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cbayer

(146,218 posts) Thu Mar 29, 2012, 11:35 AM Mar 2012

Dalai Lama wins Templeton Prize in science, religion

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/Religion/post/2012/03/dalai-lama-templeton-prize-compassion/1#.T3SASu10VaU
Mar 29, 2012
By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

Grit your teeth, China leaders. The Dalai Lama, possibly the globe's most famous contemporary voice for non-violence and compassion, was named the winner of the 2012 Templeton Prize today.

The announcement comes three days after Tibetan exile Janphel Yeshi set himself on fire Monday to protest China's control of Tibet. Beijing blamed the Dalai Lama for the incident. Chinese President Hu Jintao is visiting New Delhi this week.

Last year, the Dalai Lama, who served as both spiritual and political leader of Tibetan Buddhists in exile since 1959, relinquished his political role. That seems to cut no ice with Beijing, however.

Of course, the decision to award the honor to the Dalai Lama was made weeks before the fatal protest. The annual honor, which comes with a $1.7 million award, goes to leading voices who address spiritual questions by drawing on science and religion. Created by the late Sir John Templeton, international investor and philanthropist, the prize was announced by his son and successor at the Templeton Foundation, John Templeton Jr. The prize gets critiqued, with a swipe at journalist fellows, too, on science sites -- although last year's winner was Martin Rees, the astrophysicist and "unbelieving Anglican."

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Dalai Lama wins Templeton Prize in science, religion (Original Post) cbayer Mar 2012 OP

This man is a living example that there is another way of knowing. It is called "perceiving." Thats my opinion Mar 2012 #1

This man is a theocrat and former CIA employee. onager Mar 2012 #2

Thats my opinion

(2,001 posts)

1. This man is a living example that there is another way of knowing. It is called "perceiving."

Reply to cbayer (Original post)

Thu Mar 29, 2012, 02:27 PM

Mar 2012

The world could not do without its spiritual saints.

onager

(9,356 posts)

2. This man is a theocrat and former CIA employee.

Reply to Thats my opinion (Reply #1)

Thu Mar 29, 2012, 10:04 PM

Mar 2012

The CIA stuff is interesting, since it may be the only time in history that the far-right Chicago Tribune agreed with Red China.

The Chinese insisted for years that the Dalai Lama was a CIA tool. This was always hotly denied by His BumperStickerPhilosophy-ness, the D.L. And his horde of admiring Western groupies, of course. Until the Trib broke the story.

In 1998, the D.L. finally admitted the CIA had paid his organization $1.7 million per year for about 15 years. A large chunk of that money went right into the D.L.'s personal begging bowl.

Plus, the CIA helped the D.L. escape Tibet in 1959, and went on to train a Tibetan resistance movement...in Colorado. That went about as well as the Bay of Pigs. In 1995 the D.L. admitted to CIA employee John Knaus that thousands of lives were lost in the Tibetan resistance. (As reported on Wikipedia and other places.)

Not that the Tibetan resistance was about establishing democracy. It would have just re-instated a brutal theocracy headed by You-Know-Who, as reported by Australia's Green Left in 1996:

Tibet's Buddhist monastic nobility controlled all land on behalf of the "gods". They monopolised the country's wealth by exacting tribute and labour services from peasants and herders. This system was similar to how the medieval Catholic Church exploited peasants in feudal Europe...

Romantic notions about the "peaceful" and "harmonious" nature of Tibetan Buddhist monastic life should be tested against reality. The Lithang Monastery in eastern Tibet was where a major rebellion against Chinese rule erupted in 1956...

Chris Mullin, writing in the Far Eastern Economic Review in 1975, described Lithang's monks as "not monks in the Western sense...many were involved in private trade; some carried guns and spent much of their time violently feuding with rival monasteries. One former citizen describes Lithang as 'like the Wild West'."

The Tibetan "government" in Lhasa was composed of lamas selected for their religious piety. At the head of this theocracy was the Dalai Lama. The concepts democracy, human rights or universal education were unknown...

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/13373

Damn! It's really a shame that such noted Buddhist theologians as Richard Gere and Martin Scorsese couldn't have lived in Tibet during the D.L.'s rule. They could have only made movies with the consent of those ruling monks. And if the monks didn't like their work, they would have been subject to such enlightened punishments as blinding or disembowelment.

Yes, yes, I know, groupies - in July 2011, the D.L. praised separation of church and state while speaking to members of Congress in Washington. At least he praised the concept for the USA. Reporter Nicole Neroulias noted the oddity of these remarks, coming from a man who has (technically) wielded absolute, personal theocratic power for 6 decades:

http://uscmediareligion.org/theScoop/426/Dalai-Lama-vs-Rick-Perry-Separating-Church-Stateor-Not

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