Contacting a live reincarnation, the Dalai Lama.

[Dancing David]

As I have stated plonk, I have studiously avoided reading Yrregs posts, they are most likely further proof that he is just a troll.

But In Ryokan's post I read this quote

So there are two kinds of religion for me, the first is favors oriented, favors of the this earth type but also the adherents are concerned with their lot in the next world or post tomb and even pre conception; the second type is that which has for its almost exclusive at least pretended focus the concern with the post tomb and pre conception aspects of human existence, and also very important participation in them, for example, in your case Ryokan rebirths and Nirvana, I think the same with Dancing David even though he denies it -- people into this kind of religion think it above their dignity to supplicate deities or superior powers for favors of the earthly kind, like a job or some healing of body and heart.

This is just further proof of trolldom, the fact that I learn from other buddhists does not mean I share thier beliefs.
1. The teachings of the buddha state very clearlt that there is no sould, there is no spirit.
2. The buddha also stated very clearly that the only world we can concern our selves with is the world of life. So the nonsense that yrreg spouts about the tomb and all, it is just more proof that yrreg has not read any of the posts excapt for the cherry ones, that he wants to tell people what they think and believe.


people into this kind of religion think it above their dignity to supplicate deities or superior powers for favors of the earthly kind, like a job or some healing of body and heart.

I think in my rational material sense that there are no dieties to supplicate, this would include my buddhists parts.

This is further proof that you don't read posts yrreg, if you did you would also know that I am a pagan, a heathen, a witch, in fact an initiated high priest of some wiica offshoot, I do pray, I do supplicate dieties and I do ask them for hope and healing.

But then I am a sceptic and I figure it is just some sort of internal dialouge that occurs only within myself and the place of effect is only within myself.

Best watch yourself yrreg, you are consorting with a sorcerer and I might turn you into a fool!

Okay a foolish troll.

 

[yrreg]

Look at the big picture 1.

Thanks, Arth, for the sympathizing words.


Well, gentlemen, Arth mentions about Psi Q in his blog; you know what? I have been thinking about an EQ and an MQ: EQ for equanimity quotient and MQ for mysticism quotient.

Now for some light banter: Reading this thread can be detrimental to your EQ, that could impact adversely on your MQ.

Don't get angry; just point out the errors, misinformations, imprecisions of yours truly. No, I am not here to trade names with you folks; I am here just to do some fun messaging and learn something curious in the process, all of course to advancement of my own skeptical education.

Rest assured that I do read all your posts; it's just that I look at the big picture and the way I see it -- in a short statement, even though your rational mind proclaims yourselves to be philosophers, skeptics even; yet your heart belies your what I might call enthusiasm of being Buddha's devotees, possibly bordering on Buddha-mania

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No, I haven't received so far any reply from the Dalai Lama to my email inquiry, asking him if he really believes that he is the reincarnation, the 14th at that, of the original first Dalai Lama.

And you know what I have read about the very first Dalai Lama? He is the Chinese goddess of mercy, Kwan Yin. And you know what I have read about Kwan Yin? she is the reincarnation of Buddha himself, yes the Gautama. They all seem to be rebirths of whoever is the very first Buddha from since the start if ever of karma and rebirth.

Anyway we can distinguish in the present Dalai Lama two series of reincarnations; first the one dating all the way back to the very first Buddha to which also Gautama was a reincarnation. This is what I would call the mystical line of succession by reincarnation.

Then second, the political reincarnation dating to a first personage to enjoy the title, Dalai Lama, also a Buddha reincarnate, sometime in the 15th century of Tibet's political history, one Gedun Drub (1391-1474) -- "retrospectively considered to be the first in the line of reincarnated Dalai Lamas." This is what I call the political line of succession by reincarnation.

There is a lot of reincarnation business in Tibetan Buddhism, at least in that branch of the present Dalai Lama, the dominant Gelug school. The more I read the deeper I get into the labyrinth of Buddhas and reincarnates, and I seem to get the idea that all mankind is Buddha or ordained to be one big Buddha. Gautama was one, now the Dalai Lama is another, postponing presumptively his passage into final Nirvana in order to help suffering mankind, of course starting with his countrymen, Tibetans.

So, quantitatively all mankind or all life is one big Buddha, but qualitatively all mankind appear in different guises -- only those who have, I mean the appearances that is, opted to pass over to final Nirvana are no longer appearing in the flesh, but they can still be appealed to by suffering mankind for all sorts of assistance, for example, Kwan Yin.


