Economies of Curiosity: The Dalai Lama’s email inbox, the Foreign Researcher in Mcleod Ganj and Artaud Syndrome

Posted on April 27, 2016 by yesnooraspider

(Antonin Artaud, gazing upon the summit of interiority)

So, McLeod Ganj, India where I am living, ‘Little Lhasa’, or the Tibetan capital in exile, is a funny kind of place. It’s really only a very small town, but its few streets and rural mountain town feel belies its cosmopolitanism. It is a junction point for a virtually unceasing stream of Tibetan and foreign visitors, for news and information from all over the globe. Besides formal support from the Tibetan government in exile, and informal flows of money from friends and family – everything from transnational remittances, informal/illegal trade, community saving unions, personal support structures centered around people from the same home regions in Tibet and exile, from common Tibetan exile or Indian school graduating groups, or shared monastic colleges – many Tibetans rely on tourist dollars to survive.

I have often said that this town exists for better or worse in the midst of overlapping economies of curiosity. Romantic stereotypes and Tibetans’ global reputation precedes them. One silver lining about this curiosity or global gaze is that it can at least be turned into a source of continued survival and livelihood for exile Tibetans, who let it not be forgotten, remain by and large stateless refugees living deeply precarious lives.

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My Mother was a Rock-ogress Yeti Monster: True Tales of Dharma, Demons, and Darwin

Posted on April 27, 2016 by yesnooraspider

srin mo.png

Despite the ridiculous title, I get the feeling this next Savage Minds essay was a little less widely read. This may have something to do with the fact that the technicalities of Tibetan exile secularism and school curricula have less of a wide appeal than some of the other subjects I’ve covered. Whatever the case, I think that this particular Tibetan origin myth Continue reading →

A Modern Tibetan Refuge Formula

Posted on December 8, 2015 by yesnooraspider

I was sent this parody of the Tibetan Buddhist ‘refuge formula’, as seen on Tibetan social media, by a young Tibetan monk friend in McLeod Ganj. There’s potential commentary here on how much Tibetans depend today on social media and virtual connectivity to keep their sense of community together in diaspora. Continue reading →

Teaching Christianity to Tibetan Buddhists, as a Non-Christian

Posted on June 29, 2015 by yesnooraspider

Today, I used Hozier’s song ‘Take me to Church’ as part of an English listening exercise with some Tibetan students. I chose the song strategically: it is loaded with Christian and sexual themes but also reframes these in surprising, perhaps even blasphemous ways. I figured that the song could provide a good lesson in how important cultural background can be for language comprehension and offer a nice parallel with things the students were more familiar with as Tibetan Buddhists: in this case, the much celebrated if somewhat scandalous poetry of Tsangyang Gyatso, the sixth Dalai Lama, who in the early 18th century bucking the bonds of his royal, monastic education, returned his vows of celibacy and wrote erotic poems laden with tantric Buddhist religious imagery.