Dalai Lama misses sex, shoots guns

news.com.au ^ | 7/29/03 | Ruth Gledhill

[adam_az]

THE Dalai Lama has admitted that, in a lifetime dedicated to celibacy and non-violence, he has missed out on sex and that he shoots at hawks in anger.

Asked in an interview what experiences he had missed that ordinary people had not, he pointed towards his groin and laughed, saying: "I obviously missed this."

He was not sorry, however: "For monks and nuns, the practice of celibacy is not just a rule. Our target is to try and reduce negative emotions. Sexual desire and attachment are enjoyable, but act as a basis to anger, hatred and jealousy."

He was not convinced that he would have made a good father, admitting to having a bad temper. That temper led him to aim his air rifle at hawks, he told Conrad Kiechel, international editorial director of Reader's Digest.

"I feed birds, peaceful birds. I'm non-violent, but if a hawk comes when I'm feeding birds, I lose my temper and get my air rifle." He did not shoot to kill, "only to scare the hawks".

Speaking in Dharamsala, India, where he has lived since China put down a Tibetan uprising against communist rule, he admitted to having enjoyed spending time with Mao Zedong.

"At official dinners he made me sit beside him and treated me like his son, sometimes feeding me with his chopsticks.

"I was afraid that since he coughed so much I would catch something. He was no doubt a great revolutionary, but at the same time, his behaviour was often that of a peasant."

He said there was a softening towards Tibet by the current Chinese regime.

[First Amendment]

You're welcome to fast to death if you want to.

[Djarum]

I will end life to continue life. I won't draw conclusions about life's worth because of consciousness.

[adam_az]

We didn't develop clever brains for sneaking up on lettuce.

Early human settlements show lots of signs of eating animals - they ate whatever they could pick or catch. Curiously, they also show lots of signs of eating other humans - purposefully cracked bones for extracting and eating marrow. We are not that many generations past common cannibalism!

We are omniverous, which is why we are so successful.

Meat is a long prized food for humans because protein and fat are much more dense and long lasting energy sources than plant carbohydrate.

Also, humans have only been farming for about 10,000 years. Grains are specially bred grasses - we haven't been eating them for that long.

[adam_az]

Humans have eyes on the front of our heads like carnivores, for hunting - not on the sides like herbivores, to better spot carnivores.

[Pan_Yans Wife]

LOL

You are something else!

How can it be a duplicate, when you posted on the earlier thread, with the same article, posted by mhking?

Duplicate my @$$.

[First Amendment]

We didn't develop clever brains for sneaking up on lettuce.

Being a farmer and growing all your food takes more brains than jumping on an animal and killing it.

Also, humans have only been farming for about 10,000 years. Grains are specially bred grasses - we haven't been eating them for that long. \

Uninformed opinion.

People can live perfectly healthy lives without eating meat. Your opinion is based on the recent-evolution assumption, which is currently being transformed on a daily basis, and I'm not talking about Christian creationism either.

[adam_az]

Different Rinpoche. :) I did a web search and think I found the Rinpoche you are talking about.
http://www.cuke.com/errata/trungpa-vice.html

On the other hand, highly advanced Buddhist and Taoist training has a sexual component for building up Chi (in Taoist terms, I can't recall the Buddhist term) involving sexual stimulation and orgasm without ejaculating. Easterners have a different view of sex than do westerners, so what sounds very odd to us would not be odd to an Asian. If you are interested, I would suggest books by Mantak and Maneewan Chia, who are Taoist masters. I know there are nearly identical Buddhist teachings, but I don't recall any authors names at the moment. (it's midnight, I was working on an ongoing project of restoring a very old house all night, and I'm pooped!)

There are lots of different sects of Buddhism.

Tibetian Buddhists practice nonviolence, but not to the point of self destruction.

The Dalai Lama has Hepatitis B (IIRC), and his doctors instructed him to eat meat for his condition.

You might want to ask your GF which Buddhist writing preaches vegetarianism - as far as I know, none do. In fact, it's not even one of the Four Fold Truths or Eight Fold Paths. Also, there is no evidence in the Pali Canon that Buddha taught his followers to be vegetarian. In Buddhism, this is personal choice, not a strict law. There are some schools of Buddhism though that are strict vegetarians, but they are the minority.

