Buddhists behaving badly [Archive] - Kung Fu Magazine Forums

GeneChing

07-10-2015, 08:59 AM

Top Tibetan monk faces India money-laundering charges (http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/top-tibetan-monk-faces/1972400.html?cid=FBINT)
A top Tibetan monk who is seen as a potential successor to the Dalai Lama is to be prosecuted for money-laundering after an Indian court overturned a decision to drop charges, police said on Thursday (Jul 9).

POSTED: 09 Jul 2015 19:00

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/image/1972454/1436439478000/large16x9/640/360/karmapa-urgyen-trinley.jpg
In this photograph taken on January 1, 2014, Tibetan spiritual leader, the 17th Karmapa, Urgyen Trinley offers prayers at The Mahabodhi Temple at Bodhgaya. (Photo: AFP/STR/FILES)

NEW DELHI: A top Tibetan monk who is seen as a potential successor to the Dalai Lama is to be prosecuted for money-laundering after an Indian court overturned a decision to drop charges, police said on Thursday (Jul 9).

At a hearing on Wednesday at the Himachal Pradesh High Court, a judge issued an order for authorities to open criminal proceedings against Karmapa Urgyen Trinley over the recovery of around US$1 million in foreign currency during a raid on his Buddhist monastery four years ago.

Although criminal conspiracy charges were filed in the aftermath of the raid, a district court had dismissed the case in 2012 in a verdict that was later appealed and the subject of Wednesday's hearing.

"The impugned order of May 21, 2012, passed by the judicial magistrate of Una is quashed and dismissed," Judge Sureshwar Thakur said in his judgement, a copy which has been obtained by AFP.

Local police chief Anupam Sharma confirmed that the first step in bringing a prosecution had begun.

"We have already filed a chargesheet in the court against him," Sharma told AFP, meaning that police have filed an outline of the evidence against the accused with the court.

The case dates back to a raid in January 2011 on a monastery in the Himalayan town of Dharamshala in which investigators say stacks of bank notes from 26 different currencies were recovered, including more than US$100,000 worth of Chinese yuan.

The raid came after two people were pulled over by police in a car containing large amounts of cash. During interrogations, the pair said the money was meant for a land deal involving a trust headed by Trinley.

The 30-year-old Trinley has denied any wrongdoing, saying the bank notes found in the monastery were donations from devotees which had accumulated over the years and that he had no involvement in the land deal.

The monk is revered by followers as the 17th incarnation of the head of the Karma Kagyu lineage, one of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism.

He fled Tibet at the turn of the century at the age of 14, reaching India after an eight-day journey by foot and horseback over the Himalayas.

Since fleeing, he has mainly lived at the Gyuto Monastery in Dharamshala, the northern Indian hill station that is the seat of the Tibetan government in exile.

Trinley is recognised by both China and the Dalai Lama as the reincarnation of the Karmapa Lama, head of the Karma Kagyu lineage, one of Tibetan Buddhism's four major schools.

He is seen as as having the highest profile of a cast of young lamas who could succeed the Dalai Lama who has just turned 80. His appearances with the Dalai Lama have fuelled speculation he is being groomed as the Nobel peace laureate's spiritual successor.

His spokesman Kunzang Chungyalpa said Trinley has great faith in India's judicial system. "He strongly believes truth will prevail at the end," he told AFP.

For the record, I've done a pilgrimage to the Mahabodhi Temple at Bodhgaya too. :cool:

rett2

07-16-2015, 02:35 AM

Some more information about the incident at the Oakland temple, including possible motive and a clearer picture of the situation.

According to this article

http://www.insidebayarea.com/breaking-news/ci_28366115/oakland-monk-sought-knife-attack-superior-arrested-charged

the perpetrator was a "novice monk", which implies that he was not a fully ordained Bhikkhu. If so this is not actually a case of a Buddhist monk behaving badly, but a layperson practising for possible future ordination.

Also, the article mentions a motive "He told police he was angry with the older monk because of his disciplinary tactics, Officer Bradley Miller said."

"Disciplinary tactics" is a bit vague, but it sounds like the novice may have been unhappy with the rules and guidelines for practice.

The article also mentions that the novice had been living there for a year. Enough time to build up personal rage against someone. Earlier articles made it sound like a much shorter time, which seemed odd.

GeneChing

07-16-2015, 08:53 AM

This one is slightly OT as Wu Zeheng just claimed to be a monk (a Shaolin monk no less) but was never acknowledged as one. That puts him in a similar class as Juan Carlos Aguilar (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?66011-Juan-Carlos-Aguilar-Shaolin-gym-owner-arrested-for-torture-and-murder)

Chinese cult leader faces criminal prosecution (http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-07/16/c_134416159.htm)
English.news.cn 2015-07-16 04:10:56 [More]

GUANGZHOU, July 16 (Xinhua) -- Wu Zeheng, founder and leader of the cult "Huazang Zongmen", is facing criminal prosecution along with several other suspected cult members, following year-long investigations by police in south China's Guangdong Province, it was announced late on Wednesday.

Local procuratorate of the coastal city of Zhuhai in Guangdong has instituted the prosecution for organizing and using cult to sabotage law enforcement, alleged rape, fraud, and production and sale of harmful food.

Wu, born in 1967, got his first police record for sexual assault at an early age and was later put in detention in 1991 for fraud and rascality. In 2000, he was sentenced to 11 years in prison for illegal fund-raising and unlawful business operations.

Upon release from prison in 2010, Wu began to propagate the pseudo religion "Huazang Zongmen" as a lofty sect of Buddhism and claimed to be the successor of several eminent monks. Glorified with fabricated educational background and life experience, Wu eventually became a master with supernatural power in the eyes of his followers.

Among many glamorous titles, Wu claimed he held a PhD of Cambridge University. But investigations at his hometown in Guangdong's Huilai County revealed that he dropped out from a local junior high school.

In the name of charity and life science and through inflammatory preaching, Wu lured a growing number of believers who wished to study Buddhism, seek disease treatment, or ward off ill fortune by joining the cult, according to the police involved in the investigation.

"When we arrested Wu in his locked bedroom last July, he was with a young woman in pajamas," said a police officer, who also seized philters, luxurious liquors, cigarettes, watches, jewelries and cash in his 200-square-meter apartment in Zhuhai.

Several female followers believed "practicing" with Wu in bed could help themselves "gain supernatural power," an excuse Wu used to seduce or coerce dozens of women, including two pairs of sisters and several minors, to have sex with him.

A follower surnamed Wang said she had been raped frequently. She got pregnant three times and was forced to have abortions. Some of the raped followers became barren.

Police said Wu had six children born in wedlock and at least another six born out of wedlock.

Wu set up websites and opened social media accounts to lure followers, and swindled them out of a great deal of money.

"New comers usually gave Wu premium cigarettes, liquors and tea as presents. But he hinted that he preferred cash," said a follower surnamed Yuan.

Wu said his paintings had "holy power" of warding off misfortunes. He sold three pieces for 100,000 to 500,000 yuan (about 81,400 U.S. dollars) each to his followers.

Wu bought 11 wooden stamps worth about 3,000 yuan from an online shop, and sold them for 538,000 yuan as the stamps were "rare and blessed".

Wu asked his followers to raise millions of yuan and opened an "imperial restaurant" in Shenzhen City, Guangdong Province, where he propagated that the dishes, priced at 2,000 to 6,000 yuan, were cooked with secret cuisines and precious ingredients.

However, the food proved to be very ordinary and contained some banned herbs.

Police investigation showed that Wu amassed more than 6.9 million yuan in illegal profits.

"Huazang Zongmen" is not an officially registered organization, nor is Wu a registered monk, according to the investigations.

In 1991, Shi Suxi, former abbot of the renowned Shaolin Temple, publicly denied any links between the monastery and Wu, who claimed to be a disciple of a prestigious Shaolin monk.

The incumbent abbot Shi Yongxin also said "Shaolin has nothing to do with Wu." Most of Wu's writings turned out to be either plagiarisms or unlawful.

To whitewash his past, Wu said his imprisonment was "religious persecution", in order to seek overseas support.

Due to his followers' lobbying, 17 U.S. lawmakers jointly sent a message to the Chinese ambassador to the U.S., demanding an end to the so-called "persecution".

Wu called the police bust of his cult "a crackdown on charity", and asked his followers to formulate "A Response Plan to Emergency".

According to the plan, if Wu disappeared for more than 24 hours, followers are required to stage protests and publish the situation abroad to pressure the Chinese government.

Wu also hired a Beijing-based lawyer to lecture his followers how to cause the police trouble and hinder law enforcement.

Shi Mingsheng, vice president of the Buddhist Association of China, said "Huazang Zongmen" conforms to the Buddhism "by no means" and it is purely "a disguised cult".

David Jamieson

07-20-2015, 06:32 AM

LOL!!

I ran into one downtown Toronto on Saturday.

Comes up to me with a Hui Ke bow, holds out his hand.

I said to him "Dude, you're wearing f#c*%ng leather shoes" and walked around him.

jerk. lol

GeneChing

08-27-2015, 09:10 AM

60-year-old Buddhist priest arrested for panty theft, would’ve got away if not for his high heels (http://en.rocketnews24.com/2015/08/26/60-year-old-buddhist-priest-arrested-for-panty-theft-wouldve-got-away-if-not-for-his-high-heels/)
Casey Baseel
2 days ago

https://sociorocketnewsen.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/pt-1.png?w=580&h=550

It stands to reason that, upon reaching the age of 60 years, a man will find himself in possession of knowledge that he wants to share with younger generations. As a matter of fact, he may even feel compelled to do so, especially if his vocation is one that involves the dissemination of important lessons.

That might have been a factor in the decisions made by Shoden Yamazaki, former head priest of the Choshoji Buddhist temple in Akita Prefecture. And, truth be told, the lesson he claims he wanted to spread, “If you’re not careful, people might steal your lingerie,” is a valuable one.

However, being a good teacher is as much about how you deliver the message as it is the message itself. While it drives the point home, warning people about underwear security by dressing up in a skirt and high heels, then stealing their bras and panties, probably isn’t the best, or even really legal, methodology, which is why Yamazaki now finds himself on trial for lingerie theft.

This isn’t the 60-year-old Yamazaki’s first time to end up on the wrong side of anti-underwear theft legislation. During the investigation, it came to light that he began stealing underwear, upper elementary school girls’ in particular, at the age of 19. He continued his activities even after getting married (unlike their Catholic counterparts, Buddhist priests in Japan are allowed to wed), although when he was caught stealing underwear at the age of 29, he took a five-year break from his criminal activities.

He started up again at the age of 34, though, but was apparently able to keep his perversions well enough on the down low that in 2006 he assumed the position of head priest at Choshoji Temple. You’d think the added responsibilities would leave him less time for grabbing strangers’ panties hanging on their balconies to dry, but according to the prosecution, Yamazaki instead added a new wrinkle, and since four years ago has been dressing as a woman while on lingerie-stealing excursions.

The prosecutors claim that on June 16 Yamazaki set out from his home in Yurihonjo City by car, stopping in Kitagami City to change into a skirt and high heels. He then proceeded to Akita City, the prefectural capital, and found an adult woman’s bra and panties drying outside a first-floor apartment at around 11:30 p.m.

Seizing the opportunity, prosecutors say Yamazaki helped himself to the woman’s underwear. And he would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling high heels. From inside the apartment, the husband of the lingerie’s owner heard the clack of the footwear on the pavement. Spotting Yamazaki’s suspicious figure, the husband called out “Hey!”, to which Yamazaki cleverly retorted “This aint got a **** thing to do with me!” His ruse would probably have been more effective if, being dressed in women’s clothing, he’d refrained from using ore, the Japanese word for “me” that’s used almost exclusively by males, but everyone cracks under pressure sometimes.

Seeing through the disguise, the couple called the police. Yamazaki was subsequently arrested, after which he resigned from his position as head priest of Choshoji.

Yamazaki’s trial opened on August 24, during which he asserted that:

“It is dangerous to hang your underwear to dry outside in the middle of the night, so I stole the victim’s underwear to teach her that.”

The prosecutor responded with the obvious question “Isn’t that an unusual way of thinking?” because when the defendant himself is already using words like “stole” and “victim” to describe the incident, well, your job is pretty much being done for you.

Yamazaki’s wife also took the stand, stating:

“I knew my husband was into that sort of thing when he was younger, but I did not think he was still interested in it. I think stress was one of the causes.”

The prosecution is seeking one year in prison for Yamazaki, while the defense is asking for a suspended sentence, based on the fact that the defendant has been undergoing psychological treatment as a sex offender.

Source: Sankei News via Jin
Top image: Dresswe

Get your monks robes here (http://www.martialartsmart.com/45-001.html) (high heels not included)

rett2

08-27-2015, 11:26 PM

“It is dangerous to hang your underwear to dry outside in the middle of the night, so I stole the victim’s underwear to teach her that.”

Priceless.

Still, Japanese Buddhist priests, as in this story above, aren't Buddhist monks. They're laymen, are allowed to marry, own property and a host of other things. Of course these lay priests shouldn't steal either. But technically this case doesn't match the thread title, and doesn't reflect on the Sangha of Bhikkhus. I realize I'm nitpicking, but still. The journalist got it right, to her credit.

ShaolinDiva

08-30-2015, 11:57 AM

Priceless.

Still, Japanese Buddhist priests, as in this story above, aren't Buddhist monks. They're laymen, are allowed to marry, own property and a host of other things. Of course these lay priests shouldn't steal either. But technically this case doesn't match the thread title, and doesn't reflect on the Sangha of Bhikkhus. I realize I'm nitpicking, but still. The journalist got it right, to her credit.

Well they aren't technically laymen - they are Buddhist priests/ pastors/ ministers who are allowed to marry actually. They study Buddhism and take certain oaths as Buddhist ministers and are able to retain the household. However, there are still many Buddhist monks as well in Japan.

It began in the early Meiji period (1868-1912) when monks were ordered by government authorities to adopt common surnames and allowed to marry, to have children, and to eat meat–today extends to all the country’s Buddhist denominations.

One of my friends/ classmates is a Buddhist minister from Japan and does sermons at very well known temple here in Los Angeles. He's also married with 2 kids. But I don't think he wears heels!

rett2

08-31-2015, 04:28 AM

Well they aren't technically laymen - they are Buddhist priests/ pastors/ ministers who are allowed to marry actually. They study Buddhism and take certain oaths as Buddhist ministers and are able to retain the household. However, there are still many Buddhist monks as well in Japan.

It began in the early Meiji period (1868-1912) when monks were ordered by government authorities to adopt common surnames and allowed to marry, to have children, and to eat meat–today extends to all the country’s Buddhist denominations.

One of my friends/ classmates is a Buddhist minister from Japan and does sermons at very well known temple here in Los Angeles. He's also married with 2 kids. But I don't think he wears heels!

Thanks for the info and good point about the term layman - I was using it a bit too loosely just to mean "non monastic". I think it's great that modern Buddhism has developed ways for non-monks/nuns to become recognized as practitioners and teachers, for example through the kind of priest ordination you describe.

rett2

09-12-2015, 12:15 AM

Here's an excellent article about important and current developments within modern Theravada Buddhism.

New York Times: "'Rebel' Female Buddhist Monks Challenge Thailand Status Quo"

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/09/12/world/asia/ap-as-rel-thailand-women-in-ochre.html

GeneChing

09-28-2015, 10:14 AM

Monk accused of looting temple of $150K for blackjack addiction (http://nypost.com/2015/09/15/buddhist-monk-accused-of-using-donations-to-fund-blackjack-habit/)
By Selim Algar
September 15, 2015 | 12:59pm
Modal Trigger

https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/shutterstock_187531649.jpg?w=720&h=480&crop=1
Photo: Shutterstock

Nothing disrupts Zen tranquility like a federal embezzling rap.

A blackjack-addicted Buddhist monk from Louisiana was arrested at LaGuardia Airport and charged with looting his own temple of roughly $150,000 to fund weekly casino binges, The Post has learned.

Khang Le, the top monk at the Vietnamese Buddhist Association of Lafayette, Louisiana, appeared in full religious garb Monday in Brooklyn federal court and will likely be sent back to his home state to face the federal raps.

Investigators said that Le developed a burgeoning blackjack infatuation beginning in 2011 and began making secret visits to the L’Auberge Casino in Lake Charles.

Unable to finance the spiraling addiction with his humble $1,000-per-month salary, Le began to make massive withdrawals from the temple’s private accounts, court papers state.

“Le stated he started to gamble in 2011 or 2012 and would spend between $5,000 and $10,000 every two or three days at the casino playing blackjack,” court papers reveal of an interview with Le conducted by a federal agent in 2014. “Le admitted to having a gambling problem and admitted that he was utilizing Temple funds to gamble.”

Le told agents during interviews last year that he always went to the casino alone and sought out quiet corners in order to obscure his shameful conduct, according to court papers.

It was unclear if he wore his conspicuous regalia while hitting and staying.

“Sometimes, when Le won, Le stated that he would return some of the funds back into the Temple’s bank account,” court papers state.

Between December 2012 and the present, records showed that he withdrew $374,789 from both personal and temple accounts from ATMs at his favored gambling den or on days when he visited the casino, papers state.

Le told agents that he was well aware that his small but dedicated flock of Vietnamese immigrants would have disapproved of his gambling.

Never suspecting that their leader would behave unscrupulously, congregants never vetted their coffers, allowing Le to decimate the funds at will, papers state.

With an arrest warrant in hand after a yearlong investigation, agents learned that Le was going to pass through New York on his way to Canada to buy a used car on Saturday, a source told The Post.

Flying in from Dallas, Le was confronted at 2:26 p.m. by agents who confirmed his identity through a check of his driver’s license and placed him under arrest. He did not resist.

Wearing flowing Buddhist robes, Le made an appearance Saturday and is scheduled for a bail application this afternoon.

“He’s a good man,” said Le’s attorney, Donald Mayeaux, from his offices in Eunice, Louisiana. “I hope he will be able to come back here.”

Come back? Maybe in the next life....as a snail or something lowly.

rett2

09-30-2015, 11:37 PM

"Wearing flowing Buddhist robes, Le made an appearance Saturday and is scheduled for a bail application this afternoon.

“He’s a good man,” said Le’s attorney, Donald Mayeaux, from his offices in Eunice, Louisiana. “I hope he will be able to come back here.”"

He probably is a basically good person who did a dumb thing, just like anyone can. But theft (by a monk) means automatic expulsion and one cannot reordain in this lifetime.

Buddhist are typically forgiving however and I hope he can come back as a lay practitioner if he wants. He could get a job and help support the monks maybe.

GeneChing

11-04-2015, 10:07 AM

China Court Jails Religious 'Cult' Leader for Life (http://www.ndtv.com/world-news/china-court-jails-religious-cult-leader-for-life-1238410)
World | Agence France-Presse | Updated: October 31, 2015 12:07 IST

http://i.ndtvimg.com/i/2015-10/court-generic_650x400_51445160799.jpg
Representational Image.

SHANGHAI: A Chinese court has sentenced the leader of a religious sect labelled a cult by authorities to life in prison on several charges, according to an official statement, with three of his followers also jailed.

A court in the southern city of Zhuhai on Friday also fined Wu Zeheng, head of the "Huazang Zongmen" sect, more than 7.0 million yuan ($1.1 million), it said. The charges included organising a cult, rape, fraud and selling harmful food products.

Wu seduced dozens of women by telling them sex with him could give them "supernatural power", state media has said. He also operated a restaurant which claimed the food was cooked with "precious" ingredients.

A police investigation showed Wu had amassed an illegal fortune of more than 6.9 million yuan through his activities, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

The court also sentenced three of his followers to jail terms of one to four years, but one of those tried escaped punishment, the statement said.

The group, which operates under multiple names, claims links to Buddhism.

Analysts say China has tightened control over religious worship, among other areas, under the administration of President Xi Jinping, who took office in 2013.

Authorities have targeted cults after members of one group beat a woman whom they were trying to recruit to death in a McDonald's restaurant in May last year.

In February, authorities executed a father and daughter, who belonged to the Quannengshen group, for the murder. Another 14 members of the sect, whose name can be translated as Church of Almighty God, were jailed for up to three years in July.

In another case, a celebrity Chinese "qigong master", Wang Lin, who claimed to conjure snakes from thin air and cure the sick, was held by police on suspicion of kidnapping and murder in July, according to media reports.

In a bizarre twist to the case, his ex-wife and mistress offered 2.0 million yuan in bribes to a policeman investigating the matter in exchange for information to help Wang seek a lighter sentence, the official Xinhua news agency said on Friday.

Story First Published: October 31, 2015 12:07 IST Copied from the Busted-Qigong-Masters (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?56283-Busted-Qigong-Masters&p=1288466#post1288466) thread.

rett2

11-05-2015, 01:55 AM

The thread title has been quietly changed from "Buddhist monks behaving badly" to "Buddhist behaving badly" undercutting the point of several posts. Not a big deal, but worth noting. Even with this widening of scope, the latest article above seems to state that this isn't a recognized Buddhist organization, but a sect that "claims links to Buddhism".

GeneChing

11-05-2015, 10:34 AM

I usually state when I change thread titles, but I was in a rush yesterday and there was a lot of news. Besides, I launched this thread so I figured no harm done. But in future, I'll endeavor to state thread title changes. Honestly, I didn't think anyone was watching our forum quite that carefully. Good on you!

You have a fair point about widening the scope here, which is exactly what I intended because this didn't really seem worthy of two independent threads. But if it seems to be an issue, I'll split them later. For now, let's just watch to see how this thread progresses over time.

GeneChing

02-11-2016, 09:28 AM

This would be more appropriate in a 'Busted Buddhists' thread, but we don't have one of those. Whether or not these monks behaved badly is a matter of perspective.

Two Sichuan monks arrested for holding prayer ceremony for Dalai Lama – report (https://www.hongkongfp.com/2016/02/11/two-sichuan-monks-arrested-for-holding-prayer-ceremony-for-dalai-lama-report/)
11 February 2016 12:43 Hermina Wong

Two monks have been arrested for holding a prayer ceremony for the Dalai Lama in the Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan, according to US-backed Radio Free Asia. The arrests come amid Chinese authorities’ efforts to suppress worship in the region.

The two monks reportedly held the ceremony on January 25 and welcomed a Dalai Lama statue into Jueri Temple, located in Sichuan’s Luhuo county. Chinese authorities announced on January 31 that all Dalai Lama statues were “illegal publications” and ordered them to be handed over before February 2.

https://www.hongkongfp.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/worship.jpg
Worship of Dalai Lama at Jueri Temple. Photo: RFA.

“The authorities sent the police in to try and stop the ceremony, but they did not succeed. The atmosphere that day [January 25] was not tense, but the authorities gradually began to impose stricter regulations in the county,” a Luhuo-born, India-based monk Awangkanre told RFA.

Awangkanre also said that the authorities have since blocked phone and internet connections, making it difficult for the public to know the status of the arrested monks.

“It is a regular campaign held before the Spring Festival to crack down on pornography and illegal publications, which include portraits of the Dalai Lama,” Gou Yadong, director of external publicity at the publicity department of the prefecture, told the state-run Global Times on February 2.

https://www.hongkongfp.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/c7b17b7f-661d-4da8-9c70-0d004b9b7d27.jpeg
Photos of the two arrested monks – Baga (left) and Aojian (right). Photo: RFA.

Lian Xiangnin, an expert at the China Tibetology Research Center in Beijing, also said that the Dalai Lama advocated for separatism, and hanging his portraits would be an insult to the Chinese, as much as hanging Saddam Hussein’s portraits would be to Americans.

The article has since been deleted from the Global Times website.

The two monks, Baga and Aojian, were an abbot (khenpo) and a Buddhist scholar (geshe) of Jueri Temple respectively.

GeneChing

03-11-2016, 10:10 AM

Alas, Kuan Yin...:o

MAR.10.16
WHAT HAPPENS BEHIND THE TEMPLE STAYS BEHIND THE TEMPLE (http://roadsandkingdoms.com/5-oclock-somewhere/what-happens-behind-the-temple-stays-behind-the-temple/)
by Marco Ferrarese

http://i1.wp.com/roadsandkingdoms.com/uploads/2016/03/IMG_5077.jpg?w=960&zoom=2&quality=75&strip=all

Right when the nearby offices call it another day, the end of Muntri Street beside the God of Mercy Kuan Yin temple turns into an open-air lounge for degenerates. Cheap red plastic chairs of made-in-China quality sprout on the street next to tattered metal tables that would look at home in a morgue. This is Antarabangsa (translated not coincidentally as ‘The International’), George Town’s most infamous watering hole, a decaying traditional shop house manned by two generations of a Chinese family responsible for selling the cheapest alcohol on the island. The boss—a bad-ass, plumpy man in his mid-thirties—waits behind the bar next to a standing fan, no shirt on, his man boobs glistening with sweat. Towers of cigarettes, small packets of nuts, dried plums, and collections of the most gut-turning Southeast Asian whiskeys are his halo. He’s the pusher of an international array of beers neatly displayed before him in a wall of refrigerators. Skol, a European beer introduced in Malaysia by Carlsberg in 2004, has the lion’s share. Three cans go for 11 ringgit, the equivalent of mere $2.62USD.

In Malaysia, a predominantly Muslim nation where spirits are costly imports and other brands, like Singapore’s Tiger, sell for a minimum of 7 ringgit ($1.70) a can, we will never know where such cheap booze comes from. Some say it’s smuggled from nearby Thailand, others from the tax-free island of Langkawi to the north of Penang. What is certain is that you won’t find it cheaper than Antarabangsa. By 10 pm, hundreds of golden cans shimmer in the street corner’s dim lights, littering the autopsy tables as proof of each drunken group’s intoxication level. An Indonesian woman makes the rounds to collect the empties in a plastic bucket, saving them for the recycling shops that pay a few cents for aluminium.

For years, this twisted corner of Penang Island’s World Heritage Site was shunned and feared by locals because of the populace of drunken Indians and the area’s reputation for fistfights. Slowly, however, thirsty and penniless backpackers discovered the cheap Skol cans and made Antarabangsa a truly ‘international’ evening hangout. Seeing the white faces of these foreign kwailos (‘white ghosts’) sitting among the Indians, even the Chinese were convinced that Antarabangsa couldn’t be as bad as they had been told. In a predominantly Islamic nation where ethnic identity is a marker of everything, finding Chinese, Indians, and foreigners from all parts of Asia and the West rubbing elbows over beer is quite an accomplishment. Especially when Skol beer, another international champ, is the clincher.

The other side of the coin is that these days, Antarabangsa has become so flooded by backpackers that Lonely Planet should consider including it within its budget nightlife options. But with all the drunken locals swaying from the tables to the temple’s wall to pee—and sometimes vomit—in the drain, that’s hard to happen. Kuan Yin, however, keeps turning her merciful eye across Harmony Street towards the cleaner alleys of Little India. She also believes that what happens every night at the back of her temple is better kept a secret.

GeneChing

03-29-2016, 09:54 AM

Lord Buddha, that is. :rolleyes:

Top Thai Buddhist monk investigated over vintage Mercedes-Benz (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/29/top-thai-buddhist-monk-somdet-chuang-investigated-over-vintage-mercedes-benz)
Supporters of Somdet Chuang, frontrunner for the post of supreme patriarch, say tax evasion claims are politically driven

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2f7cdec44a29ee60184eb58b0ddcf71c0ca7da40/0_544_3287_1971/master/3287.jpg
Thai Buddhist monks on their way to the morning alms-offering ceremony. Photograph: Rungroj Yongrit/EPA

Oliver Holmes in Bangkok
Tuesday 29 March 2016 05.04 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 29 March 2016 07.56 EDT

A 90-year-old monk is under investigation for tax evasion in Thailand and will be summoned by police after he refused to answer their questions about his classic Mercedes-Benz.

The 1953-model car — in cream and worth more than $250,000 — is at the centre of a politically divisive battle over the future leadership of Thai Buddhism.

Somdet Phra Maha Ratchamangalacharn, better known as Somdet Chuang, is the frontrunner for the post of supreme patriarch, a position that leads 300,000 monks in the most populous Buddhist-majority country.

Paiboon Kumchaya, the justice minister, has said that Somdet could be arrested after he refused to answer questions from police who visited the temple.

“If he doesn’t respond to the summons, we will seek an arrest warrant,” he said.

Chuang has said the car was a gift from a follower and it is kept in a museum.

His supporters say the allegations are politically charged. Chuang has ties to the Dhammakaya Temple, a power base for Thaksin Shinawatra, the ousted former prime minister and the ruling junta’s top foe.

The leadership battle, which mirrors Thailand’s political divide between pro-military “yellow shirts” and Thaksin’s “red shirts”, has led to street protests.

The prime minister, Prayuth Chan-ocha, a general who took power in the 2014 coup, has said that unless the dispute is settled he will not nominate any candidate for supreme patriarch.

Only once the prime minister nominates a candidate to the king can the post be approved.

Chuang’s supporters took to the streets last month to protest against what they believe is state interference in religious affairs.

The army responded by trying to disperse the demonstrators, shaven-head monks in saffron robes, but it led to scuffles that shocked many Thais.

“We will not move until the state stops interfering in religious affairs,” said Methi Thammacharn, secretary-general of the Buddhism Protection Centre.

Images on television showed about 1,000 monks clashing with troops in uniform. One video showed a monk putting a soldier in a headlock.

“Don’t touch monks!” shouted onlookers.

This month, police detained a monk close to Chuang for “attitude adjustment”, a detention programme which coup leaders have used to haul in hundreds of dissenters, politicians and journalists for interrogation.

The unprecedented move increased tensions over the Buddhist leadership contest, already fraught as ailing King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 88, has traditionally been involved in Buddhist ceremonies but his ill health has created a power vacuum.

There is countrywide anxiety over the royal succession with both the yellow and red shirts seeking to solidify their position in the country’s future.

Political leaders will want a supreme patriarch, an influential figure, to be sympathetic to their cause.

The country’s last supreme patriarch, Somdet Phra Nyanasamvara, died in 2013 aged 100.

GeneChing

04-01-2016, 10:04 AM

....but oh so worthy of posting here. Plus it's not from Thailand. :rolleyes:

That's not very zen! Buddhist monk is jailed for 162-car tyre-slashing rampage after he accidentally stepped on an insect (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3409765/Buddhist-monk-jailed-162-car-tyre-slashing-rampage-accidentally-stepped-insect.html)

Julian Glew, 45, who lives in a tent in the woodlands, went on the rampage
The Buddhist monk became angry when he accidentally killed an insect
Has now been jailed for 11 weeks after going on the run for three months
Judge said his actions were 'not those of a person who lives for a peaceful co-existence'

By THOMAS BURROWS FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 03:51 EST, 21 January 2016 | UPDATED: 06:31 EST, 21 January 2016

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/01/21/08/306A0E6F00000578-0-Julian_Glew_45_who_lives_in_a_tent_in_the_woodland s_went_on_the_-m-3_1453365995418.jpg
Julian Glew, 45, who lives in a tent in the woodlands, went on the rampage because of his religious beliefs

A Buddhist monk slashed the wheels of 162 cars after he became angry when he accidentally squashed an insect.
Julian Glew, 45, who lives in a tent in the woodlands, went on the three-day barefoot rampage because of his religious beliefs.
He has now been jailed for 11 weeks after the judge said his actions were 'not those of a person who lives for a peaceful co-existence.'
Glew became frustrated and upset after inadvertently squashing the insect in September last year.
The 45-year-old, who has lived in the woods for almost 20 years, was arrested several days later following a CCTV appeal by Humberside Police.
At court, he pleaded guilty to three counts of criminal damage. He was originally due to be sentenced on October 14, but failed to show up in court.
Instead, he went on the run for three months and was finally tracked down by officers in West Yorkshire earlier this month.
Joanne Markham, for the mitigation, told Beverley Magistrates' Court that Glew had suffered some mental health issues in the past.
He was described as being 'detached from society' and having previously lived in a Buddhist monastery.
She said accommodation had been found for him at a hostel in Princes Avenue, west Hull, following his first court appearance, but it 'didn't work because of how he was used to living'.
Miss Markham added: 'He has indicated that he feels he should go to prison for what he has done. He has no previous incidents on his record and he lives without means, not claiming any benefits.'
Sentencing him to 11 weeks in prison, Judge Fred Rutherford said: 'I have noted the facts of this case, but I am still left here with someone who says he did not want to hurt anyone but went out of his way to affect 162 people by causing them massive financial inconvenience.
'He targeted vehicles randomly and slashed the tyres. That is not the actions of a person who lives for a peaceful co-existence.'
Most of the tyres were not obviously wrecked, but the irreparable damage was discovered when they were inflated and the pin-***** was found.
CCTV shows Buddhist monk Julian Glew in Pocklington driveway

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/01/21/09/306A2D0100000578-3409765-image-m-18_1453367577509.jpg
The barefoot 'Pocklington *****er' walks away after slashing a tyre on one of the 162 vehicles he targeted

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/01/21/09/306A2D0D00000578-3409765-image-m-20_1453367734774.jpg
Glew, who lives in the woodlands, walks away after puncturing a tyre on a parked car in Pocklington

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/01/21/08/3069FC2E00000578-0-image-a-4_1453366177400.jpg
Jailing Glew at Beverley Magistrates' Court, District Judge Fred Rutherford expressed incredulity at his claims not to want to harm anybody 'but nevertheless went out of his way to affect at least 162 people'

MECHANIC WAS INUNDATED WITH JOBS BUT MOST TYRES WERE BEYOND REPAIR
Motor mechanic John Galley was inundated with jobs following the slashing spree, but said many of the tyres could not be repaired.
In an interview with ITV, he said: 'Most weren't obviously damaged, but were deflated and flat.
'You had to inflate them to find the damage that was usually a pin-*****, but it was damaged in such a way that the tyre wouldn't repair.
'There was only certain types of repair that you can conduct on the tyre and generally speaking these were sidewall damage that meant it was a new tyre.'

