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Never give in to bullies!

When i was a small boy, my mother used to pray for the conversion of Russia and China. Nowadays, the very idea that a communist dictatorship would be in any way improved by converting to Roman Catholicism seems laughable... They're all just bullies - extremely powerful, but dangerous control freaks nonetheless.

Last week started with the communist military junta in Burma indicating that Aung San Suu Kyi would not be released from her ongoing 'house arrest' until some time in November AFTER the elections have taken place.

Then, on the same day, we had the communist party of China AND the Roman Catholic Church both making fools of themselves on the world stage yet again.

The Chinese have threatened U.S President Obama with serious repercussions if his planned meeting with HH Dalai Lama goes ahead. Who the hell do they think they are?! As if taking Tibet 50 years ago, without any opposition whatsoever, wasn't enough now the Chinese expect to dictate everything that happens in world politics including who meets who. The really sad thing is they will probably continue to get away with this kind of stunt. WE have allowed this situation to arise by not standing up to bullies in the first place. Every country is so afraid of China's nuclear and military might, and its growing economic prowess, that China appears to get whatever they want. This is nothing more complicated than an overblown bully taking other kids' lunch money unchallenged.
The Roman Catholic Church has gone largely unchallenged too, for millenia! In recent decades, Cardinal Ratzinger ran the show from behind the scenes. A German uber-conservative dogmatician, he has been behind all the RC Church's right-wing policies for as long as anyone can remember. The ultimate insult is perhaps that this rothweiler bigot received the highest possible in-house promotion when he was appointed Pope. This shameless validation has elevated him to such a high status that he can now do and say whatever he wants. If they're not careful, Pope Benedict will completely destroy the Church.


Despite Ratzinger possibly being gay himself - there have always been rumours - he now feels so confident as a bully that he has decided to interfere in British politics too. The UK is in the process of ratifying an 'Equal Status' Law and one of the many consequences will be that homosexuals can nolonger be discriminated or even spoken out against by any sub-section of society. This means that the RC Church could soon be prosecuted for its homophobic and hateful incitements. The Pope has sounded the battle cry by urging all priests to speak out against the new legislation with 'missionary zeal'. What a tragic world they must inhabit. How sad is the bully who kicks out at REAL authority when it finally steps in. Pres. Obama recently announced that he was going to overturn the vile legislation against gays in the US military. However, i don't see Herr Ratzinger going up against that particular might... Is that because the US military and its woeful foreign policy of late is an even bigger bully than the Church? Or, is it because the Pope knows he cannot control the American RC priests fully and might be hard pressed to get them to speak out and preach the 'party line' on anything conservative these days?

Dictatorships are soon to be a thing of the past whether they are military, political or so-called religious. If we can just stand up to them for a few decades more we will have our just rewards soon enough. The world is changing. People nolonger believe in IDEOLOGIES. We nolonger blindly follow leaders and their half-baked, self-serving dogmas.

Although the planet may be dying, people are just beginning to wake up to the truth about things. We may actually manage to avert the global crisis of climate change, but one thing is for sure... all venomous, bullying dictators beware! Hear this, you nearly-extinct dinosaurs! Your days are numbered! Pretty soon both you and the shameful, secretive regime you serve and protect will simply disappear forever!

Update letter regarding Thich Nhat Hanh's monastics inside VietNam

Plum Village, Dec 15, 2009

Dear friends
Please forgive me for disturbing you during this holy season of family and homecoming. But our Bat
Nha monks and nuns are now in a position not unlike Mary and her baby Jesus -- they do not know
where to take shelter, to practice and be together in safety. For more than three years, our 379
monastics lived and practiced undisturbed in our Bat Nha (Prajna) Monastery in Vietnam, on land owned by Abbot Thich Duc Nghi and offered to us. Since then, many buildings including a huge Meditation Hall, four nuns' residences and three monks' residences were built using thousands of contributions from generous donors around the world, including some of you. Despite our having plenty of evidence of our owning these buildings, under governmental pressure the Abbot Duc Nghi withdrew his support for us and ordered us to leave our own monastery. For fourteen months, our pleas for help to reverse this illegal action went unanswered.

As the situation has gone from bad to worse, our 379 very young monks and nuns have undergone a kind of baptism by fire, and have achieved a great success in training to understand, accept, and have genuine compassion for those who abuse them. Over the past several months they have been verbally assaulted over loudspeakers 24 hours a day and threatened with being bludgeoned to death. Policemen came demanding the monastics' identification every night from 7 pm to 11.30 pm, and cut off their electricity and water for three months.