Please proceed to the next post.

Yrreg

 

[yrreg]

Look at the big picture 2.

Articulate Western Buddhists appear to denounce the metaphysical or the superstitious notions and practices of Buddhism in traditional Buddhist lands of the Far East; but as a big picture from my reading of their messages here, whatever denunciation they profess, they do just the same give the conspicuous configuration of Buddha's devotees, exhibiting all the markings of what marketing experts call brand loyalty.

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Best watch yourself yrreg, you are consorting with a sorcerer and I might turn you into a fool!

In which case I will recite this mantra: Om Mani Pädme Hum.

In fact, I think we all should recite the mantra, it has a soothing effect on our nerves and cerebrum.

Just for fun, okay, guys. Don't take this exchange too seriously. We are just here for fun and some skeptical exercises.

If you think I don't read your messages, be assured that I do; but I try always to get the big picture, specially attending to your heart more than to your rational faculty, and Buddha-mania is what I see in your hearts notwithstanding your declaration of philosophic and skeptical culture.

Incidentally, here is an explanation by the scholarly Gen* Rinpoche (d. 1995), longtime close colleague of the Dalai Lama, for the mystical and ascetical advantages of reciting the Om Mani Pädme Hum mantra. It is really to my impression a most efficacious ejaculation (pun not intended).

The mantra Om Mani Pädme Hum is easy to say yet quite powerful, because it contains the essence of the entire teaching. When you say the first syllable

Om -- it is blessed to help you achieve perfection in the practice of generosity,

Ma -- helps perfect the practice of pure ethics, and

Ni -- helps achieve perfection in the practice of tolerance and patience.

Päd -- the fourth syllable, helps to achieve perfection of perseverance,

Me -- helps achieve perfection in the practice of concentration, and the final sixth syllable

Hum -- helps achieve perfection in the practice of wisdom.

So in this way recitation of the mantra helps achieve perfection in the six practices from generosity to wisdom.

The path of these six perfections is the path walked by all the Buddhas of the three times. What could then be more meaningful than to say the mantra and accomplish the six perfections?

Gen Rinpoche, Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones

Just for fun I uploaded part of a page on the reincarnation of Gen Rinpoche:



Yes, I understand that Westerners who go for Tibetan Buddhism taught by Rinpoches from Tibet do not in fact go for all that business of reincarnation; they just go for the purely philosophical and psychological teachings on the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, and most important, meditation.


Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!


Yrreg

*Gen Rinpoche -- I think his name is Gen like Richard as in Richard Gere, I don't think he was a general; Rinpoche means "the precious one among men", so Gen Rinpoche means Gen the Precious One among Men, like as in George the President. Correct me though if I am mistaken.

 

[SirPhilip]

"But - he added - you're going to find it pretty hard to disprove reincarnation..."

Well, there is a difference between reincarnation and transmigration. Reincarnation is like Patton's "Looking Through A Glass Darkly" and is a metaphysical idea ("I could swear I was a talking octopus in a past life, or a prince, no I was a celebrity, definitely.."). Transmigration is simply reason applied to human circumstance - lacking any other device in nature to explain why here, why now, why me, and why the hell is my pelvis incorrectly aligned. This is not to say that believing nothing you do matters and everything ceases regardless of what you do is different. When someone understands that opon death, they shed the world including everything they hold dear, but don't commit evil, they correctly apprehend ultimate peace that comes from nonattachment. Zen Buddhists/Taoists constantly reiterate the point that name, form, and distinction are not "practice", often to the point of hitting students (hard) with a stick, and "How do I know transmigration is true?" is what would surely get a good whack, because only by practice of conduct will conditions arise where you would. Buddhism, like Jainism, Hinduism, Bramanism, and Taoism, while having religious trappings (in Zen Buddhism's case, not the intention of the founder) relate to a condition - and it is a practice to arrive at that condition - the ultimate state of reason and peace. After a time, when someone is ready to step away from their carnal urges, they will do so on their own, regardless whether they are religious, live in horrible conditions, find no joy in life, are genetically engineered, or understand naturalism as peace through knowing how things around them work, because it is the quintessence of sentience. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to jump into the bitter cold to get to work. I haven't gotten much sleep over the past three days, it is cold and rainy, and there is a strange odor wafting in from the graveyard ajacent to the kitchen window as I enjoy breakfast.

It sure is a lovely day.