Inspector Joanne York, of Humberside Police, welcomed the sentence.
She said: 'Sentencing Julian Glew to 11 weeks in custody is good news for the residents of Pocklington and justice has been seen to be done.
'Vehicles were damaged over two nights in Pocklington in September 2015 which caused widespread upset and concern to the residents of Pocklington at the time. The incidents caused great inconvenience and financial loss to all those victims.
'Following his initial arrest in September he was bailed to appear in court but failed to attend and spent several weeks avoiding arrest. Mr Glew had left the Pocklington area after he failed to appear at court.
'I am very grateful to the people of Pocklington for their assistance and their support while we have carried out our investigations.'
Detective Sergeant John Burrell of Humberside Police said the case had been unprecedented in the 'pleasant and peaceful' town and had caused upset and financial loss to many.
He described Glew's excuse as 'drivel', adding: 'His is not a particularly coherent theological view and I don't think adherents of Buddhism would share the view that it was OK to inconvenience hundreds of people on account of an accident.'

rett2

04-02-2016, 05:48 AM

There is no evidence in the above article to support the claim that he is a Buddhist monk. And a great deal suggests he isn't. Methinks the tabloids are telling fibs to juice up their headlines.

David Jamieson

04-05-2016, 09:56 AM

There is no evidence in the above article to support the claim that he is a Buddhist monk. And a great deal suggests he isn't. Methinks the tabloids are telling fibs to juice up their headlines.

really? do you think so?
;)

rett2

04-08-2016, 01:47 AM

According to the article the person was upset about having accidently killed an insect.

That is not actually any kind of breach of ethics in Buddhism, even for monastics. Intention is key. Buddhists monks do try very hard not to hurt insects, but accept that accidents will happen.

Also, monastics have to live in a kind of parish, and meet up to recite the precepts regularly and confess mistakes. Even if they are hermits, they should have this kind of contact with their fellows. I believe that stepping on an insect by mistake doesn't even need to be confessed to another monk. (Please correct me if my memory is playing tricks on me). So if this person was trained in the rules and living as a monk in an extended community, he would not have needed to do more than to remind himself to be more careful in the future. And if he was unsure, all he would need to do is ask a fellow monk for advice.

I believe that Jainism is stricter here, and at least in some branches Jain monastics go to great lengths not to injure insects even unintentially.

GeneChing

04-27-2016, 03:56 PM

Watch: Chinese Monks in Violent Brawl Over Temple Work (http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/2041592-watch-chinese-monks-in-violent-brawl-over-temple-work/)
By Juliet Song, Epoch Times | April 27, 2016Last Updated: April 27, 2016 3:25 pm

A video showing Chinese Buddhist monks fighting each other at their temple was posted to Chinese social media, breaking with the serene and lofty perception conventionally associated with the ascetic cultivators.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX9wYVSNf-c

The incident happened on April 24 at the Ningguo Temple in eastern China. In the video, three monks dressed in saffron-colored robes can be seen hitting and grappling each other, while tourists try to pull them apart. One of the bonzes carries a cell phone.

Peng Pai, a state-run social news outlet based in Shanghai, reported that the confrontation arose when three monks at the temple, all of middle rank, took their disagreements about temple administration to the physical level.

The three monks involved have been expelled.

“By fighting, the three monks disregarded the Six Dharmas of Harmony,” the temple abbot told Peng Pai. “They have set a bad example for society.”

Ugly. Just ugly. :o

GeneChing

04-29-2016, 09:18 AM

Three monks expelled after video of them tussling in the temple goes viral (http://shanghaiist.com/2016/04/28/monks_dismissed_for_kung_fu_fighting.php)

http://shanghaiist.com/attachments/alexlinder/kung_fu_fighting.jpg

Three Buddhist monks were dismissed from a temple in Yangzhou after a video went viral earlier this week, revealing to the world that all monks do not in fact know kung fu.
In the video, the monks are seen fighting with less than expert timing in a 15-second-long scuffle, featuring a lot of what appears to be hair-pulling. Others monks are seen trying to break up the fight while their buddies help by filming it with their smartphones.
The tall monk seems to get the worst of the ordeal, getting bashed in the head a number of times, even with a smartphone, but by the end of the video seems well enough to at least check on his own smartphone.
Yesterday, the abbot of the temple revealed via WeChat that the three monks involved in the fracas had been expelled, never to return, sent to wander along in the wilderness, waiting for their chance at redemption, or at least that's how it seem to work in the movies.
ECNS reports that the monks were all mid-level managers at Ningguo Temple in Yangzhou and the fight was over some trivial management issue between rivals that had personal grudges against each other simmering for some time. Ah, the complicated world of temple politics.
Video of the fight went viral on Chinese social media, with many netizens believing it was representative of larger problems in Chinese Buddhism.
"Many monks these days are not sincere in their beliefs, eventually their true colors come out," commented one netizen.
"They have embarrassed all monks, especially with their poor fighting skills," wrote one Weibo user.
"I am not familiar with what type of kung fu this temple teaches," joked another.

By Alex Linder in News on Apr 28, 2016 11:00 PM

Not all Buddhists monks know Kung Fu...in fact, it's only a small percentage. Very small. :rolleyes:

BrotherLove

04-29-2016, 09:34 AM

I didn't see the hair-pulling but it would have had to have been below the belt.

PalmStriker

06-01-2016, 11:56 PM

Thailand: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-36431861

GeneChing

06-02-2016, 09:24 AM

Forgive the merge, but we do already have this thread going (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68723-Buddhists-behaving-badly). I'm copying this to our WildAid-Tiger-Claw-Champion (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57416-WildAid-Tiger-Claw-Champion) thread too, just to ttt that one.

Thu Jun 2, 2016 6:35am EDT Related: ENVIRONMENT, THAILAND
Three monks charged in Thailand as tiger potions, charms point to illicit trade (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-thailand-tigers-idUSKCN0YO16A?utm_source=applenews)
BANGKOK | BY PATPICHA TANAKASEMPIPAT

http://s3.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20160602&t=2&i=1139672717&w=&fh=&fw=&ll=644&pl=429&sq=&r=LYNXNPEC510K6
A Buddhist monk walks past a tiger before officials start moving them from Thailand's controversial Tiger Temple, a popular tourist destination which has come under fire in recent years over the welfare of its big cats in Kanchanaburi province, west of Bangkok, Thailand, May...
REUTERS/CHAIWAT SUBPRASOM

Thai authorities charged three Buddhist monks on Thursday after they were caught trying to smuggle tiger skins and charms made from tiger parts out a temple which monks said was a tiger sanctuary but critics said was a money-spinning tourist trap.

The Buddhist temple west of Bangkok has long been popular with tourists who paid about $20 each to get in and pose for pictures with its tigers, and to feed cubs and walk among them.

But the temple had come under mounting allegations of abuse and illicit wildlife trafficking and authorities armed with a court order raided it on Monday to confiscate the 137 tigers found there and take them to a government wildlife sanctuary.

The discovery on Thursday of the tiger skins and charms, or amulets, made from skins in a pick-up truck, and jars containing the bodies of tiger cubs in the temple, pointed to an even more lucrative business than thought.

"The jars have labels, so I think they've made medicine here," said Adisorn Nuchdamrong, deputy director-general of the Department of National Parks, who has been overseeing the raid to remove the temple's tigers and search its premises.

Authorities found 20 glass jars containing baby tigers and tiger organs in a "laboratory" in the temple, reinforcing suspicion it was making folk medicine, he said.

Tiger parts are used in traditional Chinese medicine, a multi-million dollar business that has driven tigers in the wild to the brink of extinction and fueled the rearing of tigers in parts of Asia, especially in China.

"We will discover more as we search on," Adisorn told Reuters.

Two temple devotees and a monk found in the pick-up truck, and two monks who helped load it, were charged under wildlife laws, Adisorn said.

Representatives of the temple were not available for comment.

The confiscation of the tiger products followed the discovery on Wednesday of 40 dead tiger cubs in a freezer.

Wildlife officials suspect the cubs were being preserved for use in potions.

Thailand is well known as a hub for illicit trafficking of wildlife products, including ivory.

Activists had for years criticized the temple and urged tourists to shun it, and complained that wildlife protection laws were poorly enforced.

The Department of National Parks had removed 84 out of the 137 tigers found at the temple by Thursday.

Workers have been using tranquilizer darts to sedate the animals before lifting them into cages and on to trucks for the journey to the government sanctuary.

(Additional reporting by Amy Sawitta Lefevre; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Wonder what our freelance contributor Dax Howard has to say about this. He wrote Hit Tiger: No really, go hit that tiger in our MAY+JUNE 2015 issue (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/index.php?p=magazine&article=1212) which discussed when he worked at the Tiger Temple.

GeneChing

06-02-2016, 10:13 AM

Dax (https://www.facebook.com/TheDax?fref=nf) also posted this...and more.

Forty dead tiger cubs found in freezer at Thai temple (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/01/40-dead-tiger-cubs-found-in-freezer-thai-temple-wildlife-trafficking)
Officials have removed 61 live tigers from Tiger Temple in ongoing operation after allegations of wildlife trafficking

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/459e81c6e1e205291d516c05287f4307e1ffd834/427_75_4373_2623/master/4373.jpg
Adisorn Noochdumrong, the deputy director general of the Department of National Parks, stands by the carcasses of 40 tiger cubs and a bearcat found at the Tiger Temple. Photograph: Dario Pignatelli/Getty Images

Oliver Holmes in Bangkok and John Vidal
Wednesday 1 June 2016 08.36 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 1 June 2016 17.00 EDT

Wildlife authorities in Thailand have found 40 tiger cubs in a freezer during a police raid on Tiger Temple, a tourist attraction that has faced repeated allegations of animal trafficking.

The discovery occurred after officials from the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation (DNP), backed by police, closed the temple this week to relocate 137 tigers to government-run sanctuaries.

“International pressure concerning illegal wildlife trafficking is also part of why we’re acting now,” said Adisorn Noochdumrong, DNP deputy director general, who said that the cubs’ carcasses were found in a kitchen area.

“They must be of some value for the temple to keep them. But for what is beyond me,” he told Reuters.

The cubs, some of them bloodied and mangled, were laid out on the floor along with other animals, including a binturong, a small rare species also known as a bearcat.

Promoting itself as a spiritual sanctuary for humans and animals, Tiger Temple has been keeping the big cats and other animals for 15 years. It charges tourists to take photos of themselves stroking adult tigers and bottle-feeding cubs.

The tigers are cared for by staff and volunteers. Monks reside at the Buddhist temple, west of Bangkok in Kanchanaburi province.

Wildlife authorities have removed 61 animals so far and vowed to close the temple for good. The site has been accused of illegally breeding tigers and some visitors say the animals appear to be drugged. A handler was recently filmed smacking a tiger on the head.

The temple denies accusations of abuse and trafficking and other visitors have lauded the conditions and the care taken over the animals.

The raid is the culmination of a battle that has been going on for years between the government and the temple, which says the tigers will be worse off in the care of the DNP.

Responding to requests for comment, the temple said on its Facebook page that a vet had requested the cubs be frozen and preserved six years ago. “He made that decision probably to keep as proof against the allegations of selling cubs,” the temple said.

It added that Thai authorities were “fully aware” the cubs were being kept frozen. The temple pointed to a post dated 4 March that directly referred to the preserved cubs.

“In 2010, the ex-vet of Tiger Temple changed [the] policy. Instead of cremation, the deceased cubs were preserved in jars or kept frozen. We have documented all the deaths from 2010 and have photographic evidence of them still being within the temple,” it added.

Thailand is a central route for illicit wildlife trade through south-east Asia, including ivory and rhino horn. Tiger parts, including bone and *****, are used in traditional Chinese medicine. Raids often find the tigers cut in half with their organs preserved on ice.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species banned the trade in tiger parts and products in 2007.

Two weeks ago, a 26-year-old man from the central province of Ha Tinh in Vietnam was found with four frozen tiger cubs at the border of Laos. He said he had bought the carcasses from a Laotian at a border market for 2 million Vietnamese Dong (£62). He was caught while delivering them to the buyer.

The move to shut down the temple has been widely praised by animal rights groups.

“The Tiger Temple has been involved in the illegal trade for years and animal and conservation groups have long tried to have it closed,” said Debbie Banks, campaigner on tigers and wildlife crime at the Environmental Investigation Agency in London.

The charity People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said this week that the temple was “hell for animals” and called on tourists to stop visiting any animal attractions.

The WWF (formerly the World Wide Fund For Nature) also commended the DNP for the raid.

“This week’s actions to remove the tigers from the Tiger Temple are long overdue and we strongly encourage the Department of National Parks to make the removal of the tigers permanent,” said Yowalak Thiarachow, country director of WWF-Thailand.

“The Tiger Temple has been posing as a sanctuary for tigers while secretly acting as a tiger farm and selling tigers and tiger parts on the black market for an enormous profit,” he added.

Thailand has an estimated 1,200-1,300 captive tigers in at least 33 facilities, he said.

PalmStriker

06-02-2016, 01:47 PM

:) Thanks, Gene ! I couldn't locate this thread but now I know it's in the Shaolin forum.

GeneChing

08-31-2016, 08:32 AM

This reminds me of the old Shaolin creation myths, how criminals, warlords and political refugees allegedly took refuge at Shaolin and added their martial skills to the curriculum. Of course, in this modern-day context, it's totally different. I doubt Zhang contributed his stabbing method to the monks of Longxing (if they even have a martial tradition there).

Monk on the run: Chinese 'killer' becomes temple abbot (http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-monk-on-the-run-chinese-killer-becomes-temple-abbot-2016-8)
AFP 8h

http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/57c682cb5124c92264c30ca2-800/afp-monk-on-the-run-chinese-killer-becomes-temple-abbot.jpg
A Chinese man who lived on the run as a monk for 16 years after allegedly killing three people was discovered when he applied for a passport to travel and submitted his fingerprints © AFP/File Manan Vatsyayana

Beijing (AFP) - A suspected murderer on the run for 16 years in China found refuge in Buddhist temples, eventually rising to become an abbot, state media said Wednesday.

Zhang Liwei was detained by police earlier this month on suspicion of stabbing three people to death with accomplices in 2000, the Beijing News reported.

After the killings in his home province of Heilongjiang, deep in northeastern China, Zhang fled nearly 2,000 kilometres (more than 1,000 miles) south to Anhui, changing his name and finding work as a temple cook and ticket-seller, it said.

Later he moved to the Longxing temple in Fengyang county, shaving his own head and proclaiming himself a monk.

He became a member of a local political consultative congress -- an organ of the county government -- and two years ago the monks elected him abbot on the recommendation of his predecessor, according to the report.

He was only unmasked when he applied for a passport to travel abroad and submitted his fingerprints -- which allegedly matched those of the wanted man.

The monks appreciated his efforts to improve their living conditions and buildings, the report said, adding that the temple had donated around a million yuan ($150,000) to charitable causes in recent years and Zhang was supporting two rural orphans financially.

But a neighbourhood nun was unmoved.

"The Buddha tells us to be contrite," the report quoted her as saying. "He should have turned himself in if he sincerely repented of what he did."

GeneChing

10-07-2016, 12:34 PM

Not sure if this is 'Buddhists behaving badly' because their soundsystem was so loud of if the tourist deserves 3 months hard labor for pulling the plug - talk about your draconian karma. :eek:

Myanmar Gives Tourist Who Pulled Plug on Buddhist Chants 3 Months in Prison (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/07/world/asia/myanmar-mandalay-dutch-klaas-haijtema.html?_r=0)
By SAW NANGOCT. 6, 2016

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/10/07/world/07MYANMAR-web1/07MYANMAR-web1-master768.jpg
Klaas Haijtema, a 30-year-old from the Netherlands, said that an amplifier broadcasting the chants had disrupted his sleep. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

MANDALAY, Myanmar — A Dutch tourist who unplugged an amplifier that was broadcasting Buddhist chants, which he said disrupted his sleep, was sentenced to three months of hard labor in prison by a court here on Thursday.

The tourist, Klaas Haijtema, 30, was found guilty of causing a disturbance to an assembly engaged in religious worship. He had been staying at a hostel in Mandalay on Sept. 23 when a nearby Buddhist center began broadcasting the recitations of religious devotees.

“I was really tired that night and woke up to the noise,” Mr. Haijtema told the court during a hearing last week. “I was very angry and assumed that children were playing music. I told them to lower the volume of the loudspeakers before I unplugged the amplifier, and they didn’t understand me. That’s why I unplugged it.”

Mr. Haijtema wept after the prison sentence was announced. He was also fined the equivalent of $80 for violating the terms of his entry visa, which require visitors to obey Myanmar’s laws and customs. Myanmar is a predominantly Buddhist country, and Mandalay is a relatively conservative city.

Mr. Haijtema’s lawyer, U Hla Ko, said that he would file an appeal and that the Dutch Embassy should ask for Mr. Haijtema’s release. Attempts to contact an embassy representative on Thursday afternoon were unsuccessful.

Buddhist organizations in Myanmar often use loudspeakers at high volume to broadcast sermons, perform rituals or solicit donations, and many social media users took Mr. Haijtema’s side after his arrest was reported.

Two lawyers not involved with the case said the Buddhist center, or dharma community hall, that woke Mr. Haijtema appeared to have violated the law by using loudspeakers after 9 p.m. The law also bans their use before 6 a.m. and requires a permit.

“The one that broke the law is the dharma community hall, not the Dutch man,” said one lawyer, U Zaw Win.

The leader of the Buddhist center, U Kyaw San, said in court last week that Mr. Haijtema had worn his shoes into the center, which Buddhists consider an offense in a sacred place. Mr. Haijtema said that he was unaware that the building had a religious purpose and that he had seen no signs telling people to remove their shoes.

A resident who lives near the center, Ko Hla Myo Aung, said that there were six others in his ward and that all of them broadcast chants at high volume late at night and early in the morning.

“If the Buddha were still alive, he would go deaf from the noise from the loudspeakers,” Mr. Hla Myo Aung said.

Other Westerners have recently run afoul of laws against insulting religion in Myanmar, also known as Burma. Last year, a bar manager from New Zealand was sentenced to two years in prison for posting an image of the Buddha wearing headphones on Facebook. He was granted amnesty and released this year.

A version of this article appears in print on October 7, 2016, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Jailed for Pulling Plug on Buddhist Chants.

rett2

10-08-2016, 11:19 PM

Not sure if this is 'Buddhists behaving badly' because their soundsystem was so loud of if the tourist deserves 3 months hard labor for pulling the plug - talk about your draconian karma. :eek:

This is an example of a state co-opting a religion for national identity-formation purposes, and having a huge chip of resentment on its shoulders toward the west. It's a show trial. They are looking for the occasional westerner to make an example of, and the Dutchman was the lucky one. If it hadn't been him, they would have found someone else to parade around over a ridiculous and completely trivial offence. No true practising Buddhist monk or layman would wish prison on someone over this. Touchy, patriotic, corrupt officials who enjoy lording it over their communities on the other hand, often hide behind religion. My tc, ymmv.

GeneChing

12-20-2016, 09:13 AM

Here's follow-up on the first post on this thread (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68723-Buddhists-behaving-badly&p=1284765#post1284765).

Judge Suspends Case For Monk Charged With Attempted Murder (http://www.sfgate.com/news/bayarea/article/Judge-Suspends-Case-For-Monk-Charged-With-10799813.php)
Bay City News Service Published 6:09 pm, Thursday, December 15, 2016

OAKLAND (BCN)
A judge today suspended criminal proceedings for a Buddhist monk who's charged with attempted murder and aggravated mayhem for allegedly trying to stab a fellow monk to death at an Oakland temple last year.
Acting after the monk's lawyer questioned his mental competency to stand trial, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Paul Delucchi ordered that two psychiatrists examine 31-year-old Phen Sokphanna and report their findings at a hearing on Jan. 26.
Oakland police said Sokphanna grabbed two knives and stabbed 66-year-old Mahamonirath Pinn several times in the head and face at the Cambodian monastery at 624 Douglas Ave. on June 16, 2015. Officers who responded to the incident found Pinn suffering from stab wounds but Sokphanna fled before they arrived.
Pinn was shown a photo of Sokphanna and he confirmed Sokphanna was the man who stabbed him, according to court filings by Oakland police Officer Michael Troupe. A witness also identified Sokphanna as the suspect, police said.
After he was arrested Sokphanna admitted that he had carried out the stabbing, according to Troupe.

GeneChing

02-16-2017, 05:41 PM

Breaking Buddhist Bad.

Myanmar monk arrested with 4.6million methamphetamine pills (http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/myanmar-monk-arrested-with-4-6million-methamphetamine-pills/story-4Vlegc4oMexs7RyQJ3ncHI.html)
WORLD Updated: Feb 06, 2017 20:02 IST

http://www.hindustantimes.com/rf/image_size_960x540/HT/p2/2017/02/06/Pictures/police-identify-myanmar-pseudoephedrine-myanmar-district-state_7adc7e3e-ec76-11e6-b027-79cd43623672.jpg
File photo of police in Myanmar's Tamu district showing a test kit used to identify pseudoephedrine, the main ingredient for the highly addictive drug methamphetamine, or "meth". (Reuters)

A Buddhist monk in Myanmar has been caught hiding more than four million methamphetamine pills in his monastery, police said on Monday, following a record haul of stimulant seizures last year.

The monk, named Arsara, is in custody after police discovered hundreds of thousands of the tablets in his car as he was driving from Shwe Baho village in the town of Maungdaw in Rakhine state bordering Bangladesh.

“First the police found 400,000 drug pills” when they searched his vehicle on Sunday evening, local police chief Kyaw Mya Win told AFP.

“The police then went to the monk’s monastery and found another 4.2 million pills.”

Myanmar is one of the world’s top narcotics-producing nations, churning out huge quantities of methamphetamines as well as opium and cannabis.

The meth pills are hugely popular across Asia among everyone from wealthy clubbers to exhausted blue-collar employees working long shifts.

Last year police confiscated a record 98 million stimulant tablets, nearly double the 50 million seized in 2015.

Drug prosecutions also jumped around 50% from 2015 to 13,500, which police said reflected the growth in the local drug trade.

Trafficking has particularly been on the rise in Rakhine state, home to more than a million people from the impoverished Muslim Rohingya minority.

In September, state media reported that two men had been arrested after 6.2 million methamphetamine tablets were found in their car in Maungdaw.

GeneChing

02-22-2017, 03:27 PM

What the hell is happening in Thailand?

Monks break through temple barricades (http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/general/1201281/monks-break-through-temple-barricades)
20 Feb 2017 at 00:39
WRITER: PONGPAT WONGYALA

Thousands of monks and followers broke through barricades to enter Wat Phra Dhammakaya Sunday, as temple devotees launched a campaign on social media to mobilise hundreds of thousands of supporters nationwide to pressure officials into ending the temple search.

The incident occurred before the 3pm deadline given by the Department of Special Investigation (DSI) for people and monks who are not residents to leave the Pathum Thani temple to enable searches as DSI officials and police have sealed off the temple to control movements in and out.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/media/content/20170220/2221377.jpg
The insults mostly bounced off security forces who tried to herd all sect followers out and all monks into one area to help their search for elusive Dhammajayo. (Photo by Pattarapong Chatpattarasill)

"We have cooperated with the government every step of the way but this is one step too far," senior monk Phra Pasura Dantamano told the Reuters news agency.

"We're asking authorities to suspend the emergency law and lift their siege. Our supplies are low and we have been without power or water for three days."

Meanwhile, Phra Sanitwong Wutthiwaso, the temple's communication head, asked officials not to cut off the water and power supply, saying the temple's management had cooperated well with the searches.

The Facebook page "Thai Monks" posted a message calling Dhammakaya supporters nationwide to gather at the temple within 48 hours to oppose an order issued under Section 44 of the interim constitution to enable the temple searches.

The Facebook page is meant to show that monks from all regions of the country are ready to support efforts to pressure officials if they use force against the temple. About 500,000 followers from the Central region are expected to turn up in support, according to the Facebook page.

The Facebook page also posted a message: "The government is broke! Want to disrobe all the Dhammakaya monks and take eight tonnes of golden [Buddha] statues."

Later Sunday afternoon, as monks and temple followers showed their signs to the media, the DSI posted this meme on its Facebook page

http://www.bangkokpost.com/media/content/20170220/2221381.jpg

Meanwhile, about 1pm Sunday, followers and monks breached the barricades at Gates 5 and 6 on Bang Khan-Nong Sua Road in Khlong Luang district and managed to enter the temple's compound before boarding vehicles parked inside the temple to reach the inner areas through a special entrance.

During the breach, a follower threw a news agency camera belonging to a correspondent, worth about 300,000 baht, to the ground, breaking it.

About 10 minutes later, followers and temple monks emerged from inside the temple. Wearing face masks, they cut open Gate 5 and formed a human shield confronting police.

Pol Lt Gen Charnthep Sesavet, commissioner of the Provincial Police Region 1, tried to negotiate and calm the situation. Scuffles lasted for about 20 minutes before each side backed off.

At 3.30pm, temple followers and monks set up a tent near the Khlong L 2 canal outside Gate 5 and Gate 6 to welcome additional followers who were coming in to support the temple.

Standoffs between police and followers and monks continued into the evening.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/media/content/20170220/2221385.jpg
Dozens of monks (in background) and some lay people held up signs, mostly in English, criticising the security forces. (Photo by Apichit Jinakul)

Pol Lt Gen Charnthep said police needed reinforcements to control the situation and prevent any ill-intended parties from triggering an incident. He said officials had taken pictures of people who broke through their barricades and would later take legal action against them.

DSI deputy spokesman Woranan Srilam denied claims on social media that officials would seize temple assets including golden Buddha statues.

Pol Maj Woranan warned that anyone who instigates resistance against officials will face legal action.

DSI director-general Paisit Wongmuang later issued a summons for 14 senior monks of the temple to report to him at the Region 1 Border Patrol Police Bureau in Khlong Luang district at 6pm.

They include its former abbot Phra Dhammajayo.

Pol Col Paisit said non-resident monks and lay people were ordered to leave Wat Phra Dhammakaya by 3pm Sunday or they would be considered as having defied an order of the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) and be liable of up to one year in jail and/or a fine of up to 20,000 baht.

Since Thursday, DSI and police have searched the 2,300-rai temple compound for Phra Dhammajayo, 72, who is wanted for forest encroachment in connection with his meditation centres in several provinces, money laundering and receiving stolen assets in connection with the multi-billion-baht embezzlement at Klongchan Credit Union Co-operative.

Meanwhile, Phra Ajarn Thammasak, who claimed to be a monk at Wat Phra Dhammakaya for 30 years, held a media briefing outside Gate 5, revealing that Phra Dhammajayo used a car to escape arrest on Feb 16 — the first day the raid began.

Phra Thammasak said the former abbot has fled but not gone far because he is sick. He also said he was ready to lead reporters to see the former abbot's escape route. He did not say where he had gone.

Phra Thammasak said he decided to come forward because he was not satisfied with the temple's management, who were aware the former abbot was not inside the temple, but still let the DSI search go on.

This could have led to clashes between followers and officials and the DSI would have been blamed for any losses, the monk said.

GeneChing

02-22-2017, 03:35 PM

Self-described as a zen monk. That's like self-identifying, is it?

Knightswood man who shone laser pen at Clutha pilot launched hate campaign at religious groups (http://www.clydebankpost.co.uk/news/15109404.Knightswood_man_who_shone_laser_pen_at_Cl utha_pilot_launched_hate_campaign_at_religious_gro ups/)

http://www.clydebankpost.co.uk/resources/images/6027749.jpg?display=1&htype=259&type=responsive-gallery
Colin Lochrie
10 hrs ago / Court Reporter, Reporter

A BUDDHIST lecturer who shone a laser pen at Captain David Traill’s helicopter the day before he crashed into the Clutha has dodged jail – over a hate campaign against Jews, other Buddhists and medical professionals.

Knightswood man Colin Lochrie, 32, described himself as “a radicalist zen monk” who hounded religious organisations and behavioural experts with abuse.

The details emerged this week when Lochrie appeared in the dock at Paisley Sheriff Court to be sentenced over a series of phone calls he made in July 2014.

Procurator fiscal depute Scot Dignan explained: “He left a voice message for the Glasgow Reform Synagogue [in Newton Mearns] which was of a threatening nature.

“He indicated he was from Golden Dawn London and complained about the manner in which they conducted their faith.

“He phoned James Alexander, a psychotherapist, as he [Alexander] was walking along Sauchiehall Street.

“He [Lochrie] said, ‘give up your profession, otherwise the consequences will be dire – you have been warned’.”

Lochrie then phoned the Buddhist group the Western Chan Fellowship, in England, and left a voicemail for their secretary, Alysun Jones, also a clinical psychologist.

Mr Dignan explained: “He said he was ‘a radicalist zen monk’ and instructed her to give up her profession.

“He stated, ‘we are watching’ and this caused her great distress.”

All the calls, between July 10 and 13, 2014, were made from Lochrie’s mobile phone.

Lochrie, of Kirkton Avenue, Knightswood, admitted his guilt last year while behind bars for his Clutha helicopter laser pen stunt.

He pleaded guilty to three charges of sending messages or leaving voicemails which were grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character.

Sheriff Colin Pettigrew deferred sentence until a date when he should have been released from prison to see if he could stay out of trouble.

But he ended up serving another jail term – when he was caught with a knife disguised as a credit card – and the case had to be adjourned again.

And, when he returned to the dock to learn his fate, Sheriff Pettigrew allowed him to walk out of court as a free man.

He placed him on a Community Payback Order, as a direct alternative to custody, requiring him to carry out 150 hours of unpaid work in the next nine months, reduced from 180 hours as he admitted his guilt. He also ordered him to be supervised by social workers for a year and to return to the dock in June to monitor his progress on the order.

Last year Lochrie was jailed for 14 months at Glasgow Sheriff Court for targeting Captain Traill’s helicopter on November 28, 2013, as it flew over his west end home.

Captain Traill was forced to take evasive action to save his vision being affected by the green light that repeatedly lit up the cockpit.

GeneChing

03-01-2017, 01:46 PM

More on the latest Thai Buddhist conflict here. (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68723-Buddhists-behaving-badly&p=1300242#post1300242)

Thai Junta Replaces Director of Buddhism Department With Policeman (https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2017-02-25/thai-junta-replaces-director-of-buddhism-department-with-policeman)
Feb. 25, 2017, at 8:04 a.m.

https://www.usnews.com/dims4/USNEWS/654ecce/2147483647/thumbnail/970x647/quality/85/?url=%2Fcmsmedia%2Fe3%2F89d711570a29339b81c8e54eb8 7ad4%2Ftag%3Areuters.com%2C2017%3Anewsml_LYNXMPED1 O09C%3A12017-02-25T130426Z_1_LYNXMPED1O09C_RTROPTP_3_THAILAND-BUDDHISM.JPG
Buddhist monks stand in front of soldiers between a wire barricade at Dhammakaya temple, in Pathum Thani province, Thailand February 23, 2017. REUTERS/Chaiwat Subprasom REUTERS

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thailand's military junta removed the chief of the department responsible for overseeing Buddhist affairs and replaced him with a police officer on Saturday, amid a stand-off between officials and monks at the country's largest temple.

Thousands of followers of the Dhammakaya Temple have defied orders to leave temple grounds for over a week, blocking attempts by police to seek out their former abbot, who is accused of money laundering.

The standoff at the scandal-hit temple represents one of the biggest challenges to the authority of Thailand's junta since it took power in 2014.

Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha used what critics call "the dictator's law" to replace Phanom Sornsilp, the lay head of the National Office of Buddhism, with an official from the Department of Special Investigations (DSI).

"The reforms must be implemented quickly and cannot follow normal procedure," the statement in the Royal Gazette announcing the move said.

