Sanskritic civilization · Tantric studies · Newar & Nusantaran Buddhism
᠀ नमो वागीश्वराय ।
Indologists still haven’t moved the Devanagari code block much beyond the inadequate ISCII-1988. Meanwhile, Michael Everson’s ill-informed “Newari” (sic) proposal — the only rañjanā-lipi proposal out there — hasn’t gone anywhere since the 1990s. Today, something like the siddham symbol in Unicode 6.0 [test page] has to be found in the Mongolian code block:
U+1800 MONGOLIAN BIRGA
Here’s something you won’t read about in inspiring new books on Varieties of Activist Experience. One recent disclosure suggests that the 2006 street riots which marked the beginning of the end of the Shah monarchy only succeeded because the Royal Nepalese Army ran out of bullets. Apparently, the previous year’s embargo had affected ammunition procurement. The preferred alternative — going through the black market — evidently consumes more time and money.
TNN, ‘W□□□□□□□s throws new light on Nepal king’s surrender’. Times of India, 5 September 2011.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/south-asia/W□□□□□□□s-throws-new-light-on-Nepal-kings-surrender/articleshow/9871594.cms
Light of the Valley: The 15th Renovation of Swayambhu. 2011. 30 minutes. Directed by Pema Gellek. [press release]
A short documentary of the 2008–2010 renovation of the Kathmandu Valley’s most sacred Buddhist site, generously sponsored by Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche and coordinated by his daughter, Tsering Gellek. I, and other readers, had the good fortune to witness this monumental undertaking at various stages.
There’s also a book (no publication information available yet).
Light of the Valley Trailer from Guna Foundation on Vimeo.
‘Visionary Realms: An Interview with Robert Beer’. 2011. [PDF at Wisdom books or online (more pictures).]
Nice to see these informed musings on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Newar art by Robert Beer, its most accomplished Western exponent, ranging from the influence of Botticelli’s Nascita di Venere upon it to thoughts on some of its current leading lights.
There is also a plug for Robert Beer’s joint venture with Wisdom books, the commercial site tibetanart.com, offering stuff at the higher-quality end of the market.
Jonathan Silk not only studies Mahāyāna Buddhism; he thinks about it as well. Is that unusual? Put it this way: I feel that I can recommend his work on that basis alone.
I would be a happy man had I a nickel — that’s a small denomination American coin – for every time I have been told that Buddhism is not a religion, but rather a philosophy, a way of life. This is more than a rhetorical strategy by which an interested Westerner allows himself to explore Buddhism without feeling an apostate for doing so. For it derives its validity only by denying Buddhist traditions their intrinsic identity, and Buddhists — traditional, Asian Buddhists — their autonomy. Once one denies that Buddhism is a religion, it ceases to be an integral part of anyone’s life. Buddhism becomes something optional, adventitious, incidental even to the people whose lives it structures. For Westerners disaffected with religion, this may be a happy solution. But at least for the scholar, it is an impossibility, for it constitutes a refusal to acknowledge the tradition in its multiplicity and complexity, or even in its most intrinsic nature. [2008:12]
Where: Department of Indian and Tibetan Studies, Asia-Africa Institute, University of Hamburg, Hamburg.
Director: Dr. Dorji Wangchuk.
Established: January 2011.
Focus: “Scholarly investigation of Tibetan (primarily Buddhist) texts”.
URL: http://www.kc-tbts.uni-hamburg.de
Michael Allen. ‘The worship of young virgin girls as goddesses in the secular state of Nepal’. Guest lecture, 23 May 2011, 13:00-15:00, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (Copenhagen).
In this lecture I intend to focus on some of the current debates in Nepal concerning the worship of young virgin girls as living forms of the goddess. At the heart of these debates is the issue of just what weight should be given to religious beliefs, practices and morals, in this case both Hindu and Buddhist, in what is now constitutionally a federal democratic republic formally committed to the propagation of predominantly secular ideals. Yet, prior to the success of the Maoist-led revolution in 2006, Nepal had been a Hindu monarchy of an orthodox kind in which the divine King and the virgin goddess were the twin pillars that together gave legitimacy to the state. My lecture concludes with some brief insights into just how both the goddess and the state survive today without their king – albeit somewhat precariously so.
Michael Allen is Emeritus Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney.
NIAS, Leifsgade 33, 3rd floor, 2300 Copenhagen S.
Stout, Daniel R. ‘How the Buddhist concept of Right Speech would be applied towards diplomatic actions using the media: a case study from the 2002 State of the Union’. M.A. thesis, 2009. [http://hdl.handle.net/2097/1485/PDF]
Some 30,000 books and manuscripts, including nearly 2,000 considered to be of “exceptional historical value”, have gone missing from the Bibliothèque Nationale, France.
The BNF contains important collections of Sanskrit manuscripts, including those gathered in Nepal and originally donated by Brian Houghton Hodgson. So much for the view that priceless South Asian artifacts, including manuscripts, are better off in European hands.
One of the BNF’s Buddhist MSS: the Udānavarga.
– Article: ‘Curator suspected of looting library’, The Guardian, June 28 2005.