Many Buddhists interpret the "nonviolence" aspect as vegetarianism, but in Tibet, they mostly eat animals - it's not such good farming country. Many Tibetian Buddhist monks eat whatever food is donated to them, which often involves meat. Beggars can't be choosers, literally.

I'm not making this up, you will find many Buddhist websites that say the same thing.

[giotto]

Gary Snyder...replied that he ate whatever he was served

It has always seemed like the height of rudeness to accept a dinner invitation and then expect the host to meet one's dietary requirements. My favorite dish is anything I don't have to prepare.

[First Amendment]

I am familiar with Mantak Chia and his wife, more Taoist than Buddhist. But I'm going to have to do some research on this. Buddha's birth was actually predicted in the Puranas about 2400 years before (before his birth), and his mission was stated to teach ahimsa, specifically non-killing. I'll have to ask my sister for references on Buddhist teachings, at least how the Tibetan Buddhists practice in Nepal.

[adam_az]

Being a farmer and growing all your food takes more brains than jumping on an animal and killing it.

The brains evolved some 1.5 million years ago, give or take a couple hundred thousand.

The last ice age only ended 15,000 years ago. Humans were hunter-gatherers then. It's kind of hard to farm through a freaking sheet of ice 50 feet thick. There is no evidence of human farming in Western Europe before 6000 years ago. Humans didn't have the technology yet. The bronze age was only 4000 years ago Property ownership developed during the iron age. Farming is about 10,000 years old. It's hard to gather enough plant food in the wild to support the caloric requirements of prehistoric man. Eyes on the front of the head like a carnivore, clever brain to outsmart prey.

Sure being a farmer takes more brains - but we had the brains long before farming. Think about it. There couldn't have been farming BEFORE the brains. Farming wouldn't have occurred at the same time as the brain. It's predicated on too much other technology which would have to be invented, which when put together would equal "farm." Early humans who lived not much differently than wild animals couldn't get enough caloris, especially in some of the harsh climates he lived in and through like ice ages and deserts, simply by eating gathered wild plant food alone! Not only that, but in much of the world, there isn't edible vegetable food all year long. We hunted - first small lizards, bugs, birds, small mammals, and later larger prey as we developed advanced technologies like chip axes, rope, clothing made from animal hide, and the container.

I don't know what this "recent-evolution assumption" jive is, but is sounds like something that you'd read on websites that talk about chemtrails and ufo abductions.

[rmmcdaniell]

Also, humans have only been farming for about 10,000 years. Grains are specially bred grasses - we haven't been eating them for that long. \

Uninformed opinion.

People can live perfectly healthy lives without eating meat. Your opinion is based on the recent-evolution assumption, which is currently being transformed on a daily basis, and I'm not talking about Christian creationism either.

You said nothing that refutes the first poster's statement. Whether or not people can live healthy lives without meat is irrelevant to the question of what the first humans ate. Even if you don't believe in evolution, how then do you account for the presence of hunter tools earlier than farming tools in archeological digs?

We didn't develop clever brains for sneaking up on lettuce.

Being a farmer and growing all your food takes more brains than jumping on an animal and killing it.

Precisely because the plant foods that humans grow are not natural strains. They have been selected for increased food production at the expense of survivability. Unlike wild plants, that survive on their own, crops must be constantly tended and nutured. If all humans left earth tomorrow on a space ship, all of our food crops left behind would be extinct in a few years. Our crops are not natural and were not there in the beginning (whenever you believe that to be).

[adam_az]

Ask her to show you where the Pali Canon specifically addresses the issue of eating or not eating meat.

BTW some Taoist monks are vegetarian. The Taoist warrior-monk diet is not vegetarian, though - it includes mostly organ meats.

I think the Buddhists differentiate between killing or ordering a thing killed, and eating something that is already killed. Ordering a lobster at a restaraunt where they have live lobster in a tank would be wrong in this theory, but buying meat is not since it was not specifically killed for you, because the butcher killed the animal before you concieved of eating it. It would be just as dead if you didn't eat it. At least this is what I've read.

(I'm not really a subscriber to this stuff, but my GF is - she's been practicing kung fu, tai chi, and yoga for years, and knows a bunch of monks from the two Chinese shaolin temples, through her teacher who is a master and is now in china. She could kick my ass if she wanted to, but she still needs me to open a bottle of soda for her once in a while. Go figure.)

