa, New Haven, 1967, pp. 246-248.

CONTEMPORARY SITUATION

Historical Tibet consisted of three provinces, U-Tsang, Kham, and Amdo, filling the one million square miles of the Tibetan plateau. The Chinese annexed the whole of Amdo and most of Kham, incorporating the land into bordering Chinese provinces. The remaining area, the Tibetan U-Tsang province and part of Kham, has been renamed the “Tibet Autonomous Region.”

The “Tibet Autonomous Region” is about one third the size of the original Tibet, and it is this area alone that China officially refers to as “Tibet.” This explains why, although Tibetans count themselves as 6 million people, the Chinese often set the number at 2 million.

CULTURAL DESTRUCTION

By 1969, approximately 6,250 monasteries, the cultural centers of Tibetan life, had been destroyed. In the 1980’s, some were rebuilt and re-opened, but the Chinese authorities tightly control activities in these monasteries, forcing individual monks and nuns to apply for a permit in order to join.

Strict regulations require an oath of allegiance to communist ideals. Devotion to, and even photographs of, His Holiness the Dalai Lama are banned both inside and outside the monasteries.

Prisons and labor camps are among the most common methods of persecution. Numerous Tibetans have perished from starvation and hard labor while in captivity.

ENVIRONMENTAL DEVASTATION

Tibet’s high plains, forests, and mountains form a unique high altitude ecosystem.

With an average elevation of 14,000 feet, Tibet is literally the highest nation on earth.

Five of Asia’s great rivers, including the Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra), Senge Khabab (Indus), the Langchen Khabab (Sutlej), the Macha Khabab (Karnali), Arun (Phongchu), the Gyalmo Ngulchu (Salween), the Zachu (Mekong), the Drichu (Yangtse) and Machu (Huang he or Yellow River), flow from Tibet into China, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. This river system, of rivers and their tributaries, are the life blood of billions of people on the Asian.

More than 15,000 natural lakes are also found in Tibet. Some of the prominent lakes are Tso Ngonpo (Kokonor lake) being the largest, Mapham Yumtso (Mansarovar), Namtso, and Yamdrok Tso. Research figures show that rivers originating from Tibet sustain the lives of 47% of the world’s population, and 85% of Asia’s total population. Thus, the environmental issues affecting Tibet are not inconsequential regional issues, but have global significance warranting international attention. More than ever before, the need to save the Tibetan Plateau from ecological devastation is urgent. It is not only the question of the survival of Tibetans, but the survival of half of humanity.

Tibet’s forest cover totaled 25.2 million hectares. Most forests grow on steppes, isolated slopes of above 35 degrees in the river valleys of Tibet’s low lying southeastern region. The principle types of flora are tropical Montana and subtropical Montana coniferous forests, with evergreen spruce, fir, pine, larch, cypress, birch and oak among the main species.

Tibet also had rich and untapped mineral resources. It has deposits of about 126 different minerals accounting for a significant share of the entire world’s reserves of gold, lithium, uranium, chromite, copper, borax and iron. Tibet has the largest high-grade uranium deposit in the world. Amdo’s oil fields produce over 1 million tons of crude oil per year.

Tibet’s high plains, forests and mountains form a unique ecosystem on the planet and are home to an array of rare wildlife, including the snow leopard, clouded leopard, lynx, Tibetan takin [goat-antelope], Himalayan black bear, brown bear, wild yak (drong), blue sheep, musk deer, golden monkey, wild ass (Kyang), Tibetan gazelle, Himalayan mouse hare, Tibetan antelope, giant panda, red panda and others. This ecosystem and many of its species are now endangered.

In Tibet, there are over 532 different species of birds in 57 families. Some of them include stork, wild swan, Blyth’s kingfisher, goose, jungle flycatcher, redstart, finch, grey-dided thrush, Przewalski’s parrotbill, wagtail, chickadee, large-billed bush warbler, bearded vulture, woodpecker and beautiful nuthatch. The most famous and rare bird is the black-necked crane called trung trung kaynak in Tibetan.

Over 100,000 species of higher plants used to grow in Tibet, many of them rare and endemic. The plant species also include about 2,000 varieties of medicinal plants used in the traditional medical systems of Tibet, China and India. Rhododendron, saffron, bottle-brush, high mountain rhubarb, Himalayan alpine serratula, falconer tree and hellebonne are among the many plants found in Tibet. There are altogether 400 species of rhododendron on the Tibetan Planteau, which make up about 50 percent of the world’s total species. According to Wu and Feng (1992), the Tibetan Plateau is home to over 12,000 species of 1,500 genera of vascular plants.

The Chinese authorities have systematically exploited Tibet’s natural resources, devastating Tibet’s ancient forests and unique wildlife, mining minerals and precious herbs, and using the Tibetan plateau as a nuclear dump site. Construction of the recently completed railway into Lhasa further compromises this naturally fragile ecosystem. The rapid influx of tourists, miners, and Chinese immigrants that the train enables, will continue the trend of environmental destruction unless dramatic steps are taken to protect the land and its resources.

MILITARY INSTALLATIONS

Construction by the Chinese of military installations throughout Tibet, especially within border areas, is increasing. These military bases wreak their own havoc on the delicate mountain and high plateau ecosystems. Their effect on Tibetans attempting to flee to safety outside Tibet or to visit their spiritual leader, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in India, is even more profound. Chinese border patrols stationed at these military bases routinely shoot at Tibetan refugees or arrest them for trying to leave the country, making the naturally arduous passage over high mountains to Nepal even more dangerous.

POPULATION TRANSFER

The most serious threat facing Tibetans is the systematic transfer of Chinese colonists into Tibet. Prior to 1949, there were very few Chinese in Tibet, and most of them were merchants.

More than 8 million Chinese have now settled in Tibet, a population transfer that threatens to overwhelm the remaining 6 million Tibetans and their distinct ancient Buddhist culture.

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FACULTY & FRIENDS

Since our founding in 1987, Tibet House US has been fortunate to have the support and participation of many of the world’s experts on Buddhism, meditation, Tibetan medicine and science, and Tibetan art and culture.

If we have omitted any past teachers, artists or workshop leaders from the list below, please let us know so we can add them.

Jensine Andresen, Ph.D.

[x]
JENSINE ANDRESEN, PH.D.

Jensine Andresen (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1997) is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Religion at Columbia University in NYC. She previously taught at comparative world religions and religion and science at both Boston University and the University of Vermont.

At Boston University, where the ‘Issues for the Millennium’ conference took place, Dr. Andresen taught in the interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Science, Philosophy, and Religion. Her research there focused on bioethics as it relates to social justice and humanitarian concerns, such as those that surround the AIDS crisis in Africa and the world. Her work at BU addressed the interface of theology and public policy as it relates to xenotransplantation, gene therapy, human cloning, stem cell research, and intellectual property rights. Also while at BU, she conducted research on the role of the frontal lobes in mediating the relationship between spirituality and health. While at BU, Dr. Andresen served as Director of InterFASE (International Faith & Science Exchange), an organization committed to furthering dialogue between science and religion in the Boston area and elsewhere throughout the world.

At Columbia University, Dr. Andresen has been focusing on developing a psychoanalytic interpretation of Tibetan Buddhist Vajrayana doctrine and practice as she has worked on translating the Sanskrit commentary on a medieval Indian Buddhist Vajrayana text called the Srilaghu Kalacakratantra. She has also worked extensively on the relationship between the phenomenology of contemplation in the Tibetan ‘Rdzgoschen’ (Great Perfection) system as it relates to contemporary findings in physics. Combining psychoanalytic, postmodern, and phenomenological approaches to the encounter of so-called self and other, she works to understand the interpenetrative arising of cosmology, biology, and awareness.

Publications:
Cognitive Models and Spiritual Maps: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Religious Experience with Robert K. C. Foreman Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Ritual, and Experience.

Stephen Batchelor

[x]
STEPHEN BATCHELOR

Stephen Batchelor is a contemporary Buddhist teacher and writer, best known for his secular or agnostic approach to Buddhism. Stephen considers Buddhism to be a constantly evolving culture of awakening rather than a religious system based on immutable dogmas and beliefs. In particular, he regards the doctrines of karma and rebirth to be features of ancient Indian civilization and not intrinsic to what the Buddha taught. Buddhism has survived for the past 2,500 years because of its capacity to reinvent itself in accord with the needs of the different Asian societies with which it has creatively interacted throughout its history. As Buddhism encounters modernity, it enters a vital new phase of its development. Through his writings, translations and teaching, Stephen engages in a critical exploration of Buddhism’s role in the modern world, which has earned him both condemnation as a heretic and praise as a reformer.

Stephen was born in Dundee, Scotland, on April 7, 1953. After completing his education at Watford Grammar School, he travelled overland to India in February, 1972, at the age of eighteen. He settled in Dharamsala, the capital-in-exile of the Dalai Lama, and studied at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives with Ven. Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey. He was ordained as a novice Buddhist monk in 1974. He left India in 1975 and studied in Switzerland, Germany and then South Korea. He remained in Korea until the autumn of 1984, when he left for a pilgrimage to Japan, China and Tibet.

He disrobed in February 1985 and married Martine Fages in Hong Kong before returning to England and joining the Sharpham North Community in Totnes, Devon, where he became coordinator of the Sharpham Trust and co-founder of the Sharpham College for Buddhist Studies and Contemporary Enquiry.

In August 2000, he and Martine moved to Aquitaine, France, where they live in a small village near Bordeaux with their cat Alex. While at home he pursues his work as a scholar, writer and artist. For several months each year, he travels worldwide to lead meditation retreats and teach Buddhism.

Personal web-site:

Stephen Batchelor

Other web-sites:

http://www.audiodharma.org/talks/StephenBatchelor.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Batchelor

http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j20/batchelor.asp

http://www.hermitary.com/solitude/batchelor.html

http://www.westernchanfellowship.org/ag ... dhist.html

Bibliography:

Living with the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil. New York: Riverhead Books, 2004.
Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime. New York: Riverhead, 2000.
Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening. New York: Riverhead, 1997. UK edition: London: Bloomsbury, 1998.<
The Awakening of the West: The Encounter of Buddhism and Western Culture. London: Aquarian Press/ Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1994.
The Faith to Doubt: Glimpses of Buddhist Uncertainty. Berkeley: Parallax Press
The Tibet Guide. London/Boston, 1987. .
Alone With Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism. New York: Grove Press, 1983.
Translator (from Tibetan)

Geshe Rabten. Song of the Profound View. London/Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1989.
Geshe Rabten. The Mind and its Functions: A Textbook of Buddhist Epistemology and Psychology. Mt. Pelerin, Switzerland: Rabten Choeling, 1991.
Geshe Rabten. Echoes of Voidness. London/Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1983. Italian translation: Le Tre Vie per la Realizzazione della Vacuita. Rome: Ubaldini Editore, 1985.
German translation: Essenz der Weisheit. Hamburg, Dharma, 1990.
Shantideva. A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life. Dharamsala, India: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1979.

Thomas Berry

[x]

Thomas Berry was born in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1914. From his academic beginnings as a historian of world cultures and religions, Berry developed into a historian of the Earth and its evolutionary processes. He describes himself as a “geologian”.

Berry received his Ph.D. in European Intellectual History with a thesis on Giambattista Vico’s philosophy of history. Widely read in Western history, he also spent many years studying the cultural history of Asia. He has lived in China and traveled to other parts of Asia. He authored two books on Asian religions, Buddhism and Religions of India. For two decades, he directed the Riverdale Center of Religious Research along the Hudson River.

“The basic mood of the future might well be one of confidence in the continuing revelation that takes place in and through the Earth. If the dynamics of the Universe from the beginning shaped the course of the heavens, lighted the sun, and formed the Earth, if this same dynamism brought forth the continents and the seas and atmosphere, if it awakened life in the primordial cell and then brought into being the unnumbered variety of living beings, and finally brought us into being and guided us safely through the turbulent centuries, there is reason to believe that this same guiding process is precisely what has awakened in us our present understanding of ourselves and our relation to this stupendous process. Sensitized to such guidance from the very structure and functioning of the Universe, we can have confidence in the future that awaits the human venture.” — “The New Story” The Dream of the Earth

Personal Website:

Thomas Berry.com

Other Websites:

http://www.earthlight.org/mfoxontberry.html

http://www.astepback.com/12principles.htm

Thomas Berry on Apps Voices

http://www.earth-community.org/

Publications:

Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community
Dream of the Earth
The Great Work
The Universe Story (with Brian Swimme)
Buddhism
Religions of India

Alexander Berzin

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ALEXANDER BERZIN

Alexander Berzin, born in 1944 in Paterson, New Jersey, he was educated in America before studying in Dharamsala on a Fulbright Scholarship. There he practiced with masters from all four Tibetan Buddhist traditions. His main teacher was Tsenzhab Serkong Rinpoche, the late Master Debate Partner and Assistant Tutor of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He served as his interpreter and secretary for nine years, accompanying him on several world tours. He has also served as occasional Dharma interpreter for His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

A founding member of the Translation Bureau of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, Berzin has developed a new terminology for translating, into English, Tibetan technical terms that have often been misunderstood.

Since 1983, Berzin has been traveling around the world, teaching various aspects of Buddhist practice and philosophy, as well as Tibetan-Mongolian history and astro-medical theory, at Dharma centers and universities in more than seventy countries. His work has involved him with a Tibetan medical aid program for Chernobyl victims, a project in Mongolia to produce Buddhism books in the local, colloquial language as well as establishing and furthering a Buddhist-Islamic dialogue.

He currently lives in Berlin, Germany.

Personal website:

Alexander Berzin

Other websites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Berzin

http://www.congress-on-buddhist-women.o ... php?id=101

Publications:

Wisdom Energy : Basic Buddhist Teachings: by Jonathan Landaw, Alexander Berzin, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Thubten Yeshe, Lama Yeshe, Rinpoche Thubten Zopa
Relating to a Spiritual Teacher : Building a Healthy Relationship cover Relating to a Spiritual Teacher : Building a Healthy Relationship
Developing Balanced Sensitivity : Practical Buddhist Exercises for Daily Life
Kalachakra and Other Six-Session Yoga Texts
Taking the Kalachakra Initiation cover Taking the Kalachakra Initiation
The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra cover The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra
Russia’s Tibet File : The Unknown Pages in the History of Tibet’s Independence
Wisdom Energy : Basic Buddhist Teachings cover Wisdom Energy : Basic Buddhist Teachings

Cristina Biaggi, PhD

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CRISTINA BIAGGI, PHD

To her work as an artist, sculptor, writer and lecturer on the Great Goddess, Dr. Cristina Biaggi brings a strong background in the classics, art and art history, archaeology, literature, and languages acquired at Vassar College, Harvard University, the University of Mexico City, the University of Utah, and New York University. She has taught Art History, Sculpture, Mythology and Drawing and is world-renowned for her contribution to the field of Goddess-centered art and scholarly studies.

Dr. Biaggi’s work reflects her strong desire to provide women today with an opportunity to experience a connection with the Goddess within themselves. It is her hope that she will motivate women to seek to build a more peaceful and caring society.

Dr. Biaggi’s work has been exhibited throughout Europe, Australia, and the United States. Her one-woman exhibitions number more than twenty, among them the “Womenís Beijing Sphere and Other Spheres” (1996), “Painting with My Granddaughter” (1995), which was recognized by The New York Times, and “Images of the Dark Goddess,” her one-woman exhibition at Manhattan’s Phoenix Gallery. She also exhibits at Ceres Gallery in New York City.

Personal website:

cristinabiaggi.com

Other websites:

http://www.sculpture.org/portfolio/scul ... id=1000228

http://www.gimbutas.org/marija/bios/cri ... iaggi.html

http://www.ceresgallery.org/biaggi.html

Publications:

The Rule of Mars: Readings on the Origins, History and Impact of Patriarchy
Habitations of the Great Goddess
In the Footsteps of the Goddess

Joseph Bobrow

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JOSEPH BOBROW

Joseph Bobrow is the founder and president of the Coming Home Project and Deep Streams Zen Institute. A Zen master in the Diamond Sangha tradition, he is also a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. Joseph writes on Zen, psychotherapy, and the interplay of Western psychology, Buddhism, and the beloved community in transforming suffering.

He is a licensed psychologist in private practice in San Francisco and a faculty member and supervisory and personal analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. A Zen master in the Aitken-Harada tradition, he has been teaching Zen since 1987. He also studied with Thich Nhat Hanh in the early 1980’s at Plum Village in southern France, where he co-translated Nhat Hanh’s Guide To Walking Meditation.

His writings explore Buddhism, psychoanalysis, and their interplay in relieving suffering and helping us realize and embody our true nature. He is the founder of Deep Streams Zen Institute, which offers Zen practice; provides continuing education for mental health practitioners, drawing on Buddhism (including Vipassana and Tibetan traditions), the creative arts, and leading edge science; and serves the community through innovative peace-building programs.

