Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

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Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Wed Aug 07, 2019 7:52 am

Harold Walter Bailey
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/7/19

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

-- Robert Charles Zaehner, by Wikipedia


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

Life

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

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

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

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

Work

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

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

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

Selected publications

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

Honours and awards

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

References

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

Notes

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

External links

• Encyclopedia Iranica, Bailey, Harold Walter by John Sheldon
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Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Wed Aug 07, 2019 8:02 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postby admin » Wed Aug 07, 2019 8:11 am

Alfred Korzybski
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/7/19

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

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

Early life and career

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

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

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

General semantics

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

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

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

"To be"

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

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

Anecdotes

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

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

Influence

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

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

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

See also

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

References

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

Further reading

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

External links

• Works by Alfred Korzybski at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Alfred Korzybski at Internet Archive
• Alfred Korzybski and Gestalt Therapy Website
• Australian General Semantics Society
• Institute of General Semantics
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Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Thu Aug 08, 2019 9:11 pm

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

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

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

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

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

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


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

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

History

International Community School


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

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

English School

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

Vienna International School

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

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

Facilities

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

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

Outside facilities include:

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

Modernizations

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

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

School Day

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

Academics

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

Accreditation

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

Graduation requirements and courses

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

Group 1: Language 1

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

Group 2: Language 2

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

Group 3: Individuals and Society

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

Group 4: Experimental Sciences

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

Group 5: Mathematics

• Mathematics HL & SL
• Mathematical Studies SL

Group 6: The Arts

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

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

Camps & trips

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

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

School magazine

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

Famous visits

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

Famous alumni

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

Athletics

Sports


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

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

Conferences

VIS participates in the following athletics conferences:

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

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

Charity

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

2004 Tsunami Disaster Response

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

Fairtrade

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

Alumni

There are multiple alumni pages. These include:

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

Scouting

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

References

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

External links

• Official website
• Scouting Group Site
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Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Thu Aug 08, 2019 10:00 pm

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Field Of Study Human Rights and International Conflict Resolution

Dates attended or expected graduation 2010 – 2011

Licenses & Certifications
AKE International
Hostile Environment Training
Issuing authority AKE International
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Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Thu Aug 08, 2019 10:02 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Postby admin » Thu Aug 08, 2019 11:12 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A. Ah.

Q. Was he reassuring?

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


Q. This what?

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

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

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

Q. Undoubtedly all this is coming out.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q. Trungpa would get his aorta cut?

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

Q. So that's just metaphorical?

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


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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

"Well?" the Prince's voice sounded.

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

"Well?" asked the Prince again.

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

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

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

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

"Just a few resisters," said the Prince.

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

"Someone may resist enlightenment," stated the Prince.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mahasi Sayadaw
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/15/19

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Image
Mahasi Sayadaw U Sobhana
The Venerable Mahasi Sayadaw
Title Sayadaw
Personal
Born Maung Thwin
29 July 1904
Seikkhun, Shwebo District, British Burma
Died 14 August 1982 (aged 78)
Rangoon, Burma
Religion Buddhism
Nationality Burmese
School Theravada
Lineage Mahasi
Education Dhammācariya (1941)
Occupation Buddhist monk
Senior posting
Based in Mahasi Monastery, Yangon, Myanmar
Predecessor U Nārada
Successor U Pandita, Dipa Ma
Website http://www.mahasi.org.mm

Mahasi Sayadaw U Sobhana (Burmese: [x], pronounced [məhàsì sʰəjàdɔ̀ ʔú θɔ́bəna̰]; 29 July 1904 – 14 August 1982) was a Burmese Theravada Buddhist monk and meditation master who had a significant impact on the teaching of vipassanā (insight) meditation in the West and throughout Asia.

In his style of practice, derived from the so-called New Burmese Method of U Nārada, the meditator lives according to Buddhist morality as a prerequisite for meditation practice. Meditation itself entails the practice of satipatthana, mindfulness of breathing, anchoring the attention on the sensations of the rising and falling of the abdomen during breathing, observing carefully any other sensations or thoughts. This is coupled to reflection on the Buddhist teachings on causality, gaining insight into anicca, dukkha, and anattā.

Biography

Mahāsi Sayādaw was born in 1904 in Seikkhun village in Upper Burma. He became a novice at age twelve, and was ordained at the age of twenty with the name Sobhana. Over the course of decades of study, he passed the rigorous series of government examinations in the Theravāda Buddhist texts, gaining the newly introduced Dhammācariya (dhamma teacher) degree in 1941.

In 1931, U Sobhana took leave from teaching scriptural studies in Moulmein, South Burma, and went to nearby Thaton to practice intensive Vipassana meditation under Mingun Jetawun Sayādaw (also rendered Mingun Jetavana Sayādaw), also known as U Nārada. This teacher had practiced in the remote Sagaing Hills of Upper Burma, under the guidance of Aletawya Sayādaw, a student of the forest meditation master Thelon Sayādaw. U Sobhāna first taught Vipassana meditation in his home village in 1938, at a monastery named for its massive drum 'Mahāsi'. He became known in the region as Mahāsi Sayādaw. In 1947, the Prime Minister of Burma, U Nu, invited Mahāsi Sayādaw to be resident teacher at a newly established meditation center in Yangon, which came to be called the Mahāsi Sāsana Yeiktha.

