New Age and its misinterpretation on Je Tsongkhapa

[goat]

I was thinking by justifying you meant explaining, not making up fake motivations.

why bother seeking an explaination unless you dont want to face what's happening?

 umm,.. sorry, but how can you face what's happening if you don't understand it? If you seek an explanation, then you want to face what's happening I would expect.

you face things with eyes and ears and mind open...only then might you understand.

[Plinio Tsai]

spiritnoname

you have a point here, but we may not forget that to do plans, to do some intelectual research and to try to understand only with the intelligence is not the actual experience of facing the challenge, face the problem for real, of to be inside of it and to try to find a way out by means of wisdom, compassion, patience and whatever training we need, right? Theactual experience can be painfull but if we survive to it the wisdom and the experience aquired is immense... so, we need the intelectual understanding but also we need to face and to experience the problem in order to find a solution with the goal to get the full learning from it and perhaps the full liberation from the problem... but we cannot force that, just be ourselves, honestly express ourselves, would be just great...

[Joey]

spiritnoname

you have a point here, but we may not forget that to do plans, to do some intelectual research and to try to understand only with the intelligence is not the actual experience of facing the challenge, face the problem for real, of to be inside of it and to try to find a way out by means of wisdom, compassion, patience and whatever training we need, right? Theactual experience can be painfull but if we survive to it the wisdom and the experience aquired is immense... so, we need the intelectual understanding but also we need to face and to experience the problem in order to find a solution with the goal to get the full learning from it and perhaps the full liberation from the problem... but we cannot force that, just be ourselves, honestly express ourselves, would be just great...

lets put it this way: if everything goes fine and dandy in your practice, you're not really practicing. Practice is dealing with shit without letting it affect others or yourself permanently.

[Plinio Tsai]

Good one, very good one Joey! I hope I can keep this on my mind always!

[Joey]

Good one, very good one Joey! I hope I can keep this on my mind always!

in the many traditions, that is the aim at the end of the day, so yea.

[Scott Hutton]

http://tinyurl.com/3yy8lv

[studyreligions]

Hi everybody

To people who read this: JE TSONGKHAPA IS A BUDDHA! You do not have to question this! But if you do, here is how you get out of this: look for the events on Je Tsongkhapa life and also to his writtings, it speaks all by itself! You will get the same conclusion that I got: HE IS A BUDDHA! On the New Age  moviment however, they got Je Tsongkhapa teachings and life events and DISTORTED it or interpretated it on their own views IN ORDER TO JUSTIFY THEIR OWN DOGMAS.  But if you act as someone that goes to the source texts, you will see how distorted is the life of Je Tsongkhapa when interpreted and wrote by some New Age authors...

One of my friends, here in Brazil, is a follower of Helena Blawatski. He said to me that Je Riponche expeled thousands of monks on his reform in Tibetan Buddhism.

I doubt very much of this affirmation, (but he show me the book in which HB wrote that.... I'm NOT a fan of HB, this is why I came to ask if someone knows about this, in other words), that really happened?

Thank you all
Plinio Tsai

hi Plinio Tsai,

There has been some research done on Blavatsky's view of Je Tsong Khapa and also her relation to Tibetan Buddhism in general. HPB's general doctrine of Theosophy posits an eternal, immutable, unchanging, ground of being for the universe... much like the Hindu concept of Brahman. As we know this run's quite opposite of emptiness as posited by Tsong Khapa and Nagarjuna for that matter. Therefore, in this article, the arguement is that HPB's doctrine is closest to the Jonang school who posits a Buddha nature that is empty of other and not self. Here is the link if you are intrested. http://www.blavatskyarchives.com/reigle04.html, I believe in this article it cites her stating that she believes that Tsong Khapa cleaned up Tibetan Buddhism from simple magic etc. and brought it back to its pure form, yet as stated above, emptiness and her doctrine don't mix well on the surface.

There is also another article that discusses HPB's perspective of shunyata or emptiness as her equating it to space... I don't know where it is but when I find it again, I'll post the link.