Joseph Bobrow is a faculty member and personal/supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, and a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association. He teaches throughout the United States.

Personal website:

http://www.deepstreams.org/

Other websites:

http://www.dharmaweb.org/index.php/Joseph_Bobrow

http://www.bpf.org/html/resources_and_l ... obrow.html

Publications:

A Guide to Walking Meditation, co-translator. Thich Nhat Hanh.
The Jewel of Liberation: Zen writings and Talks.
Coming to Life: The Creative Intercourse of Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism; in Soul on the Couch: Spirituality, Religion, and Morality in Contemporary Psychoanalysis.
The Fertile Mind; in The Couch and the Tree: Dialogues in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism.
Reverie in Psychoanalysis and Zen: Harvesting The Ordinary.
Psychoanalysis, Mysticism and the Incommunicado Core, Fort Da, Journal of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology.
Moments of Truth — Truths of Moment; in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism – An Evolving Dialogue.

John Brzostoski

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JOHN BRZOSTOSKI

John Brzostoski, painter, writer, lecturer, curator of the Tibetan art collection of the Riverside Museum, and founder and director of the Center of Oriental Studies, has taught Buddhist and Oriental philosophy and art as well as contemporary art since 1950.

In addition, he is a cartoonist, graphic novelist and folk teller. Among his projects is “bLama Quest – An Adventure of Tibet”, a graphic novel that tells the tale of a spiritual seeker in Tibet and his quest for enlightenment through a series of adventures and seemingly non-interrelated mishaps.

Website:

John Brzostoski

Ven. Chagdud Rinpoche

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VEN. CHAGDUD RINPOCHE

H.E. Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche (1930-2002) is a renowned teacher of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism. H.E. Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche is the fourteenth recognized Chagdud incarnation. Chagdud means “iron knot,” and is said to derive from one Sherab Gyaltsan, the first Chagdud incarnation, who folded an iron sword into a knot with his bare hands. This feat deeply impressed the emperor of Mongolia and inspired him to shower honors on Chagdud. Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche demonstrated the same extraordinary power several times in his youth when he compressed stout swords into folds.

Following Tibet’s invasion by China in 1959, Chagdud spent twenty years in India and Nepal working as a doctor and teaching in the refugee camps. In 1979 he traveled to America to establish the Dharma and the Red Tara practice as foretold in a dream. He was responsible for bringing many high Lamas and yogis to the west. In 1995 he settled in Brazil, where he lived until his miraculous death.

As well as the original Gonpa in Nyagrong, Eastern Tibet, more than 38 Dharma centers have been established under Chagdud Tulku’s supervision and inspiration, in America, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Switzerland and Australia. The best known are Rigzin Ling in Junction City, California and Khadro Ling, his main center in Três Coroas, Brazil.

Websites:

Chagdud Gonpa Foundation – North America

CHAGDUD GONPA AMRITA

Publications:

Lord of the Dance, Chagdud Rinpoche’s autobiography, Padma Publishing
Delog: Realms Beyond Death, by Delog Dawa Drolma, Padma Publishing
Gates to Buddhist Practice, Padma Publishing
Life in Relation to Death, Padma Publishing
Change of Heart, Padma Publishing

Dr. Tenzin Choedrak

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DR. TENZIN CHOEDRAK

Dr. Tenzin Choedrak was born in 1924 at Ringpung Dzong, Shigatse, Tibet, and is one of the most eminent masters of the Tibetan medical tradition. After the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959 he was imprisoned by the Communist Chinese for nearly 22 years. He managed to flee and arrived in Dharamsala in 1980. Dr. Choedrak is presently the Senior Personal Physician to His Holiness the Dalai Lama as well as the Chief Doctor and Director of Men-Tsee-Khang’s Pharmaceutical Department. Dr. Choedrak first visited the West in 1984 to attend an international conference on Tibetan medicine held in Venice, Italy, followed by a visit to the United States. In 1987, he visited New York, Washington, D.C., Phoenix and San Francisco to investigate the possibility of creating a scientific research program to test the effectiveness of Tibetan medicine in treating various diseases such as cancer, hepatitis, arthritis and AIDS. In the following years, he visited France, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, Mongolia, Japan, and Mexico for medical consultations, lectures, seminars and exhibitions on Tibetan medicine. A medical team headed by Dr. Choedrak conducted the first Men-Tsee-Khang exhibition of Tibetan medicine, astronomy and astrology in 12 cities in 8 European countries in 1995 and later, in 1997, repeated this exhibition in 8 cities in the United States. In 1998 Dr. Choedrak visited France, Canada and the United States for medical consultations and lectures.

Other websites:

buddhapia.com

Publications:

The Rainbow Palace by Tenzin Choedrak and Gilles van Grasdorff

Ven. Thubten Chodron

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VEN. THUBTEN CHODRON

Born in 1950, Thubten Chodron grew up near Los Angeles. She graduated with a B.A. in History from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1971. After travelling through Europe, North Africa and Asia, she received a teaching credential and went to the University of Southern California to do post-graduate work in Education while working as a teacher in the Los Angeles City School System.

In 1975, she attended a meditation course given by Ven. Lama Yeshe and Ven. Zopa Rinpoche, and subsequently went to their monastery in Nepal to continue to study and practice Buddha’s teachings. In 1977, she received the sramanerika (novice) ordination, and in 1986, received bhikshuni (full) ordination in Taiwan.

She studied and practiced Buddhism of the Tibetan tradition for many years in India and Nepal under the guidance of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Tsenzhap Serkong Rinpoche, Zopa Rinpoche and other Tibetan masters for many years. Ven. Chodron currently travels worldwide to teach the Dharma. She founded Sravasti Abbey in Washington State and is currently involved in developing it. She also works with prison inmates and hosts an ongoing collection of their writings on her ‘Prison Dharma’ webpage.

Ven. Chodron emphasizes the practical application of Buddha’s teachings in our daily lives and is especially skilled at explaining them in ways easily understood and practiced by Westerners. She is well-known for her warm, humorous, and lucid teachings.

Personal website:

thubtenchodron.org

Other websites:

http://www.sravastiabbey.org/

http://www.monasticdialog.com/a.php?id=420

Publications:

Open heart, clear mind
Buddhism for beginners
Taming the Mind
How to Free Your Mind: Tara the Liberator
Transforming Adversity into Joy and Courage
Working with anger (by Snowlion)
Transforming problems
Guided Meditations on the Stages of the Path
Guided meditations on the Lamrim
Pearl of wisdom (book I)
Pearl of wisdom (book II)
A chat about Heruka
A chat about Yamantaka
Heruka body mandala
The yoga method of Chenrezig: sadhana and commentary
Cultivating a Compassionate Heart: The Yoga Method of Chenrezig
Preparing for ordination
Choosing simplicity

Ven. Za Choejay Rinpoche

VEN. ZA CHOEJAY RINPOCHE
Za Choeje Rinpoche was identified by H.H. the Dalai Lama as the sixth reincarnation of ZaChoeje Rinpoche. At the age of 16 he entered Drepung Loseling Monastery where, after ten years of study, he graduated with the Geshe Lharampa degree and continued his studies at Gyume Tantric College in India. Rinpoche first came to the U.S. in 1998 as leader of the Mystical Arts of Tibet Tour and remained to lecture on Tibetan culture and philosophy at Emory University. In 2001, together with friends and students, he established Emaho Foundation of Scottsdale, Arizona where he is the resident teacher.

Za Choeje Rinpoche gave a Green Tara empowerment in Amherst in November 2005 following the White Tara Mandala Ceremony with the monks of Drepung Loseling at the University of Massachusetts.

Other websites:

http://www.manjushriinstitute.org/staff.html

http://ancienthealing.org/general/za-rinpoche.php

Za Choeje Rinpoche on Buddhist Library

Publications:

The Backdoor to Enlightenment; Eight Steps to Living Your Dreams and Changing Your World by Za Rinpoche and Ashley Nebelsieck

Deepak Chopra, M.D.

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DEEPAK CHOPRA, M.D.

Deepak Chopra is one of the leading mind-body spirit Gurus. He seeks to teach the benefits of incorporating meditation and a healthy lifestyle for increasing inner happiness.

Deepak Chopra was born in New Dehli, India in 1947. He attended the All India Institute of Medical sciences studying western medicine. In 1968 he came to America and began working in a New Jersey hospital. This led to a successful career in medicine in which he became chief of staff at the New England Memorial Hospital. He also established a growing private medical practice. During this time Deepak Chopra says that he used to smoke a packet of cigarettes a day and also he used to drink heavily to calm his nerves. Increasingly he became uneasy at his approach to life and also he became aware of the limitations of Western medicine. He felt there was something missing in his approach to medical care. Therefore he increasingly became interested in Ayurvedic medicine, which stresses a more holistic approach to medical care.

After studying the ancient Indian system of ayurveda and yoga in 1995 He founded the The Chopra Center for Well Being in California. This serves as a vehicle for spreading his message of alternative medicine and holistic well being. He sees his mission as “bridging the technological miracles of the west with the wisdom of the east”

His main teaching and beliefs are that to attain happiness we need to consider several things. Firstly we should find time for meditation and silencing the mind. This helps us to avoid negative emotions and thoughts. Deepak stresses that negative emotions are like toxins just like bad food could be. He also teaches that we should try to listen to the signals of our body and develop our intuition. With regard to physical health he says there is a close connection between our physical health and our state of mind. This is why he is often associated as one of the pre-eminent leaders of the mind body spirit movement.

Personal website:

http://deepakchopra.com/

http://www.chopra.com/

Publications:

Creating Health
The Path to Love: Spiritual Strategies for Healing
The Path to Love: Renewing the Power of Spirit in Your Life
The Seven Spiritual Laws for Parents: Guiding Your Children to Success and Fulfillment
Everyday Immortality: A Concise Course in Spiritual Transformation
Lords of Light: A Novel
The Angel is Near: A Novel 2000 How to Know God : The Soul’s Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries
The Deeper Wound: Recovering the Soul from Fear and Suffering, 100 Days of Healing
Grow Younger, Live Longer: 10 Steps to Reverse Aging ISBN 0-609-60079-6
Manifesting Good Luck Cards: Growth and Enlightenment
Golf for Enlightenment: The Seven Lessons for the Game of Life
The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence ISBN 0-609-60042-7
Synchrodestiny: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence to Create Miracles ISBN 1-84413-221-8
Manifesting Good Luck: Love and Relationships, 50 Card Deck
The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life ISBN 0-517-70624-5
Fire in the Heart: A Spiritual Guide for Teens ISBN 0-689-86216-4
Peace Is the Way : Bringing War and Violence to an End ISBN 0-307-23607-2
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Yoga: A Practical Guide to Healing Body, Mind, and Spirit
Ask The Kabala: Oracle Cards/Kabala Guidebook ISBN 978-1401910396
Power Freedom and Grace: Living from the Source of Lasting Happiness ISBN 978-1-878424-81-5
Life After Death: The Burden of Proof ISBN 0-307-34578-5
Kama Sutra: Including the Seven Spiritual Laws of Love ISBN 978-1-852273-85-9
Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment ISBN 978-0-06-087880-1
The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore ISBN 978-0-307-33831-0
Why Is God Laughing? The Path to Joy and Spiritual Optimism
Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment ISBN 978-0061448737

Lindsey & Bobby Clennell

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LINDSEY & BOBBY CLENNELL

Bobby Clennell has practiced yoga since 1975 and taught since 1977. She has studied in India B. K. S. Iyengar her primary teacher.

In 1991, after working in film animation in London for 20 years, she moved to New York. Incorporating her skills as an animator and illustrator, she has written and illustrated three yoga manuals: Props and Ailments, detailing the therapeutic applications of Iyengar Yoga props; Iyengar Yoga Glossary, an introduction to the unique “language” of Iyengar Yoga; and A Cosmic Body Map, a key to the Vedic gods, their location and function within the body, and their mythological significance.

Bobby is experienced in using yoga for therapeutic purposes, including fertility and prenatal needs. Her newest book, A Woman’s Yoga Practice: Poses for the Menstrual Cycle, is to be published in 2006.

“In my teaching, I try to help students restore the balance between the constant pull of the external world and our own—oftentimes neglected—individual world,” she says. “Yoga helps us operate on a quieter, less ego-driven path.”

Describing Chaturanga Dandasana as one of her more challenging poses, she says, “All of us face challenges in our individual practice. Have faith and give Iyengar Yoga a chance.”

Lindsey Clennell

Lindsey Clennell has studied yoga since 1970 and taught Iyengar Yoga since 1977with B. K. S. Iyengar, his primary teacher, and the Iyengar family.

Originally a medical student in England, he became a documentary filmmaker and writer, producing and directing more than 200 music videos, concert series, and specials. Among his subjects were Muhammad Ali and Mikhail Gorbachev among others.

Reflecting on one of his last film projects—which led to the release of 30 American hostages before the first Gulf War—Lindsey cites a favorite quote from Sri Aurobindo: “All life is yoga.” Since retiring from film, in 1991, Lindsey has focused solely on Iyengar Yoga and its physical and psychological healing effects. A student of philosophy, Lindsey imparts the in-depth teachings of B. K. S. Iyengar’s presentation of Patanjali’s Astanga Yoga.

“Iyengar Yoga enables students to envision new possibilities,” he says. “It gives them a process for discovery and evolution.” He advises new students to be realistic and to “start with a short but regular practice.”

Personal website:

Bobby Clennell

Other websites:

http://www.iyengarnyc.org/faculty.html

http://www.rodmellpress.com/womansyoga_author.html

Publications:

The Woman’s Yoga Book: Asana and Pranayama for All Phases of the Menstrual Cycle by Bobby Clennell and Geeta S. Iyengar

George Crane

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GEORGE CRANE

George Crane is a traveler and seeker. His journeys have taken him to inner Mongolia, Europe and Tibet. His work has a mixture of travel experiences, poetry, translation and oral storytelling.

Publications:

Pasiglot System, an Entirely New Practical and Theoretical Introduction
Beyond the House of the False Lama : Travels with Monks, Nomads, and Outlaws
Aidan’s Way : The Story of a Boy’s Life and a Father’s Journey
Bones of the Master : A Journey to Secret Mongolia

Howard Cutler, MD

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Samten Dakpa

[x]

Rev. John Dear

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REV. JOHN DEAR

Rev. John Dear is a peace activist and supporter of nuclear disarmament. He has served as executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the largest and oldest interfaith peace organization in the United States; worked in soup kitchens, shelters and community centers; traveled to war zones around the world, including most recently Iraq; lived in El Salvador, Guatemala and Northern Ireland.

He has been arrested 75 times in acts of civil disobedience and spent nearly a year in jail for a Plowshares disarmament in which he and friends symbolically hammered an F-15E nuclear bomber on Seymour Johnson Airforce Base in Goldsboro North Carolina. He was also cited and fined in New Mexico while delivering a petition against the war in Iraq to New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici’s office. He is a contributor at CommonDreams.org and has been nominated for the Nobel Prize.

Personal Website: fatherjohndear.org

Other Websites: commondreams.org

Dr. Yeshi Dhonden

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Geshe Pema Dorjee

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GESHE PEMA DORJEE

Geshe Pema Dorjee is an internationally recognized authority, scholar, and teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. His fluent English, keen intellect, clear and practical explanations, warm-hearted nature, and infectious sense of humor enrich his talks and discussions with meaning and inspiration.

He was born into a nomadic family in Tibet in 1951. They escaped from the invading Chinese, and he settled in Dharamsala, India, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile and the home of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

From 1973 to 1981 at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics founded by H.H. the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, he completed an undergraduate degree and two Masters degrees in Buddhist Philosophy, one in Prajnaparamita (the Perfection of Wisdom) and one in Madhyamika (the Middle Way).

For the next 16 years, he dedicated himself to the Tibetan Children’s Village School located in Dharamsala. For nine of those years, he taught Tibetan Buddhism, language, and culture. In 1990, he was appointed Principal of the school, and from 1993 to 1997 he was its Director.

In 1995, he earned his Geshe degree at the Drepung Loseling Monastery.

Geshe Pema Dorjee served for two years as the Principal of the Tibetan Teachers Training Center. He was then named the first Principal of the College for Higher Tibetan Studies, and he remained in charge of that College from 1997 to 2002.

The Tibetan government-in-exile asked him to undertake various tasks. The Cabinet, for example, appointed him to the Higher Level Textbook Review Committee. His Holiness appointed him as a member of the Public Service Commission. The Department of Health appointed him as spiritual counselor to former political prisoners who had been tortured.