Mahāsi Sayādaw was a questioner and final editor at the Sixth Buddhist Council on May 17, 1954. He helped establish meditation centers all over Burma as well as in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand, and by 1972 the centers under his guidance had trained more than 700,000 meditators. In 1979, he travelled to the West, holding retreats at newly founded centers such as the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts, U.S.
In addition, meditators came from all over the world to practice at his center in Yangon. When the Mahāsi Sayādaw died on 14 August 1982 following a massive stroke, thousands of devotees braved the torrential monsoon rains to pay their last respects.

Practice

Mahāsi's method is based on the Satipatthana Sutta, which describes how one focusses attention on the breath, noticing how one breaths in and out. Practice begins with the preparatory stage, the practice of sila, morality, giving up worldly thoughts and desires.[1][2][note 1] The practitioner then engages in satipatthana by mindfulness of breathing. One pays attention to any arising mental or physical phenomenon, engaging in vitaka, noting or naming physical and mental phenomena ("breathing, breathing"), without engaging the phenomenon with further conceptual thinking.[3][4] By noticing the arising of physical and mental phenomena, the meditator becomes aware how sense impressions arise from the contact between the senses and physical and mental phenomena,[3] as described in the five skandhas and paṭiccasamuppāda. This noticing is accompanied by reflections on causation and other Buddhist teachings, leading to insight into dukkha, anatta, and anicca.[5] When the three characteristics have been comprehended, reflection subdues, and the process of noticing accelerates, noting phenomena in general, without necessarily naming them.[6]

Notable students

Freda Bedi
• G. V. Desani
Joseph Goldstein
• Anagarika Munindra
• Achan Sobin S. Namto[7]
• Sayādaw U Paṇḍita (Panditārāma)
Sharon Salzberg
• Jack Kornfield [8]

• Chanmyay Sayādaw (U Janakabhivamsa)
• Ashin Jinarakkhita

Publications

Mahāsi Sayādaw published nearly seventy volumes of Buddhist literature in Burmese, many of these transcribed from talks. He completed a Burmese translation of the Visuddhimagga, ("The Path of Purification") a lengthy treatise on Buddhist practice by the 5th century Indian Theravadin Buddhist commentator and scholar Buddhaghosa. He also wrote a volume entitled Manual of Vipassana Meditation. His English works include:

• Sayadaw, Mahasi (1971). Satipatthana Vipassana Meditation.
• Sayadaw, Mahasi (1983). Thoughts on the Dharma.
• Sayadaw, Mahasi (1991). Practical Vipassana Exercises (PDF). Buddhist Publication Society. ISBN 978-9552400896.
• Sayadaw, Mahasi (1998). Progress of Insight: Treatise on Buddhist Satipathana Meditation. Buddhist Publication Society. ISBN 978-9552400902. Archived from the original on 2000-12-08.
• Sayadaw, Mahasi (2016). Manual of Insight. Wisdom Publications. ISBN 9781614292777.

Notes

1. Jeff Wilson notes that morality is a quintessential element of Buddhist practice, and is also emphasized by the first generation of post-war western teachers. Yet, in the contemporary mindfulness movement, morality as an element of practice has been mostly discarded, 'mystifying' the origins of mindfulness.[1]

References

1. Wilson 2014, p. 54-55.
2. Mahāsi Sayādaw, Manual of Insight, Chapter 5
3. Jump up to:a b Mahasi Sayadaw, Practical Vipassana Instructions
4. Bhante Bodhidhamma, Vipassana as taught by The Mahasi Sayadaw of Burma
5. PVI, p.22-27
6. PVI, p.28
7. "Our Teacher -". vipassanadhura.com. Retrieved 2008-05-04.
8. "About". Jack Kornfield. Archived from the original on 2013-12-22. Retrieved 2013-12-21.

Sources

• Wilson, Jeff (2014), Mindful America: Meditation and the Mutual Transformation of Buddhism and American Culture, OUP USA

External links

• A Discourse on Paticcasamuppada by Venerable Mahasi Sayadaw
• Biographical Sketch of Mahāsi Sayādaw from Buddhanet.net
• The Practical Dharma of Mahasi Sayadaw
• The Venerable Mahāsi Sayādaw's Discourses and Treatises on Buddhism
• Books by Mahāsi Sayādaw
• Biography of Mahāsi Sayādaw from the American Burma Buddhist Association
• A Discourse on Satipatthana Vipassana by Venerable Mahasi Sayadaw from Accesstoinsight.org
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Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Fri Aug 16, 2019 3:42 am

Insight Meditation Society
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/15/19

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.


The Insight Meditation Society (IMS) is a non-profit organization for study of Buddhism located in Barre, Massachusetts.[1] It was founded in 1975, by Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, and Joseph Goldstein and is rooted in the Theravada tradition.[2][3] Its first retreat center in an old mansion in Barre, Massachusetts was opened on February 14, 1976.[4]

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Insight Meditation Society, in Barre, Massachusetts in the backdrop amidst blossoming trees.