[First Amendment]

I don't like to have discussions with people that immediately bring up chemtrails and ufos. By recent evolution I mean exactly what you are talking about. I could provide links and this and that, but since you already have your belief system in place, there's no real point in continuing.
Have either one of you read "Forbidden Archeology"? If you haven't, I dare you to read it and get back to me later. It's about 1000 pages with lots of footnotes and references so it'll take you more than a day.

[adam_az]

No, you don't want to have a discussion because you are outgunned.

Where did you hear about this junk science, www.rense.com? It sounds really kooky. Lots of

A quick look on amazon describes what's wrong with it:

A Book in the Realm of Pseudoscience, May 12, 2003
Reviewer: Wade Tarzia (see more about me) from Waterbury, CT
Wade Tarzia published an extensive review of this book in _Creation/Evolution_ 34:13-25, 1994 (National Center for Science Education), also available on-line at "Doug's Archaeology Pages" website. Here are some key extracts from that review:

---

...Despite all this hard work, I think the book falls short of a scientific work primarily (but not entirely) because (1) its arguments abandon the testing of simpler hypothesis before the more complex and sensationalistic ones, and (2) the use of so many outdated sources is inadequate for a book that seeks to overturn the well-established paradigm of human evolution -- scholars must not work in isolation, especially today, when multi-disciplinary approaches are needed to remain on the cutting edge of knowledge. However, for researchers studying the growth, folklore, and rhetoric of pseudo-science, the book is useful as 'field' data. ... Forbidden Archaeology [is also] ... a well-written example of pseudoscience -- its looks like the real thing, a phenomena discussed in Williams (1991, 15) [ _Fantastic Archaeology_; see also K. Feder's _Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries_ ] ...

Mass of Details -- The mass of details with attached analyses would require book-length responses from specialized reviewers to confirm or critique. This style is a common diversionary tactic in pseudoscience. Since the authors have not aired their arguments previously through professional journals, as many scholars do before writing such a huge synthesis of material, the task of validation becomes a career itself. Such a style burdens an analysis with long leaps between broad assumptions (i.e., scientific cover-up) to the detailed evidence (i.e., minutiae of strata and dating from obscure sites) -- all on the same page. ...

Use of Old Sources -- Quotations of the 19th-/early 20th- century material are copious -- comprising, I would guess, at least 25 percent of the book. ... I do not indict the sincerity and ground-breaking of 19th century scholars. However, because knowledge seems to accumulate and research techniques seem to improve, assuming a blanket equivalency of research level between 19th and 20th century science is just going too far.

Rusting Occam's Razor -- A major flaw of Forbidden Archaeology is its quick leaps toward sensational hypotheses (see in general Williams 1991, 11-27). Sensational ideas are not intrinsically bad -- plate tectonics was pretty astonishing at one point (Williams 1991, 132), but also true. However, the cautious investigator hopes that less sensational, or simpler, hypotheses are first proposed and well tested before more complex or less likely explanations are considered. ...

Missed Evidence -- While presenting a voluminous amount of detail, sometimes Forbidden Archaeology has missed important points. For example, the book discusses the Timlin site in New York, where researchers reported finds of ancient eolithic tools dated to 70,000 YBP (p. 354). Yet Forbidden Archaeology does not mention the responses to these claims by several professionals, which casts the nature of these finds in doubt (Cole and Godfrey 1977; Cole, Funk, Godfrey, and Starna 1978; Funk 1977, Starna 1977; a reply to the criticisms is in Raemsch 1978). I found it interesting that a student created similar "eoliths" by rattling the same source material in a garbage can (Funk 1977, 543); the simple experiment has much to say about eoliths! ...

Acceptance of Poor Evidence -- ... Similarly, when the book documents a claim for a modern-type human skeleton (reported in a geology journal of 1862) in a coal deposit 90 feet deep, we learn the authors wrote the Geological Survey to date the coal to about 286 million years (p. 454). But we are not treated to a contextual discussion of the bones -- how they were found, who found them, what was the site like, and how these allegedly 286 million year old bones came out of the earth with only a loose black coating that was easily scraped away to reveal nice white bone, etc. The impression left is that, if a tabloid reported Jimmy Hoffa's corpse was found in Triassic deposits, then the authors would no doubt perform rigorous research to date those deposits and then include the data in their next book. ...