In 2001, H. H. the Dalai Lama asked Geshe Pema Dorjee to revive an important part of Tibetan Buddhism that had fallen into desuetude, the Bodong tradition. Fulfilling this task required him to establish both a scholarly project and a very practical one. To find the lost writings of that ancient tradition, to study them, translate them, and publish them, he founded in 2003 and continues to direct the Bodong Research and Publication Center in Dharamsala. To educate new monks in the Bodong tradition, he founded and continues to direct the Bodong monastery and school known as Porong Pelmo Choeding in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Although he insists that he is only a simple monk, Geshe Pema Dorjee lives the compassionate life about which he preaches. He travels to the most remote and impoverished regions of Himalayan India and Nepal. After a thorough analysis of what is most needed, he creates, organizes, directs, and raises funds for numerous humanitarian projects.

These projects include establishing schools, arranging medical care for the sick and injured, providing care for the elderly, creating an orphanage, supporting a drug rehabilitation center, educating villagers to protect them from human trafficking, creating a safe house for street girls, helping young people in Tibetan refugee camps, introducing new agricultural techniques, and providing safe water, toilets, and smokeless cookstoves.

Since 1997, he has donated much of his time to teaching and lecturing about Buddhist philosophy in countries around the world, including Sweden, England, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Finland, Norway, France, Estonia, India, Nepal, and Israel.

Since 2009, Geshe Pema Dorjee has lectured and taught in cities across the United States, including New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, Miami, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Boston and Cambridge.

Part 2 of 3

Rigdzin Dorje Rinpoche

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Mikel Dunham

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MIKEL DUNHAM

Mikel Dunham is an author, artist and photographer. In the late 1980s Dunham became the last student of the late thangka master, Pema Wangyal of Dolpo. He spent the next four years learning how to mix mineral pigments, line-brush in 22-carat gold and paint Tibetan iconography. This led to Dunham’s commission to paint the murals for a Tibetan monastery in Sarnath, India—one of eight major pilgrimage sites for Buddhists. Dunham then became artistic director for a much larger Tibetan mural project—a three-year commitment—in upstate New York at Pema Samye Ling Monastery.

In 2005, Dunham published Buddha’s Warriors: The Story of the CIA-Backed Tibetan Freedom Fighters, the Chinese Invasion, and the Ultimate Fall of Tibet. Buddha’s Warriors is a political Tibetan history based on seven years of interviews with and the CIA Task Team who secretly trained the growing Tibetan resistance movement in the late 1950s and early 60s. In the last year he has written articles for Harvard South Asian Journal, Tricycle Magazine, and a four-part report on child prostitute trafficking in Asia for Tehelka.

Dunham currently spends much of his time in Nepal researching his next political history while also playing an active role in human rights issues. He was selected as an international observer during the 2008 April elections in Nepal. Continual updates of the political situation in Nepal and Tibet are posted on his website

Personal Website:

Mikel Dunham Blog

Publications:

Samye: A Pilgrimage to the Birthplace of Tibetan Buddhism
Stilled Life
Casting for Murder
Buddha’s Warriors: The Story of the CIA-Backed Tibetan Freedom Fighters, the Chinese Invasion, and the Ultimate Fall of Tibet
Le Gout du Tibet

Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D.

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POLLY YOUNG-EISENDRATH, PH.D.

Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D., is an engaging and imaginative speaker, a Jungian analyst, a psychologist and an author. An experienced clinician and teacher, she is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Vermont and Consultant in Leadership Development at Norwich University.

Personal Website: Polly Young-Eisendrath

Publications:

The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance
Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to Be Wanted
The Resilient Spirit: Transforming Suffering into Insight and Renewal
You’re Not What I Expected: Love After the Romance Has Ended
Hags and Heroes: A Feminist Approach to Jungian Psychotherapy With Couples

Susan M. Evans, PhD

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SUSAN M. EVANS, PHD

Susan Evans PhD is Professor of Psychology in Clinical Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical Center. Dr. Evans received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the New School for Social Research in New York City. She is Interim Vice Chair and Director of Psychology in Psychiatry, Director of the Psychology Internship Program and past President of the Payne Whitney Faculty Council.

Dr. Evans is also an expert in the area of stress management, specifically Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). MBSR involves training in mindfulness meditation and aims to promote mind-body health and well-being. In recognition of her expertise and contributions, Dr. Evans was appointed as a founding fellow of the Academy of Cognitive Therapy. She has authored numerous articles and chapters on cognitive behavioral therapy, and studies in the areas of posttraumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, HIV/AIDS, and mindfulness based cognitive therapy. Dr. Evans presents her research worldwide and is regularly invited to conduct lectures, seminars and workshops in the US and abroad to professionals.

Arun Ghandi

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ARUN GHANDI

Activist and diversity speaker Arun Gandhi is the founder of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence and the grandson of the legendary peace fighter and spiritual leader, Mohandas Gandhi. Born and raised in apartheid-era South Africa, Gandhi was sent to India when he was 12 to live with his grandfather, where he observed firsthand the profound national campaign for liberation through nonviolent means.

Following his visit to India, Arun Gandhi went on to lead successful economic and social reforms in India. He then came to the United States, where he and his late wife Sunanda founded the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence. The Institute’s goals are to further the study and practice of nonviolence while also providing a unique source of information about Mohandas Gandhi and his work. By continuing his grandfather’s legacy, Arun Gandhi has been able to provide insight into one of history’s most influential leaders and has continued to stress the importance of nonviolence across the globe.

In January, 2008 Arun Gandhi was forced to resign from the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence due to his written criticism of the ongoing Israeli inclination towards violence on Palestinian lands. He later provided a written apology for his statement.

Aura Glaser

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AURA GLASER

Aura Glaser is one of the foremost students of Gehlek Rimpoche. In the late 1970s, she traveled to India where she began to study and practice Tibetan Buddhism. Aura is a Dharma teacher and a co-founder of Jewel Heart. She holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, a M.A. in Clinical Psychology from the Center for Humanistic Studies, and a B.A. in Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan. She is also the creator and former owner of Crazy Wisdom Bookstore. Aura maintains a private psychotherapy practice, and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Publications:

A call to compassion

Amy Goodman

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AMY GOODMAN

Amy Goodman (born April 13, 1957) is an American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist and author.

A 1984 graduate of Harvard University, Goodman is best known as the principal host of Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! program for over a decade, covering labor, peace and human rights movements as well as championing independent media. As an investigative journalist, she has received acclaim for exposés of human rights violations in East Timor and Nigeria. Goodman is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award.

Democracy Now! has been called “probably the most significant progressive news institution that has come around in some time” by professor and media critic Robert McChesney. In 2001, the show was temporarily pulled off the air, as a result of a conflict with a group of Pacifica Radio board members and Pacifica staff members and listeners. During that time, it moved to a converted firehouse where it continues to broadcast today.

“It’s just the basic tenets of good journalism that instead of this small circle of pundits, you talk to people who live at the target end of the policy,” she said. When the Bush Administration didn’t find weapons of mass destruction, it “laid bare more than the Bush Administration, it laid bare media that act as a conveyor belt for the lies of the Administration. You know governments are going to lie, but not the media. So I think people started to seek out other forms of information.”

When President Bill Clinton called WBAI on Election Day, 2000, for a quick get-out-the-vote message, Goodman and Gonzalo Aburto challenged him for 28 minutes with questions about Leonard Peltier, racial profiling, the Iraq sanctions, Ralph Nader, the death penalty, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Clinton defended Democratic policies against criticism, but charged Goodman with being “hostile, combative, and even disrespectful”.

In 1991, covering the independence movement in East Timor, Goodman and fellow journalist Allan Nairn were badly beaten by Indonesian soldiers after they witnessed a mass killing of Timorese demonstrators in what became known as the Dili Massacre. In 1998, Goodman and journalist Jeremy Scahill documented Chevron Corporation’s role in a confrontation between the Nigerian Army and villagers who had seized oil rigs and other equipment belonging to oil corporations. Two villagers were shot and killed during the standoff. During the 2008 Republican National Convention, several of Goodman’s colleagues from Democracy Now! were arrested and detained by police while reporting on an anti-war protest outside the RNC.

Goodman has received dozens of awards for her work, including the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the George Polk Award. In 2001, she declined to accept the Overseas Press Club Award, in protest of the group’s pledge not to ask questions of keynote speaker Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and because the OPC was honouring Indonesia for their improved treatment of journalists despite the fact that they had recently beaten and killed reporters in occupied East Timor. On October 1, 2008, Goodman was named as a recipient of the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, often referred to as the “Alternative Nobel Prize” — the first journalist to be so honored.

Websites:

Amy Goodman on Truthdig.com

Publications:

The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them
Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People who Fight Back
Standing up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times

Joan Halifax, Ph.D.

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JOAN HALIFAX, PH.D.

Joan Halifax was born in Hanover, New Hampshire in 1942. At age four a serious virus caused her to go legally blind, from which she recovered two years later. In 1964 she graduated from Harriet Sophie Newcomb College at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, where she had become drawn in to the American civil rights movement and participated in anti-war protests.[1][2] Halifax moved to New York and began working with Alan Lomax, and by 1965 she was reading books on Buddhism and teaching herself how to meditate. She worked at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University with Alan Lomax from 1964-1968. She then went to Paris and worked at the Museum of Man in the Ethnographic Film Section. She received her Ph.D. in medical anthropology and psychology and worked at the University of Miami School of Medicine. She also went to Mali, where she studied the indigenous Dogon tribe. During the 1970s, Halifax went to Mexico to study the Huichols.

In 1979, Halifax founded the Ojai Foundation, an educational and interfaith center. In 1990 Halifax founded Upaya Zen Center located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The center offers Zen training, in addition to various courses and retreats on topics such as engaged Buddhism and caring for the dying. Caring stewardship of the land and its resources has been a constant factor in the development of the site. Halifax has as well done extensive work with maxiumum security prisoners and men on death row in the state of New Mexico.

As has already been noted, Joan Halifax has done extensive work with the dying over her career. Professor Christopher S. Queen writes—in the book Westward Dharma, “She teaches the techniques of ‘being with death and dying’ to a class of terminally ill patients, doctors, nurses, lovers, family, and friends. She speaks calmly, with authority. In a culture where death is an enemy to be ignored, denied, and hidden away, Joan physically touches the dying.”

Websites:

Angel Fire Website discussing Joan Halifax’s work

Publications:

The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting With the Body of the Earth.
Shamanic Voices: A Survey of Visionary Narratives.
Shaman, the Wounded Healer.
Grof, Stanislav; Halifax, Joan (1977). The Human Encounter with Death.
Trance in Native American Churches

Andrew Harvey

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ANDREW HARVEY

Andrew Harvey was born in India in 1952, and educated at English boarding schools and then Oxford University, where he wrote a thesis on madness in Shakespeare and Erasmus. At 21, he became the youngest Fellow ever admitted to All Souls College. Soon afterwards, however, he grew disenchanted with academic life, and traveled to India (his parents were Anglo-Indian) as part of a spiritual search. There he first encountered the Divine Feminine in the form of Mother Meera, his guru for some fifteen years (until 1993).

An independent scholar, Harvey is known primarily for his popular nonfiction books on spiritual or mystical themes, beginning with A Journey in Ladakh (1983). He now lives in Chicago where he writes, conducts workshops, leads tours, and offers spiritual counseling services by telephone.

Harvey envisions true spirituality to be the divinization of earthly life through spiritual practice. These practices can take many forms and can be taken from any religious tradition. The process of divinization would result in the gradual elimination of ecological destruction and of all forms of prejudice, especially racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Harvey also stresses the divine feminine, as expressed for example in the Virgin Mary, Kali, and Mother Earth.

Harvey sees six poets and religious figures as having universal appeal:

Buddha as portrayed in the Dhammapada
Jesus as portrayed in the Gospel of Thomas
Rumi, a 13th century Sufi poet.
Kabir, a 15th century Indian poet
Ramakrishna, a 19th century Hindu sadhu
Aurobindo, a 20th century Hindu philosopher-sage
Personal website:

Andrew Harvey

Publications:

The Direct Path
Son Of Man
Sun at Midnight: A Memoir of the Dark Night
Mary’s Vineyard
Light Upon Light
Teachings of the Christian Mystics
Teachings of Rumi
Perfume of the Desert
The Return of the Mother
The Way of Passion
A Journey in Ladakh
Loves Glory: Re-Creations of Rumi
The Divine Feminine
The Web
One Last Mirror
Burning Houses

Sister Jose Hobday

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SISTER JOSE HOBDAY

Born in Texas to a Seneca-Iroquois mother and a Southern Baptist father, Sister Jose Hobday is a Seneca elder and a Sister of the Franciscan Order. She has a Masters’ degrees in theology, literature, architecture and space engineering, but she calls herself a “Student of Life” and a “Missionary-at-large.” She travels 75,000 miles a year giving lectures and workshops.

Sister Jose is one of America’s most popular speakers on prayer and spirituality. Her stories, drawn from her own experience growing up as a Native American Catholic in the American Southwest, eloquently communicate her relationship with and commitment to God, family, and community.

Other websites:

http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/ ... php?id=232

Dan Phillips Blogspot

http://www.georgiabulletin.org/local/1986/10/09/b/

http://www.gratefulness.org/readings/BeggarsGift.htm

Publications:
Simple Living: The Path to Joy and Freedom
Stories of Awe and Abundance

Sat Chuen Hon

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SAT CHUEN HON

Sat Chuen Hon is a Taoist philosopher & practitioner of Chinese medicine as well as of Taiji Quan in the Dragon Gate School, a subset of Taoism that focuses on fluid dance consisting of 13 postures and 13 movement motives. The discipline is meant to enliven the inner alchemy of the practitioner and bring Qi back into alignment.

Sat Chuen Hon founded the Dantao School in New York City, teaching an integrated form of qigong, nutrition, Tao and Taiji Quan. In addition to his practice & teaching, In 2006, he collaborated with Philip Glass on an art film which he directed titled Taiji: Chaotic Harmony.
Personal Website:

sathon.net

Other Websites:

New York Dantao School for Health & Vitality

Publications:

Taiji: Chaotic Harmony – film directed by Sat Hon music by Philip Glass
Taoist Qigong for Health and Vitality: A Complete Program of Movement, Meditation, and Healing Sounds

Dolores Huerta

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DOLORES HUERTA

Dolores C. Huerta is the co-founder and First Vice President Emeritus of the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO (UFW). During the 1960s, She co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with Cesar Chávez and coordinated the 1968-1969 Table Grape Boycott, serving to highlight and directly educate the public to the issue of immigrant inequality. The strike along with other actions were able to mobilize labor and allow them to collectively bargain in the agricultural sector for the first time in history.

She has continued to be a strong advocate for Latino equal rights, supporting laws that allow the California Driver’s examination be available in Spanish, extending rights to dependent children of California Farmworkers as well as supporting comprehensive and just immigration reform. Her acts of civil disobedience have led to her arrest on 22 occasions as well as being beaten by Police in San Francisco to the extent that she required emergency medical assistance. She currently serves on the boards of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, People For the American Way and Feminist Majority Foundation.

Personal Website:

Dolores Huerta Foundation

Other Websites:

Feminist Majority Foundation

People for the American Way

Jhampa Kalsang

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JHAMPA KALSANG

Jhampa Kalsang, Ph.D., graduated in 1989 from the Tibetan Medical and Astrological Institute of H.H. the Dalai Lama, in Dharamasala, India. He completed a full course of study and six years of training in Tibetan studies with an emphasis on traditional Tibetan astronomy, astrology, medical astrology and Buddhist philosophy. He has been on the staff of Tibetan Medical and Astrological Institute and was one of their senior lecturers.

Mr. Kalsang has spent the last eight years teaching, lecturing and attending conferences in America, Italy, France, Germany and Spain. He is a co-author of Tibetan Astronomy & Astrology and has published his book titled, Tibetan Astro Science. This text’s contents explain Tibetan astronomy and elemental astrology and the root of Tibetan Astro-Sciences. He is one of the first traditional Tibetan professional Astro-Science practitioners in the West. Because of his extensive and intimate interactions with Westerners he is able to relate to and has a deep understanding of the Western culture and its social and psychological mores. Mr. Kalsang resides in San Diego, California where he has opened the Tibet Gift House, offering Tibetan products, classes and readings. He has a private astrology practice and travels throughout the world to lecture and teach.

Personal website:

Tibet Gift House Biography

Other websites:

http://www.namgyal.org/events/details.cfm?id=52

http://www.tibetanacademy.org/astrostaff.html

Kathy Kelly

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KATHY KELLY

“At its core, war is impoverishment. War’s genesis and ultimate end is in the poverty of our hearts. If we can realize that the world’s liberation begins within those troubled hearts, then we may yet find peace…What good has ever come from the slaughter of the innocents?”

Three times since 2000 Kathy Kelly has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1996 she helped to found Voices in the Wilderness, a group which bears witness to the suffering which the U.S./U.N.-imposed sanctions have visited upon the people—especially the children—of Iraq.

Kelly traces her activism to her pious childhood on the South Side of Chicago. During high school she began to read about the Holocaust. “I remember thinking, that I never ever-ever-ever want to be the person who is trying to be an innocent bystander while something that awful goes on.”