 

[yrreg]

No tricks, please.

Thanks, SirPhillip, for your message. I like your style: informal and casual but candid, very personal, and non-confrontational.

No need for us all here to be confrontational, starting with myself. We just have to put our views here according to our stock knowledge or reading or thinking and even some amount of serious research -- of course conviction, which yours truly confess to have very little of.

But there is no need to argue in the sense of getting all worked up. We don't have to prove ourselves right and others wrong, better informed or others in error, more logical and others fallacious: just let us all say what we think might interest readers here, specially non-posters who are here to find out what people who like to communicate presumably like ourselves have to say about this or that issue, question, idea.

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Reincarnation, transmigration, metempsychosis, rebirth, resurrection: the way I see it in the big picture and with my penchant for the short statement means dead people coming back to life again in another identity or even species or in the same identity as in the case of resurrection.

As to reincarnation in the case of the Buddhism as adhered to and practiced by the present Dalai Lama, it certainly means, we can gather from his words, or accounts of his words on reincarnation and not denied by him, means a dead person coming back to life in another newly born person; in which case there is postulated the existence of a soul which is the medium of continuity from one reincarnate to another of the same human entity.

A lot of Buddhists don't believe in the existence of the soul, at least the Western new converts to Buddhism -- new in the sense that Buddhism is not in the family or from their social background.

And this is where the whole idea of rebirth and its explanation becomes tricky. I use the word tricky exactly as you might imagine what tricky means, as tricky is used without any tricks, namely how to understand and explain: what is rebirth when there is no soul or nothing to inhabit a body again.


Yrreg

 

[yrreg]

A reply from the Dalai's office... and the advantages of reincarnation.

Here below is a reply I got from the office of the Dalai Lama

2 January 2006

Dear Yrreg,

I want to acknowledge receipt of your email sent to the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama dated 29 December 2005.

Unfortunately, due to His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s very busy teaching and traveling schedule and owing to the overwhelming number of emails and letters he receives, he is unable to answer all questions personally. I hope you understand.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama, probably owing to modesty and humility, never refers to himself as being the reincarnation of any of the Dalai Lamas. He does sometimes say that he feels very close to the 5th and 13th Dalai Lama.

You might find His Holiness’s autobiographies “My Land and My People” and “Freedom in Exile” interesting.

All the best,

Rinchen Dhondrub


**********************************
Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Thekchen Choeling
McLeod Ganj 176219
Dharamsala. (H.P.)
INDIA

Phone: (+91-1892) 221343 / 221210 / 221879
Fax: (+91-1892) 221813
E-mail: ohhdl@dalailama.com
Website: www.dalailama.com

His Holiness the Dalai Lama, probably owing to modesty and humility, never refers to himself as being the reincarnation of any of the Dalai Lamas. He does sometimes say that he feels very close to the 5th and 13th Dalai Lama.

What figure of speech or rhetorical device is employed in the above statement. Hang on, I will be back as I go to check on figures of speech and more relevantly rhetorical devices.

I am back. I just looked up "rhetorical devices" and started reading on the first entry:

After reading the list of rhetorical devices in that website of the first find presented by Google, I gave up because it would take a lot of time to find just the one that fits correctly with the device employed by the Dalai's office in their statement above.

So, I just call the device they use as the "feigned modesty" rhetorical device, which I understand to be the asserting by downgrading rhetorical device, as some would tell you on your arrival at his mansion: "Welcome to my humble cottage."

What do you say, guys, does he or doesn't he believe in his own reincarnation as the 14th Dalai Lama? dating from when the counting started in the 16th century of Tibet's religious political history.

And I was thinking that I might be able to have an exchange with the Dalai Lama himself -- too ambitious from my part; one could be more lucky writing to the most powerful man on earth, George Bush, at least you get a reply signed in his own name or for him.

As the reply indicates clearly, we can forget about entering into any dialog with anyone authoritative in the Dalai's office. We just have to rely on published sources.

But that is not my idea. So, another example of craving and attachment that is essentially desire which is the source of suffering.

Anyway, I was thinking of why a man like Dalai Lama would believe himself to be the 14th reincarnation of the first ever Dalai Lama, and from this reincarnate all the way to the Gautama and, then all the way to the beginning of the Buddhist sentient universe of the grand old Buddha? he being well-versed in Western sciences and to all appearances, skeptical criticism.