The DSI are currently in charge of ongoing operations to find and arrest Phra Dhammachayo at the Dhammakaya Temple. It has ordered 14 other senior monks belonging to the temple to give themselves up or face arrest.

The National Office of Buddhism is responsible for the administration of the religion followed by some 95 percent of Thais, but does not have the power to defrock monks.

The Dhammakaya Temple is unusual in defying the military government. Opposition from political parties and activists has largely been silenced since a coup in 2014.

The former abbot faces charges of conspiracy to launder money and receive stolen goods, as well as taking over land unlawfully to build meditation centres. His aides dismiss the accusations as politically motivated.

The Dhammakaya Temple's brasher approach to winning adherents jars on conservatives, who say it exploits its followers and uses religion to make money. The temple says it is as committed to Buddhist values as anyone else.

(Reporting by Cod Satrusayang; Editing by Matthew Tostevin and Ros Russell)

Having been to Thailand and having spent some time at Wat Pho, their take on Buddhism is unique. Thailand is the most Buddhist country in the world. That has its positive and negative aspects. I'm starting to think I should split Thai Buddhism off into its own indie thread.

GeneChing

04-17-2017, 09:23 AM

Fake Buddhists for sure. I see this scam running in SF all the time - lots of fake Chinese Buddhist Monks handing out malas (http://www.martialartsmart.com/power-beads.html) to scam tourists.

Fake monks targeting foreign visitors to Japan? (http://en.rocketnews24.com/2017/04/17/fake-monks-targeting-foreign-visitors-to-japan/)
Richard Simmonds 3 hours ago

https://sociorocketnewsen.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/rsz_1untitled-2.jpg

Mock monks after your money? On layman‘s terms.

Buddhist priests and monks are a common sight in Japan, whether they be meditating, conducting religious ceremonies or looking wonderfully comical riding bicycles.

But recently posters have been popping up around Harajuku station in Tokyo warning tourists not to give money to a scam-artist masquerading as a monk, a man who ‘allwas swindles [sic]’ . While the non-native English may give us a chuckle, somebody out there has taken the time to warn visitors of the non-‘temples man’ swindling passers-by.

▼ The same poster could be seen in a number of locations
https://sociorocketnewsen.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/rsz_untitled2-1.jpg

More provocative is the statement that the rapscallion is Chinese. While this might be like tabloid newspapers in the UK branding every homeless person in London as members of Eastern European criminal gangs, with the arrest of a 54-year-old Chinese man for impersonating a monk and soliciting donations from foreigners in Ueno Park and Akihabara, it may have been referring to an actual individual.

The arrested man had been able to make around 20,000 yen (US$185) by selling prayer beads or thank you notes, supposedly to fund temple maintenance. The thank you notes, written in English, apparently cost the fake clergyman about one yen each to buy in China. Given that the 20,000 yen was allegedly made from just ten foreigners, that’s quite the mark-up.

Unfortunately, with the number of foreign visitors to Japan set to increase as the 2020 Olympics approach, scams like this may also increase. Anyone wanting to contribute to the upkeep of the many beautiful temples and shrines around Japan should do so at the collection boxes on site, or by buying one of the numerous omamori (good luck talismans) with the added bonus of possible good luck!

It should also be noted that not all Buddhist priests are after your money, some are just after your underwear.

Reference: NHK News Web
Images: ©RocketNews24

GeneChing

04-18-2017, 09:16 AM

I've partied with Buddhist nuns. It was fun. Nun fun.

Buddhist association takes legal action after video shows ‘monks partying' (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/10/buddhist-association-takes-legal-action-video-shows-monks-partying/)
Video allegedly shows Buddhist monks partying
10 APRIL 2017 • 5:41PM

A local Buddhist association has vowed to sue media outlets and netizens, after a video allegedly showing members partying at a nun's wedding went viral.

The Wutaishan Buddhist Association (WBA) of North China's Shanxi Province accused media of "tarnishing Buddhism" over the video.

Most men and women in the video were bald, in robes, and busy taking pictures of themselves or a group. Some people shouted "unify the world", and some were seen holding a board with characters "Wuxingbi".

In a statement issued over the weekend, the WBA claimed that the guests were actually members of a pyramid scheme called "Wuxingbi," whose members shave their heads.

WBA lawyer Wei Haisheng told media on Sunday that the association had reported the case to police.

"It's time for us to take actions to defend the reputation of Buddhism,” he said.

Okay, the truth is that I've been to banquets with Buddhist nuns. They were super sweet and very polite, dressed in Buddhist nun habits and making sure to serve others before they ate. It was nothing like this video for sure.

GeneChing

05-01-2017, 07:50 AM

Monks aren't necessarily supposed to be poor. They are supposed to be unattached. Some do take poverty austerities but there is a difference. :rolleyes:

Ohm, aren't monks supposed to be poor? Buddhist clergyman wraps an expensive modified sports car around a tree - after borrowing it from a friend for a joyride (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4447292/Buddhist-monk-crashes-friend-s-sports-car-Thailand.html)

Thapanat Chaiyasut, 31, took a friend's modified Nissan Silvia S15 for a spin
Barely left temple in Thailand when he lost control and wrapped it around a tree
Thapanat broke an arm, passenger Boonyarit Puengchareon left unconscious
The driver was not arrested or charged with any offences, police said

By Nelson Groom for Daily Mail Australia
PUBLISHED: 08:20 EDT, 26 April 2017 | UPDATED: 12:35 EDT, 26 April 2017

A thrill-seeking monk who took a friend’s souped-up sports car for a spin lost control and wrapped it around a tree.

Thapanat Chaiyasut, 31, was just one day from leaving a strict monkhood in central Thailand when he got behind the wheel of an orange Nissan Silvia S15 on Tuesday.

But no sooner had he left the temple than he clipped a tree and spun out of control, trapping himself and one passenger in the wreckage.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/04/26/11/3F9D13E900000578-0-image-a-2_1493204312122.jpg
Who Buddha thought it? Thapanat Chaiyasut, 31, took a friend's modified Nissan Silvia S15 for a spin before things went horribly wrong

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/04/26/11/3F9D139100000578-0-image-a-3_1493204321035.jpg
Ohm, what happened? The driver was just one day from leaving a strict monkhood iwhen he got behind the wheel of an Orange Nissan Silvia S15

Thapanat, who was found still wearing orange robes, suffered a broken arm and cuts to his leg while passenger Boonyarit Puengchareon, 19, was unconscious.

Both were taken to hospital in a stable condition.

Police captain Kornvit Meedee from the Samshook district station said the monk had taken the modified car for a joyride.

‘Police arrived at the scene with ambulance staff from the Samshook hospital and we found the car crashed with Phra Thapanat inside.

The monks' friends drove the car to visit him and he borrowed it to treat himself to a celebratory spin.

But it seems it was a little more car than he could handle.

'It was too fast for the monk to handle. The car is like the same one from the Fast and Furious movies.'

The driver was not arrested or charged with any offences, police said.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/04/26/12/3F9D138500000578-4447292-image-a-6_1493204666210.jpg
But no sooner had he left the temple than he clipped a tree and spun out of control, trapping himself and one passenger in the wreckage

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/04/26/12/3F9D13FE00000578-4447292-image-a-4_1493204646179.jpg
The driver was not arrested or charged with any offences, police said

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/04/26/12/3F9D13F600000578-4447292-image-a-5_1493204654239.jpg
Thapanat broke an arm, passenger Boonyarit Puengchareon was unconscious

GeneChing

05-30-2017, 08:30 AM

...as it is just being 'naughty'.

Tibetan Tantra = Thank you mistress! may i have another?

FORMER TIBETAN BUDDHIST NUN NOW ENJOYS A LIFE OF LATEX (http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/tibetan-nun-becomes-fetish-queen-10462364?service=responsive#ICID=sharebar_twitter)

For ten years Damcho Dyson’s only habit was her plain religious robe – but now she has swapped it for something more stretchy.

Damcho lived a simple life of chastity and was once an attendant to the Dalai Lama.

But she says a massage while on a trip to India reawakened her sexuality – and turned her into Britain’s *naughtiest nun.

And now, after quitting her Tibetan Buddhist monastery in France, she spends her weekends cavorting in latex at fetish clubs.

The 45-year-old told the Sunday People: “I’d been celibate for 10 years and, as a nun, my practice meant my brain was able to override my bodily needs.

“Lying there having that massage I had an epiphany. I suddenly had a sense of the vitality within my body and decided the time was right to leave the monastery.”

http://i3.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article10457594.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/SUNDAY-PEOPLE-PROD-21-5-2107-Damcho-Dyson-ed.jpg
Damcho Dyson with her former life (Photo: Sunday Mirror)

But it wasn’t until she ended up in London in 2011 and passed the window of a shop selling fetish clothing that Damcho realised wearing rubber could fill the Buddha-sized hole in her new life.

“I’d been a nun for ten years and was open to new opportunities so when I spotted the shop I thought ‘why not’ and headed inside,” she says.

“The first time I tried on latex I felt empowered. It compliments the female form and somehow felt reminiscent of the ritual wearing of Buddhist robes. The shop owner and I became friends and she introduced me to the latex scene.

“I went to a club feeling all *risqué, but I looked at other people wearing top-to-toe latex and rubber masks and realised I was actually quite conservative.

http://i2.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article10457584.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/SUNDAY-PEOPLE-PROD-21-5-2107-Damcho-Dyson-ed.jpg
Damcho Dyson in her nun's garb (Photo: Sunday Mirror)
http://i1.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article10457576.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/SUNDAY-PEOPLE-PROD-21-5-2107-Damcho-Dyson.jpg

Damcho Dyson wearing her favourite latex outfit (Photo: Sunday Mirror)

“I find the whole thing amazing and intriguing. It’s really liberating.”

Damcho, of Wandsworth, South London, was 23 when she first thought about being a nun, but didn’t leave her native Melbourne, Australia, for Nepal until six years later.

Despite her vows meaning she never had children Damcho – who is crowdfunding her PhD exploring human rituals – says she has no regrets.

“I travelled around the Himalayas,” she says.

http://i2.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article10457582.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/SUNDAY-PEOPLE-PROD-21-5-2107-Damcho-Dyson.jpg
Damcho Dyson at home in London (Photo: Sunday Mirror)
http://i1.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article10457583.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/SUNDAY-PEOPLE-PROD-21-5-2107-Damcho-Dyson-ed.jpg

Damcho Dyson in the lotus position (Photo: Sunday Mirror)

“It was incredibly *enriching and inspiring for me. But now I want to continue my contemplative adventure using a different medium.”

She says: “I still feel a bit like a naughty nun.

“But I’m a middle-aged woman who has *always liked to express *herself so why not?

“I’m finally letting my hair down when I once used to shave it all off.”

Damcho is raising money to fund her PhD. You can donate here (https://www.gofundme.com/BodhiUnbound)

GeneChing

06-14-2017, 10:00 AM

This is the stuff of movie murder mysteries.

MONK LEADS POLICE TO NOVICE’S BODY BENEATH TEMPLE BUDDHA (http://www.khaosodenglish.com/news/crimecourtscalamity/2017/06/02/monk-leads-police-novices-body-beneath-temple-buddha/)
By Sasiwan Mokkhasen, Staff Reporter - June 2, 2017 3:15 pm

http://www.khaosodenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/4_rlbxdab-696x522.jpg
Rescue workers use a backhoe to dig through concrete poured over a body disposed of at Wat Wang Tawantok in Nakhon Si Thammarat province.

NAKHON SI THAMMARAT — Under the shade of a stand of trees and beneath a Buddha statue, rescue workers Friday morning dug up the body of a novice monk killed and buried there five months ago.

The search was launched a day after Denchai Phumniyom, who had been a monk at the temple, told police that back in January he killed a 17-year-old novice monk and buried him on the temple grounds, poured concrete over the grave and then placed the buddha statue atop it all to conceal the deed.

At the time, Denchai, 36, was a lay assistant who helped manage the affairs of Wat Wang Tawantok in Nakhon Si Thammarat province.

http://www.khaosodenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/3_aee0BpE-500x375.jpg
Rescue workers use backhoe truck to dig under the concrete ground inside the temple.

Police said Denchai and his girlfriend, Piyachat Arunsakul, managed temple revenues from such things as amulet sales and renting out spaces in its parking lot.

“Everything in the temple relied on this couple,” said Police Lt. Gen. Thesa Siriwatho said at a Friday press briefing. “Everyone was under their control.”

Brought to speak publicly today, Denchai said he attacked Suppachoke “Pleum” Eakkiettikul because he believed the novice stole his girlfriend’s purse, which was carrying temple assets including 50,000 baht in cash, a valuable gold necklace and gold-covered Buddha amulet.

“I didn’t kill him. I just wanted to teach him a lesson and force him to return the stuff he stole,” Denchai said. “I beat him with a PVC pipe, but then he ran to get a knife and tried to fight me.”

After beating the boy senseless, Denchai said he loaded him onto a truck. He intended to took him to hospital, but the boy died along the way. So he returned to the temple with Pleum’s body to bury there.

Denchai said he decided to become a monk at the same temple because he felt guilty.

http://www.khaosodenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2_TBM8744-500x281.jpg
Denchai Phumniyom and Suriya Kusolsook are taken to point the spot where he assaulted and buried a novice monk Pleum Friday at the temple in Nakhon Si Thammarat province.

The teen was reported missing back in January, but police said they only got a break on the case recently that led them to Denchai.

Workers pulled a boy’s body this morning from the bottom of the meter-deep hole beneath the Buddha. The authorities haven’t confirmed yet that was that of Pleum, whose full name was withheld.

Police said Denchai faces charges of manslaughter and concealing a body. They’re also weighing charges against another novice monk, 18-year-old Suriya Kusolsook, who has admitted to participating in the attack, and Denchai’s girlfriend – who has denied involvement.

Both Denchai and Suriya were taken to the temple this morning for a police “re-enactment.”

http://www.khaosodenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/before.jpg
The concrete ground of Wat Wang Tawantok in Nakhon Si Thammarat province before rescue workers dig and found a human body underneath Friday

GeneChing

09-08-2017, 09:10 AM

Crazy tale.

How a Chinese seductress is using Bliss & Wisdom to undermine the Dalai Lama (https://ladakh2017blog.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/mary-jin-gebis/)
ladakh2017blog Audio, News August 12, 2017
中文版

GEBIS (Bliss and Wisdom) guru Mary Jin’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party exposed; details of her sexual and verbal abuse of monks emerge; former abbot alleges he was illegally imprisoned in PEI on her orders

21 June 2017

Taiwan, ROC – Formerly a cult leader on the run from Chinese authorities, Mary Jin seized control of GEBIS and sought to quietly replace the Dalai Lama’s influence with the Chinese-sanctioned Panchen Lama, former abbot Venerable Fan Yin says in a publicized audio recording.

Born in northeast China as Jin Mengrong (金夢蓉), which means “golden dream lotus” in Chinese, she was the second-in-charge of qigong cult Zhong Gong, which amassed millions of fanatical followers in only a few years, mesmerized by wild claims of magical powers, potions and esoteric qigong practices. Before long, the Chinese government saw Zhong Gong as a threat, and began to crack down on the cult.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Taiwan strait, a monk named Jih-Chang founded Buddhist organization Bliss and Wisdom in 1991 to promote Tibetan Buddhism in Taiwan. Master Jih-Chang, after decades of learning Buddhism from different traditions, took a special liking to Tibetan Gelug Buddhism and became close friends with the Dalai Lama. Master Jih-Chang saw it his duty to spread Tibetan Buddhism among Chinese people, and began traveling to China to teach the Tibetan text lamrim chenmo. Hoping to evade the Chinese authorities, Master Jih-Chang kept a low profile and sometimes disguised himself as a lay person.

For years, he thought he was still under the radar, as far as the Chinese authorities were concerned. He was allowed to enter China and there was no indication that the Chinese knew about his activities, or his connection to the Dalai Lama. But not for long.

In order to escape persecution, Jin Mengrong became a Buddhist and gradually infiltrated Bliss and Wisdom. Using a combination of psychological manipulation, supposed spirit visitations and mysterious magical abilities, Master Jih-Chang was tricked into believing that she was an enlightened being. Master Jih-Chang wanted to appoint her as his successor, and spiritual leader of Bliss and Wisdom, against the advice of the Dalai Lama. Master Jih-Chang sent senior monks to China to teach Jin Mengrong Buddhism.

The student soon became the teacher as Jin Mengrong began to teach the monks tantric sex. Many monks lost their vows of celibacy. Jin Mengrong, perhaps trying to become the Holy Mary, concocted a scheme to give birth to Lama Tsongkhapa. The father was to be one of the monks under Master Jih-Chang. Eventually, Jin Mengrong conceived, but the baby was aborted.

Ironically, Jin Mengrong was eventually introduced as Mary Jin to the Canadian media, after she moved to Prince Edward Island.

In 2004, Master Jih-Chang, already old and sick, was poisoned by a doctor hired by Mary Jin in Xiamen, China. Some senior monks who had broken their vows of celibacy to Mary Jin, moved to cement her position as Bliss and Wisdom’s guru. With her at the helm, Bliss and Wisdom has gradually reduced their ties with the Dalai Lama, quietly replaced by lamas linked to the Chinese-appointed Panchen Lama.

Ven Fan Yin, the first abbot of Fengshan Monastery (Bliss and Wisdom’s main monastery in Taiwan), reveals many more details of Mary Jin’s sexual and verbal abuse of young monks and novices. He also reveals he was illegally imprisoned on Prince Edward Island under Mary Jin’s orders.

https://ladakh2017blog.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/fsmmyfu.jpg?w=1100
Monks bowing to Jin Mengrong on her first trip to Taiwan in Mar 2015. That was the first time pictures of her were released.
Listen to the audio here (in Chinese):

ladakh2017
Ven Fan Yin 21 Jun 17 (https://soundcloud.com/user-890908032/ven-fan-yin-21-jun-17)
https://i1.sndcdn.com/artworks-000237992804-1nt0hb-t500x500.jpg

Here is the full transcript (translated from Chinese; any errors are mine):

From 1996:

At that time, Mary Jin (Jin Mengrong) was the second-in-charge of Zhong Gong, and was already blacklisted by the Chinese government. Zhong Gong’s leader, Zhang Hongbao, fled to the United States but died in a car accident a few years later, orchestrated by the Chinese government.

A female friend of Li Yanzhong (李衍忠; Ven Ru Zheng’s elder brother), who lived in a house belonging to a Chinese foreign affairs official, became acquainted with Mary Jin. So Mary Jin hoped to get protection through her links with the foreign ministry. She also hoped to clean up her image by become a Buddhist. Hence, she started learning the lamrim chenmo after being introduced to it by Li Yanzhong’s female friend.

At that time, she was already married with a child/children. Her husband went crazy and she divorced him.

In Beijing, she then lived with Venerable Zhong Jin (宗進法師) (NB. not from Bliss & Wisdom), caused him to break his vows and disrobe. He became known as Mr Song Jin (宋進). Jin and Song returned to Jin’s hometown in northeastern China, Daqing (in Heilongjiang province), to open lamrim classes. They called themselves Teacher Jin and Teacher Song. Eventually, Jin gave herself the title “Guru”.

A monk from Guanghua Temple (廣化寺), Mr Li Yanping, travelled to the northeast after being seduced by Mary Jin. Mary Jin slept with Li Yanping every night. Unsurprisingly, Li Yanping and Song Jin became rivals in love. Finally, Li Yanping managed to get rid of Song Jin, and lived together with Mary Jin.
continued next post

GeneChing

09-08-2017, 09:13 AM

From 1998:

At Guanghua Temple, Mary Jin claimed that she was possessed by demons. Many gurus and Rinpoches were unable to help her remove the demon, she claimed. She met Master Jih-Chang, who gave her the three refuges and prayed for her. Mary Jin, while being possessed by the demon, told Master Jih-Chang that Mary Jin was Master Jih-Chang’s most important disciple in his previous lives. The demon threatened to kill Master Jih-Chang. Mary Jin then claimed she used magic to murder 10,000 demon soldiers to save Master Jih-Chang. Having been subdued by Mary Jin, and after negotiating with Master Jih-Chang, the demon agreed to become Master Jih-Chang’s spirit protector. Master Jih-Chang named him Tee Kong (提公), or Lord Tee, and enshrined him in Fengshan Monastery. Lord Tee became a very important spirit protector of Fengshan Monastery.

(NB. Other sources state that this incident happened in the year 2000).

Lord Tee told Master Jih-Chang that Mary Jin needed to be privately tutored by a senior monk, so that she could quickly regain the knowledge and powers she had in her previous life. Venerable Jing Yuan, who had just been serving as the third abbot of Fengshan Monastery for a few months, gave up the abbotship, and courageously went to northeast China to become Mary Jin’s tutor.

Mary Jin showered her attention on Ven Jing Yuan every night. This made Li Yanping very jealous. Eventually, Li Yanping complained to Master Jih-Chang that Ven Jing Yuan had raped Mary Jin. Master Jih-Chang believed Li Yanping.

By 2003, Ven Jing Yuan had clearly broken his root vows, automatically ceased to become a monk, and returned to Singapore.

Q: If Master Jih-Chang knew that so many sexual liaisons were going on, why did he allow it to continue?

A: By then, he was already firmly convinced that Mary Jin was an enlightened being and would be his successor, so he kept the sexual liaisons under wraps.

According to the vinaya, once a monk has broken his root vows, he cannot recover his status as a bhikshu even if he takes the “recovery vows” 增益戒 (note: recovery vows allow a monk to restore his vows if he has committed minor transgressions). Ven Jing Yuan took the “recovery vows” anyway so that he could pretend to be a monk. So Ven Jing Yuan is a fake monk.

Master Jih-Chang believed Li Yanping’s accusations, and was very angry that Jing Yuan raped Mary Jin. After Ven Jing Yuan returned to Taiwan, Master Jih-Chang stripped him of his senior monk status and sent him to Edu Park to oversee construction work. Jing Yuan was very upset and felt betrayed. He felt that Li Yanping had also broken his root vow, in the same way Jing Yuan did, but was let off scot free by Master Jih-Chang. Jing Yuan would bang his head on the wall every day in anger.

Around 2003, a Guru Kong (空上師) appeared on the scene. Guru Kong was a spirit which possessed Mary Jin, claiming to be Lama Tsongkhapa and sometimes claiming to be Khedrub Je. Guru Kong also gave some mysterious teachings. Guru Kong convinced Master Jih-Chang that Mary Jin was the reincarnation of Khedrub Je, and that Master Jih-Chang was the reincarnation of Gyaltsab Je. Guru Kong told Master Jih-Chang that they were only missing Lama Tsongkhapa to complete the holy trinity. Master Jih-Chang eventually sent Venerable Ru Cheng (如誠法師, of Fengshan Monastery) to create the holy baby of Lama Tsongkhapa together with Mary Jin.

At that time, many prayers and pujas were done in Fengshan Monastery to invite the Lama Tsongkhapa holy trinity (Lama Tsongkhapa, Khedrub Je and Gyaltsab Je; this trio is mentioned in the Tibetan tradition too) to be reborn in the Chinese lands.

Mary Jin became pregnant with Ru Cheng’s child. Li Yanping was enraged, and fought physically with Ru Cheng. The Chinese police were called. In the end, Ru Cheng agreed to abort the baby. Li Yanping complained to Master Jih-Chang again that Ru Cheng was treating Mary Jin badly and was abusing her.

Ru Cheng knew he had broken his root vows already, and returned to Taiwan. He sensed that something was wrong with the whole scheme, and told Master Jih-Chang that Mary Jin was a fraud. Having believed Li Yanping’s story, Master Jih-Chang was very angry at Ru Cheng for maligning Mary Jin, whom he was supposed to see as his guru. Master Jih-Chang ordered Ru Cheng to repent, kept him in confinement and prevented anyone else from talking to him. Ru Cheng was very upset and left Bliss and Wisdom soon after. After he left, Ru Cheng went all over India to report the matter to the Dalai Lama, the Ganden Tripa Rinpoche, Sharpa Choje and Jangtsey Chojey (the three main Gelug throne-holders). Many people reported the happenings to the Dalai Lama and the throne-holders in India, including Senior Brother Li (李學長 – important lay leader of Bliss & Wisdom). They felt that the scam could not go on, because it would harm a lot of people. But because there were only a few of them, the Dalai Lama and the throne-holders were not able to publicly express anything.

After leaving Bliss and Wisdom, Ru Cheng was harassed with death threats, and almost died. His mother also passed away. On the verge of a mental breakdown, Ru Cheng moved to the United States for his own safety, and is still there.

Mary Jin claimed that she pretended to get married to Ru Cheng, in an attempt to enter Taiwan. In fact, they were actually married, and had a marriage certificate. But at that time, the Taiwanese government did not allow Chinese spouses to enter Taiwan.

Mary Jin procured a fake passport which turned out to be a “spy passport” (NB. I don’t know what passport is this – maybe a stolen one already blacklisted by Taiwanese immigration?). Jin tried to enter Taiwan with this passport, was refused entry and blacklisted by Taiwanese immigration. A monk from Guanghua Temple, Ven Xue Cheng (學誠) (NB: he is now the secretary-general of the Buddhist Association of China, the most powerful position a Chinese monk can hold, and which is of course closely linked to the Chinese government , told me to beware of Jin and have no dealings with her at all. I trusted Master Jih-Chang and did not fully believe what Venerable Xue Cheng said. Because of her attempted entry into Taiwan with a fake passport, Jin had a lot of difficulty entering Taiwan subsequently. I was deceived for 20 years, and have finally put the pieces together recently.

After that, Venerable Jing Ming (淨明), Venerable Ru Xu (如旭) and Venerable Ru Qing (如清) went to China. A lot of wrongdoing happened, much of it encouraged by Guru Kong. Jing Ming and Master Jih-Chang were in China at that time, but Master Jih-Chang gave Ven Jing Ming the assurance that Guru Kong and Mary Jin were to be trusted. Out of veneration for Master Jih-Chang, Venerable Jing Ming never said anything, but felt uneasy. Venerable Jing Ming was kept away from all conversations and was not allowed to participate in meetings. He was sent out to buy vegetables at the local market every day. Venerable Jing Ming noticed something strange – Venerable Ru Cheng (如誠) was reading books about preventing unwanted pregnancies, which he found bizarre, but eventually understood much later. Jing Ming did not break his monastic vows (no sexual activity) but all the others had broken their vows, except possibly Ru Qing (如清).

Ven Ru Qing left 3-4 years ago. He knew a lot of what happened behind the scenes, and insisted on staying in Taiwan instead of going to Canada to meet Jin. Venerable Ru Qing如清 almost turned blind from an illness. I believe Jin applied black magic/poison on Ru Qing. Doctor Hsieh Hongbing (謝鴻賓) treated Ru Qing (如清) and can testify. Tiny worms were expelled from Ru Qing’s body after being treated with smoke treatment, which is believed to be evidence of black magic. Many monks suffered from mysterious illnesses – Venerable Ru Hua (如華) , Venerable Ru Qing (如清) , Venerable Ru Qi (如起) , Venerable Ru Hao (如皓). Venerable Ru Hao, after returning from the USA to disrobe, was so ill that he almost could not speak. A doctor found a bloody palm-shaped mark on my body, which many people in the sangha saw as well. Jin had many methods up her sleeve to harass, threaten and kill people. At that time, nobody knew why our illnesses were so strange and could not be treated with conventional medicine. We were told that it was because of our bad karma, that we had to confess and repent, and pray to recover.

In his later years, Master Jih-Chang had the intention of appointing Mary Jin as his successor, but Jin could not enter Taiwan. If Master Jih-Chang died in Taiwan, Jin would not have been able to become the successor, so she devised all kinds of methods to deceive Master Jih-Chang into going to China. Jin hoped that Master Jih-Chang would die of natural causes in China, under her care, so she could become his undisputed successor. She convinced Master Jih-Chang to go to China, both to teach her, as well as to recuperate from his illness. Master Jih-Chang arranged for his trusted personal doctor, Hu Maohua (胡茂華), to take 6 months leave and accompany him to Xiamen, China. Doctor Hu was sent back to Taiwan one day after arriving in Xiamen, presumably under Jin’s orders. An inexperienced doctor, who hailed from the same village as Jin, came to treat Master Jih-Chang. The doctor prescribed heavy doses of energizing medication. (NB: stimulating Chinese herbal medicine). Venerable Da Xian (大顯) was present and he can testify. Venerable Da Xian (大顯) left the sangha after master’s death as he knew the truth and dared not remain in the organization.
continued next post

GeneChing

09-08-2017, 09:14 AM

After Master Jih-Chang consumed the stimulants, his body reacted very adversely. His pulse turned irregular and his body turned stiff. The doctor then prescribed laxatives, which weakened him greatly and finally finished him off. He died under such circumstances. He realized then that he had been cheated and died knowing that. We saw that Master’s eyes were protruding, his stomach was bloated and we were all shocked. Mary Jin told the senior monks that Master Jih-Chang was expressing an emanation of the wrathful deity Mahakala (NB: Mahakala is a Tibetan Buddhist protector deity, an emanation of an enlightened being). We were all cheated. When Master was cremated, Jin claimed that she saw Master Jih-Chang in the form of the wrathful deity Mahakala, filling the entire sky, but none of us could see it.

We all saw that Master’s remains did not contain any relics. The supposed relics in the stupa are all fakes. I was surprised then but suppressed my suspicions. Those who had their suspicions have all left, Venerable Da Xian (大顯), Venerable Ru Su (如速), Venerable Xing Hong (性弘) and Venerable Chan Zong (禪宗) were present and all the senior lay leaders knew there were no relics. Senior Brother Li (李學長) and Senior Brother Hsieh (解學長) became suspicious. Senior Brother Li knew the full incident, as he was the one who introduced Jin to Master. Mary Jin expelled Senior Brother Li with a lot of manufactured wrongdoings like slander, and I executed the sacking. This is a huge scam. Master Jih-Chang was murdered. Jin started to create a fake will, claiming that she was the successor, and that Bliss and Wisdom should not disperse. This is not Master’s will. Master Jih-Chang’s will was to appoint Venerable Ru Zheng (如證) as successor, and for all decisions in the sangha to be taken by consensus (羯磨: a democratic method of decision-making laid down by the Buddha for monastic communities. Guidelines are prescribed for how to arrive at a decision, how to take disciplinary action and so forth). Master had mentioned this every year. I am not sure who has seen Master’s will, but found out later that it is now in Jin’s possession. For obvious reasons, she is not going to release it. Venerable Ru Jun (如俊) is an accomplice in this, the fake will was released bit by bit, transcribed by Venerable Ru Jun (如俊). The prayer for Master’s reincarnation – many of you still believe it was written by the Dalai Lama, don’t you? No, it was written by Venerable Ru Ji (如吉), not by the Dalai Lama. The original prayer written by the Dalai Lama is with me, do you want to see it?

Jin subsequently appeared to take charge less often, and let the abbot Venerable Ru Zheng (如證) appear to do the talking. Jin is supporting him from behind. She took away many young novices into her inner circle.

I am not sure how much Ru Zheng (如證) knows. Ru Zheng (如證) should know quite a lot but he had to obey Jin, as he is afraid to be fixed by the Marco monks. Ru Zheng is in GEBIS now being held incommunicable. He cannot leave the GEBIS compound, every movement is monitored and reported, his passport and mobile phone are confiscated. (NB: As of August 2017, Ru Zheng is back in Taiwan and appears to be moving around freely).

The connection with Dorje Shugden had been reported to Dalai Lama and he was not pleased at all. Many Rinpoches knew that Mary Jin is associated with Dorje Shugden.

On another note: I know Master Jih-Chang had asked for a Nyingma lama to conduct rituals for Master due to this poor health. The Nyingma lama told Master Jih-Chang that there was something suspicious in his possession, and he was to surrender it, or he would refuse to conduct the ritual. The object turned out to be a ritual instrument of Dorje Shugden, planted by Mary Jin. After the incident, another monk told me that this shows that Jin is definitely associated with Dorje Shugden. Jin put the blame on Fengshan Monastery’s first Geshe, Tenzin Gyaten (NB: invited from India by Master Jih-Chang to teach), and claimed that it was he who put the Dorje Shugden instrument in Master’s room. The Dalai Lama has all along made his position very clear that he does not tolerate any practice of Dorje Shugden by his disciples. Because Mary Jin instigated Master Jih-Chang into disobeying the Dalai Lama, his practice and health deteriorated rapidly.

Jin took many monks from the child intake (預科班) into her inner circle, grooming and influencing them as they grew up. Many senior monks were sidelined. For 7 years I was banned from communicating with outsiders. Anyone who attempted to get in touch with me was warned. That’s why you’ve had no information about me for so many years. After I contracted tuberculosis, Mary Jin had no choice but to allow me to return to Taiwan. I was prepared to die in GEBIS in PEI. I thought, if you treat me like this, I will die for you to see. My father did not know my whereabouts for 2 years, not even when he wanted to include me in his will. I was not even allowed to call my father. This is proof of my persecution.