After graduating from Loyola University and while still a graduate student at Chicago Theological Seminary, she volunteered at a soup kitchen run by a Catholic Worker House. This experience enabled her to relate the ideals derived from her studies to action. As a high-school English teacher as well as a committed anti-poverty worker, she enabled her students to make the same connections between theory and practice. She moved from neighborhood poverty issues to advocacy of nonviolence on a global scale. For her participation in planting corn in the soil above nuclear missile silos, a symbolic act intended to demonstrate the peaceful use of land, she was sentenced to nine months in federal prison, Ultimately, she found this a “liberating” experience because it helped her to face fear of coercion.

Kathy Kelly is no stranger to coercion. For refusing to pay federal income taxes her teaching salary was garnished; for repeated visits to Iraq to distribute toys and medicine to children, she and her associates have incurred thousands of dollars in fines, along with threats of imprisonment. For trespassing at Fort Benning, Georgia, to protest the activities of the School of the Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2003, she has been arrested, physically and verbally abused and sentenced to three months in federal prison. She accepts the consequences of her determination to stand with others against what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the violence of desperate men.”

Other websites:

Iraq Under Siege (Seven Seas Press, 2000)
War and Peace in the Gulf (Cornerstone Press, 2001)
Live from Palestine (Edited by Nancy Stohlman and Laurieann Aladin, 2003)
Other Lands Have Dreams: from Baghdad to Pekin prison (Counterpunch Press, 2005)

Loch Kelly

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LOCH KELLY

Loch Kelly, MDiv., LCSW, is a graduate of Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary, where he was awarded a fellowship to study Buddhist meditation in Sri Lanka from 1981-2 in both the monasteries and at the University in Kandy. He has also studied the non-dual traditions of Dzogchen with Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche in Nepal and Advaita in India. Loch spent 10 years establishing homeless shelters and community lunch programs and worked in outpatient mental health in Brooklyn, New York. He has also served as the Coordinator of Counseling as well as Interfaith Chaplain for Union Theological Seminary. In addition to having practiced as a non-dual psychotherapist, Loch served on the New York Insight Teachers Council and was invited to teach meditation by Mingyur Rinpoche. Having been asked by Adyashanti in 2004 to share the Dharma and teach the direct path to recognizing our true nature, Loch now offers Evenings of Inquiry and Retreats and gives pointing-out instruction. Loch currently resides in New York City.

Personal Website:

lochkelly.org

Nawang Khechog

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NAWANG KHECHOG

Nawang Khechog is a Tibetan flute player and composer. Born in Tibet, the child of nomads, his family moved to India following the Chinese invasion of 1949/1950, where Nawang studied meditation and Buddhist philosophy. He spent eleven years as a monk, including four years in a hermit retreat in the Himalayan foothills under the guidance of the Dalai Lama. He developed tuberculosis and was taken ill several times during the experience.

A self taught musician, playing flute from his boyhood days, Nawang’s expression springs from his emotions and his life experience traveling the world as a Tibetan nomad as well as his meditation practice. In 1986, he emigrated to Australia, where he first performed, and his recordings achieved bestseller status. He has composed music for many films, including the award winning documentary Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion, as well as working as the assistant regional producer for Seven Years in Tibet.

His collaborations include work with Philip Glass, Paul Winter, Laurie Anderson, Paul Simon, Natalie Merchant, R. Carlos Nakai, and Baba Olatunji. He is currently at work making a film about Tibetan hermits.

Personal Website:

nawangkhechog.com

Maxine Hong Kingston

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MAXINE HONG KINGSTON

Maxine Hong Kingston (Chinese: 湯婷婷; born October 27, 1940) is an American Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962. She is both a prolific academic and autobiographical writer.

She was born as Maxine Ashley Hong to a laundry house owner in Stockton, California. She was the third of eight children, and the first among them born in the United States. Her mother trained as a midwife at the To Keung School of Midwifery in Canton. Her father had been brought up a scholar and taught in his village of Sun Woi, near Canton. Tom left China for America in 1924 and took a job in a laundry.

Her works often reflect on her cultural heritage and blend fiction with non-fiction. Among her works are The Woman Warrior (1976), awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and China Men (1980), which was awarded the 1981 National Book Award. She has written one novel, Tripmaster Monkey, a story depicting a character based on the mythical Chinese character Sun Wu Kong. Her most recent books are To Be The Poet and The Fifth Book of Peace.

She was awarded the 1997 National Humanities Medal by President of the United States Bill Clinton. Kingston was a member of the committee to choose the design for the California commemorative quarter. She was arrested in March 2003 in Washington, D.C., for crossing a police line during a protest against the war in Iraq. In April, 2007, Hong Kingston was awarded the Northern California Book Award Special Award in Publishing for her most recent anthology, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (2006).

Selected works

Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, edited by Maxine Hong Kingston, Koa Books, 2006.
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, Knopf distributed by Random House, 1976.
China Men, Knopf, 1980.
Through the Black Curtain, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1987.
Hawai’i One Summer (essays), Meadow Press, San Francisco, 1987.
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (novel), Knopf, 1989
To Be the Poet (nonfiction), Harvard University Press, 2002.
The Fifth Book of Peace (nonfiction), Brent, 2006
No Name Woman (essay) McGraw Hill, 1975.

Krishna Das

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KRISHNA DAS

Krishna Das (born Jeffrey Kagel May 31, 1947 in Long Island, New York) is a singer who performs Indian chants called kirtans – chanting the names of God.

Krishna Das travelled to India in the 1960s where, along with Ram Dass, he studied with a Hindu guru named Neem Karoli Baba (Maharaj-ji). Krishna Das has studied Buddhist meditation practices, Bhakti Yoga – in Hinduism this is the yoga of devotion, and is now devoted to singing and teaching. He has released several CDs, and he travels around the world giving performances and teaching, sometimes with Ram Dass. In recent years he also has often led workshops in combination with leading meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg.

Krishna Das is perhaps the best known American singer of Indian kirtan-style devotional music.

http://www.krishnadas.com

Roger Woolger, Ph.D.

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ROGER WOOLGER, PH.D.

ROGER J. WOOLGER, PH.D, is a Jungian analyst, regression therapist and professional lecturer with degrees in psychology, religion and philosophy from Oxford and London Universities.

Roger Woolger is a well known teacher in Britain, having appeared in 1966 in the Channel 4 television series Transformations and in various other television program. His current practice is the fruit of a lifelong study of the perennial philosophy and the mystical traditions of Christianity and Sufism, just as his practice of psychotherapy was early on shaped by the practice of Buddhist vipassana meditation and the mysticism of Simone Weil.

Roger has also taught literature, published articles on dreamwork and meditation and has given film seminars on Fellini, Bergman and Cocteau. He has been an amateur Shakespeare actor and teacher. His popular second book, The Goddess Within (Ballantine, 1989) written with Jennifer Barker, is an in depth exploration of feminine psychology as mirrored in the myths, conflicts and wounding of the Greek goddesses; it draws upon Rogers scholarly knowledge of Jungian writing, the history of religion and feminist revisionist history.

A lifelong interest in the Grail legend and the esoteric spirituality of medieval Europe has inspired Roger to lead several extraordinary tours to sacred sites in the South of France, to troubadour and Cathar country; sites of Black Madonnas and the Magdalene. Future tours are planned to the Italy of St. Francis, Celtic Britain, Sites of the Greek Gods and Goddesses, Healers of Brazil, the Andes and Tantric Sites of India.

Personal website:

Roger Woolger

Other websites:

http://www.rogerwoolger.com/

http://www.thoughtsnmemories.net/roger.html

http://www.kripalu.org/presenter/V0000744/roger_woolger

Publications:

HEALING YOUR PAST LIVES Exploring the Many Lives of the Soul (2004)
OTHER LIVES, OTHER SELVES (1987)
ETERNAL RETURN How to Discover and Heal Your Past Lives
JUNGIAN PAST-LIFE THERAPY (1992)

Michael Katz Psy.D

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MICHAEL KATZ PSY.D

Michael Katz Psychologist, artist, and author has a doctoral degree in psychology from New York University. He is a long time student of Tibetan Buddhism and has studied with many of the great masters of this age.

He is the co-author and editor of the book “Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light” with Chogyal Namkhai Norbu . He is also the author of the book “Tibetan Dream Yoga the Royal Road to Enlightenment “as well as the fictional novel “The White Dolphin.”

Michael a Santi Maha Sangha teacher in the Dzogchen Community was authorized to teach dream yoga and meditation by Chogyal Namkhai Norbu . He has subsequently taught dream yoga for two decades in more than 30 countries internationally as well as Harvard University, Amherst College, Tibet House and other institutions and organizations.

He was featured in the discovery channel’s program “The Power of Dreams ” and was a featured speaker at the first ” Gateways of the Mind conference in London. He was also featured in a documentary movie called “Tamara’s Sacred Journey ” after leading a group to sacred caves in Tibet in 2010.His paintings were the subject of a one person show at Tibet /house called ” Form Is Emptiness” in 2013.

Lama Tsultrim Allione

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LAMA TSULTRIM ALLIONE

Lama Tsultrim Allione, author and international teacher, is the founder and spiritual director of Tara Mandala. In 2009, Lama Tsultrim was selected by an esteemed committee of Buddhist scholars and practitioners to receive the International Outstanding Women in Buddhism Award given in Bangkok, Thailand.

Dzogchen Community Of New York
151 West 30th Street, 4th Fl. New York, New York 10001

Lama Jampa Thaye

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LAMA JAMPA THAYE

Lama Jampa Thaye is a scholar and meditation master trained in the Sakya and Kagyu traditions by his two principal teachers His Holiness Sakya Trizin, head of the Sakya tradition, and Karma Thinley Rinpoche, who was recognized as an incarnate lama by His Holiness the 16th Karmapa.

Lama Jampa obtained his PhD in Tibetan Buddhist history and served as Lecturer of Buddhist Studies and the History of Ideas for over twenty years at the University of Manchester. He was appointed by Karma Thinley Rinpoche as his dharma-regent in 1977 and given the authority to bestow vajrayana initiations in 1988. Since then he has travelled extensively giving teachings and initiations and is the author of numerous books and dharma tretises.

Lama Jampa has a dedicated Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/LamaJampaThaye and a section on the

Dechen website.

Thomas Laird

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THOMAS LAIRD

Thomas C. Laird is an author, photographer and journalist. He has been based in Kathmandu, Nepal, for thirty years and now divides his time between there and New Orleans. In 1971 at age eighteen, he left the United States and traveled overland, alone, from Europe through Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India to Nepal. In the next two years he made that trip six times. In 1973, after studying with Tibetan refugees in Nepal, he received a grant from I.A.A. Anstalt to make sound recordings in Buddhist monasteries in Kathmandu. The recordings were released as one of the first LP’s of Tibetan ritual music ever made, by Lyrichord. In 1978, he traveled through revolution in Iran and then finally settled full time in Nepal in 1979. Based in Kathmandu he worked as a photographer, Himalayan trek guide, and journalist for decades.

Grove Press published his debut non-fiction book in 2002, Into Tibet: The CIA’s First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa. Peter Matthiessen wrote the text for Laird’s first photography book, East of Lo Monthang and Ian Baker wrote the text for his second one The Dalai Lama’s Secret Temple.

In the 1970’s he lived three years amongst the Sherpa of Eastern Nepal. He photographed the Nepalese revolution of 1991 for Asiaweek and Time. In 1992, he was given the first travel permit for Mustang, and became the first westerner ever to live there for a year. He was the first westerner ever to walk legally through the Himalayas of Western Nepal to Mount Kailash ; and the first westerner to descend any part of Tibet’s Tsangpo River in a coracle in modern times. His work Newsweek and Time included the first accurate report on Nepal’s 2001 Royal Massacre, as well as battlefield reporting of Nepal’s Maoist revolution, in 2003. Additionally he has worked on film projects in various roles: Baraka, 1990, The Gurkhas, 1988-and guided Oliver Stone in Tibet in 1996. Laird has accumulated one of the largest photo-documentation archives of Tibetan murals in the world, including rare images from Tibet’s oldest surviving murals, and from abandoned cave monasteries in remote valleys never before, or since, photographed.

Laird’s first non-fiction book, Into Tibet was the result of ten years of research. In the 1990’s Laird spent months in the National Archives in Washington DC, combing through US Government documents about Tibet from the 1945-1952 period. Ultimately he filed Freedom of Information requests to obtain the key classified documents. Laird then set out on a global hunt for those who knew Douglas Mackiernan, the first undercover CIA officer ever killed in the line of duty. That led him from Florida to Tibet and from India to Hawaii, repeatedly, over the course of six years. He taped more than one hundred hours of interviews with more than two dozen primary sources, ranging from His Holiness the Dalai Lama to current members of the CIA.

Laird first met His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 1995, and then, beginning in 1997, the Dalai Lama granted Laird a long series of interviews over the course of three years. It took another six years to shape their dialogue into The Story of Tibet. In 2001, Laird, and his wife, Jann Fenner, bought their first home in the United States and began to spend long periods there, to enable Laird’s continuing research on the book. In 2005 as Laird was writing the final draft of The Story of Tibet, Hurricane Katrina forced a halt in work on the book. For the next four months, Laird picked up his camera once again, and worked to document the aftermath of that disaster for America’s leading publications. In 2006, the book was completed and is being published in US, UK and German editions. It will appear shortly in half a dozen other European language editions.

Thomas Laird now divides his time between Asia and New Orleans. He is currently working on a number of projects including planning a documentary to be based on The Story of Tibet, and planning an exhibition of life-size photographs of some of Tibet’s finest, and largest Buddhist murals, entitled A Millennium of Tibetan Murals.

Personal Website:

StoryofTibet

Publications:

Into Tibet: The CIA’s First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa
East of Lo Monthang (Photography)
The Dalai Lama’s Secret Temple (Photography)

Alison Rose Levy

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ALISON ROSE LEVY

Alison Rose Levy is a journalist, bestselling health writer, and healing arts practitioner who has covered the field of integrative medicine and mind-body healing for the last seventeen years as a contributor to O Magazine, Organic Style, Alternative Therapies, and other publications. A former Senior Health editor of New Age Journal, she offers health information and health action at http://www.health-journalist.com. She contributes as well to Huffington Post.

Joseph Loizzo, M.D.

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JOSEPH LOIZZO, M.D.

Joseph Loizzo, MD, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry in Complementary and Integrative Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, where he researches and teaches mind/body health. He has taught science and religion, the scientific study of religious experience, and the Indo-Tibetan mind sciences at Columbia University, where he is currently a visiting scholar.

In 1998, Dr. Loizzo opened the Center for Meditation and Healing at Columbia University’s Presbyterian Hospital, the first mind/body center in the U.S. to offer programs in stress-reduction, self-healing and lifestyle change based on the Tibetan health and mind sciences. In 2003, it joined the Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine at Weill Cornell College of Medicine, to better test and refine the effectiveness of its programs. Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science was then opened in 2005 to make these programs available to the community at large.

Dr. Loizzo has published numerous articles and chapters in professional journals and textbooks on the challenges of researching Indo-Tibetan healthcare, the role of mind-body methods in medicine and psychiatry, and meditative approaches to psychotherapy. His translation study, The Reason Sixty of Nagarjuna with Commentary of Candrakirti, is one of the inaugural volumes in the American Institute of Buddhist Studies Translation Series.

Personal Website:

Dr. Joseph Loizzo

Other websites:
John’s Hopkins Website

Publications:

Nagarjuna’s Reason Sixty with Chandrakirti’s Reason Sixty Commentary – by Professor Joseph Loizzo (Translator), Robert A F Thurman (Editor), Thomas F Yarnall (Editor)

Peter Mathiessen

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PETER MATHIESSEN

Peter Matthiessen (born May 22, 1927, in New York City) is a two-time National Book Award-winning American novelist and nonfiction writer as well as an environmental activist. He frequently focuses on American Indian issues and history, as in his detailed study of the Leonard Peltier case, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. In November 2008, at age 81, he received his second National Book Award for Shadow Country, an 890-page revision of a trilogy of novels he released in the 1990s. His first National Book Award was won in 1980 for The Snow Leopard. His story Travelin’ Man was adapted into the film The Young One by Luis Buñuel.

Along with George Plimpton, Harold L. Humes, Thomas Guinzburg and Donald Hall, Matthiessen founded the literary magazine The Paris Review in 1953. At the time he was a young recruit for the CIA.

In 1965, Matthiessen wrote a novel about a group of American missionaries and a South American tribe. The book was later made into a major Hollywood film with the same title, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, in 1991. In 2008, Matthiessen’s fiction trilogy Killing Mr. Watson, Lost Man’s River and Bone by Bone, based on accounts of Florida planter Edgar J. Watson’s death shortly after the Southwest Florida Hurricane of 1910, was reformatted into a single volume entitled The Shadow Country. The book won the 2008 National Book Award.

In September 1973, Matthiessen went on an expedition to the Himalayas with field biologist George Schaller. Matthiessen and his late wife Deborah practiced Zen Buddhism. Matthiessen later became a Buddhist priest of the White Plum Asanga. He lives in Sagaponack, New York.