Here is another page on this subject in general http://blavatskyarchives.com/price.pdf There is a portion that brings up Dzogchen and Blavatsky.

I believe Blavatsky was one of the first westerners that converted to Buddhism. In her case, the Theravada of Sri Lanka. Although, her doctrine of Theosophy believed in an ancient wisdom that was the root of all the great religions of the world. Each individual founder of a religion (that resembled her idea of the ancient wisdom) was in fact a type of theosophical Bodhisattva, who incarnated in order to state the ancient wisdom in the form that suited the particular culture. In her perspective, Buddhism is the religion with the closest resemblence today to the ancient wisdom tradition of Blavatsky.

As for the accusation of Tsong Khapa expelling monks... I haven't seen that so far. But she is a prolific writer!

I hope this clears up any misconceptions.

Peace and Blessings,

Melvin

[Scott Hutton]

Yes, I agree:  there is a certain disharmony between what HPB left behind and what one intuits as one's identity with emptiness becomes more obvious.  She was a wonderful, energetic woman who did much good but I don't think she's to be trusted as a guru.  I think, for all the protestations, she, and all the theosophists are, at heart, Hindus.

Hinduism is a noble tradition to which we all owe including us Buddhists, an unrepayable debt - still and all, it is not the current in which we Dharma-holics swim.

One reads her works as though one were afloat in an ocean of fascinations but, more often than not, one returns to the beach as uninformed as one was when one first entered the waves.  A certain exhiliration from the exercise.

Every few years I jump in; there's a certain strength to be gathered.

Are you familiar with the works of Alexandra David-Neel?  Now there was stream enterer.

Scott

[studyreligions]

I totally agree with your statement that Theosophy is Hinduism at heart. It seems they have more in common with Vedanta than Buddhism, yet HPB believed Buddhism is closest to her ancient wisdom and she states that her gurus live in Tibet. Also there is something very special about India and Hinduism in the fact that Shakyamuni Buddha decided to incarnate in that culture... maybe he thought it was the culture that proved to be most conducive for the Dharma. Even the word Dharma runs deep in the Hindu context.

The only work that I have read of Alexandra David-Neel was her book Magic and Mystery in Tibet. Her life and journeys are purely amazing... It must have been quite the adventure to travel in India and Tibet especially in her time.

[Scott Hutton]

After having said nice things about HPB, I do think we should admit that there are times when she was given to what New Yorkers call "window dressing," which is to say, placing an object for sale in a fancy store window and surrounding it with all sorts of extraneous items to make it appear more attractive.

When she wrote, no one in the West knew of the down to earth practicality of Tibetan Dharma, the unsentimental way it deals with day to day life.  All was super duper wish granting jewels that would make a disco look like a one light bulb privy, flying lamas (there were NO ordinary kind lamas in this scenario) and wall to wall wonder workers.

Off course we know now that all that was twaddle, misfires of explorers' imaginations.

Still and all, it was a gold mine from which to claim one's teachers.  I do think she overdid it, though, with all them mahatma letters coming out of the woodwork.  Or was it the ceiling?  Why the hell couldn't they use a post office like anyone else?  Were they saving on postage?

Alice Bailey is another such problem:  her "Tibetan", while undeniably a constructive presence in many lives, well, his teachings bear only a remote resemblance to Tibetan Dharma as I've encountered it.  They are lovely, kind teachings - but they are Something Else and the connection with what we here understand as Dharma is mainly tangential.

Mme David-Neel, however, got off her duff and hit Tibet.  The real Tibet, the dirty and mystical and wonderful and advanced and backward Tibet of her day.  She did it on sheer nerve - rather like Rimpoche's fleeing the barbarity of New Jersey for the civilization of his gompa.  I believe she was the first Western woman to become  lama.  One of the many things I love about her is that she never lost her French common sense and adherence to reason.  She was one of the true Western Dharma pioneers.  Most of us, unless we were stoned out by LSD and hash and hauled ass to India for a better high, sat back here on our duffs and waited for the Dharma to join us.

Which, thanks to all that is good, it did.