Then, hired mobs arrived on the stormy night of September 27, 2009 to forcibly and violently eject 147 monks, smash doors and windows and torment the 232 nuns. They all escaped and sought shelter at Phuoc Hue temple. At Phuoc Hue, the monks and nuns continue to be harassed, and the most compassionate and elderly abbot of that temple, after much resistance, also has been violently forced to sign a letter evicting our monastics. As of December 31, 2009, these brothers and sisters will have absolutely no place to go, and in fact may be drafted by the government into the armed forces. Even if they return to their familial homes, the harassment is unlikely to cease unless and until they disrobe and abandon their monastic life completely.

NOW is the most crucial moment for our monks and nuns. Please quickly go to
www.thepetitionsite.com/6/religious-freedom-in-viet-nam , sign the petition. This is the second one, not the one you signed in August 2009. Please sign and write to five friends asking them to sign, to achieve the greatest number we could before December 31, 2009. You have come through for me, for us, many times before. I know I can count on you in this, our hour of greatest need.

With all our most heartfelt blessings and wishes of peace to you,
Sister Chan Khong

Oh Siam! Precious Thailand!

Now that the Irish winter has well and truly taken hold, i have come to my beloved Thailand once again.
I plan on staying here until March 1st.
Having arrived on Dec 1st i spent my first 2 weeks in and around Bangkok and, thanks to some friends living there, i got to see much more of the city's nicer side than before.
I particularly enjoyed the beautiful Lumpini Park area and the wonderful apartments with vast views of the cityscape and the river.

While i was in BKK, the Thai people celebrated the birthday of His Majesty the King. Although he is quite elderly now, and has been ill in hospital for some time, the King managed to make his annual public appearance. The short event was televised to the nation and the King's short speech though very frail was very timely and direct.
He said his greatest wish for Thailand was that her peoples would become united in peace and that her politicians would serve the people's highest interests, without any corruption whatsoever.

The Red Shirts who support ousted leader Thaksin Shinawatra, we are told, are poised to stage a full rebellion in the New Year. Despite the fact that Thaksin is now exposed and disgraced for his corruption, and has been convicted and sentenced in absentia [because he is in exile], the majority of the electorate still support him and want his safe return to government.
So democracy, such as it is in Thailand, continues to be in a state of disintegration.

If there is a bloody revolution in the near future, only one thing could make matters even worse. The death of the King, it is said, would most likely lead to an all-out civil war here. And, although nobody wants to contemplate his passing away, His Majesty is very old and sick now and death will come sooner or later.
His rightful successor, the crowned prince, is not generally highly regarded compared to the present king who is adored by all across the board. The king is widely considered to be the only force holding the country together.

I wish only good things for Thailand but i fear the inevitable collapse may come sooner than anyone dares imagine.

My few short months here may well turn out to be far more eventful than planned.

So, i have retreated to an airy room on the 20th floor, with a calming panorama of the ocean in Phuket.

The summer here is in full bloom.
And the pleasant waves on the beach below that once brought a tsunami murmur:

'Things change, sweetheart.
Carnage, chaos, and corruption are no different.
Wait long enough and EVERYTHING comes and goes.
Whatever rises falls'.

Celebrating Collapsing Walls

Today, leaders from all over the planet gather in Berlin to celebrate 20 years since the dismantling of the wall that separated east from west Germany.

This occasion prompts me to look deeply at the world in general to see what other walls, visible and invisible, need to come down before we can consider ourselves truly free.

In my own country, Ireland, there is one city which still has walls dividing Republican from Unionist communities. Belfast rather shamefully calls the walls 'Peace Lines'. They imagine that keeping people apart with buffer zones will eventually lead to a day when diverse communities can respectfully co-exist. I don't agree. Maybe as a short-term, temporary solution, walls may be helpful. But walls also create cultural inertia. The short-term becomes long-term and nothing much changes behind those walls. Peace remains elusive. Fear and distrust reign supreme.

There are dividing walls all over the world disguising themselves as social and economic norms. These less-visible walls are, in many cases, even longer lasting than bricks and mortar. The 'haves' and the 'have-nots' remain separate and those with all the power wish to keep it that way.