Works

Race Rock (1954)
Partisans (1955)
Raditzer (1961)
At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965)
Far Tortuga (1975)
On the River Styx and Other Stories (1989)
Killing Mister Watson (1990)
Lost Man’s River (1997)
Bone by Bone (1999)
Shadow Country (2008) (a new rendering of the Watson trilogy)

Glenn Mullin

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GLENN MULLIN

Glenn H. Mullin is a Tibetologist, Buddhist writer, translator of classical Tibetan literature, and teacher of Tantric Buddhist meditation. He divides his time between writing, teaching, meditating, and leading tour groups to the power places of Nepal and Tibet. Mullin lived in the Indian Himalayas between 1972 and 1984, where he studied philosophy, literature, meditation, yoga, and the enlightenment culture under thirty-five of the greatest living masters of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism. His two principal tantric gurus were the late great masters Kyabje Ling Dorjechang and Kyabje Trijang Dorjechang, who were best known as Yongdzin Che Chung, the two main gurus of the present Dalai Lama. He is the author of over 20 books on Tibetan Buddhism, many focusing on the lives and works of the early Dalai Lamas.

After returning from India in 1984 Glenn founded and directed The Mystical Arts of Tibet, an association of Dharma friends that was instrumental in bringing the first tours of Tibetan monks to North America to perform sacred Temple music and dance, as well as create mandala sand paintings. He gave this to Drepung Loseling Monastery in 1994, and it continues to bring Tibetan spiritual culture on tours around the world.

Personal Website:

glennmullin.com

Publications:

Ten Books On the Lives & Works Of Early Dalai Lamas

Selected Works of the Dalai Lama I
Selected Works of the Dalai Lama II
Selected Works of the Dalai Lama III
Selected Works of the Dalai Lama VII
Selected Works of the Dalai Lama XIII
Training the Mind in the Great Way
Mystical Verses of a Mad Dalai Lama
The Fourteen Dalai Lamas
Gems of Wisdom from the Seventh Dalai Lama
A Drumbeat Resounding Total Victory’
Ten Books On Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy

Tsongkhapa’s Six Yogas of Naropa
Readings of the Six Yogas of Naropa
The Practice of Kalachakra
Living and Dying: The Tibetan Tradition
Six Texts on Arya Tara
Meditations on the lower Tantras
The Crystal Wishing Gem
Advice from Buddha Shakyamuni
The Trainings of a Novice Monk
Four Songs to Jey Rinpoche
Four Books On Tibetan Buddhist Art

The Art of Compassion
The Mystical Arts of Tibet
The Female Buddhas
The Flying Mystics of Tibetan Buddhism

Miles Neale

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MILES NEALE

Miles Neale, PsyD, LMHC is a New York state licensed psychotherapist integrating Buddhist contemplative science into his clinical and consulting practice. He is a graduate of the doctoral program in clinical psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and conducted his Master’s research on the health benefits of mindfulness meditation. Since 1998, Dr. Neale studied clinical applications of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism with his mentor Dr. Joseph Loizzo.

Beginning in 1996, Dr. Neale studied Buddhist philosophy and meditation while living for extended periods of time in traditional monastic settings in Thailand, India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. He has received training from the late Insight meditation masters Godwin Samararatne and Anagarika Munidra and well as the renowned Tibetan masters Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Gelek Rinpoche.

In addition to his integrative East/West training and clinical expertise, Dr. Neale has taught contemplative education programs in prestigious university hospitals such as Harvard, Columbia, Cornell and Albert Einstein. He is currently a teaching faculty member of the Nalanda Institute, consults on the design and implementation of meditation programs with clinics, hospitals and businesses, and offers lectures and meditation workshops through his various affiliations in the New York metropolitan area.

Personal Website:

milesneale.com

Shulamit Elson

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SHULAMIT ELSON

Shulamit Elson is a gifted teacher and author and the creator of MediSounds Meditation, as well as numerous CDs. Shulamit has been teaching sound based meditation for over 20 years. She is the director of the Soul Songs School, she is also the director of the Great Octave Foundation, which teaches sound meditation to those affected by trauma and stress.

Lama Palmo

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LAMA PALMO

Lama Palmo (Lama Willa Miller Plamo, MA) has spent the last 20 years studying and practicing Tibetan Buddhism. Her teachers include the late Venerable Kalu Rinpoche and H.H. Dilgo Kyentse as well as Lama Norlha, Tsultrim Gyatso, Bokar Rinpoche and other teachers from all schools of Tibetan Buddhism. Lama Palmo has completed two of the traditional three-year retreats and has spent extensive time in Nepal, India and Tibet engaged in both study and service work. Currently she lives in Arlington, MA where she writes, teaches Tibetan Buddhist practice and meditation. She adapted Tibetan Buddhist Yoga practices into a new form which is accessible to beginners. She has as well helped found the Natural Dharma Fellowship in Boston and offers courses through the Dzogchen Center affiliated with Lama Surya Das. She is currently working toward a PhD at Harvard University in Tibetan Studies.

Personal Website:

lamapalmo.googlepages.com

Natural Dharma Fellowship

Books:

Everyday Dharma: Seven Weeks to Finding the Buddha in You (2009)

Susan Piver

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SUSAN PIVER

Susan Piver is writer, teacher, and speaker on topics such as love, creativity, and spirituality. She has written for Body and Soul, SELF, Oprah magazine, Reader’s Digest, and the Shambhala Sun and is regularly featured in the media, including multiple appearances on Oprah, the Today show, CNN, and in USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Money, and others. Susan has been a student of Buddhism since 1995 and graduated from a Buddhist seminary in 2004. She is an authorized meditation instructor in the Shambhala Buddhist lineage.

Personal Website:

Susan Piver

Publications:

The Hard Questions: 100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say ‘I Do’
How Not to Be Afraid of Your Own Life
The Wisdom of a Broken Heart

Rachel Naomi Remen, Ph.D.

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RACHEL NAOMI REMEN, PH.D.

Rachel Naomi Remen is one of the earliest pioneers in the mind/body holistic health movement and the first to recognize the role of the spirit in health and the recovery from illness. She is Co-Founder and Medical Director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program featured in the Bill Moyers PBS series, Healing and the Mind and has cared for people with cancer and their families for almost 30 years.

She is also a nationally recognized medical reformer and educator who sees the practice of medicine as a spiritual path. In recognition of her work she has received several honorary degrees and has been invited to teach in medical schools and hospitals throughout the country. Her groundbreaking holistic curricula enable physicians at all levels of training to remember their calling and strengthen their commitment to serve life.

She teaches at UCSF and is the Founder and Director of the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness, a ten-year-old professional development program for graduate physicians.

Personal Website:

Rachel Remen

Publications:

Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal
My Grandfather’s Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge and Belonging

Kwan Sai Hung

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KWAN SAI HUNG

Kwan Sai Hung is a martial arts, qigong and tai chi practitioner. In addition, he is a Taoist teacher of the Zheng Yi sect and practiced at the Huashan monastery. His style combines techniques of qigong and tai chi. A fictionalized version of his life is chonicled in ‘The Wandering Taoist’ and ‘Chronicles of Tao: The Secret Life of a Taoist Master’.

Sharon Salzberg

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SHARON SALZBERG

Born in New York City in 1952, Sharon Salzberg experienced a childhood involving considerable loss and turmoil. An early realization of the power of meditation to overcome personal suffering determined her life direction. Her teaching and writing now communicates that power to a worldwide audience of practitioners. She offers non-sectarian retreat and study opportunities for participants from widely diverse backgrounds.

Sharon first encountered Buddhism in 1969, in an Asian philosophy course at the State University of New York, Buffalo. The course sparked an interest that, in 1970, took her to India, for an independent study program. Sharon traveled motivated by “an intuition that the methods of meditation would bring me some clarity and peace.”

In 1971, in Bodh Gaya, India, Sharon attended her first intensive meditation course. She spent the next years engaged in intensive study with highly respected Buddhist teachers. She returned to America in 1974 and began teaching vipassana (insight) meditation. Today she leads intensive retreats worldwide as well as a variety of non-residential programs, workshops, and classes.

She has helped establish the Insight Meditation Society, the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies as well as the Forest Refuge, a long-term retreat center secluded in a wooded area on IMS property. Sharon resides in Barre, Massachusetts, and New York City.

Sharon has also emerged as a featured speaker and teacher at a wide variety of events. She has addressed audiences at the State of the World Forum, the Peacemakers Conference (sharing a plenary panel with Nobel Laureates His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Jose Ramos Horta) and has delivered keynotes at Tricycle’s Buddhism in America Conference, as well as Yoga Journal, Kripalu and Omega conferences. She was selected to attend the Gethsemani encounter, a dialogue on spiritual life between Buddhist and Christian leaders that included His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Personal website: Sharon Salzburg

Publications:

• Heart as Wide as the World (1999) ISBN 1-57062-428-3
• Voices of Insight (2001) ISBN 1-57062-769-X
• Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience (2003) ISBN 1-57322-340-9
• Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness (2004) ISBN 1-59030-187-0
• The Force of Kindness: Change Your Life with Love and Compassion (2006) ISBN 1-59179-355-6

Jill Satterfield

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JILL SATTERFIELD
Jill Satterfield is the founder of Vajra Yoga & Meditation, a synthesis of yoga and Buddhism that combines meditation, yoga postures, visualization and contemplation practices. She is also the founder and Director of the School for Compassionate Action: Yoga & Meditation for Communities in Need, a not for profit that trains teachers to offer yoga, meditation and emotional support to at-risk youth, people suffering with chronic pain and illnesses, PTSD, and addictions.

Jill turned to yoga 30 years ago in an effort to heal from a debilitating physical condition coupled with acute chronic pain. In 1992, she extended her exploration of the integral relationship of the mind and body through the study of Buddhism. Through combining the two disciplines – yoga and Buddhism – she healed beyond all medical prognoses. Jill is on the faculty of Spirit Rock Meditation Center’s Mindfulness for Yoga Training and the Kripalu Institute’s Integral Leadership Program for young adults. Jill was scholar and teacher in residence at the Kripalu Center in 2004, and was named one of the four leading Buddhist and yoga teachers in the country by the Shambhala Sun Magazine. She has been teaching for the past 20 years.
Jill Satterfield
Founder and Director
http://www.schoolforcompassionateaction.org
http://www.vajrayoga.com

Huston Smith

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HUSTON SMITH

Huston Cummings Smith is among the preeminent religious studies scholars in the United States. His work, The Religions of Man (later revised and retitled The World’s Religions), is a classic in the field, with over two million copies sold, and remains a common introduction to comparative religion.

Smith was born in Soochow, China to Methodist missionaries and spent his first 17 years there. As a young man, of his own volition after suddenly turning to mysticism, Smith set out to meet with then-famous author Gerald Heard. Heard responded to Smith’s letter, invited him to his Trabuco College (later donated as the Ramakrishna Monastery) in Southern California, and then sent him off to meet the legendary Aldous Huxley. So began Smith’s experimentation with meditation, entheogenic studies and association with the Vedanta Society in Saint Louis under the auspices of Swami Satprakashananda of the Ramakrishna order.

He has been a friend of the XIVth Dalai Lama for more than forty years and met and talked to some of the great figures of the century, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Thomas Merton.He developed an interest in the Traditionalist School formulated by Rene Guenon and Ananda Coomaraswamy. This interest has become a continuing thread in all his writings.

He now lives in the Berkeley, CA area where he is Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Personal website:

hustonsmith.net

Other websites:

Thinking Outloud Website

Publications:

A Seat at the Table The Soul of Christianity : Restoring the Great Tradition
The World’s Religions
The Illustrated World’s Religions: A Guide to Our Wisdom Traditions
The Way Things Are
Why Religion Matters
Cleansing the Doors of Perception
Huston Smith: Essays on World Religion
Buddhism : A Concise Introduction
Forgotten Truth : The Common Vision of the World’s Religions
Beyond the Post-Modern Mind: The Place of Meaning in a Global Civilization
Islam: A Concise Introduction
One Nation Under God: The Triumph of the Native American Church

Part 3 of 3

Sogyal Rinpoche

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SOGYAL RINPOCHE

Ven. Sogyal Rinpoche

A world-renowned Buddhist teacher from Tibet, Sogyal Rinpoche is also the author of the highly acclaimed The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

Born in Kham in Eastern Tibet, Sogyal Rinpoche was recognized as the incarnation of Lerab Lingpa Tertön Sogyal, a teacher to the thirteenth Dalai Lama, by Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö, one of the most outstanding spiritual masters of the twentieth century. Jamyang Khyentse supervised Rinpoche’s training and raised him like his own son.

In 1971, Rinpoche went to England to study Comparative Religion at Cambridge University. He continued his studies in Tibetan Buddhism in multiple schools with Kyabjé Dudjom Rinpoche and Kyabjé Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche among others. His central text, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, has been printed in 30 languages and 56 countries.

Rinpoche is also the founder and spiritual director of Rigpa, an international network of over 130 Buddhist centres and groups in 41 countries around the world. He has been teaching for over 30 years and continues to travel widely in Europe, America, Australia, and Asia, addressing thousands of people on his retreats and teaching tours. In addition, Rinpoche is a frequent speaker at major conferences in all areas of society, including medicine and healing, universities and educational institutions, interfaith dialogue, movements for peace and non-violence, the world of business and leadership, and the field of serving the dying and hospice care.

“when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.”

Personal Website:

Rigpa Spiritual Center

Heather Stoddard, Ph.D.

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HEATHER STODDARD, PH.D.

Websites:

Dr. Heather Stoddard speaks in advance of Olympics in Beijing

Heather Stoddard speaks of the Golden Buddhas from Tibet

Publications:

Early Sino-Tibetan Art
Le mendiant de l’Amdo (Recherches sur la Haute Asie) (French Edition)
Mongolia: The Legacy of Chinggis Khan with Patricia Ann Berger, Terese Tse Bartholomew & James E. Bosson
Tibet from Buddhism to Communism

Robert A. F. Thurman, Ph.D.

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ROBERT A. F. THURMAN, PH.D.

Robert A. F. Thurman is who the NY Times Magazine refers to as “The Dalai Lama’s man in America.” A scholar, author, former Tibetan Buddhist monk, co-founder with Richard Gere of Tibet House in New York City, a close personal friend of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, and father of five children including the actress, Uma Thurman, he is the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. Time magazine named him one of the “25 Most Influential Americans.” He has lectured all over the world; his charisma and enthusiasm draw packed audiences.

Robert Thurman’s flair for the dramatic may be attributed to the weekly Shakespeare readings hosted by his parents, in which Robert participated alongside such guests as Laurence Olivier. He managed to get himself kicked out of Exeter just prior to graduation for playing hooky in a failed attempt to join Fidel Castro’s Cuban guerrilla army in 1958. Harvard University admitted him anyway, but a deep dissatisfaction and questioning led him to drop out and he traveled on a “vision quest” as a pilgrim to India. Returning home to attend his father’s funeral, he met a Mongolian monk, Geshe Wangyal, and thus began Thurman’s life-long passion for Tibetan Buddhism.

In 1964, Geshe Wangyal introduced Thurman to His Holiness the Dalai Lama and described Robert as, “…a crazy American boy, very intelligent and with a good heart (though a little proud), who spoke Tibetan well and had learned something about Buddhism [and] wanted to become a monk…. Geshe Wangyal was leaving it up to His Holiness to decide.” Thurman became the first Westerner to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. He was 24 and the Dalai Lama 29. They eventually met weekly and His Holiness would quickly refer Thurman’s questions concerning Buddhism to another teacher and turn the conversation to Freud, physics, and other “Western” topics of interest to him. Thurman describes this phase of his life: “All I wanted was to stay in the 2,500-year-old Buddhist community of seekers of enlightenment, to be embraced as a monk. My inner world was rich, full of insights and delightful visions, with a sense of luck and privilege at having access to such great teachers and teachings and the time to study and try to realize them.” But when he returned to the United States, Thurman found that his career as a monk was not viable, so “I decided that I wanted to learn more Buddhist languages, read more Buddhist texts.… The only lay institution in America comparable to monasticism is the university, so in the end I turned to academia.”

Robert Thurman currently holds the first endowed chair in this field of study in the United States, at Columbia University, where he serves as president of the board of the American Institute Buddhist Studies.

Thurman is not only a scholar, but a champion of the preservation of Tibetan culture. In 1987, he and actor Richard Gere founded New York City’s Tibet House, a nonprofit institution devoted to preserving the living culture of Tibet, where he currently serves as president of the board of trustees. Thurman writes, “What I have learned from these people [Tibetans] has forever changed my life, and I believe their culture contains an inner science particularly relevant to the difficult time in which we live. My desire is to share some of the profound hope for our future that they have shared with me.”