Faulty View of Science Process -- One of the most striking themes of Forbidden Archaeology is the notion that scientists are slaves to tradition, which slows down or stops the adoption of new ideas. Yet, scientists have often overturned paradigms in the face of a social tradition that penalized them for it. Galileo pushed his 'wild' views of a heliocentric solar system until threatened by state-officiated torture. Modern cosmology is another example, a branch of knowledge under such motion and revision that I suspect astronomers are giants among coffee drinkers. Similarly, paleoarchaeology is revised often in the face of new evidence (see Tuttle 1988 for a feel for the controversy). The "knowledge filter" would have to be impossibly acrobatic to span all this change. ...

Conclusion -- ...This book, and other creationist texts that use similar techniques, is most useful as ethnographic data in studies of comparative religion, cult movements, popular movements, anti-science, fantastic archaeology, rhetoric, folklore -- the book can be studied in any of these fields. With its emphasis on "secrets" and "hidden history" and "cover-up," the book participates in the popular genre of the conspiracy, akin to popular beliefs about the Kennedy assassination and crashed alien spaceships kept in guarded Air Force hangars ... I see Forbidden Archaeology fantasizing about a past open-mindedness to legitimize a vast restructuring of our present understanding -- without good evidence.




Forbidden Archeology - A Hidden Agenda or a Critical Review, July 13, 2002
Reviewer: A reader from Del Mar, CA USA
Since the Authors, Cremo and Thompson, gathered, compiled and analyzed such a large quantity of material from many diverse sources, I was initially excited about the book. However, as I read their book and referred back to some of the primary sources cited, I found that, at best, material was frequently taken out of context, , or, worse, the Authors ignored critical, supplemental material.

For example, the Authors make early reference to the distal end of a humerus (KNM-KP 271) that was recovered from the west side of Lake Turkana in Kenya, at the Kanapoi site. The Authors went on to quote from Henry McHenry's early work that the Kanapoi humerus was "barely distinguishable from the modern Homo," thereby suggesting that modern humans were at least 4 million years old. However, other researchers (Patterson and Howells ) in addition to McHenery note that "it is difficult to identify the family from the distal end of the humerus [alone]," and that, in general, scientists are not able to distinguish between human and chimp populations based the humerus alone. Subsequent research (prior to the release of the Author's book) by Meave Leakey has shown that the remains in question belong to Australopithecus anamensis not Homo sapiens.

While the above is but one example, I found that as I read further into Forbidden Archeology, I frequently had to go back to the original citations in order to get a "true," "uncolored" view of what information was actually presented in the primary sources.

Given the fact that both of the Authors are members of the Krishna Bhaktivendanta Institute "that studies the relationship between modern science and the world view expressed in the Vedic literature," one begins to suspect the authors might have an agenda that "colors" the findings presented in their book.

The more I read, the more it became obvious to me that Forbidden Archeology serves better as a bibliography than as Johnson suggests a "complete review of the scientific evidence concerning human origins."

[adam_az]

Oops, lots of sources doesn't mean squat if they are quoted out of context as many amazon reviewers point out, are quite outdated, or where there are simpler competing explanations which are not mentioned in the book.

Junk science.

[wideminded]

So for a follower of Buddha to eat meat is totally hypocritical. I do hope this isn't true....

In his autobiography, which I read several years ago, the Dalai Lama said that when he was growing up, Tibetan Buddhists would eat meat but would not kill animals. I don't remember if he said who was doing the butchering, but he seemed to realize that there was an element of hypocrisy.

[First Amendment]

It is very easy to go to Amazon and copy and paste a bunch of other peoples' opinions. Other people who also have the same safe little belief system so there is no nasty disagreement. And if someone presents a different thesis you can compare them to ufologists, or believers in a strange religion.

Are you afraid to read it yourself? I don't want to argue with you, you are convinced that the current scientific view (which is not monolithic, BTW) is the absolute truth and cannot be disagreed with, or the person so disagreeing is a blasphemer. You can rest happily in your belief system. Try reading the book.

[adam_az]

Sure, right after I read von Daniken.

Sheesh.

[First Amendment]

Ha - you're afraid to read it! Reminds me of people who are afraid to read anything but the Bible.