After I returned to Taiwan for tuberculosis treatment, Ven Jing Yuan and Ven Ru Jun told the two monks who looked after me to leave me. They said, “Ven Fan Yin is useless. You have a great future, why waste it on him?” But the two of them are genuine spiritual practitioners, who would not forsake someone in difficulty. The two monks looked after me for two years until I recovered. In that period of time, Ven Jing Yuan and Ru Jun asked to two monks to join the inner circle (Marco monks), but they refused to go. They are now in GEBIS PEI, and they have no intention of joining the inner circle. This is how they mistreat the senior monks, especially those who do not kowtow to Mary Jin.

Q: Ven Fan Yin, when all this was happening, how did you practice guru devotion?

A: At that time I was blamed for the Senior Brother Mu (穆學長) incident. They accused me of fund-raising without Mary Jin’s permission. In reality, that was not the case. In fact, she was the one who told me to do the fund-raising, and when things went wrong, she blamed it on me. Afterwards I thought, never mind, for the sake of the organization, for the sake of Master Jih-Chang, I will shoulder all the blame myself. At that time I thought, fine, if you want me to use this incident to help me grow, I will! I will practice the dharma and show you what I can do! At that time I did not see her faults at all. I was very grateful to her for helping me through. Because I almost died – I thank the Buddhas for giving me tuberculosis, so I could escape.

Q: Venerable Fan Yin, when was the turning point then?”

A: This year Rizong Rinpoche came to Taiwan to teach “Essence of Fine Speech” for three months (NB: Rizong Rinpoche, the 102nd Ganden Tripa, gave teachings from Feb-Apr 2017 at Fengshan Monastery’s Lake Mountain Campus, Taiwan). Rizong Rinpoche mentioned Bliss and Wisdom’s problems every day, such as our attachment to sensual pleasures, not genuinely exerting ourselves in spiritual development ….you know all that! Slowly, I started to wake up. I asked Venerable Ru Xing (如性) every day, “What happened? Why is Rizong Rinpoche talking about these topics all the time?” Because Venerable Ru Xing knew about many of Bliss and Wisdom’s internal problems. Rizong Rinpoche would discuss Bliss and Wisdom’s problems with Ven Ru Xing frequently. Venerable Ru Xing wanted to help Bliss and Wisdom as he was Master’s disciple (NB: Ven Ru Xing was ordained as a teenager by Master Jih-Chang in Taiwan, then sent to India to learn from Tibetan lamas. He lives in India and serves as Rizong Rinpoche’s Chinese translator when he comes to Taiwan). As time went by, he became very discouraged and felt it was impossible for things to change at Bliss and Wisdom.

From the bottom of my heart, I told Rizong Rinpoche, “I accept your advice and guidance. I would like to go into an intensive retreat under your guidance, and with the fruits of my spiritual practice, I will save Bliss and Wisdom.” Rizong Rinpoche agreed to help me. He told me that the single most important cause for Bliss and Wisdom’s problems is our incorrect guru devotion. Mary Jin’s teachings on guru devotion are not Buddhist, they are creationist and theistic, and building up a personality cult. Her teachings do not come from a pure lineage, like Rizong Rinpoche’s teachings. Rinpoche knows clearly, that all the problems we have are due to incorrect guru devotion teachings.

A few years ago, Rizong Rinpoche was already telling me this. When I was ill, Rinpoche refused to consult the oracle for me, and told me, “All these obstacles, all these problems including your illness are caused by indiscriminate guru devotion”. When I heard this, I sincerely repented and confessed my faults. Rizong Rinpoche saved me. I slowly gained trust in Rizong Rinpoche, and contemplated on his teachings. Rizong Rinpoche helped me to see the reality; otherwise, it would have been impossible.

continued next post

GeneChing

09-08-2017, 09:15 AM

Q: So you only connected the dots recently?

A: Yes, only recently did I manage to connect the dots. I spoke to many people, whom I am not prepared to name at this stage. For those who know the inside story, some are not willing to face reality, some have children in the sangha or in the Edu Park, and some are comfortable with the present situation. They thought hiding the truth is better for Bliss and Wisdom. If they reveal the truth, a lot of people will have their faith completely broken. Their worlds will be shattered. After what I have told you, I think you will lose your appetite for a week, and lose sleep for a week. You will have to face the agony of having your faith broken, your lives and thoughts all turned upside down. I spoke to “the elder” (NB: identity not revealed by Ven Fan Yin) and realized the truth. “The elder” knew everything, Jin spoke to “the elder” for 10 hours in Taiwan when she visited Taiwan. “The elder” saw everything, what Jin was doing in her pyjamas with those people.

(NB: “the elder” appears to be a monk or layman holding a senior position in Bliss and Wisdom)

Subsequently, I wanted to do an intensive retreat with Rizong Rinpoche, Rizong Rinpoche agreed to help and provide support. I applied for leave from Mary Jin as she is my guru. That was 2 months ago (April 2017). I even bought my air tickets and planned to leave on 10th May. She agreed, but said that I had to go and meet her personally (NB: Mary Jin was in Singapore at that time). I wanted to go, but everyone advised against it. They told me I was finished if I went – I was sure to be confined again.

So I asked to speak to Mary Jin on the phone. She ignored my request initially. Finally, I sent her a message saying that if she did not want to hear me speak, I would reveal all her secrets to the whole world. That scared her and she immediately spoke to me on video conference. I started by criticizing her closest confidants and attendants – Novice Ru Fa (如法), Venerable Ru Qun (如群), Venerable Xing Jing (性景), and Venerable Ru Ji (如吉), revealing all their faults. She scolded them one by one, hoping to allow me to vent my frustrations. The next day, I told many teachers in BW Edu Park that I am leaving again. The teachers in Edu Park were very worried, because I practically evaporated from the surface of the earth for 7 years after going to Canada to meet Mary Jin. They wanted me to stay, so I could continue guiding them. Venerable Xing Chang (性長) advocated on their behalf – “The teachers are asking me, what if you get confined again?”, asked Ven Xing Chang. I said I can practice in isolation if I am confined again. Every adverse situation is an opportunity to practice. Just like her transgression of the vows – her behavior is teaching me how to discriminate between right and wrong.

Subsequently, all the teachers present in the meeting were warned. Mary Jin’s confidants named and shamed by me in the video conference wanted revenge. In the second video conference, Jin summoned Ven Xing Chang and I, and interrogated me angrily, “Why did you say I would confine you? This will cause many people to lose faith in me”. It can destroy her reputation. She kept scolding and scolding non-stop. I told her that was not the case, I did not tell them I would be confined. Many teachers knew about what happened seven years ago, and were concerned for me. It was Ven Xing Chang who asked me what I would do if I were confined. So I answered them honestly. Mary Jin was enraged. She said, “How could you answer like that? You should have said, you were not going to be confined.” She asked Ven Xing Chang angrily, “How could you ask that kind of question?” So Ven Xing Chang asked her, “Then what is the correct answer we should give?” That made Mary Jin even angrier, and she went on and on. Finally, it became obvious that Ven Xing Chang was against them. More on this next time.

At the third video conference, all senior monks were present, about 30 of them in Lake Mountain Campus. Jin told all of them, “The organization is in a mess now”. Jin is starting to get worried. She called Secretary-General Huang (NB: Sec-Gen Huang was appointed as the highest-ranking lay leader of Bliss and Wisdom in 2014/15, and held the position for two years before quitting. Before his appointment, he was a Buddhist but not a follower of Bliss and Wisdom) seeking a solution, “The organization is messy now, Ven Fan Yin and Xing Chang are too powerful and influential, what can we do about it?”. Sec-Gen Huang answered, “You have to face the reality now, shouldn’t you?” It was obvious that Jin was panicking and understood the crisis on hand. Not even Sec-Gen Huang could help her.

Jin tried to soothe the emotions of the senior monks by imploring them to be patient, to practice gratitude, and not to be like Ven Xing Chang. I asked, “Guru, we have something to say, the vinaya dictates that monks are not allowed to live under the same roof as women. Everyone knows this, and Rizong Rinpoche has even chastised you in the US, telling you not to live with monks and novices.” Jin started to cry and said, “They cannot leave me. If they leave me, how will they live.” It is obviously an excuse, she is the one who cannot live without them. This is a flagrant violation of the vinaya rules. When Jin heard this, she asked angrily, “What do you mean? Are you trying to drive me away? Where do I live if I don’t live here?” I said I wasn’t trying to chase her away, that I was very grateful to her contributions to this organizations and had great faith in her, but I told her, “Please do not live together with monks and novices.” Mary Jin said, “Who said we are living together? We are only living in the same building”. They are actually living on the same floor in expensive bungalows. Anyway, whatever she said was just a stone-walling tactic.

To show his support for her, Venerable Ru De (如得) started crying dramatically, and spoke a lot. It was all for show. Those are all her trusted lieutenants. Even Ven Ru Zheng (NB. former abbot) came out to say that it was very difficult for her to be the guru, she is going through a lot of difficulty for our sake….after that, I said, “Ven Ru Zheng! That’s not what you say in front of me. During the entire process you were badly abused by Ven Ru Qun and his gang, you came crying to me every day!” When he heard that, his face turned black, everyone was laughing. That’s what the monks are like now – always saying what they don’t mean.

So Mary Jin asked, who else is unhappy about her living arrangements? I said, many people outside the organization are criticizing us. A lot of people are asking me questions, and I don’t know how to answer them. So she asked, who has heard about this, who has doubts? Some people raised their hands. These people will definitely be warned and brainwashed.

The very next day, Venerable Jing Ming (净明) left hastily, because Mary Jin ordered him to go to PEI immediately. Venerable Jing Ming (净明) sensed the impending crisis, gave her an excuse and escaped. Subsequently, Jin said hysterically in an internal video broadcast, “No matter where you are, even if you travel to the ends of the earth, I will look for you.” (NB. can be interpreted as signaling concern, or a veiled threat that Mary Jin will hunt him down). She’s a very good actor. She would always start by saying, “I am here today all because of Jing Ming and Fan Yin, it was because they supported me as their guru. I will always be grateful for their contribution and support. I miss them so much. I treat them so well, why did they want to leave?” And she also said, “What Jing Ming and Fan Yin are doing is wrong. It shows that something is wrong with their guru devotion. Wherever Ven Jing Ming goes, I will look for him!” So they left no stone unturned in hunting down Ven Jing Ming.

continued next post

GeneChing

09-08-2017, 09:16 AM

The Dalai Lama knows all about her transgression of the vows and all her wrongdoing. But we ourselves have to take the initiative to speak to the Dalai Lama about it, so that he can express his stand. We have to remain united, and be strong enough to bring her down within the organization before the Dalai Lama can publicly state his position. If the Dalai Lama only hears from Venerable Ru Cheng alone, he has insufficient evidence and support to make his stand public.

Eventually we discovered that Mary Jin needs a new man every night. She would summon a monk or novice after 12 midnight, telling them that she had some tantric practices to teach them. She has many different methods of persuasion, such as telling the monk how they were a loving couple in a previous life, how he was a king and she the queen, or that she has special tantric techniques to help treat your illnesses. The monks who’ve left Bliss and Wisdom can testify.

Now we have to think about how to report this to the Dalai Lama, how to combine and co-ordinate our actions, and figure out our responses to her.

Anything that Jin gave out, such as pendants, praying beads, and her hymns can cause headaches and nausea. Many sensitive people have these reactions. It’s best not to accept them.

The Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party are behind her. The transmission of the Four Interwoven Annotations came from Harwa Rinpoche, who is in cahoots with the Chinese government. He belongs to the Chinese Panchen Lama’s system. Their goal is to control Bliss and Wisdom, breaking the lineage away from the Dalai Lama and swinging it to the Panchen Lama in China, while sucking away Taiwanese money at the same time. It is estimated that they have sucked away about NT$8 billion, from the time Master Jih-Chang passed away until now. Senior Brother Mu’s affair was also a scam.

Venerable Hsing Yun (NB. Ven Hsing Yun is one of the most renowned Buddhist leaders in Taiwan. He is the founder of Fo Guang Shan Monastery in Kaoshiung, Taiwan) received her visit with great fanfare, when she came to Taiwan the first time. The reason is that when Venerable Hsing Yun visited China, he was told by someone in the CCP that he was to expect a representative from them, and he was to show his support to her. We have verified this. Ven Hsing Yun’s disciples were quite unhappy about this, because this was very unusual.

https://ladakh2017blog.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/1-2-2.jpg
Jin Mengrong meets Venerable Hsing Yun on her first trip to Taiwan

Her identity is clear now. We are all cheated, including Master Jih Chang, and everyone in Bliss and Wisdom, since 1996. As the saying goes, “Relying on the wrong teachings will break all the roots of virtue”. For all the wisdom Master Jih-Chang had, he was cheated as he did not heed the Dalai Lama’s advice. Pabongka Rinpoche was a wise man, but the same thing happened to him too as he did not heed his guru’s advice. When Dorje Shugden appeared in various manifestations in front of him, even as benevolent deities, he was deceived and believed them to be real. His guru knew it was a scam. His guru tried to help him, and wanted him to burn all ritual instruments connected to Dorje Shugden. Pabongka then deceived his guru that he had done so. So Pabongka fell very ill as a consequence of it. The Dalai Lama told me this story about Pabongka. A lot of problems arise when people don’t trust their gurus, and instead trust Dorje Shugden. Just like Master Jih-Chang, who preferred to trust Mary Jin instead of the Dalai Lama.

Dorje Shugden appears to be a dharma protector, but is in fact an evil demon. Just like Mary Jin, who came up with a Lord Tee – it’s a demon too.

Busted Qigong Masters (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?56283-Busted-Qigong-Masters) & Buddhists behaving badly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68723-Buddhists-behaving-badly)

GeneChing

12-26-2017, 08:29 AM

I suspect this wasn't a monk of any sort. I wish this story had a pic.

Young lass shocked to discover online boyfriend is eccentric monk (https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2017/12/25/young-lass-shocked-to-discover-online-boyfriend-is-eccentric-monk/)
NATION
Monday, 25 Dec 2017
1:45 PM MYT
by allison lai

PETALING JAYA: A young girl found out the man she had been dating online for three months was actually a monk when they decided to meet.

China Press reported that the girl, who related her encounter on her Weibo, the Chinese Twitter equivalent social media platform, said that she did not know what to do.

She said that the man asked to meet her up after three months of online dating, and she was shocked to see him turn up in a monk's robe at her hotel room in China recently.

Considering the relationship they had built, she let the handsome young monk in, only to discover more bizarre findings about him.

She said the man was even meditating when he was on the toilet.

The girl also revealed that when the couple engaged in intercourse, the man kept chanting some gibberish which she could not understand.

"He brought nothing with him, saying that all beings come and leave the material world empty-handed," she said, adding that she began to feel worried and decided to secretly take some of his pictures.

She also said the man even followed her to her office later and did not want to leave.

"He was in his monk's robe and said that he wanted to go absorb the essence of the sun and moon near the full glass panel.

"All my colleagues are laughing at me! What should I do?" wrote the girl on her Weibo.

Many netizens, after seeing her posts, said that the man was likely a cheat who was out to get lucky.

They also advised the girl to pay him some money to leave, with some criticising her for being desperate and allowed herself to fall for a love scam.

GeneChing

02-08-2018, 10:55 AM

A real fake monk. :mad:

Police arrest fugitive Chinese murder suspect who won a village’s love as a fake monk (http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2132342/fugitive-chinese-murder-suspect-who-won-villages-love-fake-monk)
Li Tianyou, who was caught last month, became an abbot in east China and even led a fundraising campaign for a new temple
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 07 February, 2018, 11:36am
UPDATED : Wednesday, 07 February, 2018, 1:02pm
Yujing Liu

https://cdn4.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/980x551/public/images/methode/2018/02/07/4e2680b8-0aef-11e8-a09e-8861893b1b1a_1280x720_130212.JPG?itok=lgB07x0m

A suspected murderer on the run for 16 years in China has been arrested by police after avoiding capture by posing as a monk, local news reports said.

Li Tianyou, 41, was detained by police in late December on suspicion of killing a suitor of his girlfriend in 2002 in Guangzhou, capital of southern China’s Guangdong province, Thepaper.cn reported on Tuesday.

Li went on the run after three of his accomplices were arrested and jailed soon after the killing, according to information released by the Guangdong authorities late last month.

He kept moving from place to place, never staying long in a city. Forced to avoid using his ID or bank card, he often went hungry.

https://cdn4.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/images/methode/2018/02/07/4bdd1e70-0aef-11e8-a09e-8861893b1b1a_972x_130212.JPG
Li Tianyou was wanted in connection with the killing of his girlfriend's suitor in 2002. Photo: Thepaper.cn

“While going to great lengths to avoid arrest, he went through a lot of suffering,” a Guangzhou investigator was quoted as saying.

By the time he arrived in Nanjing, Jiangsu province in 2004, Li had little money, according to the authorities.

Since working was out of the question, he decided to pass himself off as a Buddhist monk even though he had only superficial knowledge of Buddhism.

He shaved his head and obtained certification as a monk using a fake ID he had bought.

He survived on the free food and accommodation that temples provided to visiting monks passing through town.

https://cdn4.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/images/methode/2018/02/07/4cf1a4b6-0aef-11e8-a09e-8861893b1b1a_1320x770_130212.JPG
Li avoided getting caught by shaving his head and obtaining a monk’s certificate with a fake ID he had bought. Photo: Thepaper.cn

Li’s path took a different turn when he arrived in a rural village in Suqian, eastern China’s Jiangsu province.

He plunged himself into the Buddhist community, helping to raise 40,000 yuan (US$6,350) to build a new temple. His display of leadership and energy led to his appointment as abbot, the report said.

Villagers said Li was kind to them.

“He would always give us fruits when we passed by his door,” an elderly villager said. “The children loved him.”

Li’s stature as an abbot continued to rise as time passed.

Many people came from nearby regions to worship in his temple while others donated money for its upkeep.

https://cdn3.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/images/methode/2018/02/07/4c5e5238-0aef-11e8-a09e-8861893b1b1a_1320x770_130212.JPG
Li’s stature in the community rose after he spearheaded a fundraising campaign for a new temple. Photo: Thepaper.cn

Through it all, Li remained guarded. He discouraged people from taking his photograph and would communicate with the outside world only through his students, the report said.

Visitors were required to present their ID cards before entering the temple, and he even warned his students to be cautious when interacting with people from Guangdong, his hometown.

Meanwhile, the manhunt for Li by Guangzhou police had received a big boost from a digital age innovation: big data.

Police used computational analysis of extremely large data sets to track Li’s patterns over the years. The authorities declined to reveal exactly how they tracked him down, but in September 2016, the investigation determined that a certain abbot in rural China was likely to be Li.

https://cdn4.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/images/methode/2018/02/07/4b269060-0aef-11e8-a09e-8861893b1b1a_1320x770_130212.JPG
Li discouraged people from taking his photograph and would communicate with the outside world only through his students. Photo: Thepaper.cn

By now, Li was hiding in a two-storey house he had bought in a nearby village with a student.

He was finally arrested on December 28, after police traced him through interviews with various people he had interacted with from his time on the run, the report said.

Li was not the first murder suspect to be on the run while impersonating a monk and taking refuge in Buddhist temples.

In 2016, Zhang Liwei was arrested after fleeing his home province of Heilongjiang in northeastern China. Zhang had held jobs as a cook and ticket-seller before gaining a foothold as an abbot at a temple in Anhui province – and eventually being captured.

Zhang was unmasked only when he applied for a passport to travel abroad and submitted his fingerprints – which allegedly matched those of the wanted man.

GeneChing

03-06-2018, 09:12 AM

It has always fascinated me that Buddhists are perceived as so peaceful by Westerners. I imagine that comes from ignorance of Buddhist history.

Opinion Just How Vicious Buddhist Killer Monks Can Be (https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/asia-and-australia/.premium-just-how-vicious-buddhist-killer-monks-can-be-1.5867001)
Buddhism is perceived in the West as a peace-loving religion, but the horrific testimonies coming from Myanmar today are a salutary reminder that no group is immune from deteriorating into violence

Ofri Ilany Mar 04, 2018 3:16 AM

https://images.haarets.co.il/image/upload/w_1751,h_1020,x_21,y_184,c_crop,g_north_west/w_857,h_482,q_auto,c_fill,f_auto/fl_any_format.preserve_transparency.progressive:no ne/v1519940189/1.5867000.1003309274.jpg
A poster of Ashin Wirathu burns in a pro-Rohingya demonstration outside the Myanmar embassy in Jakarta in 2015.Achmad Ibrahim / AP

Last week, the German newspaper Die Zeit published a profile of the Buddhist monk Ashin Wirathu. One photograph showed him wearing a red robe, standing in front of a gilded shrine. The reporter, Erich Follath, described him as short and gentle, possessing a youthful smile and a melodious voice. Anyone who didn’t read the story itself might have thought it was about some method of Buddhist meditation, or was full of descriptions of infinite compassion.

However, the context of the piece was utterly different: Wirathu is the extremist leader of the Buddhist nationalist movement in Myanmar and the major inciter against the country’s Muslims. Since last summer, the country once known as Burma has carried out atrocities against members of its Muslim minority. The army surrounds their villages in the western part of the country, whose residents have been massacred and raped. In many locales only burnt houses remain; the others have been bulldozed off the face of the earth. About 650,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled their homes, mass graves are being unearthed and, according to Physicians Without Borders, some 10,000 have been killed.

In the article, Wirathu denies allegations that women have been raped, claiming that no soldier would even agree to touch a Muslim woman, because “her body is too repulsive.” In the past, he urged his followers to expel Muslims from Myanmar, adding that they are “less deserving of protection than mosquitoes.” He maintains that the Muslims – who constitute less than five percent of a total population of some 54 million – pose a demographic threat to the country.

Wirathu, who may be the most influential religious leader in Myanmar, has close connections with the military. He openly identifies with the global front of nationalism and with xenophobia. He congratulated Donald Trump on his election, and has expressed support for both Marine Le Pen and the far-right German party Pegida. “Perhaps Pegida will be the salvation of Germany one day, just as I am saving my homeland,” he said in the Die Zeit interview.

Although Buddhist political violence has recently reached extreme levels in Myanmar, the phenomenon itself is not new. Nor is it aimed only against Muslims. In Sri Lanka, Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, which is rife with racist elements, has flourished for a hundred years. Buddhist leaders there claim that pure Aryan blood flows in their veins – in contrast to their Hindu Tamil countrymen. In Thailand, Buddhist monks incited to the murder of communists, and in Japan four centuries ago, they led attacks against Christians. (In the 16th century, Buddhists in Japan were still executing Christians by means of crucifixion.)

In fact, it turns out that in almost every country that has a Buddhist majority, there have been outbreaks of violence led by religious leaders, many of them in recent decades. Nevertheless, no one has called on Buddhism to “take stock,” as is demanded frequently of Islam. Nor does anyone maintain that “Buddhism needs to undergo reformation” in order for it to adapt to the modern world.

For some reason, people are reluctant to see Buddhist violence as a concrete threat. In the West, Buddhism enjoys the image of a peace-loving, harmonious religion, opposed to all forms of coercion and free of the fanaticism and violence of the monotheistic faiths. But in recent months the atrocities being perpetrated in Buddhism’s name in Myanmar and elsewhere has stirred a trenchant discussion about the myth of nonviolence associated with the religion.

“This myth of Buddhist nonviolence is a product of Western fantasy,” Canadian journalist Hadani Ditmars wrote last September, in Maclean’s magazine, in reference to the horrors in Myanmar. The American scholar of political Buddhism Michael Jerryson noted last year, in the wake of a wave of Buddhist violence in Thailand, that the “popular narratives of passivity and victimhood in Western culture are blind to the diversity in Buddhism and its long history of violence.” Militant monks represent a long tradition in Buddhism, he added. Accordingly, it cannot be said that the Buddhists who support violence are “not true Buddhists,” as that would mean that a considerable proportion of the world’s genuine Buddhists are not really Buddhists.

It is more reasonable to argue that the philosophical-spiritual worldview sometimes called “Buddhism” is actually a Western invention. This is not to say that Buddhism is more violent than other faiths. But recent hostilities involving Buddhists prove that no group is immune to the potential to wield violence, even murderous violence, if it has the power to do so.

Ruffians and brutes

As Nietzsche once wrote, those who purport to desire weakness usually do so because they are perforce weak. In this sense, the only difference between Buddhism and Christianity, for example, is that due to historical circumstances, Christianity was able to attain a position of power. For that reason, the historical record of that religion includes atrocities such as the Rhineland massacres of 1096, the Inquisition and the annihilation of Native Americans. In its essence, Christianity is no more inclined to violence than other religions. In fact, when it first emerged, it was apparently the most submissive and nonviolent religion of all.

In fact, the stance of righteousness and moral purity – which sometimes stems from long periods of persecution, or life under oppression – is easily reversed and can morph into a particularly destructive outburst of holy violent rage. People who have become accustomed to seeing themselves as nice folks who aren’t capable of hurting a fly can sprout terrifying fangs and claws very fast.

Slightly over a century ago, communists were, for the most part, considered to be idealistic intellectuals who objected to the death penalty and cared for every living creature. But a few years of being in control were sufficient to demonstrate that communism could indeed be a murderous force.

And then there’s the Jews, of course. Until the early 20th century, a Jew bearing arms was considered a joke or a bizarre and exceptional phenomenon. But the Zionist project has already accustomed the world to the idea that people of this faith, too, can be ruffians, even brutes.

During Purim, we learn all manner of things from the reading of the Scroll of Esther. But perhaps the most striking message it conveys is that the moment the Jews were given power, even for just a few days, they immediately set about killing tens of thousands of Persians.

Buddhists, Jews, queers, Yazidis, Armenians and women – all these groups are often portrayed as essentially peaceful. In fact, those who do not possess power cannot effectively wield violence, and that’s a situation that can change the moment a group seizes control of the government, or even part of it.

Ofri Ilany
Haaretz Contributor

GeneChing

06-19-2018, 11:18 AM

MAY 24, 2018 / 12:13 AM / A MONTH AGO
Thailand arrests senior monks in temple raids to clean up Buddhism (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-thailand-buddhism/thailand-arrests-senior-monks-in-temple-raids-to-clean-up-buddhism-idUSKCN1IP0X3)
Reuters Staff

3 MIN READ

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thai police raided four Buddhist temples on Thursday, arresting several prominent monks and worshippers in the year’s biggest such operation amid a crackdown on illegal financial dealings by temples.

http://s4.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20180524&t=2&i=1265418630&r=LYNXNPEE4N0L9&w=1280
Phra Phrom Dilok, 72, a member of the Sangha Supreme Council is escorted by police officers at the Thai Police Crime Suppression Division headquarters in Bangkok, Thailand, May 24, 2018. REUTERS/Stringer

The raids are the military government’s latest bid to reform Buddhism, which is followed by more than 90 percent of Thailand’s population of 69 million, but whose image has been tarnished by money and sex scandals involving monks.

“This is the investigation stage... it will all come down to facts and evidence,” police official Thitiraj Nhongharnpitak, of the Central Investigation Bureau, which is investigating the monks, told reporters.

More than 100 police commandos raided four temples in Bangkok, the capital, and the adjacent central province of Nakhon Pathom, in the early hours of Thursday.

http://s1.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20180524&t=2&i=1265418634&r=LYNXNPEE4N0LA&w=1200
An unidentified assistant abbot of Golden Mount Temple is escorted by police officers at the Thai Police Crime Suppression Division headquarters in Bangkok, Thailand, May 24, 2018. REUTERS/Stringer

Among those arrested was Phra Buddha Issara, 62, an activist monk who led street protests in 2014 and launched a campaign to clean up Buddhism, but gained enemies by publicly naming other religious leaders he accused of wrongdoing.

Buddha Issara was formally stripped of his position as a monk and sent to Bangkok remand prison to await trial on charges of robbery, forgery, and illegal detention of officials during the protests, his lawyer, Theerayuth Suwankaesorn, told Reuters.

Phra Phrom Dilok, 72, a member of the Sangha Supreme Council, which governs Buddhist monks in Thailand, was also arrested over alleged embezzlement of temple funds, police said.

Two other senior monks, Phra Sri Khunaporn and Phra Wichit Thammaporn, both assistant abbots of Bangkok’s Golden Mount temple, were also arrested over alleged embezzlement, they added.

Representatives of the three monks did not immediately respond to Reuters’ telephone calls to seek comment.

Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwan said the arrests were about getting to the bottom of the allegations.

“This is part of the investigation,” Prawit said.

Thailand’s temples, which earn billions of dollars every year from donations, have been embroiled in scandals ranging from murder, sex and drugs to shady financial dealings.

Under pressure from the junta, Thailand’s body of Buddhist monks has been trying to clean up its own act since last year, by enforcing tougher discipline for more than 300,000 monks.

The military took power in a 2014 coup it said was needed to restore order after months of anti-government protests, and has promised to hold elections next year, despite postponing the date several times.

Buddhist monks are highly respected in Thailand and taking action against them was historically considered taboo. But recent scandals have forced authorities to rethink how they handle allegations against Buddhist religious leaders.

Reporting by Panu Wongcha-um, Panarat Thepgumpanat, and Aukkarapon Niyomyat; Editing by Amy Sawitta Lefevre and Clarence Fernandez
If only we would do this here with Christianity. :eek:;)

GeneChing

06-29-2018, 07:52 AM

https://cdn4.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/2000x792/public/images/methode/2018/06/22/a5f6877e-7445-11e8-aa4d-d2a0e82fc143_4000x1584_213147.jpg?itok=dDJJxsXt

BLOOD SUTRA: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BUDDHISM, RELIGION OF PEACE AND COMPASSION? (http://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/2152083/blood-sutra-whatever-happened-buddhism-religion-peace-and)
The emergence of radical groups like the MaBaTha that promote a Buddhism based on racial and national identity is fuelling violence across the region

BY PAUL FULLER
23 JUN 2018

https://cdn2.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/landscape/public/images/methode/2018/06/22/ab3c0e16-7445-11e8-aa4d-d2a0e82fc143_1280x720_213147.jpg?itok=rzLvXreL

Tolerance and compassion may be the qualities most often associated with Buddhism. But Asia has been witnessing a spate of violence as new Buddhist movements emerge across the region based on the idea that the religion is under threat and needs protection. Fuelled by a particularly strong sense of Buddhist identity collated with national and ethnic anxieties, this form of Buddhism – based on a localised form of the religion – evokes a rhetoric of intolerance and discrimination that justifies behaviour in stark contrast to the traditional image of peace and enlightenment.

https://cdn2.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/images/methode/2018/06/22/b6a66e22-7445-11e8-aa4d-d2a0e82fc143_1320x770_213147.jpg
Myanmar police prepare for a rally by the hardline Buddhist group MaBaTha at the US embassy. Photo: AFP

In Myanmar, where thousands of Muslim Rohingya have been massacred in the past year triggering an exodus, Buddhist groups have been reacting in radical ways to questions of identity. The most prominent reaction has been from a movement known as the Amyo Barthar Thathanar (Organisation to Protect Race and Religion), often known by the Burmese acronym MaBaTha. Led by prominent Buddhist monk Ashin Wirathu, this group has been rebranded as the Buddha Dhamma Parahita Foundation (Foundation for the Welfare of Buddhism) and enjoys widespread support.

The MaBaTha grew out of various groups including an earlier nationwide organisation within Myanmar known as the 969 Movement.

The 969 Movement encouraged Burmese citizens to frequent only Buddhist-owned businesses and purchase goods displaying the group’s symbol, which signified that the premises were owned by Buddhists. This symbol is the Buddhist or sasana flag, with the Burmese digits 969 superimposed on it.

https://cdn2.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/images/methode/2018/06/22/972a2264-7445-11e8-aa4d-d2a0e82fc143_1320x770_213147.jpg
The flag of the 969 Movement. Photo: Internet

Groups like the MaBaTha and the 969 movement are part of a phenomenon in which Theravada Buddhism, the school of Buddhism practised in South and Southeast Asia, is used as an ideological vehicle with racial and national identity as its core. This has led to conflicts based upon the conflation of ethnic and religious identities and a rhetoric of intolerance, discrimination and, very often, an overt form of Islamophobia. This is not the Buddhism of the Pali Canon, or of the popular imagination. It is a Buddhism in which the preservation and defence of Buddhism (the sasana) is more important than cultivating wisdom, calm and compassion.