Well, the answer is very simple: he is also into a script of the making of his peculiar school of Tibetan Buddhism; but he did not choose that script, it was chosen for him when he was just a baby, by people who want to perpetuate the system of political succession in Tibet.

What system is that? The same one as we call in the West the Divine Right accession to the throne of kings and emperors and popes.

Who are the real power in that kind of a system? Who else but the guys in charge of administering the system, the people who determine the identity of the baby reincarnate of the previous Dalai Lamas.

And a very important detail: they always and by script look for a baby which they can teach and train and convince and instill into his heart and head to eventually occupy the Dalai Lama's throne, but always docile to their policies and promptings.

I thought I read somewhere that there was some Dalai Lama or some figurehead Lama who decided and took the drastic step for freedom and a normal life: reject the throne and find himself a wife.

Lesson to be learned here: What prices personal freedom?

----------------

We are into what I call the imponderables and the ineffables.

I am thinking of a new thread also in Buddhism, but something which I think would be more productive in terms of real knowledge, namely, fact and fiction in Buddhist suffering.


Yrreg

 

[yrreg]

A letter from an 'admirer'

I received a letter from a reader of my messages here, giving me credit for my thinking about Buddhism.

That was one week ago; he has written to me again today.

So in recognition of this 'admirer' I am reproducing my letter to him here below [recognition of him or of myself? hahaha softely].

I decided not to delay to read carefully again your email and that review of Michael Shermer on the Dalai's book, the Convergence of Science and Spirituality.

Shermer is a gentleman skeptic when it comes to the Dalai Lama, and I seem to find also generally that skeptics are treating Buddhist thinkers with kid's gloves.

What do I think of the Dalai Lama? About his book, anyone with an average IQ can write that kind of a book where nothing radically new is introduced, but the author is trying to preach the union of science and religion, or that they should respect each other, or that both can learn from each other, in particular Buddhism, giving the impression that Buddhism is scientific nonetheless -- unlike the traditional religions of the West and the Middle East today, basically monotheistic -- feeling so smug that monotheism is too primitive compared to the Nirvanistic religions from the Far East.

From my own very limited knowledge of Buddhism, it is no different from the early superstitions of mankind about the universe and the meaning of life, but considered in a very negativistic way, what we call pessimism clothed in a robe of optimism with language and quasi concepts, like karma, rebirth, Nirvana, non-self: all of which are altogether unscientific in the context of science we now possess today, and also the laws of logic and clear thinking.

I am disappointed with Shermer, he did not give the Dalai Lama the criticism that should be a great help to the poor Dalai Lama. Which or what is that? To give up his Dalai Lama status and embrace the normal life of every man: get a job or undertake a livelihood, make a home for himself and a woman, not too late yet for this life program, and adopt some needy kids to develop into social autonomy one day.

That is what all life is doing even dogs and cats and all living forms do, which have the burden of conserving their species by their own efforts, not leaving it to nature to get the work done.

So, here is a message from Yrreg to the Dalai Lama:

"Tell your followers that in the name of Buddha you are leaving them to assume a normal life like any peasant and streetsweeper are doing; and not to worry about the fate of your followers, they are plenty of competent men and willing very willing ones to take over from you, sir, and continue to lead them according to their inured script of Tibetan Lamaism with the expectation of world domination one day; or you tell them those who would follow you into a normal life, you will help them to adjust to the real world of life, work, and love."​

Well, that is my honest opinion.

Yrreg

----- Original Message -----

From: xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx
To: <gertes@hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, January 09, 2006 6:41 AM
Subject: SciAm on DalaiLhama. I hope you like this text?


I found this and hope you like it. I don't trust dalai Lhama at all. He seems to be pragmatic, he has no way of being independent of what they expect of him but his pragmatism will give buddhism unfair good creds.

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/05-10-19.html

this is my last post until i get n email from you cause I would fell like if I spammed you not knowing if you want my contributions. here is the citation.

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Science Without Borders

a book review by Michael Shermer

[Look up the link if you people want to read the reference...]

Well, good friend from the web email network, if you are around, I am very glad to meet you and share my thinking with you.

----------


And to everyone here in JREF forum, I am doing skeptical criticism on Buddhism for fun only, by exercising my sketpical criticism as I have learned it from James Randi et alii. But why Buddhism? Because there seems to be no one doing it and as someone said several times in this JREF forum, "Why should Buddhism get a free ride here when everything and everyone gets a good skeptically critical thrashing" [something to that effect].


Yrreg