Overview

IMS offers Buddhist meditation retreats at two facilities – the Retreat Center and The Forest Refuge – in rural central Massachusetts. The Retreat Center is one of the two IMS centers in the United States. However, all the centers teach vipassanā.

From 1996-2006, IMS offered a correspondence course developed by its founders Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg entitled Insight Meditation which consisted of 12 audio cassettes and a workbook.[5] The course later evolved into Insight Meditation: An In-Depth Correspondence Course, with 24 audio CDs and an 88-page workbook.[6]

Vassa is a basic practice for Buddhist monastics. During this three-month retreat, monks seclude themselves and follow a tight regimen of meditation and dharma study. Every year, the Insight Meditation Society runs a three-month course that has been called the "marathon of meditation". Save for triweekly interviews with instructors and nightly lessons, the retreatants observe full silence. In Theravada tradition, after lunch, they do not eat another meal, but are allowed snacks and drink tea, which is not accepted by many Buddhists as proper practice.[7] The center's courses provide instruction and practice in vipassanā or mettā meditations.[4]

Teachings

"When a Retreat Center course is in progress, anyone who is not already participating in the retreat is welcome to attend the evening talks about the teachings, known as dharma talks. Those with insight meditation experience are also welcome to attend group sittings." [8] Dharma talks are available for free download, a service provided by Dharma Seed.

References

1. Jayakrishna, Nandini; Ornish, Dean (2009-09-08). "Being young, here, now". The Boston Globe.
2. Latin, Don (2005-01-23). "Bridging Eastern and Western Buddhism". San Francisco Chronicle.
3. Fronsdal, Gil (1998). "Insight Meditation in the United States: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," in C.S. Prebish & K.K. Tanaka (1998), The Faces of Buddhism in America, University of California Press.
4. "FAQ about IMS". Insight Meditation Society. Retrieved December 22, 2015.
5. Goldstein, Joseph (1996). Insight Meditation. Boulder, CO: Sounds True. ISBN 9781564559067.
6. Salzberg, Sharon (2004). Insight Meditation: An In-Depth Correspondence Course. Boulder, CO: Sounds True. ISBN 1591790727.
7. Goleman, Daniel (1993-03-21). "A Slow, Methodical Calming of the Mind". The New York Times.
8. "IMS Retreat Center General Information". Insight Meditation Society's Official Website. Insight Meditation Society. Retrieved 25 February 2012.

External links

• Official website
• Dharma Talks given at Insight Meditation Society -Retreat Center
• Dharma Talks given at Insight Meditation Society -Forest Refuge
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Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Sat Aug 17, 2019 1:41 am

Carl Götze (educator): German educator and school reformer
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Accessed: 8/16/19

Carl (Karl) Johann Heinrich Götze (born January 2, 1865 in Pinneberg , † May 2, 1947 in Cuxhaven ) was a German educator and school reformer.

Life and work

Carl Goetze attended from 1884 to 1887 a teacher training for elementary school teachers in Hamburg, where he subsequently found a first job as a teacher. In 1906 he married Gertrud Scheel, with whom he had two children. From 1914 to 1919 he taught at the school in Brödermannsweg in Groß Borstel. He then took over the management of the experimental school Telemannstraße in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel. In 1920 he moved to school board, where he led the elementary school as a high school board. His service ended with retirement in 1930. He positioned himself early Social Democratic, but was only after 1918 a member of the SPD .

As a school reformer Götze engaged from the end of the 19th century, first in the company of the Friends of the fatherland school and education system. He wanted to change the aesthetic education comprehensively and lead from a technically oriented, theoretical drawing theory to creative design. For this he attended English schools, where the drawing lessons had been reformed and worked with the New Paths to the artistic education of youth, a related standard work by James Liberty Tadd, which appeared in 1900 on the German book market. As part of his efforts, he met the director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle , Alfred Lichtwark. They organized in 1897 in the Kunsthalle an exhibition of free children's drawings, which gained national recognition under the title "The child as an artist". Götze initiated the art education days that took place in Dresden in 1901, in Weimar in 1903 and in Hamburg in 1905. From 1905 to 1914 he published the art magazine Der Säemann and became involved from 1908 in a leading position in the federal government for school reform. The educator worked closely with Georg Kerschensteiner and the Prussian Central Institute for Education in Berlin.

During Götze's service in the Weimar Republic, comprehensive school reforms took place in Hamburg. These included the self-administration of the schools, a working school, free forms of teaching and practical teaching methods. In addition, the Institute for Teacher Training was launched. Together with school senator Emil Krause, Götze was able to protect the four experimental schools in elementary school against attacks by conservatives. As a representative of the school reform in Hamburg, he participated in numerous domestic and foreign congresses and events.

Since 1991, the Carl-Gotze-Schule in Groß-Borstel reminds of the former pedagogues.

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Literature

Reiner Lehberger: Götze, Carl. In: Hamburg Biography. Volume 1, Christians, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-7672-1364-8, pp. 107-108.

Heinrich Kautz: Götze, Carl Johann Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1964, ISBN 3-428-00187-7, p 595 ( digitized ).
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