This does not conform to the idea of Buddhism cherished in the popular imagination. However, if we put aside our romantic idea of Buddhism, how surprised should we be by these emerging Buddhist narratives? There is little historical evidence for an egalitarian, liberal, multicultural and secular Buddhist society other than in this imagined version of Buddhism. This is not to suggest that the extremism of MaBaTha-type movements might ever have been normal in Buddhist culture, but it would be wrong to deny that narratives of ethnic and religious identity have indeed been important factors in Buddhist societies. Over time, these have created complex Buddhist cultures that do not conform to our simplistic ideas of Buddhism.

https://cdn1.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/images/methode/2018/06/22/bbb786f8-7445-11e8-aa4d-d2a0e82fc143_1320x770_213147.jpg
Myanmar police guard the US embassy during a rally by supporters of the hardline Buddhist group MaBaTha in Yangon. Photo: AFP

When Buddhists act in a violent way, or one that supports ethnic distinctions, this is usually supposed to be a deviation from “authentic Buddhism”. This authenticity is challenged severely by the rise of Buddhist extremism in Myanmar, which demands a new vocabulary to understand this phenomenon – one that uses terms not readily associated with Buddhism. Descriptions of Buddhist violence, Buddhist nationalism, prejudice and discrimination are all ideas which form part of Buddhist extremism. These notions now need to be accepted if we are to understand Buddhism in modern Asia.

https://cdn4.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/images/methode/2018/06/22/b1c60f98-7445-11e8-aa4d-d2a0e82fc143_1320x770_213147.jpg
MaBaTha supporters in Yangon. Photo: AFP

In Myanmar and wider Buddhist Asia, the notion of national and ethnic identity and shared cultural and ethnic characteristics distinguishing Buddhists from non-Buddhists can be used in a number of ways. For example, in Thailand there is the idea of “nation, religion, monarch” and in Myanmar “nation, language and religion”. In both cases, the idea of adherence and allegiance to Buddhism is linked to other factors in the formation of identity. The defence of one’s religion is linked to these other themes of national and ethnic identity. To defend one is to defend the other.

https://cdn1.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/images/methode/2018/06/22/e967bd44-7449-11e8-aa4d-d2a0e82fc143_1320x770_213147.jpg
Ultra-nationalist monk Ashin Wirathu. Photo: AFP

The threat to Buddhism in much of Buddhist Asia is perceived to come from Islam. Buddhist leaders like Ashin Wirathu promote themselves as defenders of Buddhism. These self-proclaimed protectors of Buddhism can use arguments to justify why they can act in aggressive ways to defend Buddhist institutions. This protection of Buddhism is key in the recent Burmese discourse about the relationship of Buddhism and national identity, making it both a rallying call of Burmese Buddhist nationalists and a key element in what it means to be Burmese.

Some Buddhist leaders have justified violence against non-Buddhists. Sitagu Sayadaw is one of the most respected religious leaders in Myanmar, known for his teachings and for his philanthropic work. In a recent sermon, he clearly intended to suggest that the killing of those who are not Buddhist is justified on the grounds that those who do not follow Buddhist precepts and do not take refuge in the Buddha, his teachings and the monastic community, are less than human. Violence is justified if those persecuted are not Buddhists.

The seeds of such violence are embedded in Buddhist texts and doctrines themselves. For example, Buddhist religious texts state the Buddha’s teachings are subject to decline and will disappear at a specific point in history. This lends itself to the need to preserve Buddhism for future generations and defend it against attack. There is also the textual idea that a pure version of Buddhism, existing in a particular geographical location, must be defended, and this includes protecting Buddhism against insult and disrespect. This all leads to an urgency to protect and defend Buddhism, and to the possibility of Buddhist violence. So far the target of this supposed Buddhist backlash has primarily been Islam, but other minority groups are not immune either. In Myanmar, apart from the Rohingya, there are also reports of genocidal attacks on Christian Kachins.

It seems likely that extremist Buddhist movements will continue to flourish in Myanmar. Their arguments are used by nationalist movements to create a populist mix of patriotism and religious allegiance. They have very real currency on the political stage and are likely to play an important part in the 2020 elections in Myanmar.

The bloodbaths in Myanmar, the sporadic attacks on minorities in Sri Lanka, and the assertions of Buddhist identity in Thailand that we have been witnessing of late may only be the rumblings of a more muscular form of Buddhism that Asia will have to learn to live with, as the world comes to grips with a new idea of Buddhism.

Paul Fuller is a lecturer in Buddhist Studies at Cardiff University, UK, and author of The Notion of Ditthi in Theravada Buddhism

There have always been extremist Buddhist movements. Every religion preaches peace and compassion.

GeneChing

07-16-2018, 08:23 AM

The ‘King’ of Shambhala Buddhism Is Undone by Abuse Report (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/nyregion/shambhala-sexual-misconduct.html)

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/07/12/nyregion/11shambhala01/merlin_141009645_42f4b8c4-ba51-47be-a656-544ba241cc5e-jumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp
A photo of Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, the leader of Shambhala International, sits on a throne reserved for him inside the group’s New York center, but he has taken leave amid charges of sexual abuse. Credit Gabriella Angotti-Jones/The New York Times
By Andy Newman
July 11, 2018

In a shrine on the sixth floor of a Manhattan office building, a photo of a man in golden robes hangs above an altar. Another photo of him sits upon a throne.

He is the head of one of the largest Buddhist organizations in the West, Shambhala International, a network of more than 200 outposts in over 30 countries where thousands come for training in meditation and mindfulness and some delve into deeper mysteries.

The man is Mipham Rinpoche. He is known as the Sakyong, a Tibetan word that translates roughly as king, and his students take vows to follow him that are binding across lifetimes. These days, they are feeling sad, confused, angry and betrayed.

Late last month, a former Shambhala teacher released a report alleging that the Sakyong had sexually abused and exploited some of his most devoted female followers for years. Women quoted in the report wrote of drunken groping and forcefully extracted sexual favors. The report said that senior leaders at Shambhala — an organization whose motto is “Making Enlightened Society Possible” — knew of the Sakyong’s misconduct and covered it up.

The Sakyong apologized a few days before the report was formally released, admitting to “relationships” with women in the community, some of whom “shared experiences of feeling harmed as a result.” Followers and Shambhala groups around the world demanded more action.

On Friday, it came: The governing council of Shambhala International, which is based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, resigned en masse, “in the interest of beginning a healing process for our community.”

That night, the Sakyong, 55, took leave from running Shambhala as an outside firm investigates abuse allegations against him and other Shambhala teachers. He would, the announcement stated, “enter a period of self-reflection.”

The Sakyong is not only another executive or religious leader dethroned by #MeToo, but the sole holder of the most sacred teachings in a custody chain that goes back centuries, the only one who can transmit them, according to the traditions of his lineage.

A few days before the Sakyong stepped aside, Ramoes Gaston, a volunteer at the Manhattan center, on West 22nd Street, who has studied Shambhala for eight years, said the revelations had ripped his world apart.

“I don’t want it to be exposed,” Mr. Gaston said. “But it has to be exposed.”

The downfall of a Buddhist leader in the West accused of sexual impropriety has become its own sorry tradition. Last year, Lama Norlha Rinpoche, who founded a monastery in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., retired after allegations of sexual misconduct. So did Sogyal Rinpoche, author of “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,” who was accused of decades of sexual assaults and violent rage. In the Zen tradition, fallen masters include Joshu Sasaki and Eido Shimano, two of the leading proponents of Zen in America.

In Shambhala, bad behavior runs in the bloodline. The organization was founded by the Sakyong’s Tibet-born father, Chögyam Trungpa, a wildly charismatic man, brilliant teacher and embodiment of the concept known as “crazy wisdom” whose alcoholic exploits and womanizing were well known. He died in 1987. In between Chögyam Trungpa and the Sakyong, Shambhala was led by an American-born Buddhist who is mainly remembered for having sex with students even after he knew that he had AIDS.

The hyperconcentration of authority in the most revered teachers of Tibetan Buddhism lends itself to abuse, said Lama Tsultrim Allione, one of the first American women to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist nun and a former member of Chögyam Trungpa’s group who knew the Sakyong when he was a child.

“One is told that one must see the lama as the Buddha and that anything the lama does is perfect and that whatever might seem wrong with it, that is your impure vision. This can be a transformative practice, but only when the lama is truly awake,” said Lama Tsultrim, who leads a Buddhist center in Colorado and just published a book, “Wisdom Rising: Journey Into the Mandala of the Empowered Feminine.”

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/07/12/nyregion/12shambhala/merlin_141001437_ba5a5254-0a41-4184-99fa-3fdcbc629b2b-jumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp
The Sakyong, with his fiancée, Khandro Tseyang, in 2006, has apologized to his followers, admitting to “relationships” with women in the community. He said he would enter “a period of self-reflection.”Credit Andrew Vaughan/CP, via Associated Press

In Shambhala, Lama Tsultrim said, “the level of institutionalized hierarchy is quite extraordinary,” with the Sakyong functioning “sort of like a divine king.” His inner circle, with its ministers and attendants, is called the “court.” He has a personal flag that local centers can buy for $350, to fly when he visits.

The woman behind the exposé, Andrea Winn, grew up in the Shambhala community in Halifax and says that she and many other children were sexually abused by adults in the community.

In early 2017 — months before #MeToo became a cultural phenomenon — she began a yearlong effort, “Project Sunshine,” to gather accounts by survivors of the abuse. The resulting report, published in February, prompted Shambhala International to announce “an effort to address issues of past harm in our community.”

The Sakyong praised survivors for “bravery and courage” in speaking out, without mentioning any misconduct of his own. But the report also prompted women who said they had been abused by the Sakyong to come forward, providing material for the second report, released June 28.

One woman wrote that for years, before he was married, the Sakyong would kiss and grope her when he got drunk. Like many women around the Sakyong, she desperately hoped to become his wife, she wrote, and she rationalized his boorishness by telling herself that the Sakyong was trying to show her “the patterns of my own poverty mentality and grasping.”

Another woman wrote that the Sakyong summoned her one night and when she refused to have sex with him, he pushed her face toward his ***** and said, “You might as well finish this.” She wrote, “I was so embarrassed and horrified I did it.” A third woman wrote that the Sakyong groped her in 2011, after his daughter’s first birthday party.

Yet another woman came forward on Tuesday and said that at a dinner in Chile in 2002, a drunken Sakyong pulled her into the bathroom and locked and blocked the door.

“He started to grope me and try to undress me,” the woman said by phone, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “I was like ‘No, no, I have a boyfriend.’ He said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’” She said the Sakyong grabbed her hand and put it on his ***** through his robe before she escaped.

With the exception of the 2011 episode, the allegations against the Sakyong date from before 2006. They were vetted by a retired employment lawyer, Carol Merchasin, who contacted Ms. Winn after the first report was released. Ms. Merchasin said she found all the accounts to be credible.

The Sakyong would not comment on the accounts “out of respect for the integrity of the independent investigation,” said his lawyer, Michael Scott.

Ms. Winn, 50, a leadership coach based in Halifax, said of the council’s resignation and the Sakyong’s stepping aside: “It came as a surprise, and as a huge relief. Now I feel that there’s this possibility for healing.”

Local centers are dealing with the fallout in their own ways. At a center in New Haven, the Sakyong’s photo has been taken down.

At a meeting at the New York center last week, several people who had found refuge in Shambhala from their own histories of addiction and sexual abuse said they no longer felt safe, and a teacher, Kevin Bogle, resigned in protest.

“I have been livid this entire week from the news that has been reported and the harm that has been committed,” he told the gathering.

Many of the Sakyong’s followers are praying for him. Mr. Gaston of the New York center said that when he sees the Sakyong’s photo above the altar, he thinks about the pain the Sakyong must have been in that would have led him to cause such harm to others. “With every breath I exhale,” he said, “I hope that some of my mercy is communicated to him.”

Follow Andy Newman on Twitter: @andylocal
Aaron Robertson contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on July 11, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Women Allege Abuse, and a Buddhist ‘King’ Falls

Wow. What a blow to Shambhala International.

GeneChing

08-02-2018, 01:50 PM

HEALTH
China investigates high-ranking Buddhist monk accused of coercing nuns into sex (https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2158046/china-investigates-high-ranking-buddhist-monk-accused-coercing)
Abbot of the Longquan Temple on the outskirts of Beijing denies allegations, saying they stemmed from ‘fabricated material’ and ‘distorted facts’
PUBLISHED : Thursday, 02 August, 2018, 8:50pm
UPDATED : Thursday, 02 August, 2018, 10:11pm
Reuters

https://cdn1.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/980x551/public/images/methode/2018/08/02/d840fc1a-964f-11e8-acb0-2eccab85240c_1280x720_205417.JPG?itok=DVt7_1Ks

China’s religious affairs administration said on Thursday it would investigate claims a high-ranking Buddhist monk sexually harassed nuns and coerced them into sex, the latest case of a prominent figure accused of sexual misconduct in the country.

Xuecheng, the abbot of the well-known Longquan Temple on the outskirts of Beijing, has denied the allegations and on Wednesday night posted a statement from the temple on Weibo – China’s Twitter-like service – saying the allegations stemmed from “fabricated material” and “distorted facts”.

Why Chinese women don’t speak out about sexual harassment in the workplace
The claims made against Xuecheng, who also heads the Buddhist Association of China and is a member of the Communist Party’s top political advisory body, were outlined in a 95-page document prepared by two former monks at the monastery.

The document swiftly went viral on Chinese social media on Tuesday amid a wave of other allegations that has stoked heated debate and seen China’s fledgling #MeToo movement gain momentum and widen to different aspects of society despite government pressure and censorship.

Included in the document were extensive details and screenshots of explicit text messages allegedly sent by Xuecheng, including claims to nuns that they could be “purified” through the physical contact and that sex was part of their study of religious doctrines.

The monastery, in its statement, acknowledged that the document was prepared by the two former monks and that it reserved the right to take legal action against them.

China’s State Administration for Religious Affairs said in a statement that it had started an investigation and was treating it as a matter of “high importance”.

The Chinese Buddhist Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The global #MeToo movement was triggered by accusations by dozens of women against US film producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconduct, including rape, triggering a wider scandal that has roiled Hollywood and beyond. Weinstein has denied having non-consensual sex with anyone.

The catalyst for a Chinese #MeToo-style movement came in December last year when a US-based Chinese software engineer published a blog post accusing a professor at a Beijing university of sexual harassment.

In China, the hashtag #MeToo has so far appeared more than 77 million times on Weibo, although most the posts with that hashtag are not viewable.

THREADS:
An Open Secret: Hollywood - Please Watch (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70520)
Buddhists behaving badly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68723-Buddhists-behaving-badly)

David Jamieson

08-07-2018, 01:15 PM

Even within Christian churches, a lot of this stuff is cosplay and money grubbing.
I personally find the overtly religious to be somewhat off-putting and of not much actual use to themselves or society.
But, I can only watch my own little square of the world here. :)

GeneChing

08-23-2018, 03:33 AM

Police probe sexual misconduct claims against Chinese monk (https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/wireStory/police-open-probe-sexual-misconduct-claims-monk-57349324)
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BEIJING — Aug 23, 2018, 4:28 AM ET

https://s.abcnews.com/images/Lifestyle/WireAP_8765308bb0444ef3896f655300d544fd_12x5_992.j pg
FILE - In this July 3, 2015, file photo, Abbot Xuecheng of the Beijing Longquan Temple poses for a photo in one of the temple buildings in Beijing, China. According to a statement issued Thursday, Aug. 23, 2018, Chinese police have opened an investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against one of the country's best-known Buddhist monks whose case has highlighted the growth of the #MeToo movement in China. (Chinatopix via AP, File)

Chinese police have opened an investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against one of the country's best-known Buddhist monks whose case has highlighted the growth of the #MeToo movement in China.

A statement issued by the State Religious Affairs Administration on Thursday said police were investigating claims of sexual assault by Xuecheng. It said he also faces censure from the official government-backed Buddhist Association on suspicion of "violating Buddhist precepts."

Xuecheng has denied the claims but earlier this month resigned as head of the Buddhist Association.

Fellow monks accused him of harassing and demanding sexual favors from nuns at his monastery in the outskirts of northwestern Beijing, as well as embezzling funds. Their accusations, including testimony from alleged victims, were posted online, prompting a public outcry and unusual coverage by state media.

A small but increasing number of academics, civil society activists and one of China's best-known television hosts have been called out for inappropriate sexual behavior.

In addition to heading the Buddhist Association, Xuecheng was an influential political adviser to the central government. His monastery, Longquan, is popular with educated Chinese, including many who give up high-paying jobs to devote their lives to religious study.

China has roughly 250 million Buddhists whose religion has suffered varying degrees of repression under the officially atheist Communist government. That number is likely growing fast as some young Chinese turn increasingly spiritual and retreat to temples and monasteries.

Not all is so Zen-like, however. Some leading monks have been criticized for embracing China's rampant commercialism, among them Shi Yongxin, abbot of the Shaolin Temple famed for its fighting monks.

Shi was accused by subordinates in 2015 of keeping mistresses and embezzling monastery funds while he jet-setted around the world seeking sponsorship and real estate deals for the 1,500-year-old cradle of kung fu.

The religious affairs bureau statement said Xuecheng's temple is also under investigation for putting up buildings without construction permits. Authorities are also looking into the issue of "the whereabouts of a large amount of funds," it said.

Even within Christian churches, a lot of this stuff is cosplay and money grubbing.
I personally find the overtly religious to be somewhat off-putting and of not much actual use to themselves or society.
But, I can only watch my own little square of the world here. :) Well, sure. That's true about any position of power, and especially poignant in lieu of the Pope's recent response to sexual abuse within the Catholic church (https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2018-08/pope-francis-letter-people-of-god-sexual-abuse.html). As you know, David, I was just in Italy too, and I was actually inside the Vatican when this statement was released this week. There was a terrific thunderstorm as I was in the Sistine and the Basilica. It was awesome, in the true meaning of the word.

GeneChing

08-29-2018, 07:39 AM

"So much for the notion that all Buddhists are extraordinarily peaceful…" <- This is exactly what I'm on about with this thread. There's this weird Western stereotype about Buddhists that they are somehow more peaceful than other organized religions, but in truth, Buddhism is as old a Christianity and suffers from similar issues of corruption, just like any longstanding powerful institution.

Regardless, this is a pretty horrible story.

Buddhist Monk Beats 9-Year-Old Boy to Death During Prayer Session (http://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2018/08/25/buddhist-monk-beats-9-year-old-boy-to-death-during-prayer-session/)
BY DAVID G. MCAFEE
AUGUST 25, 2018

A Buddhist monk from Thailand killed a nine-year-old boy by beating him after the child was disruptive during a prayer session.

So much for the notion that all Buddhists are extraordinarily peaceful…

http://wp.production.patheos.com/subdomain/sites/8/2018/08/shutterstock_1115605379.jpg

The monk, 64-year-old Suphachai Suthiyano, reportedly “flew into a rage” during a prayer gathering when the child, Wattanapol Sisawad, disrupted the ceremony by being “playful.” The monk used a bamboo stick to assault the boy several times before slamming his head into a pillar, killing him.

The child fell into a coma and passed away late Thursday, a hospital worker at Kanchanaburi provincial hospital told AFP on Friday, requesting anonymity.

The incident comes as Thailand, a majority-Buddhist country, grapples with multiple other scandals among its clergy, including cases of extortion, sex and drug use.

The suspect, who was defrocked on Sunday following his arrest, was charged earlier this week with assault.

Police Captain Amnaj Chunbult said the charge will be revised to “assault resulting in death” once he receives official confirmation.

This isn’t the only scandal involving Buddhist monks, according to AFP. Other incidents have dealt with extortion, sex, and drugs. In Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), for example, there is a long history of Buddhist violence against the Rohingya Muslims.

There’s also an ongoing effort by social media companies to tamp down hate speech in Myanmar, much of which comes from extremist Buddhist monks.

Facebook has identified and removed several hate figures and groups from the platform, including the extremist Buddhist monks Ashin Wirathu, Parmaukkha and Thuseitta, known for hate speech against Rohingya. It has also deleted pages linked to the monk-led nationalist group Ma Ba Tha — the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion.

Outside of Myanmar, Thailand has its own issues. In the case of Sisawad, the young boy who was killed by an angry Buddhist monk, his mother has said she “will not forgive” the killer. Sisawad was a Buddhist novice, a popular role for many of the men and boys who spend time in a monastery of some sort.

This isn’t even the only crime committed by a Thai Buddhist monk in recent history.

Earlier this month, Thailand’s infamous “jet-set monk” — so-called after footage emerged of him carrying a Louis Vuitton bag on a private jet — was sentenced to 114 years in prison for money-laundering and fraud.

In May the abbot of the popular “Golden Mount” temple in Bangkok surrendered to police after $4 million was found in bank accounts in his name.

The case came on the heels of an ongoing investigation into whether the National Office of Buddhism had misused millions of dollars under its control.

Authorities last year floated the idea of introducing digitised ID cards to better track monks with criminal convictions.

Move over Catholic Church. You’ve got company.

As we’ve seen far too often when religious leaders hold power in a particular country, corrupt individuals representing that faith continue to break laws. In this case, the crime led to a young boy’s death.

(Thanks to Jeff for the link)

GeneChing

09-19-2018, 07:56 AM

UM Buddhism professor charged with assault (http://www.montanakaimin.com/news/um-buddhism-professor-charged-with-assault/article_06230d50-b86d-11e8-a44a-8f6b82a4ad60.html)
Ryan OConnell Sep 14, 2018

https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/montanakaimin.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/8/20/8203c090-b86d-11e8-bc4e-7bc399fb822e/5b9c366919b05.image.jpg
Bradley Steven Clough
Photo courtesy Missoula County Jail Roster

A professor at the University of Montana was charged with assault and booked into jail last Saturday after allegedly punching a bouncer in the stomach at a Jason Isbell concert.

Associate professor Bradley Clough, who currently teaches classes on Buddhism and yoga, pleaded not guilty to one count of misdemeanor assault on Sept. 12, stemming from a Sept. 8 altercation at the Kettlehouse Amphitheater when, according to court documents, a security guard asked Clough to leave a private booth.

According to the affidavit, Clough “became agitated and began screaming vulgarities” at the security guard. The bouncer reportedly attempted to grab Clough, and Clough “punched [him] in the stomach” before attempting to flee. Clough was apprehended by the same guard.

Clough, when approached twice in his office on campus, declined to comment, and instead referred the Kaimin to speak to his attorney, Brian West. After the Kaimin left a voicemail and sent an email to West, the lawyer declined to comment “on a client’s pending case” through an email.

The misdemeanor is punishable by up to six months in jail and up to a $500 fine. According to the Missoula County Jail Roster webpage, Clough was also charged with felony probation violation when booked, though documents elaborating that charge were not immediately available.

Clough’s next hearing is scheduled for Nov. 21.

Clough is a professor in the Global Humanities and Religions department, and has worked at UM since 2008, according to his curriculum vitae. According to Academic Planner, he is teaching two 3-credit courses this semester: Buddhism and A History of Yoga East & West.

On May 24, in a separate case, Clough pleaded guilty to felony criminal endangerment and received a 10 year suspended sentence. According to court documents related to that case, a bystander saw Clough’s vehicle driving erratically on Nov. 8, 2017, and called 9-1-1. An officer observed the vehicle and initiated a stop. Clough was unable to perform a field sobriety test, but a preliminary breath test showed there was no alcohol in his system, according to a court affidavit.

Clough told the officer he may have taken too much Clonazepam, according to charging documents, a prescription drug used to treat seizures, anxiety and panic disorder.

Stipulations of that sentence included complying with all laws and prohibited use or possession of alcoholic beverages and illegal drugs, as well as not visiting bars or casinos, according to court documents.

Documents from the criminal endangerment case stated Clough had previous DUI convictions from June 1997, November 2001, November 2008 and August 2015.

Paul Hamby contributed reporting to this story.

Many of us gravitate to religion for therapy. Doesn't always work. :(

GeneChing

10-17-2018, 03:08 PM

Thai monk sentenced for raping teen girl he impregnated (http://www.startribune.com/thai-monk-sentenced-for-raping-13-year-old-he-impregnated/497776931/)
By KAWEEWIT KAEWJINDA Associated Press OCTOBER 17, 2018 — 5:55AM

BANGKOK — A Thai court on Wednesday sentenced a former Buddhist monk known for his jet-set lifestyle to 16 years in prison for raping a young teenage girl who he also impregnated.

Wirapol Sukphol became infamous when he appeared in a 2013 YouTube video in his monk's robe aboard a private jet wearing aviator sunglasses with a Louis Vuitton carry-on by his side.

He was defrocked amid accusations that he had sexual relations with women — a major violation of the precepts guiding monks' behavior — and had impregnated one. Because of the furor, he fled to the United States, where he was arrested in 2016 and extradited last year.

On Wednesday, the Ratchada Criminal Court in Bangkok handed Wirapol two eight-year prison terms, one for abducting a minor under 15 and another for rape.

Wirapol is already serving a lengthy prison sentence. In August, the same court sentenced him to 114 years in connection with funds he fraudulently raised from followers. He was found guilty of fraud, money laundering and violation of the computer crime act for spending money he had solicited for Buddhist statuary and temple improvements instead on cars and luxury goods.

Legal technicalities capped the 114-year sentence at 20 years, meaning he will now serve a 36-year prison sentence.

Wednesday's court ruling said prosecutors charged that Wirapol abducted a 14-year-old girl and sexually assaulted her from January 2000 to the middle of 2001, during which time she also became pregnant.

The victim, now 32, said she was satisfied with Wednesday's sentencing. She said she would present the ruling to the Sisaket Juvenile and Family Court, where she has filed a lawsuit against Wirapol requesting 40 million baht ($1.2 million) in child support in a case the court had put on hold pending Wednesday's ruling. She said Wirapol had initially provided her 10,000 baht per month to take care of their child but he gradually stopped the payments.

According to Thailand's Department of Special Investigation, Wirapol at one point had accumulated assets estimated at 1 billion baht ($30.1 million). During a shopping spree from 2009 to 2011, he bought 22 Mercedes Benz cars worth 95 million baht ($2.9 million), the department said.

An earlier civil court ruling ordered the confiscation of 43.5 million baht ($1.3 million) from Wirapol.

Should've kept it at 114 years. That would've spilled over into his next life.

GeneChing

11-21-2018, 10:04 AM

Taiwanese Buddhist monk caught doing drugs, throwing sex parties (https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3580359)
Monks gone wild: Buddhist monk caught making porn videos, throwing sex parties, taking drugs in western Taiwan
By Keoni Everington,Taiwan News, Staff Writer
2018/11/21 17:06

https://tnimage.taiwannews.com.tw/photos/shares/5bf5268851fb0.jpg
Master Kaihung. (Image from buddhistcompassion.org)

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) -- News has surfaced of a Buddhist monk in western Taiwan caught breaking every monastic vow in the book, including allegedly taking drugs, filming pornographic videos, and throwing sex parties.

Police in Miaoli County yesterday (Nov. 20) arrested a 29-year-old Buddhist monk identified as Master Kaihung (開泓法師), who's birth name was Hsieh Jen-hao (謝仁豪), for possessing illegal drugs, among other suspected crimes. The list of alleged impious acts committed by the monk has been described by Liberty Times as one of the biggest scandals within Taiwan's Buddhist community in many years.

When Miaoli police arrived at the Chongfo Temple (崇佛寺) yesterday with a search warrant, they were blocked from entering by four monks, who shouted to Kaihung to hide in another room. Kaihung then locked himself inside the room, but it was not long before a man surnamed Chen (陳) unlocked the door.

Once police entered the room, they first encountered a startled-looking Kaihung playing with a smart phone. Inside his wardrobe they found 19 grams of amphetamines, pipes, erection medication, anal relaxants, ultra thin condoms, and a container of Tapeijou holy water (大悲咒水) filled with sexual lubricant, reported Liberty Times.

In addition, police found two USB flash drives which contained "male-on-male sex videos," drug use, nude photos of men, and footage of sex with men, according to the report. All told, the flash drives are believed to contain over 200 GB of pornographic material.

Because Kaihung and Chen were in the room where the amphetamines were found, both were brought in for questioning on suspicion of violating drug laws. After questioning the men, police transferred them to the Prosecutor's Office on charges of violating the Narcotics Hazard Prevention Act (毒品危害防制條例).

After a court hearing, the judge ordered that Kaihung be released on NT$100,000 bail, while Chen was released without bail.

According to Liberty Times, Kaihung converted to Buddhism at the age of 14 and followed the late Master Chihhai (智海法師) in the Tongshan Temple. At the time he was considered "talented and intelligent," but after the death of his master, his behavior started to change.

As he grew older, he became involved in drugs and started bringing back other monks to engage in sexual acts, and eventually he was asked to leave the Tongshan Temple. Over two months ago, Monks at the Chongfa temple took him in. However, he again began to stray from the path and started to abuse drugs and hold "sex parties." Eventually, the monks at Chongfa had had enough and informed the Miaoli police.

https://tnimage.taiwannews.com.tw/photos/shares/5bf51ab808fc2.jpg
Police searching temple for evidence. (CNA image)

But was he eating meat? :p

Too soon? Come on, it's Thanksgiving (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?7130-Happy-Thanksgiving) tomorrow. The American anti-vegetarian anti-native holiday. :o

GeneChing

11-29-2018, 09:47 AM

Explicit videos of up-and-coming Buddhist monk’s meth-fueled gay sex parties at temple leaked (https://shanghai.ist/2018/11/22/explicit-videos-of-up-and-coming-buddhist-monks-meth-fueled-gay-sex-parties-at-temple-leaked/)
The 29-year-old Buddhist youth leader is said to have lured other monks back to his room with drugs and seduced them into having sex
by Alex Linder November 22, 2018 in News

https://i0.wp.com/shanghai.ist/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/monk-sex.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1

For one prominent Buddhist monk in Taiwan, life in the temple wasn’t all meditation, prayer, and self-sacrifice.

Footage has been published online showing 29-year-old Master Kai Hung cavorting in ways not typically associated with one who has donned the monk’s robe. In one clip, Kai Hung is seen tumbling around naked with another nude man in a bed and smoking meth. In another, he rambles, obviously stoned out of his mind, to the camera, babbling incoherently about how much he loves his “husband.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjCuCMl2aJE

The shocking footage was published on Tuesday morning by Taiwan news outlet Mirror Media. Later that day, police arrived at the Chongfo Temple in Miaoli county where Kai Hung was residing. According to a report from Liberty Times, other monks tried to prevent officers from entering the temple, talking loudly to give him a chance to hide.

However, Kai Hung was eventually discovered hiding out inside of a room that also contained 19 grams of amphetamine tablets, smoking pipes, aphrodisiacs, anal relaxants, condoms, and a bottle of holy water which was filled with lube. Police also found a pair of USB flash drives which contained over 200 GB of pornographic material including photos of nude men and gay sex videos, some of which were homemade and starred Kai Hung himself.

https://i2.wp.com/shanghai.ist/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/monk-sex2.jpg?w=800&ssl=1

Afterward, Kai Hung was arrested and charged with drug crimes. He was later released on NT$100,000 ($3,200) bail.

It turns out that Kai Hung had once been considered a bright and devout disciple with much promise, holding the position of secretary-general at the Chinese Young Buddhist Association. However, following the death of his master, Kai Hung’s behavior took a turn for the impious. While residing at another temple in the county, Tongshan Temple, he is said to have lured other monks back to his room with drugs before seducing them into sex.

Kai Hung’s scandalous behavior got him kicked out Tongshan Temple back in September. He was then welcomed to Chongfo Temple where he is reported to have continued to break all the monastic vows in the book, resulting in him being expelled from the Buddhist youth association.

https://i2.wp.com/shanghai.ist/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/monk-sex3.jpg?w=800&ssl=1

For his part, Kai Hung has denied any wrongdoing, telling police that while he did drugs, he never gave them to anyone else and that the videos had been relased as part of a nasty smear campaign against him by those at his former temple.

Pretty tough to deny when they got vids.

So sad. Buddhism is a hard path and so many lose their way.

GeneChing

01-09-2019, 09:26 AM

This isn't quite a Buddhists behaving badly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68723-Buddhists-behaving-badly) or a Meditation (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?26155-Meditation) post, but we don't have a Vipassana thread... yet.

The Other Side Of Paradise: How I Left A Buddhist Retreat In Handcuffs (https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a25651175/the-other-side-of-paradise-how-i-left-a-buddhist-retreat-in-handcuffs/)
Michael Holden went to a Buddhist retreat to find himself. Now he's off his meditation
BY MICHAEL HOLDEN, ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANNA BU KLIEWER
26/12/2018

https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/unknown-42-1545388069.jpg
Anna Bu Kliewer

‘ALL OF HUMANITY’S PROBLEMS STEM FROM MAN’S INABILITY TO SIT QUIETLY IN A ROOM ALONE’ – BLAISE PASCAL, 1662

The police stayed calm and the Buddhists were calmer, but by then there wasn’t much anyone could do. In the hours previously, I had come to believe, simultaneously and sequentially, that I was: dead, alive, omniscient, immortal, non-existent, gay, straight, telepathic, a flower, a pulse of pure energy and a nuclear bomb. And that was the good part, relatively speaking. By the time I was handcuffed and led to an ambulance, my troubles, or at least this episode among them, were just underway.