Look at China and India for example. The vast majority of the world's population live there. Their way of life illustrates my point perfectly. The economic and political reality there is based on the richer ruling class and the poorer working class remaining apart. Let's be honest, it is extremely uncomfortable to be face to face with the very people we must condemn to slave labour in order to build our own personal empire. China is building its future on this principle and India is not far behind them. And let's not forget that India still clings to the ancient caste system whose glass walls divide and stratify her enormous population into more manageable, controllable battalions of workers.

Looking at the various walls that divide us on a more global scale, we become ever-more mindful of the fakeness of borders themselves. They are man-made afterall and are usually the direct result of wars in which vast numbers of young men were forced to their deaths in the pursuit of ideals driven by fear and greed. In the early history of the human race, if life wasn't working out for you in one place, you just marched off to a better place - even as far as another continent altogether. But now, thanks to borders and confederations, human beings are nolonger free to move about and live where they need to be.


Every night on the TV news we watch Africans and Asians perish in hostile environments they cannot escape. They are not free to migrate [despite the fact their original trans-migrations first populated the entire world. We are their children!]

We don't want them or their different ways over here, dragging our struggling cocoon down the tube. We can't have people just living anywhere they want! ... Can we?
Without borders, the planet would just be reduced to utter chaos! ... Wouldn't it?

Anyway ... sorry for banging on about all this. But it's a blog ... That's what it's for!

I remember - speaking of Walls - when i was a young child my mother gave me some Wall's ice-cream on one of those scorching late summer's days we used to have in Ireland before we ruined the planet.
As i savoured the first spoonful, Mammy told me to really enjoy it because there were children all over the world who wouldn't be having any ice-cream.

Completely missing the whole point, i thought to myself -

Oh, how kind of them! Those lovely children are not having any ice-cream just so I can have some.

Yogis of Tibet

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFxwaGSiNNQ


According to experts, perhaps the best thing that Tibet has to offer the world is the purity and depth of its meditation tradition. But in recent years that tradition has all but become extinct inside Tibet.

Tibetan Buddhism is undergoing a kind of flourishing in the West wherever it has taken root, thanks to certain great masters. but those masters are the last of their kind it is said.

Flourishing though it is in the West, Tibetan Buddhist meditation remains strong only at the beginner-intermediate practitioner levels. The most advanced practices have yet to emerge in the West, depending as they do on the evolution of advanced Western practitioners.
Hopefully, it is not too late and meditators in our part of the world will realise full enlightenment, thus embodying the fruition of the richest practices available within the vast tradition of Tibet.
However, inside Tibet, these particular advanced practices have all but died out due mainly to the concerted efforts of the Chinese purge of Tibet.

If the above clip whets your appetite for seeing more of that documentary, please enjoy the whole thing on googlevideo here.

I am ever mindful of the fact that these Tibetan yogis have actually broken silence about the specifics of these secret tantric practices because they are convinced that all knowledge of them may well die out with the practitioners themselves who are sharing their incredible personal stories on screen. It is a rare and precious document of a secret tradition near extinction.

4 Young Tibetans Executed by Chinese

It is with a heavy heart i write of the sad news that 4 of the young Tibetans who were arrested last year by the Chinese following the uprising in Lhasa were executed two days ago on October 20.

Regular readers of this blog may remember that i was in studying at Gyuto monastery in Dharamsala last year when the riots and protests were happening both in India and, of course, in Tibet itself.

You can find those previous blog entries by searching the list of topics at the side of this page.

Not only was the original Chinese invasion of Tibet practically unreported, along with the Tibetan uprising at that time, but last year's uprising was also largely unreported. As it unfolded there was eventually a total news blackout.

The four young people who have recently been executed were, of course, not the rebellion's leaders. But they were tried and convicted as such and doubtlessly spent the last year in the harshest goulag being starved and tortured to near death.

You can read the brief statement of the Tibetan Government in Exile regarding the executions here. In fact there are two news stories you can read there by clicking on the headlines of each.

But i would simply like to pay tribute to the four by publishing three of the four names that are known at present... May they have found natural great peace and may their reincarnation be a happy one.



Those executed have been identified as:

Lobsang Gyaltsen, aged 27, born in Lhasa

Loyak, aged 25, of Tashi Khang, Shol Township, Lhasa and

Penkyi, aged 21, born in Sakya County.

The identity of the fourth person is still unknown.