Personal website: www.bobthurman.com

Other websites: http://literati.net/Thurman/

Publications:

Anger: The Seven Deadly Sins
The Central Philosophy of Tibet: A Study and Translation of Jey Tsong Khapa’s “Essence of True Eloquence”.
Circling the Sacred Mountain: A Spiritual Adventure Through the Himalayas.
Essential Tibetan Buddhism.
The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti: A Mahayana Scripture.
Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within
Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness.
Inside Tibetan Buddhism: Rituals and Symbols Revealed.
The Jewel Tree of Tibet: The Enlightenment Engine of Tibetan Buddhism.
Mandala: The Architecture of Enlightenment.
Thurman, Robert A.F. The Speech of Gold: Reason and Enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism. Motilal Banarsidass Pub., 1990.
Thurman, Robert A.F., trans. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Known in Tibet as The Great Book of Natural Liberation Through Understanding in the Between. Composed by Padma Sambhava. Discovered by Karma Lingpa. Foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. New York: Bantam, 1994.
Tsong Khapa’s Speech of Gold in the “Essence of True Eloquence”. Now published under the title The Central Philosophy of Tibet: A Study and Translation of Jey Tsong Khapa’s “Essence of True Eloquence”.
Maitreyanatha/Aryasanga. Trans. Robert A.F. Thurman, Lozang Jamspal, et. al. Universal Vehicle Discourse Literature (Mahayanasutralamkara). Treasury of the Buddhist Sciences.
Thurman, Robert A.F. and Marilyn M. Rhie. Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet. New York: Abrams, 1991.

B. Alan Wallace, Ph.D.

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B. ALAN WALLACE, PH.D.

B. Alan Wallace is an author, translator, teacher, researcher, interpreter and Buddhist practitioner interested in the intersections of consciousness studies and scientific disciplines such as psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and physics. Stated simply, Wallace endeavors to chart relationships and commonalities between Eastern and Western scientific, philosophical, and contemplative modes of inquiry.

B. Alan Wallace is an author, translator, teacher, researcher, interpreter and Buddhist practitioner interested in the intersections of consciousness studies and scientific disciplines such as psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and physics. Stated simply, Wallace endeavors to chart relationships and commonalities between Eastern and Western scientific, philosophical, and contemplative modes of inquiry.

Alan Wallace was born in Pasadena, California, in 1950, the son of Protestant theologian David H. Wallace, and was raised in the United States, Scotland, and Switzerland. In 1968, he began his undergraduate education at the University of California, San Diego, with an emphasis on biology and philosophy. He spent his third year abroad at the University of Göttingen, Germany, where he shifted the direction of his studies to Tibetan culture and language. Wishing to immerse himself more fully in the study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism, in 1971 he discontinued his university education and moved to Dharamsala, India, where he enrolled in classes at the Library of Tibetan Works & Archives, which was established in that year under the auspices of the Dalai Lama. In 1973, as a newly ordained Buddhist monk, he enrolled in the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, where he trained until 1974. The following year he received full monastic ordination from the Dalai Lama, who then encouraged him to join the renowned Buddhist contemplative Geshe Rabten at the Tibet Institute in Switzerland. Two years later, he continued his training and also began teaching at the Center for Higher Tibetan Studies in Mt. Pelerin, Switzerland, still training under Geshe Rabten and many other Tibetan scholars and contemplatives. In 1979, with the encouragement of the Dalai Lama, he returned to India, where he began a series of solitary meditation retreats, first under the direct guidance of the Dalai Lama, and later in Sri Lanka and the United States. In 1984, he enrolled in Amherst College, where, as an Independent Scholar, he studied physics, the philosophy of science, and Sanskrit, completing his undergraduate degree summa cum laude in 1987. In 1987, with the permission of the Dalai Lama, he formally returned his monastic vows, and two years later married Vesna A. Wallace, an accomplished Buddhist scholar in her own right. In that same year, he enrolled in the graduate program in religious studies at Stanford University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1995. During these years at Stanford, he also continued his studies of the philosophy of science and of the mind. His main research centered on integrating Buddhism with Western science and philosophy with the aim of achieving a more comprehensive understanding of consciousness. In 1997, he joined the faculty of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he taught courses on Tibetan Buddhism, language, and culture, as well as the interface between science and religion. In 2001, he left his position at the university and devoted himself to a six-month solitary meditation retreat in the high desert of eastern California. In 2003, Alan established the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, a non-profit institution concerned with synthesizing scientific and contemplative inquiry into the nature and potentials of consciousness.

Alan Wallace

Publications:

Hidden Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and Consciousness.
Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge.
The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness.
The Bridge of Quiescence: Experiencing Tibetan Buddhist Meditation.
Choosing Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind.
Embracing Mind: The Common Ground of Science & Spirituality.
The Attention Revolution: Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind.
Genuine Happiness: Meditation as a Path to Fulfillment.
The Four Immeasurables: Cultivating a Boundless Heart.
Buddhism with an Attitude: The Tibetan Seven-Point Mind-Training.
A Passage from Solitude: A Modern Commentary on Tibetan Buddhist Mind Training.

Alice Walker

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ALICE WALKER

Alice Walker, best known perhaps as the author of The Color Purple, was the eighth child of Georgia sharecroppers. After a childhood accident blinded her in one eye, she went on to become valedictorian of her local school, and attend Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College on scholarships, graduating in 1965.

Alice Walker volunteered in the voter registration drives of the 1960s in Georgia, and went to work after college in the Welfare Department in New York City. Alice Walker married in 1967 (and divorced in 1976). Her first book of poems came out in 1968 and her first novel just after her daughter’s birth in 1970.

Alice Walker’s early poems, novels and short stories dealt with themes familiar to readers of her later works: rape, violence, isolation, troubled relationships, multi-generational perspectives, sexism and racism. Her work has explored the lives of Langston Hughes & Zora Neale Hurston as well as two books exploring the issue of female circumcision in Africa among many other topics.

She currently travels in promotion of environmental protection, women’s rights and issues of economic justice.

“…it has taken these years to unburden my life of many of the things I used to worry about: my papers, my bills, my persona, the writer’s life. The process of clearing is on-going, as I now enter a period, perhaps the last phase of my life, which will be fundamentally dedicated to Wandering and Meditation. I feel in my bones the connection to the Ancients who have, through the ages, spontaneously shed as much as possible of their worldly concerns and have taken to the road, the hillside, the kitchen or hammock, or to meditating alone or with others as they move slowly about the earth, identifying only the present moment as home.”

Personal website: Alice Walker

Other websites: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/alice ... walker.htm

http://www.pr.com/press-release/61539

Publications:

Once (Poems)
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women
Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems
Langston Hughes: American Poet (editor)
Meridian
Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning
I Love Myself When I Am Laughing… & Then Again When I Am Looking Mean & Impressive (editor)
You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories
The Color Purple
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose
Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful
To Hell With Dying
Living by the Word
The Temple of My Familiar
Finding the Green Stone
Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems
Possessing the Secret of Joy
Warrior Marks
The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult
Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism
By the Light of My Father’s Smile

Acharya Lama Pema Wangdak

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ACHARYA LAMA PEMA WANGDAK

Born in Purang in Western Tibet in 1954, Lama Pema Wandak’s family escaped from Tibet in 1959 and eventually resettled in a refugee camp in Mundgod, South India. He is the only child of five in his family to have survived the escape. Lama Pema has been a monk since the age of 7 and is a student of His Holiness the Sakya Trizin and other great masters from the Sakya order of Tibetan Buddhism. A graduate of the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies in Benares, India, he received his Acharya (masters) degree from Sanskrit University in 1980. His Holiness the Sakya Trizin sent him to teach in the United States in 1982 as the first of the younger generation of Tibetan teachers in America from the Sakya School. Lama Pema is the creator of “Bur Yig”—Tibetan Braille. He has been guiding western students for over 20 years and continues to travel and teach extensively at Dharma centers around the world. His marvelous command of the English language and excelled wisdom and compassion have established him as a respected and renowned teacher in today’s world.

Weekly teachings of Tibetan Buddhism are offered at the Palden Sakya Centers located in New York City and Cresskill, New Jersey. In addition, there are also Centers in Woodstock and Philmont, New York; Jamaica, Vermont; and Dayton, Ohio.

Personal website: Lama Pema Wandak

Other websites:http://www.pr.com/press-release/61539

Lobsang Tenzin Geshe Wangdak

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LOBSANG TENZIN GESHE WANGDAK

Lobsang Tenzin Geshe Wangdak, Khensur Rinpoche, was born in 1934 in the Kham province in Tibet. At age ten he entered Ba Zingon Monastery there. At 18, Rinpoche journeyed to central Tibet and joined the Loseling College at Drepung Monastery near Lhasa, where he studied until 1959. In 1960, after fleeing to India, he resumed his studies at Buxa, where a temporary monastery was established. In 1970, he moved to the newly relocated Drepung Monastic University in Mundgod, south India. After two years of intensive study and practice he moved to Sarnath, studying there until 1977. Rinpoche returned to Drepung to take his Geshe exams, and his scholastic achievement eaned him the Geshe Lharampa degree.

Soon after completing his Geshe exams, he was invited to teach at Namgyal Monastery in Dharamsala, India, where he was senior teacher for 14 years, teaching both sutra and tantra. While at Namgyal, Rinpoche received initiations and teachings of tantric practices of all four traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. In 1991, he was appointed Abbot of the monastery by H.H. the Dalai Lama, a position he held until 1994. In 1995, His Holiness appointed Khensur Rinpoche Abbot and Senior Resident Teacher at Namgyal Monastery in Ithaca, NY. He retired from Ithaca in 1998, and now resides at the Chenrezig Tibetan Buddhist Center in Middletown, Connecticut.

Besides his studies in the core curriculum under his tutor at Drepung, H.E. Drepung Khenchen Pema Gyaltsen, Khensur Rinpoche received tantric initiations from His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso; from His Holiness’ two tutors, His Holiness Kyabje Ling Rinpoche and His Holiness Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche; and other esteemed scholars including His Holiness Kyabje Zong Rinpoche.

Other websites:

http://www.chenrezigcenter.org/

http://buddhisttorrents.blogspot.com/20 ... geshe.html

Jan Willis, Ph.D.

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JAN WILLIS, PH.D.

While completing her bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Cornell University in the 1960s, Jan Willis found herself pulled in two directions: on the one hand, having lived in fear of the Ku Klux Klan where she grew up in Alabama, she was drawn to the revolutionary politics of the Black Panthers; on the other hand, after traveling to Nepal in her junior year, she was taken with the possibility of learning more about Tibetan Buddhism. How does one decide which values to embrace? How does one decide which tradition to claim as one’s own? How does one decide between becoming a Black Panther or a Buddhist? These are the questions that have animated Willis’s life.

Having resolved in the end to follow the contemplative path, Willis returned to a monastery in Nepal, where she found herself the only woman among sixty monks being trained in Tibetan Buddhism. And now, some thirty years later, after completing her doctorate at Columbia in Indic and Buddhist Studies, Willis is a professor of religion and the Walter A. Crowell Professor of the Social Sciences at Wesleyan university. As a scholar and as a practitioner, Willis has committed herself to making the value of Buddhism more evident to people of all races. As the passages from Dreaming Me included here demonstrate, Willis believes that this spiritual practice has much to offer those who seek peace in troubled times, particularly African Americans trying to find relief from the despair and rage that are the legacy of slavery in the United States. Willis remains attracted to the contemplative life because, as she puts it, “Buddhism is a come-and-see model. Meditation is the path. You don’t have to accept dogma. You have to spend time on the cushion.”

To this day, Willis credits her time at Cornell with having changed her life. “It was as if [MacLeod] reached down into the Jim Crow South and liberated me,” she said. “I know how different my life could be if it had not been for that.”

Personal website: Wesleyan Faculty Website

Other websites:

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Jan ... le.cp.html

http://www.newhum.com/for_students/link ... illis.html

Publications:

The Diamond Light of the Eastern Dawn: An Introduction to Tibetan Buddhist Meditation.
On Knowing Reality: The Tattvartha Chapter of Asanga’s Bodhisattvabhumi.
Feminine Ground: Essays on Women and Tibet (Editor, and contributor of two of six, essays).
Enlightened Beings: Life Stories from the Ganden Oral Tradition
Dreaming Me: An African American Baptist-Buddhist Journey. New York: Riverhead Books.,

William Bushell, Ph.D.

[x]
WILLIAM BUSHELL, PH.D.

William Bushell, PhD, has been researching and lecturing on the health-enhancing and anti-aging effects of meditation and yoga for many years at Harvard, MIT, and Columbia, as a Fulbright Scholar and at the Salk Institute. He has collaborated with Robert Thurman and His Holiness the Dalai Lama on conferences and research projects.

Dr. William Bushell is at the forefront of research into the mental and physical effects of advanced yogic practice of the Indo-Tibetan and other traditions. His wide-ranging work seeks to integrate western scientific models with traditional Tibetan tantric systems, and has been presented at many venues and institutions, including recently at the Meetings of the Society for Neuroscience, MIT & the Salk Institute.

Other websites: http://www.infinityfoundation.com/Bushell.htm

Publications:

Longevity and Optimal Health : Integrating Eastern and Western Perspectives

Mark Epstein, M.D.

[x]

Michael Eigen

[x]

Faried Esack, Ph.D.

[x]

Peter Fenner

[x]

Roshi Norman Fischer

[x]

Barbara Foster

[x]

China Galland, Ph.D.

[x]

Sharon Gannon & David Life

[x]

Kyabje Gehlek Rimpoche

[x]

Geshe Gelek Chodak

[x]

Joseph Goldstein

[x]

Tara & Daniel A. Goleman, Ph.D.

[x]

Alex Grey

[x]

Paul Hackett

[x]

Lorne Ladner, Ph.D.

[x]

Robert Langan

[x]

Peter Laughingwolf

[x]

Noah Levine

[x]

Stephen & Ondrea Levine

[x]

Frank Lipman, M.D.

[x]

Ven. Kyabje Denma Locho Rinpoche

[x]

Sakya Jekunma Chimea Luding

[x]

Bill Magee, Ph.D.

[x]

Arnaud Maitland

[x]

Michael Meade

[x]

Woodsen Merrell, M.D.

[x]

Michael Vincent Miller, Ph.D.

[x]

Wes Nisker

[x]

Tenzin Norbu

[x]

Khenpo Tenzin Norgey

[x]

Robert Nozick, Ph.D.

[x]

Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D.

[x]

Tenzin Palmo

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Marilyn Byfield Paul

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Dr. Choeyang Phuntsok

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Milbry Polk, Ph.D.

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Timothy Quill, M.D.

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Dr. Lobsang Rabaye

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Dr. Tashi Rabten

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Marylin Rhie, Ph.D.

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Ven. Mathieu Ricard

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Stephanie Bryn Sacks

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Therese Schroeder-Sheker

[x]

Elizabeth Pyjov

[x]
ELIZABETH PYJOV

Elizabeth studied the neuroscience, philosophy, and pedagogy of compassion at Stanford Medical School with the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. She has taught compassion at Stanford University, Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School, Columbia Medical School, Columbia School of Public Health, Mt. Sinai Medical School, NYU Medical School, Novartis, Warby Parker, Altfest Management, Tibet House US, the Rubin Museum, the 92nd St Y, the Harvard Club of New York, and yoga teacher trainings.

Elizabeth graduated from magna cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in Romance Languages and Literatures and the Classics and is currently a student at Harvard Law School. She is currently an advisor for Click Therapeutics. Elizabeth has worked for Global Justice in New York City, for Italian television at RAI International in Rome, at the United Nations in Geneva, Click Therapeutics in New York City, and at the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford, CA. At Stanford she helped develop Stanford’s compassion program into a corporate version that was subsequently used at Kaiser and in serveral Silicon Valley tech companies. Elizabeth is fluent in Russian, French, Italian, Spanish, and English. She has worked or studied in Argentina, Italy, France, Peru, Switzerland, Russia, and Spain. Her international experience has led her to understand that among those of various traditions, customs, and religions, people find happiness in many of the same ways. They want to be healthy, do meaningful work, and be close to their loved ones—what brings joy is always kindness, a caring attitude, and compassion. She is delighted to be teaching compassion in New York City and Boston. You can contact her at epyjov@jd19.law.harvard.edu.