It is not the conclusion one pictures to a meditation retreat: a shackled, ranting, middle-aged man being taken to hospital under police supervision. Ideas like mindfulness and meditation are sold largely by images of good-looking people and unfurrowed brows. Yet it wasn’t upbeat marketing that led me to a 10-day, silent sanctuary on the Welsh borders, but a man on fire.

Forty years before flunking out of Buddhism in chains, I chanced upon Malcolm Browne’s 1963 photograph of Thich Quang Duc, a monk, sat, burning to death by his own hand in an act of protest at a crossroads in Saigon, South Vietnam. “As he burned he never moved a muscle,” said The New York Times journalist David Halberstam, a witness to it, “never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.”

I was young when I found the horrific image but I saw in it, also, proof that there was another way to be beyond than the swirling, self-sustaining system of hopes and regrets already established in my restless brain.

Decades later, a collision of life crises (marital, professional, medical and familial) and a kind of emotional insurgency — a relentless sense that there was something beyond or beneath all this — propelled me first into meditation, and then to the retreat where, if enlightenment were not forthcoming, at least I would have spent some time without my phone. What could go wrong?

A simple, contemporary definition of meditation is “a family of self-regulation practices that focus on training attention and awareness in order to bring mental processes under greater voluntary control.” Written references date back to 600BC. Techniques and traditions vary, but the most prominent associations are with Buddhist philosophy, and there are few spiritual schools of thought or religions which do not accommodate some practice which might be described as meditative.

Meditation’s modern offspring, “mindfulness”, has its roots (as a phrase) in the 20th century. Where one begins and the other ends is the subject of much debate. Suffice to say whether you’re sitting silently in a monastery or staring at a smartphone in your sister’s spare room, if you are taking time out to observe your thought patterns and breathe in a conscious manner, one or both terms have you covered.

What began in antiquity abided and bloomed into a billion-dollar industry in the US alone. Be it through ashrams or apps — there are over 1,300 now, and the Headspace app has been downloaded close to 35m times — meditation has been touted as a panacea for everything from childhood trauma to palliative care. There is plenty of evidence, empirical and anecdotal, that in many of these areas it does have positive results. So, I read some books, looked online, sat, and watched what my mind did.

From 15 minutes of sitting a day I felt subtly but tangibly changed. “Mental processes” were definitely “under greater voluntarily control”. I was no Buddha, but I was demonstrably less volatile. I had a taste for it and was soon seeking ways to do more. Much more. I booked the retreat. The perceptive among you will note this is precisely the kind of desirous behaviour pattern that meditation is often deployed to break, but Nirvana wasn’t built in a day.

Deep in the Herefordshire countryside at the tail end of June, the retreat I attended felt and looked like the apex of serenity. The discipline chosen by me and around 150 other attendees — an idealistic mix of ages, races and gender — is known as Vipassanā which, they will tell you, means “seeing things as they really are”. We decamped cheerfully from coaches and cars, gave up our phones, agreed not to speak for a week-and-a-half and wandered off to billets on the sprawling former farm. The atmosphere prior to the commencement of silence (you can talk with the retreat leaders at allotted times, if need be) was one of warm, collective anticipation, somewhere between a school trip and a festival.

At 4am the next day, we were awoken by a gong. And so began an 11-hour daily programme of meditation, punctuated occasionally by vegetarian food (until midday, after which it was fruit only). In the evenings, we gathered to hear the teachings of the course’s founder, Satya Narayan Goenka, an avuncular but deceased Burmese/Indian businessman and Buddhist scholar whose posthumous addresses were screened nightly. They came to provide a kind of group release; we laughed, and not just as counterpoint to the silence. Like other spiritual teachers, and some stand-ups, Goenka walked a fine line between practical philosophical insight and observational comedy.

After several days of silence, sermons, slender rations and pre-dawn starts, something significant shifted inside me. The inner dialogue ceased, replaced by an outbreak of peace so fundamental as to transcend what I could or can still share with language. And I could see and sense, even if I couldn’t speak to the others, that this was happening among them too.

The power of such a revelation, that everything you might have hitherto insisted you consisted of was instead an illusory construct which can, through self-examination, vanish and be replaced by something best described as love… that can take some getting used to. The implications for your “self” (by this point a minority shareholder in that which you perceive yourself to be) and society (all conflict, and thus much of history, being by these terms an avoidable mistake) are considerable. But before I could assimilate this, or perhaps because I couldn’t, the limitless love became a gruelling fear, mutating into the conviction that I, personally, could bring about the end of everything, since the macrocosm of our universe seemed so clearly and precariously contained within the microcosm of my being. Say this like you mean it, act stubbornly on your pronouncements, and they will come for you with handcuffs too.

continued next post

GeneChing

01-09-2019, 09:28 AM

I HAD COME TO BELIEVE, SIMULTANEOUSLY AND SEQUENTIALLY, THAT I WAS: DEAD, ALIVE, OMNISCIENT, IMMORTAL, NON-EXISTENT, GAY, STRAIGHT, TELEPATHIC, A FLOWER, A PULSE OF PURE ENERGY AND A NUCLEAR BOMB. AND THAT WAS THE GOOD PART, RELATIVELY SPEAKING

Psychosis is, I suspect, a little like falling in or out of love: something on the cusp of the personal and the universal that each of us experiences differently. Between the ambulance ride and the oblivion of sedation, I was held in a room with two police officers at the local A&E. They looked on reasonably benignly as I did my best to convey what I was feeling which, among other stark hallucinations and a roiling, primal fear, was that I was dying and being reborn every 90 seconds or so. I can’t really describe what that is “like” since the one comparable event is largely unremembered and the other unknowable, but it felt real and it was gruelling, and, in the end, I was begging them to knock me out.

All this was much to reflect on as I recovered (to some extent) in a psychiatric hospital over the next 48 hours. How had I fallen so hard and wide of the mark of meditation, of something so seemingly benign? Others on the retreat had become emotional, openly weeping (as I had done) but no one else had begged to stop, only to refuse to leave and then been forcibly removed.

What I did know, was that I had been “here” before. And not in a past life. In the mid-Nineties, in my mid-twenties when I was working as a journalist in London, I took enough recreational drugs to keep me awake for nine days, at the end of which I was psychotic, sectioned, sedated and held in hospital for four months. That might sound dramatic, but I did it to myself and for all I know the treatment (including drugs since withdrawn from use) and the incarceration saved my life. Certainly, it shaped it.

The advantage of this, insofar as it had one, was that when my mind disintegrated for the second time, I had some sense of what I was in for, and I knew I could get back. Maybe. Even naked terror takes the occasional break, and the sense in those moments that there is a way out, is in some ways all you need to carry on.

This time I was in and out of hospital in one weekend. With a month’s worth of anti-psychotic medication, I had some decisions to make. It seemed clear to me that if I could reach such an altered state through intoxication and insomnia once, and then do it again 20 years later through silence and concentration, then that state was “real” and not a figment of my imagination or the symptom of an illness per se.

I didn’t want to stay medicated (my previous stint had lasted a decade), and I understood that the rules of the retreat meant that as I had left before the end, I could not go back. Vipassanā makes it clear in its literature regarding “serious mental disorders” that: “Our capacity as a non-professional volunteer organisation makes it impossible to properly care for people with these backgrounds.”

I had been screened out at the initial application because of my history and then, after going into detail, accepted, as my prior issues were so long ago. I was thrilled to be admitted and delusional when I left, but barring some emails and a follow-up phone call, early exits from Vipassanā are final. Tossed from what had seemed briefly to be heaven, I went back to my elderly folks, weaned myself off the meds, and got thoroughly depressed.

In the weeks that followed, I began to google “meditation”, “mental illness”, “mania” (as my ex-wife pointed out, I ought really to have done this beforehand). But it was then I found that far from being alone in this, I was one of many who had learned the hard way that at a certain level, for some practitioners, something like psychosis is part of the meditative programme. And that not everyone who goes through that survives.

https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/unknown-43-1545388330.png
Anna Bu Kliewer

Dr Daniel Ingram is a recently retired, frontline ER physician who worked in one of America’s largest trauma centres in Huntsville, Alabama. He left trauma medicine in his late forties, he says, since, “you see some extremely bad stuff in high quantities, it starts to take its toll… it is in some ways a younger person’s game.” Ingram is also the author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, a seminal and substantial text which, alongside a busy online forum which he moderates, has become a resource for those for whom the vogue for meditation revealed the void. One of his contentions is that despite millennia of existing wisdom about what can and will happen when you close your eyes and follow your breath for long enough, modern versions of these practices are often mis-sold.

“This dream of peace and wellbeing, happiness and contentment, mental health and emotional clarity,” says Ingram, “[doesn’t recognise] that some reasonable proportion of people will also be catapulted into full-on, deep-end spiritual development by crossing what the Buddhist tradition I come from calls the ‘Arising and Passing Away’ stage. And then they’re off and running in this whole different end of development, which, as you now know, is quite a different thing than what most people signed up for.”

An irony of finding Ingram’s work was that my own “madness”, the singularity of which I was both scared and perversely proud of, was made familiar, if not quite mundane. In a broad sense, he has heard it all before.

“You crossed the ‘Arising and Passing’ and hit the standard ‘Dark Night’ stages, just as one would predict,” he explains. When I tell him about the birth-and-death cycling, which I had taken to be particularly troubling and profound, he just says, “Nice”. These challenging but navigable “stages of insight”, he explains, are as old as meditation itself. They have, however, been largely omitted from the modern conversation.

The Vipassanā retreat I visited is part of a global, free-to-attend franchise run on the guidelines established by Goenka. The regime there, says Ingram, is, “absolutely perfect for getting people across the ‘Arising and Passing Away’, [but] not normalising the next stages.” These stages are often traumatic, known colloquially and historically as the “Dark Night”, and bear little or no phenomenological difference to the medical classification of mental illnesses, particularly bipolar disorder. According to Ingram, with the right expectations and support, the stages are temporary. Without it, “people crash out into the world a total wreck. I’ve had a hundred of these calls, more, I couldn’t possibly count them,” he says. “If you go online, the number of reports of this happening is thousands. So many I’ve lost track of them all.”

Three months before I entered Vipassanā, Megan Vogt, a 25-year-old American woman left a near-identical centre in the US “incoherent, suicidal and in psychosis,” according to reports in the local news. Ten weeks after she left the retreat she took her own life. Unlike me, Vogt had no history of mental illness or drug use. She would not have presented any issue at the application stage or known what hit her on the retreat. Nor did her family, or, it seems, the medical professionals to whom she was referred.

A spokesman for the Vipassanā Trust, which manages the network of retreats in the Goenka tradition, acknowledged that Vogt’s case was “horrendous, tragic and traumatic” but that such outcomes were “exceptionally rare”. He told me 1.2m new students have used their retreats since 2001, and they have accepted more than 200,000 since 2016. He also said that this case, and any other “serious incident”, was subject to an “incident review”, and that the Vipassanā Trust’s objective in these matters was to “check ourselves that everything is being done, and if not then make some changes and tighten it up”. He added that any student, regardless of how they exit or whether they finish the programme, is welcome to contact them for support or even to reapply.

Meditation can be rigorous, especially Vipassanā.

GeneChing

01-22-2019, 03:56 PM

Daaaaaaaaaang. Thai monks don't mess around.

Street seller cheats death after Buddhist monk stabs him in the neck to prove his lucky necklaces don't have magic powers (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6614503/Street-seller-cheats-death-Buddhist-monk-stabs-prove-lucky-amulets-powerless.html)
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
Nai Atchawanit, 30, was slashed across the head and neck in Bangkok last Friday
He told the monk his amulet was blessed by higher powers and repelled attacks
Video shows a brave tourist intervening and holding him up to prevent blood loss
The monk was arrested by Thai police while the victim remains critical in hospital
By ROSS IBBETSON FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 03:40 EST, 21 January 2019 | UPDATED: 02:50 EST, 22 January 2019

A Thai street seller cheated death after a Buddhist monk stabbed him in the neck to prove that the lucky amulets he was hawking had no supernatural powers.

The hawker was selling 'occult' charms when he began arguing with the monk over their abilities last Friday afternoon in the popular China Town area of Bangkok, Thailand.

Victim Nai Atchawanit, 30, is said to have told monk Niwan Phrachakasem, 54, that the lucky amulet around his neck was blessed by higher powers and could repel attacks.

Niwan allegedly said he would disprove it and produced a 12-inch long knife from under his orange robes before slashing at Atchawanit's head and neck.

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/01/21/08/8783538-6614503-image-a-11_1548058478134.jpg
The English-speaking tourist holds the victim up and puts pressure on his wound to try and stop blood loss
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/01/21/10/8783528-6614503-Moments_later_the_victim_collapses_on_the_floor_af ter_he_became_-a-1_1548065101554.jpg
Moments later the victim collapses on the floor after he became to weak to stand
Video footage shows the English-speaking tourist holding the victim up (left) to try and prevent blood loss before he slumps to the ground (right)

Harrowing video footage shows the injured man falling to the ground in a pool of blood, before a brave tourist intervened and held him up to prevent blood loss.

With the monk a few yards away holding a knife, the tourist was heard calling for help while many locals hurried by - too afraid to intervene.

The English-speaking man, in white t-shirt and orange shorts, has been credited with helping to save the victim's life.

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/01/21/08/8783526-6614503-image-a-25_1548058729770.jpg
Niwan Phrachakasem, 54, stands close by while his victim bleeds
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/01/21/10/8783522-6614503-Medics_attend_to_the_victim_while_the_monk_is_arre sted-a-2_1548065101560.jpg
Medics attend to the victim while the monk is arrested
Niwan Phrachakasem, 54, (left) stands around while the English-speaking man tries to save his victim and he is detained by the police (right)

Police arrived on the scene and arrested the knifeman monk who told police that the victim had 'encouraged him to stab him to test the power of his amulet.'

Officers detained Phrachakasem in custody while they investigate his credentials as a monk and wait to interview the victim, who was last night in a critical condition at a nearby hospital.

Lieutenant General Satit Mitrak from the Phlap Phla Chai Road Police Station said: 'He (the street seller) came to talk to the public about the power of the occult, spirituality and the amulets worn around his neck. He was then challenged to prove their strength.'

Lieutenant General Mitrak said the injured man had a 20cm (8in) long wound in his head and a large knife was recovered from the scene.

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/01/21/08/8783520-6614503-image-m-15_1548058594520.jpg
The monk can be seen holding what looks like a foot long blade while his victim is bleeding on the ground

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/01/21/08/8783512-6614503-image-a-16_1548058639207.jpg
Paramedics and police rushed to the scene to takeover from the brave efforts of the English-speaking bystander

He added: 'The foreign man was very brave to help the victim. His courage helped to save him from losing more blood until paramedics arrived.

'Witnesses at the scene have described an argument between the monk and the victim.

'We do not know if the attacker was a real monk or his background.

'We will check CCTV and interrogate both parties to find the full story and prosecute the attacker.'

GeneChing

02-18-2019, 09:03 AM

There's a big difference between "exposed by Chinese media" and actually busted. Despite accusations, the Abbot has yet to be found guilty on any charges. Note that this is Epoch Times, the publication from Falun Gong (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?25214-FALUN-GONG-Falun-Dafa), which is in direct opposition to Shaolin.

Shi Yongxin, abbot of the Shaolin Temple, walks out of the monastery premises in in Dengfeng City, Henan Province, China, on April 7, 2005. (Cancan Chu/Getty Images) (https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2014/09/18/52599358-700x420.jpg)
Shi Yongxin, abbot of the Shaolin Temple, walks out of the monastery premises in in Dengfeng City, Henan Province, China, on April 7, 2005. (Cancan Chu/Getty Images)

Chinese Monks Become ‘Sugar Babies’ for Wealthy Women (https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-monks-become-sugar-babies-for-wealthy-women_2803010.html)
BY FRANK FANG, EPOCH TIMES
February 15, 2019 Updated: February 16, 2019 Share

In ancient China, monks lived a celibate spiritual life and devoted their time to Buddhist studies.

But in modern-day China, some monks have led a sordid life at night while pretending to be religious practitioners during the day.

Song Zude, a well-known Chinese entertainment critic, recently wrote on his Sina Weibo account, a platform similar to Twitter, that some Chinese temples have begun contracting out a unique service.

A group of businessmen make special arrangements for monks—only those who are good-looking—to become male “sugar babies” for wealthy Chinese women.

Song wrote that some of these monks have come to earn as much as several million yuan a month (1 million yuan equals $147,650) from money and gifts that their female clients give.

Some monks have bought expensive sports cars and houses, while some have amassed enough wealth to become “sugar daddies” themselves and engage in relationships with younger women.

These monks continue to put on their monastery robes during the day, but put on a suit at night to meet with women.

On WeChat, a social media account with the name “Tian Ya Lian Xian” put up an article in response to Song’s claims.

The WeChat article stated that Song’s claims were not surprising, as it is widely known in China that businessmen take out such contracts with temples. In other words, monks are simply hired by these businessmen to provide sexual services.

According to the WeChat article, the businessmen also hire the monks to do fortune telling and carry out fake religious rituals to generate income for themselves.

Several well-known Chinese monks have engaged in similar promiscuous behaviors.

Shi Yongxin, abbot of the famous Shaolin Monastery and vice president of China’s state-controlled Buddhist Association of China, was exposed by Chinese media in 2015 to have fathered two illegitimate children. He was also accused of having illicit relationships with several women, including nuns and believers, as well as embezzling funds from the monastery.

According to Chinese state-run media The Paper, Shi was also a former member of China’s rubber-stamp legislature, the National People’s Congress, from 1998 to 2018.

In August last year, Xue Cheng, president of the Buddhist Association of China, quit his position after he was accused of sexually assaulting his female disciples and psychologically manipulating them. According to Reuters, he was also allegedly involved in a corruption scheme involving 10 million yuan ($1.64 million).

Xue was a Communist Party member who was part of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a political advisory body.

On Weibo, some Chinese netizens were stunned upon learning about Song’s claims.

A netizen from coastal China’s Zhejiang Province sarcastically wrote, “You can sign a contract with a temple? What a strange country.”

Meanwhile, a netizen from Beijing had a suggestion: “Let’s get some pieces of evidence and drive these monks out of the temples.”

THREADS
Buddhists behaving badly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68723-Buddhists-behaving-badly)
Abbot scandals (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?42909-Abbot-scandals)

GeneChing

02-18-2019, 09:04 AM

There's a big difference between "exposed by Chinese media" and actually busted. Despite accusations, the Abbot has yet to be found guilty on any charges. Note that this is Epoch Times, the publication from Falun Gong (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?25214-FALUN-GONG-Falun-Dafa), which is in direct opposition to Shaolin.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2014/09/18/52599358-700x420.jpg
Shi Yongxin, abbot of the Shaolin Temple, walks out of the monastery premises in in Dengfeng City, Henan Province, China, on April 7, 2005. (Cancan Chu/Getty Images)

Chinese Monks Become ‘Sugar Babies’ for Wealthy Women (https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-monks-become-sugar-babies-for-wealthy-women_2803010.html)
BY FRANK FANG, EPOCH TIMES
February 15, 2019 Updated: February 16, 2019 Share

In ancient China, monks lived a celibate spiritual life and devoted their time to Buddhist studies.

But in modern-day China, some monks have led a sordid life at night while pretending to be religious practitioners during the day.

Song Zude, a well-known Chinese entertainment critic, recently wrote on his Sina Weibo account, a platform similar to Twitter, that some Chinese temples have begun contracting out a unique service.

A group of businessmen make special arrangements for monks—only those who are good-looking—to become male “sugar babies” for wealthy Chinese women.

Song wrote that some of these monks have come to earn as much as several million yuan a month (1 million yuan equals $147,650) from money and gifts that their female clients give.

Some monks have bought expensive sports cars and houses, while some have amassed enough wealth to become “sugar daddies” themselves and engage in relationships with younger women.

These monks continue to put on their monastery robes during the day, but put on a suit at night to meet with women.

On WeChat, a social media account with the name “Tian Ya Lian Xian” put up an article in response to Song’s claims.

The WeChat article stated that Song’s claims were not surprising, as it is widely known in China that businessmen take out such contracts with temples. In other words, monks are simply hired by these businessmen to provide sexual services.

According to the WeChat article, the businessmen also hire the monks to do fortune telling and carry out fake religious rituals to generate income for themselves.

Several well-known Chinese monks have engaged in similar promiscuous behaviors.

Shi Yongxin, abbot of the famous Shaolin Monastery and vice president of China’s state-controlled Buddhist Association of China, was exposed by Chinese media in 2015 to have fathered two illegitimate children. He was also accused of having illicit relationships with several women, including nuns and believers, as well as embezzling funds from the monastery.

According to Chinese state-run media The Paper, Shi was also a former member of China’s rubber-stamp legislature, the National People’s Congress, from 1998 to 2018.

In August last year, Xue Cheng, president of the Buddhist Association of China, quit his position after he was accused of sexually assaulting his female disciples and psychologically manipulating them. According to Reuters, he was also allegedly involved in a corruption scheme involving 10 million yuan ($1.64 million).

Xue was a Communist Party member who was part of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a political advisory body.

On Weibo, some Chinese netizens were stunned upon learning about Song’s claims.

A netizen from coastal China’s Zhejiang Province sarcastically wrote, “You can sign a contract with a temple? What a strange country.”

Meanwhile, a netizen from Beijing had a suggestion: “Let’s get some pieces of evidence and drive these monks out of the temples.”

THREADS
Buddhists behaving badly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68723-Buddhists-behaving-badly)
Abbot scandals (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?42909-Abbot-scandals)

GeneChing

02-19-2019, 09:08 AM

Buddhist master blesses temple by spinning around over 150 times, throws up on carpet (https://shanghai.ist/2019/02/16/buddhist-master-blesses-temple-by-spinning-around-over-150-times-throws-up-on-carpet/?fbclid=IwAR0WARRUzckBgTBMbTfId5_TzQg5766PdOPydZ3N iKQnecBjSx9H2W2vyKM)
We are all truly blessed by this video
by Alex Linder February 16, 2019 in News

https://i1.wp.com/shanghai.ist/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/spinning-master3.jpg?w=998&ssl=1

A Buddist mater blessed a temple in Taiwan on Tuesday by spinning around some 152 times while sprinkling holy water. She then came to a stop and made a different kind of offering.

In video posted to the Facebook page of Master Huiyen, the master is seen twirling around in her robe on a long red carpet at a temple in central Nantou county. As she rotates, she spills out water from bottles handed to her by attendants. When a bottle runs out of water, she simply tosses it to the ground and takes the next one.

Over an impressive period of nearly four minutes, Huiyen never stops spinning, however, when she finally does come to a stop, it doesn’t take long for her body to react as she pukes all over the red carpet.

Huiyen herself appears unashamed by her vomiting, posting numerous messages of peace and prosperity in the comment section below. Meanwhile, netizens playfully wondered if the barfing was a usual part of the ritual and holy as well.

Here's the facebook vid (https://www.facebook.com/314197465700371/videos/583035162161315/). :o

GeneChing

07-31-2019, 08:51 AM

Gang led by former Shaolin monk busted (http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1159874.shtml)
By Zhang Han Source:Global Times Published: 2019/7/31 20:33:56

http://www.globaltimes.cn/Portals/0/attachment/2019/2019-07-31/eb832da4-1dda-481c-9714-92dbad86c9b5.jpeg
Shaolin Temple in Dengfeng, Central China's Henan Province Photo: VCG

Police in Central China have caught 16 gangsters led by a former monk reportedly from Shaolin Temple and will invite the public to share their insights into the gang's crimes at a public meeting on Thursday.

Police in the city of Yanshi, Henan Province issued a notice Tuesday, saying they had busted a gang led by Shi Yongxu. The police invited residents to come and identify their crimes at the meeting.

A police officer responsible for this case told the Global Times Wednesday that serious criminals had been detained including Shi.

"The meeting aims to encourage residents to provide more clues as some insignificant figures in the gang are still at large," the officer said. He declined to be fully named and refused to disclose what kind of crime the gang members had committed.

Shi was born in Henan in 1969 and has attended events as the deputy head of Buddhist Association of Yanshi and member of the Yanshi committee of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, according to The Beijing News.

In a report by China News Service in 2017, Shi is the 33rd generation of Shaolin discipline and was in charge of kung fu monks.

Shi used to run a shop in the temple after becoming a monk, but he was not a master, a staff member at Shaolin Temple told The Beijing News. The article did not name the staff member.

Shi left the temple in the 1990s. No other monks followed him, said the staff member.

China launched a three-year campaign in early 2018 against gangs and organized crimes, which also targeted officials who shelter criminal organizations.

THREADS
Shaolin Scandals (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?47568-Shaolin-Scandals)
Buddhists behaving badly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68723-Buddhists-behaving-badly)

Djuan

07-31-2019, 10:55 AM

framed!! nothing tarnishes Shaolin!! .....smh I wont say what "monastic clergymen" need their asses exposed and punished, they arent from Denfeng, or any part of Asia at all though..... and Buddha's Sangha is Pure. this stuff makes for good movie scripts, "monk flees temple for abusive gongfu sparring, becomes brutal (OG H.A.E.S.) gang leader who advises agains guns, after losing his gang to guns, goes back to the temple to repent and teach qi gong." ;) right?

Dang it , I came here to post something nice about Shaolin too lol
now I have to remember.

Amituofo

GeneChing

08-01-2019, 10:50 AM

15 hours
Self-Proclaimed Shaolin Master Arrested as Gang Leader (http://www.sixthtone.com/ht_news/1004376/self-proclaimed-shaolin-master-arrested-as-gang-leader)
Authorities in central China’s Henan province have arrested a criminal gang led by a man who claims to have trained Shaolin monks, according to an official statement (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzI2MTUyNjAwMg==&mid=2247489852&idx=1&sn=465861f9fa7d9fa203ddb24acf7d1229&chksm=ea5841a1dd2fc8b77578cf15a454d761c574973e19e7 b9bf677258af580bda7ddec98767ca85&mpshare=1&scene=1&srcid=&sharer_sharetime=1564558553917&sharer_shareid=78c6c5bc243e491e82820f549720a5cc&pass_ticket=Ci7gaZNGBwBx%2BeCYOYEYE5%2Bglns3Qn8xCz kmZLSlIHRIuozQKi0Q3Lw95i%2F6PJUj#rd) released Tuesday.

Luoyang City police say they arrested 16 suspects in Yanshi, another city, earlier that day for their alleged involvement in a range of illegal activities, including blackmail and extortion. Among those taken into custody is the gang’s leader, who police identified as Shi Yongxu.

Shi claimed to have once trained Shaolin monks and even declared himself to be the heir apparent to the abbacy of the renowned Songshan Shaolin Temple, according to domestic outlet The Beijing News (http://www.bjnews.com.cn/news/2019/07/30/609624.html). However, a temple staff member has denied Shi’s claims, insisting that he only worked as a clerk at the temple’s souvenir shop.

The same staff member also told The Beijing News that Shi had left his job at the store 20 years earlier, and that the other suspects had never been associated with the temple. (Image: Weibo)

http://image5.sixthtone.com/image/5/19/396.jpg

The official statement (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzI2MTUyNjAwMg==&mid=2247489852&idx=1&sn=465861f9fa7d9fa203ddb24acf7d1229&chksm=ea5841a1dd2fc8b77578cf15a454d761c574973e19e7 b9bf677258af580bda7ddec98767ca85&mpshare=1&scene=1&srcid=&sharer_sharetime=1564558553917&sharer_shareid=78c6c5bc243e491e82820f549720a5cc&pass_ticket=Ci7gaZNGBwBx%2BeCYOYEYE5%2Bglns3Qn8xCz kmZLSlIHRIuozQKi0Q3Lw95i%2F6PJUj#rd):

公告

近期，洛阳市公安局牵头侦办偃师市以释永旭为首的涉黑恶犯罪团伙，抓获团伙成员16名。现定于2019年8 月1日上午9时30分，在偃师市召开释永旭涉黑恶犯罪团伙主要成员公开指认现场揭发检举动员大会，届时将在大口镇大街（镇政府南100米）设主会场，并押解犯罪嫌疑人进行公开指认犯罪现场活动，请广大群众前往参加。

举报电话：13592059700 高警官

15838836110 李警官

偃师市公安局

2019年7月30日
googtrans

Public notice

Recently, the Luoyang Municipal Public Security Bureau took the lead in investigating the black criminal gangs headed by Shi Yongxu, and arrested 16 members of the gang. It is scheduled to be held at 9:30 am on August 1, 2019, and the main members of Shi Yongxu’s black criminal gang will be openly identified in Yanshi City to publicly identify the on-site prosecution mobilization meeting, which will be held in Dakou Town Street (100 meters south of the town government). The main venue is set up, and the suspects are escorted to publicly identify the crime scene activities, and the masses are invited to participate.

Reporting number: 13592059700 High police officer

15838836110 Officer Li

Yanshi City Public Security Bureau

July 30, 2019

THREADS
Shaolin Scandals (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?47568-Shaolin-Scandals)
Buddhists behaving badly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68723-Buddhists-behaving-badly)

GeneChing

08-02-2019, 12:03 PM

We don't have a Busted Feng Shui masters thread, so I'm copying this from the Feng Shui thread (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?9565-Feng-Shui)to the Buddhists behaving badly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68723-Buddhists-behaving-badly) thread.

Hong Kong murders: when five women were killed by feng shui master with cyanide ‘holy water’ (https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/short-reads/article/3020085/hong-kong-murders-when-five-women-were-killed)
Three close friends and the two teenaged daughters of one of the women were poisoned by Chinese feng shui practitioner Li Yuhui during a ‘longevity rite’
Mercedes Hutton
Published: 10:45am, 26 Jul, 2019

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2019/07/26/137e2426-a944-11e9-862b-600d112f3b14_image_hires_140813.JPG?itok=Tg7Q-oyL&v=1564121298
Feng shui master Li Yuhui was executed in 1998 convicted of manslaughter after for killing five women in Telford Gardens. Photo: TVB screenshot
“A mother, her two teenage daughters, and two women friends were found dead in a suspected suicide pact in a flat in Kowloon Bay last night,” ran a story in the South China Morning Post on July 24, 1998.
The five were later identified as Becky Lam Chun-lai, the 49-year-old executive director of a publicly traded company, who lived with her husband and three children in Repulse Bay; Choi Sau-chun, 44, a mother of one and resident of Telford Gardens; Tsui Shun-kam, 40, who lived in the fifth-floor flat, also in Telford Gardens, in which the bodies were found; and Tsui’s daughters, Lee Ying-fai, 17, and Lee Ying-hei, 13.
In the days before they died, the women, who were close friends, had each withdrawn large sums of money, totalling HK$1.3 million. An examination showed all five had died from cyanide poisoning, reported the Post on July 27.
Mainland Chinese feng shui expert Li Yuhui was named in a July 28 article as a person of interest. On August 5, the Post reported that Hong Kong police had lost contact with Li, who was in China. Li’s arrest was announced on October 9. A day later it was reported that he would stand trial in the mainland, where he would face the death penalty if convicted, following an alleged confession.

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2019/07/26/1fd556fe-a944-11e9-862b-600d112f3b14_1320x770_140813.JPG
A police drawing showing where the five bodies were found inside the fifth-floor flat in Telford Gardens. Photo: SCMP

According to an October 10Post article: “The women, who had only known Li a month, were given ‘holy water’ – later confirmed to have been cyanide – to drink and told that every $10,000 could buy another year of life” as part of a longevity rite. Tsui was told to give each daughter a cup of “holy water” to drink. Once all five were dead, Li took the HK$1.3 million and returned to the mainland.
Li’s trial began on March 4, 1999, in Shantou, Guangdong province. The accused denied the charges levelled against him, claiming a Zen Buddhist was the master*mind behind the crime. “I’m not the real murderer,” he reportedly told the court. However, he was unable to provide the judge with any details about the alleged Zen practitioner.
On March 24, the Post announced Li had been sentenced to death for the murders. Li appealed the decision, but on April 20, his plea was rejected and he was executed by firing squad.

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2019/07/26/9c4c70e2-a943-11e9-862b-600d112f3b14_972x_140813.JPG
Andrew Hui King-chun officiates at his wife Becky Lam Chun-lai's funeral service at Hong Kong Funeral Home. Photo: SCMP

GeneChing

08-12-2019, 09:11 AM

Shi Yongxu deserves his own thread (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71428-Shi-Yongxu-busted) now.

Former Shaolin monk, 15 associates arrested on suspicion of gang activity (http://www.ecns.cn/news/2019-08-07/detail-ifzmsrxe1264703.shtml)
1 2019-08-07 10:44:39 China Daily Editor : Li Yan

A group of 16 people, including their leader, a former monk from Shaolin Temple, were arrested recently on suspicion of gang-related crimes in Central China's Henan province amid an ongoing crackdown against organized offenses nationwide.

Police in Yanshi, Henan, issued a statement recently that they had busted the gang, led by Shi Yongxu, on allegations of fighting, illegal detention, blackmail and disturbing public order.