Do you know of the site abebooks.com?  It's a wonderful book search site.  You can find her book on the secret oral teachings there for just a few dollars.  I'm not sure if I'm remembering right but her student, Lama Yongden (I may have the name wrong, please double check if it's of interest) left behind two novels, both of which I read but whose titles quite escape me:  while not overt about it, one was about wisdom and the other about compassion.  They're worth tracking down too.

I just visited the site and to my surprise found a diary of her travels and correspondence which I didn't know existed.  It's in the original French, which I can shamble through, so maybe I'll get it.

I have my reservations about a later explorer, Lama Govinda, but that's for another time...

Regarding Siddhartha's incarnating into a Hindu culture (I think, technically, he took rebirth in Nepal), what better choice could he have made?  It was the richest spiritual culture of its day, millennia more evolved than the West.  The Nath tradition, which goes back via the Cosmic Babaji (whom I'm sure HPB would have claimed as a guru had she known about him) into the mists of time, claims him as one of their own - and I believe it is even said that he took teachings from the forest hermits.  We can be sure that he had a passle of gurus, which gave him a handle on what was necessary to transcend.  As Guru Padmakara would say, "Wondrous is this!"

In the West of course they simply would have stoned him to death and gone about their business.  The West was slightly more advanced when Jesus passed through:  they'd moved on to crucifixions.

I daily feel gratitude that Siddhartha incarnated where he did, and daily try not to get upset at Jesus for where he made his entrance.

Oh, is SO wonderful to perceive the fresh breezes and mind clearing winds of clean air flowing through this forum again!  Our winds were, I think, a bit more out of whack than we realized.



Scott

[Scott Hutton]

A footnote, Melvin, to my last post:  I quickly scanned the paper whose link you were so kind to share and noted an inference, albeit a weak one, that since Tibetan terms not generally known in her time appear in the Mahatma letters, that is perhaps an argument for their authenticity.

I would treat that argument with great care, were I you.

It was for some years a great privilege of mine to, from time to time, converse over the telephone with a formless entity, never incarnate, rather well known in the United States, especially among the Hollywood set.  I regard the channel as up there with the best of them, and probably the greatest channel of the last century (though he's still at work as I type) - I think, indeed, he's in advance of Edgar Casey.

I regard the entity as a great friend, though we no longer chat on this plane.  The channel and I are warm friends, but we decided it was healthier to let our acquaintance reduce itself to a friendship, leaving my friendship with the entity develop on its own.

All of that is lead in to once I was reading a very esoteric text of Padmasambhava, the real thing, translated by Dr. Guenther.  (You know of course Guru Padmakara left behind a number of texts - none of are in the traditional canon, which is as it should be.  Guru P. is/was Something Else.)  During these days of reading, I had a phone conversation with the entity.

To my amazement, after the intial chit-chat the entity began referring, and even quoting from, this text.  Now, trust me, this could NOT have been information in the channel's memory bank - he is a lovely person (actually, for years, I have suspected that in another life was one of the oracles of Tibet) but his reading habits do not tend to Dharma, and they certainly don't tend to the far-out Dharma of Guru Ripoche.

It is my belief that, when Mind manifests on planes subtler than this one, there is no such thing as time-consuming data transfer:  the various manifestations, appearing as sentient beings - their minds are "entangled" (as contemporary physics uses the word, not as fox hunters might think), which is to say an "event" occurring in one awareness is immediately accessible to all seemingly "other" awarenesses.

Conclusion (mine alone perhaps):  there was more going on in that mahatma letter channelling than evidence being produced in court, and I don't think our theosophist friends are quite up to speed.

Scott

PS:

The entity once referred to Guru Padma as an "embodiment of all that is good and beautiful and true".  I of course didn't argue.

[Plinio Tsai]

Hi Melvin

Thank you very much for your answer and links... I do not know nothing on Helena writings and so on... The closest I get to teosofists was of listening to some public speechs of Khrisnamurti... So, I always get confused when things come to debate on religions.


Thank you and Scott about the clear information on the subjects....

Plinio Tsai