Dr. Elizabeth Visceglia

[x]
DR. ELIZABETH VISCEGLIA

Dr. Elizabeth Visceglia, Board certified in Psychiatry, is a twenty-five year student of Yoga. She met her teacher, Guruji Prakash Shankar Vyas, a Kriya Yogi, eighteen years ago when she was living in Varanasi, India, and she continues to study and practice with him. Her first published study found that Yoga has a profoundly positive impact for people with schizophrenia, their symptoms, and their quality of life, and she continues to do research on Yoga and schizophrenia. Elizabeth also supervises yoga therapists working in the mental health field. A former AIDS educator in Kenya, and a graduate of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Elizabeth has a private practice in Brooklyn where she lives with her family. For more information, visit: elizabethvisceglia.com

Susanna Nicholson

[x]
SUSANNA NICHOLSON

Susanna Nicholson MPhil, CIHC, has taught meditation both privately and in hospitals for over fifteen years and is currently a student in the Nalanda Certificate Program in Contemplative Psychology. Her vipassana background started with intensive, one-on-one training at Passadhi, a retreat center in Ireland run by Marjo Oosterhof, Buddhist translator and former nun. Her graduate-level Buddhism studies continued at the University of Virginia, Department of Religious Studies. For over two years she has studied with Ruth King, a dharma teacher on matters of race. Her teaching supervisor is Paul Harvey in the U.K. She is credentialed in secular, mindfulness-based life coaching as a Certified Integrative Health Coach at Duke University, and through certification in Presence-Based Coaching.

Brooke D. Lavelle

[x]
BROOKE D. LAVELLE

Brooke D. Lavelle is the Co-Founder and President of the Courage of Care Coalition. Brooke holds a PhD in Religious Studies from Emory University, an MA in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism from Columbia University and a BA in Religion and Psychology from Barnard College. Her academic work focuses on the diversity of contemplative models for cultivating compassion and mindfulness, as well as the cultural contexts that shape the transmission, reception, and secularization of Buddhist contemplative practices in America.

Marianne Gunther

[x]
MARIANNE GUNTHER

Marianne Gunther, MPS, ATR-BC, LCAT, is a New York state licensed creative art psychotherapist, currently completing the Nalanda Institute’s Contemplative Psychotherapy Program. A long time student of the Dudjom Tersar lineage, Marianne has quietly brought mindful awareness and bodhisattva practice to her clinical work in a variety of settings; inpatient detoxification and psychiatric units, bereavement group facilitator at A Caring Hand: The Billy Esposito Foundation; and bereavement specialist for MJHS Hospice & Palliative Care. Marianne received her B.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, Boston, her Masters in art therapy from Pratt Institute. Marianne welcomes you to refresh and renew your inner spaciousness with her during the lunch time series.

Frederick Marshman Bailey
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/2/19

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.

TIBETAN REFUGEES

Sir. – Recent devastating events in Tibet caused over 15,000 Tibetans to cross the perilous Himalayas into India. It may be a long time before these unfortunate people can safely return to their overrun country. Our own consciences should allow us neither to neglect nor forget them.

The Indian Government has manfully coped with this addition to its own problems at home. In this country we are bound in honour to help relieve needs of the Tibetan refugees, because from 1905 to 1947 there was a special relationship between Tibet and the United Kingdom – a relationship handed on to the new India.

On balance we think it wisest to concentrate chiefly on collecting money which can be used for the benefit of the refugees, not least in the purchase of necessary antibiotics and other medicaments. The Tibet Society has opened a Tibet Relief Fund for which we now appeal in the hope of a generous response. Donations should be sent to the address below or direct to the National Bank Ltd. (Belgravia Branch), 21 Grosvenor Gardens, S.W.I.

Yours faithfully,

... F.M. Bailey ... The Tibet Relief Fund, 58 Eccleston Square, S.W. I., Letter to the Times, July 31, 1959, p.7.

-- Tibet Society, by tibetsociety.com

Frederick Marshman Bailey

Frederick Marshman Bailey CIE FRGS (3 February 1882, Lahore, India – 17 April 1967, Stiffkey, Norfolk) was a British intelligence officer and one of the last protagonists of The Great Game - the fight for supremacy between the Russians and the British Empire along the Himalayas. His clandestine work gave him many opportunities to pursue his hobbies of photography, butterfly collecting, and trophy hunting in the high Tibetan region. Over 2000 of his bird specimens were presented to The Natural History Museum,[1] although his personal collection is now held in the American Museum of Natural History, New York.[2] His papers and extensive photograph collections are held in the British Library, London.[3]


Miru Gyalwa, Mrs Bailey, Major Vance, Colonel Bailey, 1927 in Tibet

Early life

Born in Lahore on 3 February 1882, F. H. M. Bailey was the son of an officer in the Royal Engineers of the British Army who was also named Frederick, resulting in the younger Bailey usually being called "Eric". He was educated at Edinburgh Academy, Wellington College (1895-1899) and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, from where he was commissioned onto the Unattached List of the Indian Army on 28 July 1900. He was admitted to the Indian Army on 26 October 1901 and was attached to the 17th Bengal Lancers. He was promoted to lieutenant on 28 October 1902 and transferred to the 32nd Sikh Pioneers on 1 March 1903.[2] He obtained a transfer to the Foreign & Political Department on 24 January 1906. During a mission in Sikhim he began to study Tibetan, and became so proficient that he accompanied Francis Younghusband in his 1904 invasion of Tibet. He then served as the British Trade Agent in Gyantse (Tibet) at intervals between December 1905 and December 1909.

He later travelled in unknown parts of China and Tibet, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in October 1906 (seconded by his father Colonel F Bailey who had joined the society in 1880[2]) eventually earning the Gold Explorer's Medal from the Royal Geographical Society for his discoveries. He also contributed notes on big-game to the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. He was promoted Captain 28 July 1908 and served during the operations in the Abor country 1911-12.

Bailey transferred himself from the Indian Army to the Political Department to get appointments on the Tibetan frontier. In 1911 he crossed China and southern Tibet to Assam in a failed attempt to reach the 150 foot falls on the Yarlung Tsangpo previously reported by the Indian pundit Kinthup,[4] and in 1913 he made an unauthorized exploration to the Tsangpo Gorges with Captain Henry Morshead of the Survey of India. Morshead was later a surveyor for the initial 1921 British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition, along with George Mallory. Their adventures led them to the Rong Chu valley a gorge on the upper Tsangpo. It was in this valley that Bailey spotted a tall blue poppy at the margin of the forest and pressed it in his notebook - now called Meconopsis baileyi. They reached Kintup's falls at the monastery of Pemakochung and were greatly disappointed to find the falls to be about thirty feet.

First World War

On 4 September 1914 Bailey was appointed as a Captain with the 6th Reserve Regiment of Cavalry at Dublin. He served on the western front during March to April 1915 with the 34th Sikh Pioneers, where he was shot in the arm. At the time he was serving in the Indian Expeditionary Forces as one of the few Urdu-speaking officers on the front. When his wound continued to worsen, he returned to England, but he later joined the fight again at Gallipoli in September 1915 serving with the 5th Gurkhas, where he was wounded twice more.

He was appointed a Companion of the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire on 1 January 1915[5] and was transferred to the Supernumerary List on 24 December 1915.

He was sent back to India, where he served as Political Officer on the North West Frontier during the Mohmand Operations January 1916 to March 1917.

In December 1917 he was sent to South Persia where he served until February 1918 as a Political officer, then Chinese & Russian Turkistan 1918-1920

He was appointed a temporary Lieutenant-Colonel, 1 April 1918 until 30 May 1920.

Mission to Tashkent

One of Bailey's more well-known adventures occurred in 1918, when he traveled to Tashkent in Central Asia on a mission to discover the intentions of the new Bolshevik government, specifically in relation to India. During this mission he also shadowed Raja Mahendra Pratap, an Indian nationalist who had established the Provisional Government of India in Kabul in 1915. Pratap was at the time liaising with Germany and Bolshevik authorities for a joint Soviet-German assault into India through Afghanistan.[6] It was at this time that the first plans for the Soviet Kalmyk Project was first considered. Bailey eventually had to flee for his life from the city, and only escaped after taking on the guise of an Austrian POW[7] and joining the Cheka, with an assignment to find a rogue British agent - that is, himself. Upon his return to England, he was a national hero. Bailey later recorded his exploits in his book Mission to Tashkent. He was also instrumental in organising support for the Basmachi Revolt.

Later life


In the Mishmi Hills

In 1921 Bailey married Hon. Irma, daughter of Baron Cozens-Hardy.

He was the Political Officer for Sikkim and Tibet, stationed in Gangtok (Sikkim) from June 1921 - October 1928, during which time he made annual visits to Tibet to inspect the Gyantse Trade Agency and visited Lhasa from 16 July to 16 August 1924 (accompanied by the Medical Officer, Major J. Hislop IMS)

He helped Frank Kingdon-Ward and Lord Cawdor in 1924 when he was a Political Officer in Gangtok, Sikkim. Bailey arranged passports and encouraged them to search the fifty-mile unexplored gap of the river to solve the riddles of the Tsangpo Gorges. Kingdon-Ward wrote a book by the same name documenting that expedition.

He was among the earliest to import the Lhasa Apso breed of dog into Britain.[8] He was in contact with others interested in Central Asia including Richard Meinertzhagen.

He was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel 28 July 1926.

He was the Resident at Baroda, Central India from 1930–32, and was appointed the Resident in Kashmir later in 1932 until 1933.

In February 1935 he was appointed His Majesty's Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at Kathmandu.[9] He held this appointment until retiring in 1938.

He retired from the Indian Army on 3 February 1937 and in the Second World War served as a King's Messenger to Central and South America between 1942 and 1943.

Legacy

Bailey is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of Tibetan snake, Thermophis baileyi.[10]

See also

• London Gazette
• Indian Army List (various dates)
• Wellington College Register
• The Times

References

1. Warr, F. E. 1996. Manuscripts and Drawings in the ornithology and Rothschild libraries of The Natural History Museum at Tring. BOC. (BMNH 1938 7-15)
2. Anon. (1967) Obituary: Lt.-Col. F. M. Bailey, C. I. E. 1882-1967. The Geographical Journal 133: 427-428.
3. Papers at Mss Eur F157, photographs at Photo 1083.
4. Bailey, F.M. 1911
5. "No. 29024". The London Gazette (Supplement). 1 January 1915. p. 3.
6. Bailey & Hopkirk 2002, pp. 224–227
7. Bailey, F. M.; A Visit to Bokhara in 1919; The Geographical Journal > Vol. 57, No. 2 (Feb., 1921), pp. 75-87
8. Bailey, Eric (1937) Dogs from the Roof of the World : Many unusual Breeds Found in Tibet the Strange Land That Lies in the Clouds. American Kennel Gazette 25(3) "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 8 November 2006. Retrieved 12 December 2006.
9. "No. 34133". The London Gazette. 15 February 1935. p. 1091.
10.
Beolens, Bo; Watkins, Michael; Grayson, Michael (2011). The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. xiii + 296 pp. ISBN 978-1-4214-0135-5. ("Bailey, F. M.", p. 14).

Further reading

• Anon. Obituary. Ibis 1967:615-616
• Bailey, F. M. China-Tibet-Assam: A Journey, 1911 (London: Cape, 1945)
• Bailey, F.M; Hopkirk, Peter (2002), Mission to Tashkent, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-280387-5.(1946, republished 1992 and 2002).
• Bailey, F. M. No Passport To Tibet (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957)
• Brysac, Shareen Blair and Karl E. Meyer. Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia. (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint Press, 1999).
• Cocker, Mark. Loneliness and time: the story of British travel writing. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1992).
• Hopkirk, Peter. Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin's Dream of an Empire in Asia. (London: Kodansha International, 1984).
• McKay, Alex. Tibet and the British Raj: The Frontier Cadre 1904-1947' (Richmond, Curzon Press, 1997)
• Milton, Giles Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Global Plot, Sceptre, 2013. ISBN 978 1 444 73702 8
• Swinson, Arthur. Beyond the Frontiers. The Biography of Colonel F.M. Bailey Explorer and Special Agent(London: Hutchinson of London, 1971)

External links

• Memorial plaque at Wiveton church

Marco Pallis
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/2/19

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.

TIBETAN REFUGEES

Sir. – Recent devastating events in Tibet caused over 15,000 Tibetans to cross the perilous Himalayas into India. It may be a long time before these unfortunate people can safely return to their overrun country. Our own consciences should allow us neither to neglect nor forget them.

The Indian Government has manfully coped with this addition to its own problems at home. In this country we are bound in honour to help relieve needs of the Tibetan refugees, because from 1905 to 1947 there was a special relationship between Tibet and the United Kingdom – a relationship handed on to the new India.

On balance we think it wisest to concentrate chiefly on collecting money which can be used for the benefit of the refugees, not least in the purchase of necessary antibiotics and other medicaments. The Tibet Society has opened a Tibet Relief Fund for which we now appeal in the hope of a generous response. Donations should be sent to the address below or direct to the National Bank Ltd. (Belgravia Branch), 21 Grosvenor Gardens, S.W.I.

Yours faithfully,

... Marco Pallis ... The Tibet Relief Fund, 58 Eccleston Square, S.W. I., Letter to the Times, July 31, 1959, p.7.

-- Tibet Society, by tibetsociety.com

Marco Pallis
Born 19 June 1895
Liverpool, England
Died 5 June 1989 (aged 93)
Nationality British
Known for Writings on Tibet

Marco Alexander Pallis (1895 – 5 June 1989) was a Greek-British author and mountaineer with close affiliations to the Traditionalist School. He wrote works on the religion and culture of Tibet.

Early life: Education, Travels, and Wartime Experiences

Born in Liverpool on 19 June 1895, he was the youngest son of wealthy and cosmopolitan Greek parents.[1] Pallis was educated at Harrow School and the University of Liverpool, where he studied entomology.[2] In 1911 he traveled to British Guiana to study insects, and in 1912, he joined the Greek campaign against the Ottoman Empire during the first of the Balkan Wars. During the siege of Ioannina, the ancestral town of the Pallis family, he worked at a field hospital in Arta.

During the First World War, Pallis, initially aided the Salvation Army in the region along the Sava River in Serbia. In 1916 he enlisted in the British Army and received a commission as an army interpreter in Macedonia. Malaria and a severe inflammation of his right eye cut short his Macedonian service. After a lengthy convalescence in Malta, Pallis applied to and was accepted by the Grenadier Guards. He received basic training, then advanced training as a machine-gunner. In 1918, as a second lieutenant, he was sent to fight in the trenches of the Western Front. During the battle of Cambrai, in a charge that killed his captain and first lieutenant, Pallis was shot through the knee and was forced to retire from combat.

Mountaineering, the Himalayas, and Introduction to Buddhism

Following the war, Pallis climbed and explored against doctor's orders for his injured knee.[3] He went on expeditions to the Arctic, Switzerland, and the Dolomites, and Snowdonia, the Peak District, and the Scottish Highlands when closer to home. In 1933 Pallis led a small mountaineering party to the area of Kinnaur, one of the Himalayan borderlands. Near the village of Nako, at the border with Tibet, Pallis and his team succeeded in making the first ascent of Leo Pargial (22,280 feet).[4]

In 1936 Pallis returned to the Himalayas at the head of another expedition. His party traveled first to Sikkim, an “antechamber of Tibet”, where their failure to scale the summit of Simvu (22,360 feet) was, at least for Pallis, more than made up for by their encounter with the saintly abbot of Lachhen, in whom, according to Pallis, “intelligence, compassion, and initiatic authority were reflected in equal degree”.[5]

From Sikkim Pallis had hoped to cross the border into Tibet proper, but due to political circumstances it was impossible to obtain the necessary permissions. Forced to alter his plans, he decided instead to make his way to Ladakh. He was accompanied by his close friend Richard Nicholson[6] and one other member of their climbing party, Dr. Robert Roaf. Once in Ladakh, they discarded Western clothes in favor of the chuba,[7] and assumed as much as possible a Tibetan manner of living. “It was our way of saying to our hosts: ‘We wish to be as one of you. Please make no unusual arrangements on our behalf. We love your tradition, and hope it will not be rashly changed. We have found means of attuning ourselves to its ways.’”[8]

Pallis by now saw himself as a “pilgrim” of Tibetan Buddhism and in both Sikkim and Ladakh he received his religious education directly from qualified instructors within the living tradition. He dedicates his Peaks and Lamas to four teachers in particular, “the great contemplator, abbot of Lachhen, the venerable Dawa, bursar of Spituk, the venerable Konchhog Gyaltsan of P’hiyang, and the venerable Geshe Wangyal of Drepung, Lhasa who for my benefit and for the good of all creatures set in motion the Wheel of the Doctrine”.[9][10]

The Second World War[11] prevented further travels until 1947, when Pallis and Richard Nicholson were able to visit the Tibetan heartland before the coming Chinese invasion. They traveled widely throughout Tibet’s Tsang province, seeking to fulfill their shared desire to “absorb the spirit of the Tradition by direct experience”.[12] Over the course of their stay they were able to make contact with each of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism (Gelugpa, Nyingmapa, Kagyudpa, and Sakyapa), visiting such holy sites as the ancient Pel Sakya monastery, seat of the Sakyapa and “a treasure-house of all the arts at their very best”,[13] as well as the Tashilhunpo monastery, seat of the Panchen Lama and one of the four great monasteries of the Gelugpa.