Details about the case, including specifics of the gang's crimes, have not been revealed by police.

The statement quickly aroused public attention, and information about Shi-that he was among the 33rd generation of monks studying the Shaolin discipline and in charge of the kung fu monks at the Shaolin Temple-hit Chinese media headlines.

Some media also said Shi attended events as vice-president of the Buddhist Association of Yanshi and member of the Yanshi committee of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

Late on July 30, the Shaolin Temple-located at the foot of the province's Songshan Mountain and regarded as the cradle of Chinese kung fu-issued a declaration on its website, clarifying Shi as a monk in the 1980s who had left the temple on his own in 2003.

"Shi's activities have nothing to do with the temple, and we have never had a title called kung fu monk," the declaration added.

On July 31, the Buddhist Association of Yanshi also issued a statement via the city's website, saying they have removed Shi from positions at the association and dismissed him as abbot of Hongjiang Temple in the province, considering his suspected offenses.

A staff member of the Shaolin Temple also told Beijing News that Shi used to run a shop in the temple after becoming a monk, but he was not a master.

Huaxi Metropolis Daily, a newspaper based in Sichuan province, reported Shi was involved in several major cases. For example, it said Shi blackmailed a house owner and urged him to pay fees for what he claimed were house repairs.

A senior monk in the Shaolin Temple also told the newspaper that Shi still occupied four main halls, even though he left the temple.

"He asked the temple to give him 3 million yuan ($427,000) as compensation for moving out of the halls, but the temple refused to do that," the paper quoted the monk as saying.

The halls were cleaned up when newspaper staff went to the temple on Saturday.

All the information reported by the paper has not been verified by the police.

China launched a three-year campaign in early 2018 against organized crime, which also targeted officials who shelter criminal organizations.

Beijing courts released a statement saying they convicted 271 people for their involvement in 65 organized crime cases from January last year to the end of June, 46 of whom were sentenced to more than five years' imprisonment.

THREADS
Shaolin Scandals (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?47568-Shaolin-Scandals)
Buddhists behaving badly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68723-Buddhists-behaving-badly)

GeneChing

09-25-2019, 07:52 AM

More on Thailand's Tiger Temple scandal here. (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68723-Buddhists-behaving-badly&p=1294005#post1294005)

86 Big Cats Rescued From Thailand’s Tiger Temple Have Died in Government Custody (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/86-big-cats-rescued-thailands-tiger-temple-have-died-government-custody-180973172/)
Although the government says inbreeding, stress contributed to the felines’ demise, critics have also cited cramped conditions, inadequate facilities

https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/hjnHGqoj-RmAO2sDEVTkRn5-bHU=/800x600/filters:no_upscale()/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/f5/9c/f59c1992-862b-498e-b611-766dd2677b7b/tigertemple.jpg
The Tiger Temple charged tourists to feed, take photos with captive felines (Dmitri1999 via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 3.0)
By Meilan Solly

SMITHSONIAN.COM
SEPTEMBER 18, 2019

In 2016, Thai authorities removed 147 big cats from the so-called “Tiger Temple,” a notorious tourist attraction long plagued by allegations of abuse and exploitation. Three years later, 86 of these tigers are dead, leaving just 61 survivors still in government care.

Thailand’s Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation announced the tigers’ passing Monday. Per a statement, the animals’ primary cause of death was laryngeal paralysis, a respiratory disease that impairs sufferers’ breathing. Other contributing factors included stress triggered by relocation; immune deficiencies associated with inbreeding; and canine distemper, a virus most commonly seen in domestic dogs.

Speaking with the New York Times’ Ryn Jirenuwat and Richard C. Paddock, Edwin Wiek, founder of the Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand, says the deaths could have been avoided if the government had taken preventive measures such as increasing the distance between cages.

In an interview with BBC News, the conservationist notes that cramped conditions enabled the spread of disease among the big cats. He further cites the government’s limited budget, which prevented officials from treating those affected by canine distemper. (The virus is easily managed with proper food and supplements, clean water, and space to roam.)

“To be very honest, who would be ready to take in so many tigers at once?” Wiek says. “The authorities should have asked for help from outside, but instead insisted on doing all [the] work themselves.”

The tigers’ one-time temple caretaker, Athithat Srimanee, also refutes the government’s account. “They did not die because of inbreeding,” he tells Reuters’ Panarat Thepgumpanat and Panu Wongcha-um, but because they were housed in inadequately sized cages.

Australian conservation nonprofit Cee4Life exposed conditions at the Tiger Temple, a Buddhist monastery located northwest of Bangkok, in an investigation published in January 2016. As National Geographic’s Sharon Guynup reported in an accompanying exposé, the temple—controversial due to its reputedly poor treatment of captive animals—generated around $3 million in annual income by charging tourists to feed and take pictures with the tigers housed on its grounds.

Government raids conducted in the aftermath of the media firestorm confirmed critics’ long-held suspicions. Authorities searching a truck attempting to leave the compound discovered more than 1,600 tiger parts destined for the illegal wildlife market, as well as 40 deceased tiger cubs stuffed into a freezer.

In a statement, Sybelle Foxcroft, cofounder of Cee4Life and leader of the investigation that exposed conditions at the Tiger Temple, attributes the 86 felines’ death largely to their treatment at the compound.

“I wrote publicly about Mek Jnr,” a male tiger exhibiting particularly severe symptoms during a 2015 visit to the site, “and I was just about begging the Tiger Temple to help him, but they ignored it all and said he was fine,” Foxcroft explains. “He was far from fine and he would end up dying in agony from this.”

If operations at the tourist attraction had continued, the activist adds, the 86 felines “would have still died of the same illnesses, but the difference would be that the Tiger Temple would have skinned the dead bodies, and used the body parts for sales.”

According to the Times, the government avoided releasing information on the tigers’ welfare for months. In November, for example, Kanjana Nitaya, director of Thailand’s Wildlife Conservation Office, said several tigers had died but declined to cite a specific number. She maintained that officials were “taking the best care of the tigers we can provide.”

Moving forward, Dina Fine Maron writes for National Geographic, the government will continue caring for the Tiger Temple survivors, ensuring that conditions are safe and designed to reduce stress. It remains unclear whether authorities will move the 61 remaining tigers to a different facility or otherwise change the way in which the animals are managed.

About Meilan Solly
Meilan Solly is a Washington, D.C.-based arts and science journalist. She has previously served as Smithsonian's American Society of Magazine Editors intern and a Kiplinger.com editorial intern. Website: meilansolly.com
Follow @meilansolly

GeneChing

11-18-2019, 09:50 AM

Is Buddhism Violent? (https://www.lionsroar.com/buddhism-violence/)
BY RANDY ROSENTHAL| NOVEMBER 1, 2019

Buddhism is a religion of peace. So why do some monks carry guns and preach hatred? In this conversation with Lion’s Roar, religious studies professor Michael Jerryson argues that, if you look closely, “violence abounds” in Buddhist doctrine.

https://www.lionsroar.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/british-library-1-3.jpg
Photo by Steve Evans.

In recent years, the phenomenon of “Buddhist violence” has received increasing attention. The seeming oxymoron entered the Western consciousness during the Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009), but I first heard about it during the Buddhist-Muslim conflict in southern Thailand that erupted in 2004. Today, it is notorious due to the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.

Buddhists are people, and people are violent. But the fact that Buddhist monks incite violence against Muslims is disturbing to many Westerners — especially to Buddhist practitioners who consider the Buddha’s teaching to be completely non-violent. Many of us struggle with how to understand the violence encouraged by nationalistic Buddhist narratives found in Myanmar, Thailand, and Sri Lanka.

Last year, I wrote an essay on the Myanmar situation that was published in Buddhadharma. In it, I concluded that the crisis was a cultural — not religious — conflict and that extremist Buddhists were unofficially directed by the military government. Therefore, I surmised, the violence could not accurately be called “Buddhist” — a conclusion in accord with the views of many Buddhist practitioners, teachers, and academics.

But Religious Studies scholar Michael Jerryson thinks otherwise. He has written extensively on Buddhist violence, including in his books Buddhist Fury and, most recently, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, in which he argues that violence is inherent in Buddhism, both in practice and in doctrine. I spoke with Jerryson to better understand what he wants us to know.

In your introduction, you write that “violence abounds in Buddhist thoughts, doctrine, and actions.” What do you mean when you say that “violence abounds”?

In the West, for about the last hundred and fifty years, white Western males have pretty much controlled what they see as the canon of Buddhist scripture, or doctrine. We’ve been normed in the West to orthodoxy — looking at texts and scriptures as being the authority for doctrine. There’s orthopraxy, which is people who think that rituals are more important. But there’s also a third component that I’ve argued, which is the cultural authority. Burmese monks and Thai monks are seen as the equivalent of scripture.

I’ve heard Western Buddhists say, “Is that truly Buddhist? Is that Buddhist doctrine?” To which I say, “Who are you to dictate what is doctrine for these people?

For example, [Buddhist studies professor Rupert] Gethin and I had a dispute about whether or not the Mahavamsa [an epic Sri Lankan poem written in the 5th or 6th century] is considered part of the canon. Gethin said, “No it’s not. It’s not at all,” and explained how it’s not part of the Vinaya [the rules for Buddhist monks] or the core teachings.

I said to him: “If you go to Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan Buddhists will see the Mahavamsa as core to what they believe and what they do.” He said, “Well, it’s not core.”

People say that extremist monk U Wirathu is not drawing upon doctrine. In Myanmar, as one of the high-ranking Buddhist monks, what he says is doctrine.
That’s a great reflection of how what we consider doctrine is already artificial. And the Mahavamsa has a very powerful argument for violence in it. [King] Dutthagamini ends up slaughtering millions of Tamils. And, at the end, he’s visited by these fully awakened beings who tell him he’s only killed 1.5 people: only one person took on the three refuges, which means that they are a Buddhist; and only one person committed to the five moral precepts, and so they are half a person. The rest are no more than beasts. That’s an example of how violence is in doctrine.

People also say that [Burmese extremist monk] U Wirathu is not drawing upon doctrine. I argue that Wirathu is speaking doctrine, because, in Myanmar, as one of the high-ranking Buddhist monks, what he says is doctrine.

Doctrine is not locked in. Every Buddhist tradition has different amounts of doctrine. The Vinaya differs everywhere you go. The suttas or sutras differ everywhere you go. The Abhidhamma differs everywhere you go.

In my study, I’ve never found encouragement of violence in the Pali Canon. Is there something I’m missing? Is there anything in the orthodoxy that encourages violence, or is it used to justify violence?

I would say it’s the latter. It’s how it’s being used and interpreted. We see this in all the world’s traditions. The Ten Commandments say “Thou shalt not commit murder.” We have Christian ministers who kill abortion clinic doctors because of how they interpret the meaning. In that same line of thinking, shunyata — emptiness — is a very powerful notion because it strips a person of any sense of permanency and it removes a sense of killing a person.

In the Russo-Japanese war, during Japanese Imperialism, WWII, Rinzai, Soto Zen, and Pure Land Buddhist monks would advocate that it’s okay to kill. They would explain, “These people are not really people. They are the five psycho-physical aggregates. They’ll get reborn in a true Buddhist land so they can get awakened.”

In Theravada, you have a very strong promotion of a king, the equivalent of what would be a bodhisattva in Mahayana. You could say that, in Theravada, the king is vaulted to the level that the bodhisattva is in other traditions. In Theravada, the Buddhist king is given a lot of leniency on what he needs to do.

Across doctrinal divisions, there are times when people proclaim that they are awakened, and they think Mara [the embodiment of evil] has arisen and that we have to combat Mara, and this is end-times. This is embedded in Buddhist scriptures. By invoking that “Mara’s here” or “I’m Maitreya,” it strengthens the sense that we must really push back at all costs — including violence.

You write in one chapter that Buddhists have a “just war ideology.” Is this where that sense comes from?

In Christianity, your first rule is non-violent. But, if another virtue presents itself, it can trump the first interdiction. In Buddhism, you need to avoid harm. However, there are certain times when a need overrides that. That’s considered “just violence,” or a “just war.” So defense of dharma — defense of Buddhism — would be one clear example that is used again and again. What we see now in Myanmar and Sri Lanka is these Buddhist monks saying, “These are signs that Buddhism is under attack, and Islam is going to overtake us, and we must protect this.”

When I lived in southern Thailand, a military monk explained to me, “The Buddhists are like small ants against this great elephant. But, when we come together, we can push back against it. That’s why I keep this Smith and Wesson behind my robes here.”

continued next post

GeneChing

11-18-2019, 09:51 AM

Can you explain what a military monk is?

Certainly. Initially, I didn’t set out to study Buddhism and violence. I was interested in social activism and Buddhism, so I went to Thailand to do interviews. When I was in southern Thailand in 2004, I started hearing rumors about military monks. One day, in my fieldwork, I was at this monastery and I met a military monk. He explained to me that military monks are soldiers who get earmarked to go to a monastery and become ordained. They retain the soldier status and retain a monthly salary and they carry a gun. And the argument is: who is better trained to protect these monasteries than soldiers, clandestinely, as monks?

This example of a military monk, of someone who’s simultaneously a soldier and a monk, violates the Vinaya — the monastic guidelines. However, it’s an example of how the ways in which people actually practice are different than how they read about it.

If you’re not a Christian and you read about Christianity in the Bible, and then you look at how Christians behave, you’ll see that as well. So, when I teach religion, I always tell people: You have to look at both the emic — the internal perspective — and the etic — the external perspective. Both of these matter.

In Buddhism, you need to avoid harm. However, there are certain times when a need overrides that. That’s considered “just violence.”
From the outside looking in at Thai Buddhists, you could say, “They’re not being true Buddhists.” But we have to honor their perspective as well, which is that they are Buddhists.

At first, I thought this monk was an aberration. But there have been soldier monks in Thailand, the Japanese have this, the Chinese have this. The Martial Arts have come from this, too, with Chinese monks who were soldiers. And I found the undercurrent of a pattern that had been left out of the way in which we think about Buddhism. I thought these military monks were a perfect example of the Buddhist relationship to violence.

Brian Victoria, who wrote Zen at War, and I are at odds. Brian Victoria thinks that all the travesties and terrible things that Japanese Buddhists did were actually aberrations; they’re not Buddhist. That it’s just politics to have done this. I’ll tell Brian: First off, there is no universal Buddhist council, like the Pope in Roman Catholicism, who says what is right and wrong. There is none. The sanghas decide what is right and wrong in each tradition, and they can defrock who they want to. And you don’t have the ability to say, “This group is wrong.” The sangha has the authority.

And he says, “Well, Michael, it’s not Buddhist. It’s political.” And I tell him: Politics have always existed in Buddhism. The earliest legend of the Buddha is that he was a prince. The idea of the sangha comes from the gana-sanghas, pseudo-democracies created by the Sakya clan that the Buddha was a part of, in modern-day Nepal. The Buddha liked this idea and drew from it.

The idea of cleaving apart politics and religion is a modern invention. Before the 1800s, we had theocracies across the world in all different religions. It’s only recently that we’ve tried to cleave these apart, and I think it’s artificial. The line between politics and religion is not clear at all. Both are about authority, and sometimes they’re able to cleave out different pools of authority so they don’t collide with each other, but in the end they’re both dealing with very similar things. They are both dealing with right and wrong. So, when Brian Victoria says, “This is politics, it’s not Buddhism,” I say “You’re missing the forest for the trees. You’re not seeing the nature of how religion operates in the world.”

You noted that, in Thailand, you could lose your access to the state. Is that because your book criticizes the monarchy?

Yes. I knew when I wrote the book that I might be banned from Thailand for the rest of my life. People like Andrew Marshall and other Western scholars have been tried in absentia, and if they enter the country they get fifteen years in prison, or more. And I have a whole chapter critiquing the monarchy and the king, which can get me in jail.

When I saw the cover of your book, I had a shock. It’s an image of a monk trying to push a boulder onto the Buddha. And the title is a reference to the famous koan, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” What are you trying to say with the cover and the title?

There’s a legend about the Buddha and his cousin Devadatta. Devadatta is like a nemesis of the Buddha. According to the legend, Devadatta tries to kill Buddha several times — one time pushing a boulder off of a cliff as the Buddha is walking down the road.

And, there’s the koan, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” The idea is that the Buddha is within you. The tathagatagarbha, buddhanature, is within you, not outside of you. Don’t see it outside. Seek it within. It’s not meant to be actual violence. But I paired the koan with the idea of Devadatta meeting the Buddha on the road and actually trying to kill him, showing how we have metaphors and we also have real legendary instances of the same thing. I’m not trying to advocate the koan being about violence, but show that there are both symbolic violence and actual advocations of violence.

https://www.lionsroar.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/jerryson-books.jpg

There is a bit of cognitive dissonance in what I’m doing with these covers. My Buddhist Warfare cover was taken by a photojournalist in 1988, on the eve of the violence in Myanmar. She asked this young novice holding a gun, “Could I take a picture?”

Scholars were furious about the cover before they read the book. People said, “How dare you put a picture of a child with a gun on a book?” I’d go, “Do you think we created this image? We didn’t. This exists. It sounds like you’re more concerned with the issue of violence being present in the world than you actually are with the cover.”

That’s what I’m trying to do with these covers. On the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence, I have the image of Abraham trying to kill Isaac. That’s a very horrible image, but it’s embedded right in the foundation of Abrahamic religions. If God tells you to kill your son, do it. I put the image of that to remind people. Wake up! This is what we have here. Don’t dismiss it.

I want to shift gears from physical violence. You also talk about structural violence. In that case, the evidence is more apparent and you don’t have to get so nitpicky into doctrine. You talk about how gender discrimination is a structural act of violence. So, even though the Buddha might have allowed women to take robes and said that a woman can reach enlightenment, nonetheless the Buddhist patriarchal system is equivalent to support of violence against women.

We have no evidence of what the Buddha actually said. The earliest examples of anything we have is from the second or third council, around the time of Ashoka — 150 years later. Often, people who are upset about what I’m saying say to me, “Oh, Dr. Jerryson, you’re wrong because the Buddha said this.” I say, “The Buddha didn’t say anything that you know about. It’s what the tradition thinks the Buddha said.” There’s no proof beyond the inside perspective of what happened there.

In the narrative of the Buddha, his aunt, who raised him, beseeched him after a while, asking to become ordained, and he said no. Turned her away. So then she turned to his cousin, Ananda, his favorite disciple, and she beseeched Ananda to advocate on females’ behalf. Ananda was turned away two times by the Buddha according to this legend. The third time, the Buddha said, “Okay, I’ll let women in. But because I’m letting women in, the life of the dharma has been shortened by 500 years.” And he created some rules for this which are still present to this day.

continued next post

GeneChing

11-18-2019, 09:53 AM

Fear is a primary emotion. Behind anger is fear. And if you don’t listen to the people in a way that they feel heard, they’re going to go into anger. Violence is an extension of that.
The first is that women must be ordained twice, where men are only to be ordained once. So men get ordained within the male sangha, women have to be ordained within the female sangha and then the male sangha. When women do transgressions they have to visit the male sangha and speak about them to the male sangha.

Another example is the fact that seniority among Buddhists in the Vinaya is dictated by how long you are a monk. So, Randy, if you were a monk for 10 years and I was a monk for one year, I might be older than you, but I defer to you, because you’ve been a monk longer. And I pay respects in that way. Now let’s say that we met a female monastic who had been a monastic for 20 years. She would have to bow to me, because the way it’s written in the scriptures, in the doctrine. A male monk is always higher than a female monk.

In some traditions, women cannot be awakened on their own. They have to be reborn as a man. In Pure Land Buddhism, they go to Pure Land as a male and then become awakened.

Beyond these examples, we can look to the current debates about whether or not women can be allowed to be ordained. Some Buddhists say, “Look, women cannot be ordained because the lineage has died out. There is no female sangha. And there’s no Buddha to initiate it again so therefore we can’t do it.”

In Thailand, women cannot get ordained. Over 78% of men are temporarily ordained—it is normal in Thailand to be temporarily ordained—and may even do this to give their mother enough merit to go to heaven because the mother can’t do this on her own, because she’s prevented from doing so.

Monks are given free rides in Thailand. Transportation money. They’re allowed to get income money from the state. Women don’t get this. And, in fact, women who do ordain, who are not part of the Thai sangha, are attacked in Thailand. There’s been arson attacks against them, death threats.

When I wrote this book and sent it off to the University Press, one of the reviewers said, “Gender discrimination is not violence. This should be taken out.” And I said, “No. Too long have we used Western definitions for violence, which by itself is too ambiguous because no one can really define what violence is. We need to start looking at what each religion sees as violence before we look at religion and violence.” So in Buddhism, “himsa” is often translated as “violence” and “ahimsa” as “nonviolence,” when in fact it’s “non-harm” and “non-injury.”

So, in this way, the self-immolations of over 150 Tibetans are not considered violent, because, according to scripture, there’s no harm being evinced by these people burning themselves up, and they’re harming no one else. So it’s not violent. So a Westerner would say, “suicide is violent.” But it’s not within the emic (insider) perspective there. At the same time, women are being harmed in the instances I’ve talked about. They’re being harmed in a social way and in a physical way and in a spiritual way. So that, according to Buddhist precepts, is violence against them.

You include French-American scholar Bernard Faure’s statement that “a consistent feminist critique could shatter Buddhism to its foundations.” How exactly could a modern critique shatter Buddhism to its foundations? There would be no Buddhism anymore?

Religion is always changing. And if it doesn’t change, it dies out. It has to remain relevant to modernity. That’s taking place in Buddhism. There’s a famous example in which Sariputra is met by a female goddess, and Sariputra says, “Well, you’re a female, you can’t be awakened.” And she says, “It doesn’t mean anything that I’m female.” And he goes, “Yeah it does.” And so she goes, “Good, you’re a female,” and turns him into a female. And he goes, “Ah!” And she turns him back — boom — and she goes, “It doesn’t really matter.” And Sariputra has to admit the fact that it doesn’t matter, that gender is really, in the end, insubstantial to what the dhamma is. That we are empty of any true existence in this way. But, unfortunately, these examples are few and far between in Buddhism.

If you examine the idea of himsa and ahimsa and how gender distinctions and discrimination is embedded within a lot of Buddhist traditions and practices, it’s shattering that you have to renegotiate what you’re going to prioritize and how you’re going to prioritize it. A lot of women have done this. We see a lot of reimagining and reconfiguring that I would consider shattering of the foundations. But, it’s gonna take a lot of change. I think that’s what Bernard Faure is getting at.

We have no evidence of what the Buddha actually said. The earliest examples of anything we have is from 150 years later.
Right now, there are so many rapes taking place in Buddhist monasteries. Female monastics get raped and sexually assaulted by male monks and they can’t report it to the authorities, who are male.

In Vietnam, a couple of years ago the UN invited Australian monk Ajahn Brahm to speak about female monastics and ordination at a conference. When he got there, he was disallowed from speaking about it. Fast-forward to two years later, I’m invited to give a paper at a conference in Thailand, and when I’m invited they tell me, “Please don’t talk about southern Thailand.” And I go, “Okay. Is it okay if I talk about gender?” And he goes, “Sure.” So, I talk about all the politics behind gender ordination in my paper. I get past the entry-level reviews. I’m one of the twelve papers selected by the committee. But when it gets to the higher-ups, who are male, they go, “Nope, no discussions about women and ordination. Forget about it.” So, we see here a patriarchal system that has been around for centuries, that has protected men at the expense of women, and has used Buddhist doctrine to legitimize it — at the expense of women who are harmed, from being raped and sexually assaulted to simple discrimination. So, to make this shift will be shattering for many communities.

continued next post

GeneChing

11-18-2019, 09:53 AM

In your book, you stay away from sexual violence. Is there a reason? Are you saving that for your next book?

When I was writing this book, I tried to do three cases where, according to Buddhist views of violence, Buddhists are doing violence. And three cases in which violence is being done to them, and they’re victims of it. So, I tried to make sure there’s balance.

I’m fearful that if I had one chapter on sexual abuses, people would dismiss it, and go, “Oh, that’s just people acting wrong.” But, in my view there is an institutional structure behind this, supporting all of this. Let’s examine the institutional structure, and we’ll see how it percolates into sexual abuses.

I’ve heard lots of reports. Like, in Laos, where a community of young girls will report a Buddhist monk is molesting them, and the parents say, “No, I don’t believe them.” I’ve listened to Rohingya refugees. You hear about the gang rapes by the Buddhist Rakhine soldiers and the Burmese Buddhist military. It’s awful.

Now, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do another book, because I’m dying of ALS. Last year, I was given less than a year to live — or maybe up to five years to live. So, I’m trying to use the last years of my life to fight for and advocate reducing suffering. If I have time to do another book, great. But if not, that’s why.

Wow. I didn’t know that. I really appreciate you spending the time with me to talk about your work. I know you get a lot of blowback. So, I’d like to give you the opportunity to respond to people who say you’re actually doing violence to Buddhism with your work.

I think there is a problem in Western academics. Most of the scholars who teach Buddhism are former or current monastics. If you’re an academic, you should wear the academic hat, and then take it off when you want to discuss Buddhist issues. But, too often, Buddhist teachers can get away with things that people teaching Christianity and Judaism can’t do. They can preach religion in their classes, do meditation classes. If you did Christian prayers in the classroom, you’d get kicked out.

In the end, I feel that my duty is to disseminate knowledge as best as I see it, to elucidate issues around the world that are not being seen clearly. This is why I went to southern Thailand. I actually had a hit put on me when I was doing my fieldwork for my dissertation. And I had a newborn daughter. My wife didn’t want me to go back, and I said, “Look, journalists are willing to risk their lives to cover the news. If I want to call myself an academic — which is supposed to be the highest level of knowledge production — why shouldn’t I be risking things?” So, I took out a half-million-dollar life insurance policy temporarily and went and did my fieldwork. And, to this day I have PTSD from it. So, I take my duty as a scholar very seriously.

Please don’t dislocate these people from being Buddhist because of the atrocities they’re committing. Help them feel heard, respect their views, and then disagree and explain how you see it as violent.
I don’t think it’s my job to promote things like we see with [Buddhist scholar] Robert Thurman. He once got in a fight with [Buddhist scholar] Donald Lopez, saying you shouldn’t critique the depiction of Tibetans because it will hurt the Free Tibet movement. I would say to Robert Thurman, “That’s not our job.” If you want to do that, do that as a monk. Our job as scholars is simply to explain as best we can. So I try very carefully not to say what is wrong or right. I try to describe as clearly as possible what I see happening.

Too often we dismiss people committing violence and just ignore them. We get angry at them or say they’re not true Buddhists. That’s a big mistake, in my view. Anger is a secondary emotion. Fear is a primary emotion. Behind anger is fear. And if you don’t listen to the people in a way that they feel heard, they’re going to go into anger. And violence is an extension of that — not feeling heard. Instead of attacking people for doing violence or advocating violence, we need to — first and foremost — make them feel heard. Listen to their concerns. When we talk about our fears, fear goes away. When we talk about anger, it increases and gets more and more and more. So, I say to people, please don’t dislocate Wirathu from being a Buddhist, or these Burmese Buddhists from being Buddhist because of the atrocities they’re committing. Help them feel heard, respect their emic views, and then disagree and explain how you see it as violent. But you need to do the first thing before doing the second. Otherwise, you won’t get anywhere. That’s the issue at hand. We have to listen to people’s fears.

Catchy headline and lead shot. Good read.

GeneChing

05-19-2020, 09:39 AM

The Tibetan lama who was really a plumber from Devon (https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/may/17/tibetan-lama-who-was-a-plumber-from-devon-1956-bestseller-the-third-eye?fbclid=IwAR30OQesLui92I6RlIlVeR824745qDWFm9lV0 7DApnkJCGjbGo4cEArG4Ps)
A 1956 bestseller about life in a Himalayan monastery turned out to be made up by a man who’d never been there. But that didn’t stop the Dalai Lama endorsing it
David Bramwell
Sun 17 May 2020 06.00 EDT

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/bf32fbf049f1c0bce5eeb14781e08c840cd45f6a/0_0_1361_1017/master/1361.jpg
Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, AKA Cyril Hoskin, in 1958, and his bestseller. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

Travel writing has always been plagued with spurious facts, exaggerated claims and barefaced lies, from fantastical beasts geographer Pausanias’s Guide to Greece in the second century AD to Louis de Rougement’s serialised Australasian adventures for the Victorian Wide World Magazine, most of which he gleaned from the reading room of the British Museum.
When it comes to accounts of exotic climes, however, none is quite so extraordinary – or enduring – as The Third Eye, written in 1956 by a person who called himself Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. This spiritual travelogue covers Rampa’s early life in Lhasa, his years in a Tibetan monastery, encounters with yetis, yogic flying and other Buddhist mysteries. The book sold half a million copies in its first two years, making Rampa something of a celebrity.
He did, however, have his detractors. Rampa’s wild claims – not to mention his West Country burr – led Tibetologist Heinrich Harrer to hire a private detective. What this gumshoe uncovered surprised even his employer. Not only had Rampa never been to Tibet, he didn’t even own a passport. He was a former plumber from Devon called Cyril Hoskin who damaged his back by falling out of a tree while owl-spotting. During convalescence he had, it seems, settled on a drastic career change.
The media was scandalised; Hoskin was unrepentant. Cheerfully admitting that he’d never been to Tibet, he now claimed that as he lay semi-conscious at the bottom of a tree that fateful afternoon, half-strangled by his binoculars, an elderly lama (monk) had floated by on the astral plane and the pair had agreed to swap bodies. (Whether, in 1950s Tibet, an elderly lama ever claimed to be a West Country plumber remains unverified.)
Rampa nevertheless garnered a global following. His 20 books range from an interstellar travel memoir entitled My Visit to Venus to Living with the Lama, transmitted to him telepathically by his cat, Mrs Fifi Greywhiskers.
History should not judge Rampa, who died in 1981, too harshly. Many leading Tibetologists admit that he set them on their paths, and the Dalai Lama has acknowledged Rampa’s role in drawing attention to the plight of his country. “The ****her one travels, the less one knows,” sang George Harrison in 1968’s The Inner Light. With lockdown making travel writing almost impossible, fellow freelancers take note. A ripe imagination, decent broadband and a trickster’s cunning are perhaps all you need.

• The Third Eye (Ballantine Books, £7.99) remains the UK’s bestselling book on Tibet

Hmmmm, I need a new job (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71782-Kung-Fu-Tai-Chi-is-ceasing-publication). Maybe something like this?

GeneChing

01-15-2021, 10:35 AM

He's not really behaving badly but I didn't know where else to post this. There are a lot more pix. I only c&ped a few.

Hot ‘Monk’ Going Viral is Revealed to Be a Famous Burmese Chinese Actor (https://nextshark.com/paing-takhon-hot-monk-burmese-chinese-actor/)
BY CARL SAMSON
JANUARY 14, 2021
19 SHARES
1 MINUTE READ

https://cdn.statically.io/img/nextshark.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/dfbdfbdsf-800x500.jpg?w=800&quality=80&f=auto
Photos of a Burmese Chinese actor who dressed up as a monk have gone viral on Asian social media.

Paing Takhon, 24, who stands at about 5 feet 10 inches, has acted for various movies and a documentary drama series in Myanmar.

He was listed as one of the Top 10 Actors of 2019 by the Myanmar Times.

https://cdn.statically.io/img/nextshark.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/PAING_01-e1610636731949.jpg?w=800&quality=80&f=auto
Image via @paing_takhon
Earlier this week, Takhon, who started his career as a runway model, shared photos of himself dressed as a monk on Instagram.

It did not take long before the photos spread like wildfire, with many users expressing awe at the sight of a “hot” monk.

Image via @paing_takhon
In addition to dressing like a monk, Takhon actually lived like a monk for 10 days.

“Spent my New Year 2021 by being a monk for 10 days and I felt so peaceful and knew myself more,” the 24-year-old captioned his post.

Check out more of his photos below:

https://cdn.statically.io/img/nextshark.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/PAING_6-e1610636890443.jpg?w=800&quality=80&f=auto
Image via @paing_takhon

Image via @paing_takhon

Image via @paing_takhon

Image via @paing_takhon

Image via @paing_takhon
Needless to say, fans have been swooning over his appearance.

“I can’t even take you seriously. If the monks at my temple were that handsome, I’m afraid I would never go to the temple again in fear that I would sin,” one wrote.

Another commented, “Divine handsomeness.”

Image via @paing_takhon
Aside from acting and modeling, Paing also happens to be a singer.

In 2017, he released a full solo album called “Chit Thu” (Lover) and donated all of his earnings to children from Ananda Metta orphan school.

Feature Images via Paing Takhon

mawali

01-16-2021, 01:15 PM

I am sure where it seems to be the same in Thailand, where people leave their workplace or profession for x period of time (4 wks, 8 wks, 2 months, etc) and do the monk thing as a way to "get away" and or reorient, to a spiritual place instead of training the senses (Pattaya, etc). It isn't as bad the the full time monk engaging in non monk activities that disrupts his sensual appreaciation of material benefit.