After his departure from the Tibetan plateau, Pallis lived in Kalimpong, India, for nearly four years[14] before returning to England in 1951.[15] Kalimpong was then a center of literary and cultural activity, as well as a refuge for many of those who were being forced to leave Tibet. Pallis formed many lasting relationships during this time, including an acquaintance with the then queen of Bhutan and her family, whom he later visited in England, and with the Dalai Lama’s former tutor Heinrich Harrer, with whom Pallis later collaborated in exposing the fraudulent writer Cyril Hoskin, alias “Lobsang Rampa”.[16] While in Kalimpong, Pallis also met with the Dalai Lama’s Great Royal Mother, and he developed a close relationship with the abbot of the nearby Tharpa Choling monastery.

After the political upheavals in Tibet in the 1950s, Pallis became active in the affairs of the Tibetan [Tibet] Society, the first Western support group created for the Tibetan people. Pallis also was able to house members of the Tibetan diaspora in his London flat. Pallis also formed a relationship with the young Chögyam Trungpa, who had just arrived in England.[17] Trungpa asked Pallis to write the foreword to Trungpa’s first, autobiographical book, Born in Tibet. In his acknowledgment, Trungpa offers Pallis his “grateful thanks” for the “great help” that Pallis provided in bringing the book to completion. He goes on to say that “Mr. Pallis when consenting to write the foreword, devoted many weeks to the work of finally putting the book in order”.[18]

-- Chogyam Trungpa in Scottish kilt

Musical career

Pallis studied music under Arnold Dolmetsch, the distinguished reviver of early English music, composer, and performer,[19] and was considered “one of Dolmetsch's most devoted protégés”.[20] soon discovered a love of early music—in particular chamber music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—and for the viola da gamba. Even while climbing in the region of the Satlej-Ganges watershed, he and his musically-minded friends did not fail to bring their instruments.


Viola da gamba

Pallis taught viol at the Royal Academy of Music, and reconstituted The English Consort of Viols, an ensemble he had first formed in the 1930s. It was one of the first professional performing groups dedicated to the preservation of early English music. They released three records[21] and made several concert tours in England and two tours to the United States.[22]

According to the New York Times review, their Town Hall concert of April 1962 “was a solid musical delight”, the players having possessed “a rhythmic fluidity that endowed the music with elegance and dignity”.[23] Pallis also published several compositions, primarily for the viol,[24] and wrote on the viol’s history and its place in early English music.[25]

The Royal Academy of Music, in recognition of a lifetime of contribution to the field of early music, awarded Pallis an Honorary Fellowship. At age eighty-nine his Nocturne de l’Ephemere was performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London; his niece writes that “he was able to go on stage to accept the applause which he did with his customary modesty.”[26] When he died he left unfinished an opera based on the life of Milarepa.[27]

Peter Davidson, cofounder of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light (HBL), a nineteenth-century British occult order, was born and raised in Forres, Scotland. In 1866 he married Christina Ross. He became a violin maker and in 1871 published a book, The Violin, that surveyed the historical and technical aspects of the instrument. At the same time, he was a student of the occult and corresponded with various occult notables throughout Britain, including Hargrave Jennings. He may have become an initiate of Pascal Beverly Randolph (1825-1875), whose teachings he would later integrate into those of the brotherhood. Much of this occult interest seems to have been stimulated by occasional visions of angelic beings. He may also have been contacted by an Oriental adept, similar to one of the mahatmas with whom Helena Petrovna Blavatsky of the Theosophical Society (TS) had claimed contact. He would later suggest that the HBL and the TS had been founded by the same order of beings. In 1878, he published The Philosophy of Man, which manifested his interest in both the occult and alternative medicine, and invited contact by readers who shared his ideas.

-- Davidson, Peter (1842-1929), by Encyclopedia.com

Writings on Buddhism and Tradition

Pallis described "tradition" as being the leitmotif of his writing. He wrote from the perspective of what has come to be called the traditionalist or perennialist school of comparative religion founded by René Guénon, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, and Frithjof Schuon, each of whom he knew personally.[28] As a traditionalist, Pallis assumed the "transcendent unity of religions" (the title of Schuon's landmark 1948 book) and it was in part this understanding that gave Pallis insight into the innermost nature of the spiritual tradition of Tibet, his chosen love. He was a frequent contributor to the journal Studies in Comparative Religion (along with Schuon, Guénon, and Coomaraswamy), writings on both the topics of Tibetan culture and religious practice as well as the Perennialist philosophy.

Pallis published three books over a span of almost forty years. His first, Peaks and Lamas (1939),[29] mentioned previously, tells the story “of how access was gained, across the varying episodes of Himalayan travel, to a traditional world, still complete and vigorous, that of Buddhism in its Tibetan branch”.[30] This was followed by The Way and the Mountain (1960)[31] and by A Buddhist Spectrum (1980),[32] both collections of essays that attempt to deal “with a number of Buddhist themes of prime importance in such a fashion as to make up . . . a coherent view of the world and of a human destiny realizable in this world as seen through Buddhist eyes”[33] Several of Pallis’ essays were also included in Jacob Needleman’s The Sword of Gnosis.[34] After his final journey to Tibet, while living in Kalimpong, Pallis wrote a short book in the Tibetan language addressing the dangers posed to Tibet by the encroachment of modern culture.[35] In addition to penning his own writings, Pallis translated Buddhist texts into Greek, and translated works of fellow traditionalist writers René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon from French into English. Some of Pallis’ own works have also been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, and Turkish.[36]

Since the publication of his first book, sixty-six years ago, generations of scholars and students have turned to Pallis for insight into Buddhism and Tibet. His work is cited by such writers as Heinrich Harrer, Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell, Thomas Merton, Robert Aitken, and Huston Smith. Despite such scholarly acclaim, it is also true, as Harry Oldmeadow states, that “Pallis had no interest in research for its own sake, nor in any purely theoretical understanding of doctrine: his work was always attuned to the demands of the spiritual life itself. [His essays] should be of interest not only to those on the Buddhist path but to all spiritual wayfarers.”[37] Huston Smith expresses a similar judgment when he declares: “Though Pallis respects scholarship, he doesn’t consider himself a Buddhist scholar. . . . What he does is focus on key Buddhist teachings and mine their essential and existential meaning. In the course of this project he regularly refers to other traditions, especially Christianity. . . . The result is completely satisfying. For insight, and the beauty insight requires if it is to be effective, I find no writer on Buddhism surpassing him.”[38] Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and Robert Aitken gave encouragement to the reprinting of Pallis’ classic Peaks and Lamas, which Wendell Berry has called, “The best book, in my limited reading, in connecting a form of Buddhism with its sustaining culture. . . . [It is] useful to anybody interested in what a traditional culture is or might be, and how such a culture might preserve itself.”[39]

Death

Marco Pallis “retired to the Heavenly Fields” on 5 June 1989. Writing for the Independent, Peter Talbot Wilcox concludes the obituary of his friend with these words:

It remains to risk a brief comment: that he was and remains a great teacher . . . who made sense of life and of the life to come; in whose presence insuperable difficulties became less daunting; who took endless troubles to help those who brought their problems to him; someone to whom the spiritual quest in prayer was the one thing needful, who by his own life demonstrated the validity and truth of traditional teachings; and that, however emasculated by modernism, these remain the only valid criteria for those who, as he would put it, have ears to hear. His life was a celebration of “The Marriage of Wisdom and Method”: which is the title of one of his essays.[40]

Bibliography

• The Way and the Mountain: Tibet, Buddhism, and Tradition, (World Wisdom, 2008) ISBN 978-1-933316-53-6
• The Spiritual Ascent: A Compendium of the World's Wisdom, (Fons Vitae, 2008) ISBN 978-1-933316-53-6
• A Buddhist Spectrum: Contributions to the Christian-Buddhist Dialogue, (World Wisdom, 2004) ISBN 978-0-941532-40-2
• Peaks and Lamas: A Classic Book on Mountaineering, Buddhism and Tibet, (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004) ISBN 978-1-59376-058-8
• Sikkim, (Cosmo, 2003) ISBN 978-81-7020-759-7
• Ladakh, (Cosmo, 2002) ISBN 978-81-7020-756-6
• A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom: An Encyclopedia of Humankind's Spiritual Truth, (Fons Vitae, 2000) ISBN 978-1-887752-33-6

See also

• Perennial philosophy
• Titus Burckhardt
• Hossein Nasr
• Martin Lings
• Huston Smith
• Jean-Louis Michon
• Jean Borella
• Elémire Zolla

Notes

1. For more on Pallis’ family see Laura Cameron and David Matless, “Marietta Pallis,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
2. See Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions Books, 1975), p. 71-72.
3. According to one of his Himalayan climbing partners, “Pallis hides a good deal of determination behind his mild manner” (F. Spencer Chapman, Helvellyn to Himalaya: Including an Account of the First Ascent of Chomolhari [London: The Travel Book Club, 1941], p. 84).
4. The Pallis led ascent is cited by Stephen Venables, Everest: Summit of Achievement (London: Royal Geographic Society, 2003); Walt Unsworth, Everest: The Mountaineering History (Seattle: The Mountaineers, 2000); and Harish Kapadia, Trekking and Climbing in the Indian Himalaya (London: New Holland Publishers, 2001).
5. Peaks and Lamas, p. 360.
6. Pallis and Nicholson met in the 1920s when both were pupils of Arnold Dolmetsch, and remained thereafter life-long friends. They were frequent climbing partners before traveling together to the Himalayas.
7. The traditional dress of Tibetan men. Made of wool and often fur-lined, the chuba is a long-sleeved and ankle-length robe that is worn belted at the waist.
8. Peaks and Lamas, p. 201.
9. Peaks and Lamas, Dedication
10. The diversity of Pallis’ instructors is further indicated in a story told by Arnaud Desjardins, the French writer and filmmaker. Guided in the early 1960s by the Dalai Lama’s personal interpreter, Desjardins met and interviewed many of the most respected Tibetan spiritual leaders, then in exile. He relates: “I remember a conversation, one evening in Sikkim, when the question which arose was of Westerners who had really come near enough to tantrayana to understand something more than words and formulas. One such person, of whom those present spoke with the greatest regard and deference, was repeatedly referred to in this conversation by the English word ‘Tradition.’ ‘Tradition’ had spent some time with such-and-such a guru; ‘Tradition’ has visited such-and-such a monastery. And all of a sudden it became apparent to me that this Mr. ‘Tradition’ was Marco Pallis (under his Tibetan name of Thubden Tendzin). . .” (Arnaud Desjardins, The Message of the Tibetans [London: Stuart & Watkins, 1969], p. 20).
11. Pallis served as a Liverpool police officer during World War II.
12. Peaks and Lamas, p. 200.
13. Marco Pallis, “The Marriage of Wisdom and Method”, The Middle Way: Journal of the Buddhist Society, Vol. XXXVI, No. 2, August 1961, p. 54.
14. A fellow English expatriate and acquaintance of Pallis, the then novice monk Urgyen Sangharakshita (born Dennis Lingwood), provides us with a brief but informative glimpse into Pallis’ domestic life in Kalimpong: “The bungalow was situated at the top of a flight of irregular stone steps, and what with trees looming up behind and shrubs pressing in on either side it was a sufficiently quiet and secluded place. Here Thubden La, as he liked to be called, lived with his friend Richard Nicholson, otherwise known as Thubden Shedub, the companion of the travels recorded in Peaks and Lamas. As lunch was not quite ready, he showed me around the place. Tibetan painted scrolls hung on the walls, and the polished wooden floors were covered with Tibetan rugs. There were silver butter-lamps on the altar, and massive copper teapots on the sideboard, all gleaming in the shuttered semi-darkness. In one room I could just make out the unfamiliar shape of a harpsichord” (Sangharakshita (D.P.E. Lingwood), Facing Mount Kanchenjunga: An English Buddhist in the Eastern Himalayas [Glasgow: Windhorse Publications, 1991], p. 173).
15. In 1959, Pallis made a return visit to northern India and Sikkim.
16. See “Private v. Third Eye”, Time Magazine, Monday, 17 Feb. 1958.
17. For more on the relationship between Trungpa and Pallis, see Pallis’ article “Discovering the Interior Life,” published in The Sword of Gnosis: Metaphysics, Cosmology, Tradition, Symbolism (New York, NY: Penguin, 1974).
18. Chögyam Trungpa, Born in Tibet (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2000), p. 15.
19. Arnold Dolmetsch (1858-1940), was a true pioneer in his field. His circle of friends and collaborators extended to many of the major literary and artistic figures of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, including William Morris, George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, and W.B Yeats. See Margaret Campbell, Dolmetsch: The Man and His Work (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975).
20. Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History (New York: Dover Publication, 1996), p. 38.
21. The Music of Their Royal Courts (Saga Records, London, 1967); To Us a Child. . . (Abbey “Pan” Records, Eynsham, Oxford, 1968); and Music with her Silver Sound. . . (Decca “Turnabout/Vox” Records, London, 1971).
22. When on their second tour in 1964, Pallis had the opportunity to meet with the Catholic writer Thomas Merton at the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky, where they spoke of Zen, Shiva, and the plight of the exiled Tibetan government. See Thomas Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life: Seeking Peace in the Hermitage (The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 5: 1963-1965) (New York, NY: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), p. 157; and Thomas Merton, A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk’s True Life (The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 3: 1952-1960) (New York, NY: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), p. 279.
23. H.K., “Viol Consort Gives Town Hall Program”, The New York Times, 14 April 1963, p. 15.
24. His compositions, printed or recorded, include, Marco Pallis, Divisions upon a Ground: A Contemporary Work for Viol with Accompaniment for Organ or Harpsichord (London: Thames Publishing, 1980); Marco Pallis, arrangement, Renaissance Tunes: Ensemble Pieces for String Instruments (London: Thames Publishing, 1983-4); Marco Pallis, Nocturne de l’Ephémère (Wadhurst, East Sussex, England: Pearl, 1985); Marco Pallis, String Quartet in F# Minor (St. Albans: Corda Music Publications, 1991).
25. His articles include, Marco Pallis, “The Instrumentation of English Viol Consort Music”, Chelys, Vol. 1, 1969, pp. 27-35; Marco Pallis, “Tenor I or Alto? Some Thoughts on the Instrumentation of the Consort of Viols”, VdGSA Journal, Vol. 9, 1972, pp. 5-15; and Marco Pallis, “The Rebirth of Early Music”, Early Music, Vol. 6, No. 1, January, 1978, pp. 41-45.
26. Dominie Nicholls, Quite a Lot (privately published, 2002) ch. 12.
27. Milarepa: Drame Spirituel en Quatre Parties (unpublished).
28. Pallis traveled in India with Coomaraswamy's son Rama, who later also became a writer, and knew the elder Coomaraswamy through lengthy correspondence. Pallis corresponded with both Guénon and Schuon and was able in 1946 to visit Guénon at his home in Cairo; Pallis met with Schuon, either in Pallis' flat in London or in Schuon's home in Lausanne, nearly every year for over thirty years.
29. Marco Pallis, Peaks and Lamas (London: Cassell & Co, 1939, 1940, 1942; London: Readers Union, 1948; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940, 1949; London: Woburn Press, 1974; New York: Gordon Press, 1975; Delhi: Book Faith India, 1995; and Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005).
30. The Way and the Mountain, p. xxxvii.
31. Marco Pallis, The Way and the Mountain (London: Peter Owen Limited, 1960, 1991; and Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2008).
32. Marco Pallis, A Buddhist Spectrum: Contributions to Buddhist-Christian Dialogue (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980; New York: The Seabury Press, 1981; and Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2003).
33. A Buddhist Spectrum, p. xi.
34. Jacob Needleman, The Sword of Gnosis: Metaphysics, Cosmology, Tradition, Symbolism (New York: Penguin, 1974)
35. See “Haven’t We Met?”, Time Magazine, Monday, 4 Dec. 1950.
36. In Italian: Marco Pallis, Il Loto e la Croce (Turin: Borla Editore, 1969). In French: Marco Pallis, Preface, Milarepa: Ses Mefaits, ses Epreuves, son Illumination, translated by Jacques Bacot (Paris: Fayard, 1971); Cimes et Lamas (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1955; and Paris: Editions Kailash, 1997); Lumieres Bouddhiques (Paris: Fayard, 1983); and La Vie Active, Ce qu’elle est et ce qu’elle n’est pas (Lyon: Paul Derain, 1954). In Spanish: El Camino y la Montaña (Buenos Aires: Kier Editorial, 1973, 1998); Cumbres Y Lamas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1946). In Turkish: Yol ve Dağ (Istanbul: Cengiz Erengil, 2007).
37. Harry Oldmeadow, Foreword, in Marco Pallis, The Way and the Mountain (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2008), p. x.
38. Huston Smith, Review of Marco Pallis, A Buddhist Spectrum in The Eastern Buddhist Vol. 15, No. 2, Autumn 1982, p. 145.
39. Back cover, Marco Pallis, The Way and the Mountain (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2008).
40. Peter Talbot Wilcox, The Independent, London, June 1989.

External links

• Biography at World Wisdom