I met a few (decades ago) and that seems to be the practice in those places staing they are secular. Notwithstang the Burmese refugee crisis of getting rid of "minorities' stans a part of the secular/spiritual reality on all bases!:D

UKJim

01-18-2021, 05:21 PM

tragic wherever this happens.

GeneChing

02-04-2021, 09:58 AM

CHINA / SOCIETY
Fake ‘Living Buddhas’ end up behind bars for using Tibetan Buddhism to amass wealth, rape disciple (https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202102/1214673.shtml)
By Gao Lei
Published: Feb 02, 2021 09:40 AM

https://www.globaltimes.cn/Portals/0/attachment/2021/2021-02-02/c34b2547-a9da-4494-b45f-e5aa371062b3.jpeg
Wang Xingfu disguises himself as a living buddha. Photo: file picture

Over the years, with the popularity of Tibetan Buddhism, many people including some television celebrities have been worshiping "Living Buddhas." Seeing profits in this, some lawbreakers made use of people's devotion to the religion to amass large amounts of money and even rape their disciples.

The Global Times dug out how two fake Living Buddhas used religion to harm their disciples.

Prison guard-turned 'living buddha'

Wang Xingfu, who claimed himself a "Living Buddha" and used the name of Lhosang Tenzin, swindled hundreds of millions of dollars and even raped several women over the past decades.

Wang had 21 "Ashrams" and more than 3,000 "disciples" across China. Before proclaiming himself as a "Living Buddha," Wang dubbed himself a "qigong master" in late 1980s when the country was caught up in a "qigong frenzy."

Like many other fake qigong masters, Wang profited from the wave. He embezzled the Tibetan Buddhism and fabricated a so-called "secret school of mind recharge."

Then he set up classes in cities including Ji'nan, Chengdu and Shenyang, earning more than 5,000 yuan ($773) or even as much as 7,000 yuan a month, a high income in the late 1980s and early 1990s in China.

Seeing the profits, Wang who was a prison guard at that time, had no interest in his work and kept asking for leave until he was fired. In the middle and late 1990s, as the government cracked down on the fraudulent "qigong masters," Wang changed his "secret school of mind recharge" to "ancient yoga theory application research institute," and developed a so-called "supreme secret yoga" to cheat money from disciples.

In 2006, Wang got to know the a Living Buddha named Gongzhi in Eruo Monastery, Ganzi Prefecture, Southwest China's Sichuan Province. Gongzhi was well known there and at that time he was seriously ill.

Wang, who was desperate to "legitimize" his schemes by using Tibetan Buddhism, tried hard to curry favor with Gongzhi. He took his "disciples" to donate money and goods worth over 1 million yuan to Gongzhi's temple. He then also claimed to have studied Buddhism in temples for many years and is the reincarnation of a "Living Buddha."

As a result, Gongzhi took Wang as his only disciple outside the Tibetan regions and told his disciple, Lurong, who would take over as the abbot of Eruo Monastery, to be good to Wang.

Lurong at the beginning did not welcome Wang but his attitude changed when he saw Wang was able to support the temple.

In 2008, Lurong illegally held an "enthronement ceremony" for Wang and claimed Wang as a Living Buddha named Lhosang Tenzin and even gave him a fake ID card showing Wang as Tibetan. Wang even fabricated a "reincarnation system" for himself.

In 2016, Wang divorced with his wife. When the case was exposed, Lurong was asked by the police why he illegally hosted "enthronement" for Wang and forged him as a "Living Buddha." Lurong said that Wang had many disciples and could donate money and goods to the temple.

After being arrested, Wang also attacked Lurong whom he used to call "vajra brother," saying Lurong treated him as a money machine and he felt deep "regret."

https://www.globaltimes.cn/Portals/0/attachment/2021/2021-02-02/e4ceeaed-6736-47e9-a806-f799f61ca684.jpeg
Wang Xingfu's villa in Xiamen, East China's Fujian Province. Photo: file picture

'Religious teaching' for money

After becoming the "Living Buddha Lhosang Tenzin" following his "enthronement" in 2008, Wang became even more unscrupulous and committed many heinous crimes on his followers, such as fraud, molestation and even rape.

Before his crimes were uncovered, many of his followers, who had been seriously harassed by him, did not consider themselves victims of Wang's crimes, and some even chose to defend him.

One of his followers surnamed Wei said Wang controlled his disciples' mind in a horrific manner - he made the disciples swear not to betray him, otherwise, they would suffer terrible retribution and even lose their lives.

Laxianjia, vice director of the religious institute of the China Tibetology Research Center, said Tibetan Buddhism has "Exotoric Buddhism" and "Esoteric Buddhism." A disciple usually needs to spend more than 20 years in the period of "Exotoric Buddhism" with his or her master. During this period, the disciple can question and even change masters. But once the disciple passes "Exotoric Buddhism" stage to "Esoteric Buddhism," the disciple must fully follow the teachings of the master whom he or she had identified during the "Exotoric Buddhism" stage.

Laxianjia believed Wang used the close relations between disciple and master in the "Esoteric Buddhism" stage to make his disciples willing to be controlled. Laxianjia said Wang actually knew nothing about Buddhism, after questing Wang when he was in detention.

One of his disciples said that most of Wang's disciples were in urgent need of consolation of the faith due to their own or family troubles and Wang is good at using some concepts in Buddhism to appease these people.

Some had doubts about Wang, but their doubts were relieved when they saw how Lurong received Wang in the monastery.

According to the police investigation, the main way Wang cheated money was to charge people for his teachings. The money varied from 300 yuan to 8,000 yuan. He also sold "religious instruments" and carried out "religious activities" to make money. He made nearly 200 million yuan in more than 10 years.

Wang spent the money buying houses and properties across the country and gave his wife and son money. Wang said he gave Lurong more than 40 million yuan.

Besides fraud, Wang even used the concept of "Yuganaddha" to molest and rape female disciples.

Laxianjia said that the "Yuganaddha" in Tibetan Buddhism is about the combination of "wisdom" and "methods" rather than the nonsense that Wang talked about.

When he was arrested, police found condoms and "oil" that can boost sexual drive. He claimed the disciples he raped had consented.

Some of his disciples who had sex with him said Wang called them to the room for sex.

One of the women who was raped by him in 2013 said Wang came to the hotel in casual clothes after she checked in at his request. After she kowtowed to Wang and told him her family's problems and asked for his blessings, Wang became impatient and said the disciple needs to offer the master the body and mind. Wang later peeled off her clothes.

"I knew what he wanted to do then. I was quite scared. But as I thought he was a Living Buddha, and I was afraid that if I rebelled against him, there would be retribution. I didn't dare to resist. I just knelt down and cried and kowtowed to him," she said.

So far, investigators have evidence that Wang has sexually assaulted at least 10 female "disciples" over the years, including eight who were raped and two who were indecently assaulted.

A police officer told the Global Times that due to the reluctance of most victims of sexual assault cases to come forward, and the long time span of Wang's crimes, the number of women raped by Wang may be far higher.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/Portals/0/attachment/2021/2021-02-02/421b302b-8335-4290-bd7d-a5f6f487ce86.jpeg
Cash and foreign banknotes are found by the police from Wang's residence. Photo: file picture
continued next post

GeneChing

02-04-2021, 09:58 AM

https://www.globaltimes.cn/Portals/0/attachment/2021/2021-02-02/f9ee3986-01fd-42e8-a622-9d99747ae4f2.jpeg
Cash and foreign banknotes are found by the police from Wang's residence. Photo: file picture

A key accomplice

Wang would not have had the opportunity to commit such heinous crimes if it weren't for Lurong, the abbot at Eruo Monastery.

Lurong, through stealing and violating the traditional convention of Tibetan Buddhism, turned Wang, a liar from qigong, into a "living buddha" and helped Wang deceive a huge number of believers in the country.

Lurong has known of Wang's crime as early as 2016, when a woman follower of Wang reported his sexually assaulting women and looting money. But Wang reminded Lurong about how the Eruo Monastery had been depending on Wang's followers' sponsorship.

To not lose Wang as a "money machine," Lurong became Wang's accomplice. He not only published an "investigation report" to prove Wang did not have any problem, but also hired people to remove online posts reporting Wang.

All the punishment Lurong gave Wang was letting him confess in front of the sacred tower and warning him to be a "qualified monk."

"I felt he wanted to use my money to renovate the monastery in order to lift his prestige among locals," Wang said.

From the perspective of Tibetan Buddhism, Lurong's behavior is also a serious violation of Buddhism, said Zhou Wei, an expert on Tibetology. "It completely violated the philosophy of Tibetan Buddhism and the concept of "integrity" in religion. It is all crooked ways."

This is also the reason why the two were prosecuted for "organizing and using a cult to undermine the implementation of the law." Their behavior deviated from Tibetan Buddhism and has long become a "cult."

https://www.globaltimes.cn/Portals/0/attachment/2021/2021-02-02/cb8d64aa-db7f-4789-ac59-5c2ac08bc508.jpeg
Wang Xingfu during an illegal "enthronement" in 2008 which seriously violated Tibetan Buddhism rituals. Photo: file picture

Another monster

Apart from Wang's case, police also cracked down a fake living buddha case as appalling as Wang's in Shenzhen of South China's Guangdong Province.

Yang Hongchen, the main suspect in the Shenzhen case, was born in Northeast China and became a monk in a small Hongye Temple in North China's Hebei Province in the late 1990s.

Afterwards, he went to Labrong Monastery in Northwest China's Gansu Province and fabricated a "living buddha" certificate and an ID as a Tibetan. With the new identity, he returned to Hongye Temple and began to deceive people there.

To bamboozle more people, he claimed himself to be the former head of the Chinese Buddhism Association and the reincarnation of respected patriotic monk Sherab Gyatso.

Many victims in Yang's case said that believed Yang's story. But monks in Labrang said Yang was never a monk in the monastery, let alone a living buddha. People from Yang's hometown said Yang wasn't even a monk.

Before 2017, Yang already had dozens of believers. He also raped many of his female followers and caused one to get pregnant.

Under the mind control of Yang, the violated women were either afraid of being cursed by the "living buddha" or believed it was for religious progress. None of the women chose to report Yang's assaults.

Finally, Yang's hedonistic life style drew suspicion from a follower, who reported to the religious administration department in Shenzhen.

The fair trial

In the past three years, the relevant persons involved in the Wang, Lurong and Yang cases have been convicted of serious crimes by the court in the first trial, and completed the second trial this year.

Wang was sentenced to 25 years in prison and fined 20 million yuan for crimes of organizing and utilizing a cult to undermine laws, illegal operation, rape and compulsory indecency. Lurong was sentenced to six years imprisonment and fined 5 million yuan.

Yang was put in jail for 18 years and fined 150,000 yuan for using superstition to undermine law enforcement, fraud, rape and embezzlement. He pleaded not guilty in both court trials and blamed his followers.

Police believe that such scams are still hidden in society, and because some victims are mentally controlled, it greatly increases the difficulty of investigations.

To identify such criminals, Li Hanying, former senior official on religious affairs at the United Front Work Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, reminded that the public can check the identity of a "living buddha" at an online query system of the State Administration of Religious Affairs or check with local religious departments.

Li noted that Buddhism is a religion of rationality and wisdom and believers should not blindly obey someone because of admiration. Therefore, everyone must establish this concept of "right faith" and improve the quality of faith and the ability to differentiate between good and evil.

Once a suspicious "living buddha" is discovered, it is even more important to quickly report him to the religious affairs department and public security organs, Li said.

These cases also have triggered thinking of related departments on how to strengthen supervision, stop such frauds in the name of religions, and upgrade publicity on such crimes.

Laxianjia suggested that schools could open some courses on common sense about religions. "It is not to spread religions on campus, but to tell people the essence and knowledge of religions and lead people to have the correct values to avoid being deceived."

Lurong and some Tibetan monks served as accomplices and violated the reputation of Tibetan Buddhism, which experts believe shows Buddhist monks should strictly maintain their reputation and rituals of Tibetan Buddhism and discipline themselves, and therefore safeguard and respect for the freedom of religions in China.

threads
Buddhists-behaving-badly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68723-Buddhists-behaving-badly)
Busted-Qigong-Masters (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?56283-Busted-Qigong-Masters)

GeneChing

02-09-2021, 10:12 AM

https://lithub.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/meditation-857916_1920.jpg

How a Poetry Collection Masquerading as Buddhist Scripture Nearly Duped the Literary World (https://lithub.com/how-a-poetry-collection-masquerading-as-buddhist-scripture-nearly-duped-the-literary-world/)
”The lioness’s roars of the ancient nuns have been muffled into sweet new-agey purring.”
By An Tran
February 3, 2021
When The Best American Poetry 2015 hit the shelves, mainstream media bloomed with stories of a hot new literary scandal: one of the poems in the collection, published under the name Yi-Fen Chou, was actually the work of a middle-aged white American man named Michael Derrick Hudson. The poem was widely seen as a racial appropriation of the voice and identity of a young Chinese woman, one that the author undertook after failing to publish widely under his own name and identity.

Half a decade later, a new literary scandal has poked up its head, this time in what is known as the Buddhist Anglosphere, and it is far a more extensive transgression. Please make yourself acquainted with one Matty Weingast, a white American man, whose release of The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns—originally marketed by Shambhala Publications as a translation of the Therigatha (Verses of the Elder Nuns), an important work of Buddhist scripture composed by the first awakened women—initially met generous fanfare that soon boiled over into a frothing controversy as more Buddhists familiar with the original text read Weingast’s book more carefully.

Counted among those Buddhists is this article’s author—a writer of short stories, a Vietnamese American raised in Mahayana Buddhism, and an armchair historian of early Buddhist texts—who was, at first, incredibly excited to hear of this new translation. In Buddhist tradition, an awakened being typically composes a gatha, or verse, commemorating their enlightenment. The Therigatha is an especially sacred collection of these awakening verses, because the poems are said to be authored by the very first community of Buddhist nuns, led by the Buddha’s stepmother, Mahapajapati Gotami. All extant lineages of Buddhist nuns are believed to trace back directly to her and the first community of nuns that she established. Emerging from a time and setting where many of the surrounding cultures did not think it was acceptable for women to practice religious asceticism, and some held that it was impossible for women to attain liberation, the Therigatha stands out as one of the earliest anthologies of women’s literature in human history and, for Buddhists, a testament to the spiritual ferocity and capacity of women.

Tradition holds that, after the Buddha was at first reticent to ordain a community of nuns, fearing for their safety living in secluded forests, Mahapajapati and the women that would become the Elder Nuns walked barefoot from Kapilavastu to Vaisali—a distance that today covers over 220 miles—demanding he reconsider. Realizing that his concern was mistaken in the face of the aspirant nuns’ determination, the Buddha agreed and ordained his stepmother as the first nun. The Therigatha, maintained in the liturgical language of Pali, is a 2,500-year-old tome of power, a rare transmission of women from the ancient world speaking in their own voices to triumphantly declare that they have conquered death. Any new translation of this immensely powerful text is highly significant in Buddhist communities.

To market the book, Shambhala Publications, which is the leading mainstream publisher of Buddhist literature in America and distributed by Penguin Random House, collected blurbs from some of the biggest names in American Buddhism, including Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and Thubten Chodron, among others, many of which lauded it as a fresh new translation of the Therigatha. But it is not. The First Free Women, Weingast’s book, is not a translation of the Therigatha at all—it is entirely a work of original poetry, composed by Weingast himself.

Weingast’s poems bear little to no resemblance to the poems of the Elder Nuns. They often strip away concepts like rebirth, karma, and spiritual attainments, replacing these key Buddhist doctrines with distortions derived from Buddhist modernism, the post-colonial revisionist movement originating in the 19th century, which sought to re-imagine Buddhism in the guise of rationalist philosophy and romantic humanism (a more appealing approach in the West).

The great gulf between Weingast’s poems and the sacred verses they claim to represent was first publicly noted by the Venerable Ayya Sudhamma Theri, an American nun and the founder of the Charlotte Buddhist Vihara, on the popular blog Fake Buddha Quotes in November. She wrote, “Weingast’s poems may mislead readers into a soft feel-good version of early Buddhism, without rebirth, without psychic powers, and, it seems to me from what I’ve read of it, without celebrating the promise of complete liberation. In Weingast’s version, the lioness’s roars of the ancient nuns have been muffled into sweet new-agey purring.”

Plucking poetry or religion or anything else from one culture and transposing it to another does not give one the liberty to re-imagine it entirely, then masquerade this new product in the original’s identity.
While there is no shortage of commercial reviews of the book that have praised it for providing access to “rarely heard female voices” (in the words of one reviewer), it is important to note that Weingast, by colonizing the voices of these revered Asian women, ultimately binds them further within a power dynamic that privileges the male gaze.

This is no more apparent than when Weingast’s version of the poem composed by the Buddha’s stepmother, Mahapajapati, is compared to any valid translation, such as the version by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, a prominent Pali translator in San Diego who teaches and practices in the Thai Forest tradition. The original poem makes no reference at all to Mahapajapati acting as a mother figure to the Buddha, which more than one past translator has noted; yet, Weingast’s poem foregrounds her maternal role to the Buddha, writing (in Mahapajapati’s voice), “What mother doesn’t see a Buddha in her child?” Bhante Sujato, an Australian monk and translator of Buddhist texts, comments on this, saying: “Weingast puts in Mahapajapati’s mouth the idea that universal motherhood is the Buddhist path. She is no longer a free woman, but one bound by the limitations of a man’s understanding.”

In the past, Weingast has admitted he isn’t qualified to translate the text. Last May, Pamela Weiss, a prominent meditation teacher associated with the San Francisco Zen Center and the Insight Meditation Society, published an interview with Weingast that was held at the San Francisco Insight Meditation Community in front of an audience. In regard to his writing process, Weingast said, “I had no idea what I was doing, so it just kind of allowed me to just make it up as I went along […] So it was kind of always just this seeing what it was, seeing what it was for me, that was the important part.”

In response to a question about how Weingast chose specific English words to interpret their Pali originals, Weingast responded, “Not so much [in reference] to Pali, because she [the chief editor] doesn’t have Pali,” admitting that neither he nor the editor have any expertise in the text’s source language. He then described a process of reading and re-reading the verses aloud in different ways, trying different words based on what “rings true.”

In November of 2020, Weingast said in the Creative Dharma Newsletter, “My approach was to read a poem many, many times… then reconstruct the poem around that primary image or the instruction.” He added, “I had no training in this, and I wasn’t telling people what I was doing because the whole thing was so weird. But something allowed me to say: let’s see where this goes. I was in over my head, not properly trained to do this, but that allowed it to turn into whatever it wanted.”

Between these two interviews is a full admission that Weingast was not trained in Pali translation, did not work with anyone who was, and composed the book based on intuition without any concern for resembling what was supposed to be the source material. He explained on the podcast, “Besides their importance as a historical and religious text, the Therigatha is a beautiful work of art. […] When you have that depth of meaning, you can see it from a thousand different angles and it’ll be true from any point.” This position is rooted firmly in the imperialist perspective of Buddhist modernism, wherein the Buddhadharma is seen as so malleable a set of teachings that it can be anything. In this modernist perspective, the ultimate goal of extinguishing birth and death is shed away, regarded as an extraneous primitive and superstitious cultural baggage that accumulated like dust onto a pristine, “purer” version of Buddhism, one accessible only through the superior western rationalist gaze. The dharma, then, is re-packaged to the masses as a suite of secularized self-help exercises, composed of curated cherry-pickings from revised, re-imagined, or wholly apocryphal texts.
continued next post

GeneChing

02-09-2021, 10:12 AM

But of course, Weingast and the entirety of the modernist project are wrong in this: plucking poetry or religion or anything else from one culture and transposing it to another does not give one the liberty to re-imagine it entirely, then masquerade this new product in the original’s identity. That is textbook cultural appropriation. It is fraud. It is sacrilege.

“I made a mistake by endorsing the book without reading it properly and apologize for that.”
Hoping to defend himself after Ayya Sudhamma’s analysis began attracting more attention in the Buddhist Anglosphere, Weingast invited her, and others who were getting involved in the discussion, to a Zoom conversation on December 28. In Ayya Sudhamma’s account of the call published on Bhante Sujato’s website, Weingast repeatedly side-stepped the question of whether his work is or isn’t supposed to be a translation. He noted that he had been concerned, at one point, that people might mistake his book for a translation; he also described a process of composition that involved sitting in meditation and taking note of the feeling he intuited from each original poem.

This writing process recalls other attempts at shamanistic divination and channeling as they were undertaken by Western interlocutors, such as the mediumship and séance practices that emerged with Henry Olcott and the Theosophists in the 1800s, during one of the West’s earliest attempts to spiritually appropriate Buddhism. And yet, after acknowledging that the work is not a translation, Ven. Sudhamma recalled that Weingast stated “adamant[ly]” that he would not change the title, nor the front or back covers of the book.

Some readers have noted that Shambhala Publications, ultimately, bears responsibility for the book’s title, covers, and marketing campaign. On January 17, a small coalition of Buddhist monastics, translators, scholars, and authors (this article’s author included) sent an open letter to Shambhala calling for the removal of the book from publication on these grounds. In their response, a brief letter that was received by the co-signatories, Shambhala called the book a “work of poems inspired by the Therigatha,” acknowledged an awareness of the issue, and stated they “are in the process of adjusting [their] online descriptions so that there can be no ambiguity around the question of translation.” After that, the publisher added a note on the book’s page, saying its description had been “updated to clarify this is not a literal translation of the Therigatha.”

The implication from Shambhala is that the publisher never intended to market the work as a translation in the first place, when all the language around the book shows otherwise, including its title, original marketing copy, the cataloguing metadata sent from Shambhala Publications to the Library of Congress (which describe it as a translation), and numerous blurbs, which call it a translation, while the promotional copy on the back cover declares the poems “transmit the words of these liberated women,” that “their voices are all here,” and that Weingast is “offering readers a rare glimpse [at] the spiritual literature and poetry of the first female disciples of the Buddha.”

While it is destined to be lost to us, the Therigatha has survived and endured for 2,500 years—it will not be erased today.
Bhikkuni Canda, a British nun and spiritual director of the Anukampa Bhikkuni Project, recently released a public statement on her Facebook account to “acknowledge that I made a mistake by endorsing the book without reading it properly and apologise for that. I have contacted Matty and the publishers, Shambhala, to ask that my endorsement be removed from the book.”

Recently, a second open letter was sent to the publisher from 42 co-signatories at the time of this article’s writing, with more still adding their names, who outlined the group’s grievances and demands for remediation. Among the list of demands are calls for Shambhala Publications to: withdraw the book in its current form from publication; issue a public apology explaining how this deception came to be and why it was defended; release the book under a different title if it is to be re-released; ensure any marketing material related to the book makes clear it is not a translation of any kind; remove the existing subtitle from any version of the book; work with the Library of Congress to ensure the book is catalogued as a work of original poetry; and others.

Several days after I reached out to Shambhala Publications for a comment for this article, their team directed me to two public letters, both released just before the deadline that Lit Hub’s editors had given them to respond. The first, a public letter from Shambhala Publications president Nikko Odiseos and addressed to signatories of the open letters, states, “Although it was certainly not our intention to mislead readers regarding the nature of this poetic reimagining of the Therigatha, we see that many were, in fact, unclear about this point, and we fully acknowledge our misjudgment in how we presented this author’s work. … We did not present [the book] as we should have, for which we are sorry to both the author and to readers who very reasonably expected something different.”

The publisher also said that, in consultation with the author, the book will be reissued “clearly and unambiguously as an original work, rather than as a translation.” While failing to provide an explanation on how this situation came about, Odiseos promises that Shambhala “will also be updating the subtitle, cover, descriptive copy, and the Library of Congress information,” and that they have begun reaching out to everyone that provided an endorsement “to give them the opportunity to revisit their endorsements before the new edition comes out.”

A separate public letter, a general note on the book’s first edition also issued Monday, acknowledges the controversy around the book, noting, “the provenance and classification of the book as an ‘adaptation’ or ‘loose translation’ has become the subject of debate.” This is a soft capitulation, still trying to frame this as a misunderstanding, rather than an explanation as to why the book was clearly and fraudulently marketed as a translation.

Tradition holds that the teachings are destined to be forgotten in this world, to be rediscovered in a distant time and future by another Buddha, when we are all long forgotten. In an early text, the historical Buddha warns of the teachings’ disappearance, telling us that “when the counterfeit of the true teaching appears in the world then the true teaching disappears.” He adds, hopefully, “The true teaching doesn’t disappear like a ship that sinks all at once,” exhorting to his followers that the appropriate defense against counterfeiters is to diligently maintain their respect and reverence for the teachings and transmission. In this way, the teachings’ fade from the world is slow and gradual. Ultimately, while it is destined to be lost to us, the Therigatha has survived and endured for 2,500 years—it will not be erased today, not by this one act of forgery, not as long as Buddhists, and friends of Buddhists, who respect the teachings take notice and speak out.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article stated Weingast does not know Pali; however, Weingast claims to be self-taught.

Ouch. I love Shamballa press and have many of their publications. :(

GeneChing

03-02-2021, 07:17 PM

Dated, but relevant again.

The unhappy truth behind Happy Science (https://www.evangelical-times.org/22690/the-unhappy-truth-behind-happy-science/)
September 2012
Select Language▼
The unhappy truth behind Happy Science

Happy Science — a fast growing new religious movement — has arrived in Uganda, among many other nations. We are indebted to Rodgers Atwebembeire, a graduate of African Bible University and a researcher for the Africa Centre for Apologetics Research (www.acfar.org) for writing this article.

On Rubaga Road, near the Hotel Sojovalo, is one of the first African outposts of a Japanese sect that expects to one day rule the world.
Happy Science entered Uganda in 2008. It has since spread beyond Kampala to Lira, Karuma, Tororo and Entebbe. It has recently been engaged in an aggressive and expensive promotional campaign heralding the appearance of its founder at Namboole Stadium.
That founder is Ryuho Okawa, a 55-year-old former businessman who was born as Takashi Nakagawa on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s main islands.

Wealth

Okawa claims that in 1981 he experienced ‘Buddha enlightenment’, which led him to organize the kofuku no kagaku (‘science of happiness’) in October 1986, to offer ‘salvation for all humankind’. Okawa has gained a wide audience through publishing and films. Today he is one of Japan’s wealthiest men.
Happy Science is one of the new religions that have sprouted in Japan since World War II. It advertises itself as ‘a universal religion open to people of all religious, cultural and ethnic backgrounds’.
But more than this, Okawa claims to be the most important person in the world today — El Cantare, the literal reincarnation of the original Buddha and ‘supreme God of Earth’. In 1991, the Associated Press quoted Okawa as boasting that ‘I came here as more than the Messiah … This universe, this world, were based on my words and my teachings’.
Moreover Okawa has claimed, ‘It is I who possess the highest authority on earth. It is I who have all authority from the beginning of the earth until the end. For I am not human, but am the law itself’.
How did Okawa come to such stunning delusions of grandeur? One reason is that he is a practising occultist — a spirit medium. And like Alice Lakwena, Credonia Mwerinde and Joseph Kony, he confounds and controls his followers by claiming to speak for the dead.
The Japan Times explains that before founding Happy Science, Okawa ‘wrote books in which he channelled the spirits of Muhammad, Christ, Buddha, and Confucius’, among others.
Strangely, these long-departed religious leaders and geniuses have, according to Okawa, much the same message: ‘Japan is the world’s greatest power and should ditch its constitution, rearm and lead the world’.
Indeed, in 1991, the Associated Press described Okawa’s passionate sermon at a giant rally where he declared the Japanese as a ‘chosen people’, who are destined to ‘destroy the United States and the Soviet Union’, making China a ‘slave’ and Korea a ‘prostitute’.

Fantasies

But what does all this mean to Christians in Uganda [and elsewhere]? Scripture commands followers of Jesus to ‘test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world’ (1 John 4:1).
Christians will find the vast doctrine of Happy Science neither happy nor scientific. It’s a bizarre, complex combination of New Age and eastern mysticism, mixed with Okawa’s sci-fi fantasies of lost civilisations and multi-dimensional beings.
And it conflicts violently with the Bible in almost every major category of belief. Okawa denies the Trinity, the unique deity and incarnation of Jesus Christ, Christ’s atonement for sin and resurrection, and the doctrine of everlasting punishment.
In his books Okawa shamelessly makes Moses, Peter, Paul, and even Jesus, his spirit puppets to mouth his occultic messages.
At a time when many are seeking hope, longing for answers and hungry for something ‘new’, Ugandans need to know that Happy Science is a hollow substitute for the good news that ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life’ (John 3:16).
Curious churchgoers who are tempted by Okawa’s pride and pageantry should beware lest, ‘as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ’.
‘No wonder’, the apostle Paul continues, ‘for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. Therefore it is not surprising if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness, whose end will be according to their deeds’ (2 Corinthians 11:3, 14-15).

GeneChing

03-10-2021, 10:33 AM

Shoot. The pix won't display. You'll just have to click the link if you dare...

Chinese entrepreneur sells pensive Donald Trump Buddha statues (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/10/donald-trump-buddha-statue-china-taobao?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1)
One buyer says he bought statue of former US president on Taobao as reminder not to be ‘too Trump’

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7657bf9894707ce482cdeb9d0814fa1e24957baf/385_82_1316_790/master/1316.jpg?width=620&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&
The Trump Buddha statue for sale on the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao. Photograph: Zzamuyu/Taobao
Martin Belam
Wed 10 Mar 2021 07.36 EST

Donald Trump is not known for his calm and peaceful demeanour, but that hasn’t stopped one entrepreneurial furniture-maker in China from casting a statue of the former US president in a pose more readily associated with the Buddha.

The Trump Buddha statue, listed on the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao, is priced at 999 Chinese yuan (£110 GBP/$150 USD) for the small version, which measures 1.6 metres tall. A larger version, listed as 4.6 metres tall, is available for 3,999 yuan (£440/$610).

The statue, with Trump’s hands folded in his laps, thumbs pointing outwards, is a pose from Buddhist art that signifies meditation and contemplation, something the 74-year-old has had more time for since leaving the White House in January for his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida.

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7657bf9894707ce482cdeb9d0814fa1e24957baf/90_0_1361_1701/master/1361.jpg
The Trump Buddha statue shows Donald Trump in a meditative pose. Photograph: Zamuyu/Taobao
China’s state-owned Global Times paper first reported on the product and spoke to the seller, based in Xiamen, Fujian province, who is promoting the statue with the slogan “Make your company great again!” The seller said they had already sold “dozens” of the 100 statues manufactured so far.

One buyer told the Global Times they had bought the statue as a humble reminder not to be “too Trump”.

Trump – whose name can be rendered in two different spellings in Chinese –特朗普 for Tèlǎngpǔ or 川普 for Chuānpǔ – is a popular source of merchandise on the Taobao website, where users can buy Trump facemasks, models, little statues, hats, socks and more. Taobao, owned by Alibaba, has yearly retail sales said to exceed the combined e-commerce sales of all US companies. By 2016 more than 1bn products were available on the site.

It’s not the first time the twice-impeached former president of the US has been rendered in a Buddha pose. Novelty gifts of a 3D-printed bright orange Trump Buddha are available on the craft website Etsy, where the seller says: “The Trump Buddha is not intended to stir up anything political. In fact, this Laughing Buddha mashup is simply a reminder that, no matter where we fall in the political spectrum, we could all use a little more laughter and joy in our lives!”

False Buddha statues are so weird. But then, so are false crucifixions - they just aren't as prevalent.

GeneChing

04-09-2021, 04:07 PM

More on Paing here (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68723-Buddhists-behaving-badly&p=1320115#post1320115).

Myanmar: Celebrity model arrested amid coup crackdown (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56672054)
Published1 day ago
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/F741/production/_117879236_myanmarmodele.jpg
INSTAGRAM/@PAING_TAKHON
Paing Takhon with the iconic three finger salute of the protesters
One of Myanmar's most popular celebrities has been arrested by the military as part of a growing crackdown on artists and actors.

Paing Takhon, a model and actor with millions of fans in Myanmar and Thailand, had been active in both online protests and in-person rallies.

Takhon's Instagram - with more than a million followers - has been taken down along with his Facebook account.

The military seized power in a coup on 1 February, sparking weeks of protests.

Around 600 civilians have been killed as forces respond to the demonstrations with increasing levels of violence.

What happened on Thursday?
According to a Facebook post by Takhon's sister Thi Thi Lwin, around 50 soldiers with eight military trucks came to arrest him at around 05:00 local time (22:30 GMT Wednesday) on Thursday.

A close acquaintance of his, who did not wish to be named, told the BBC he was taken from his mother's home in North Dagon, a township in Yangon.

They said that he had been suffering from "serious depression".

The acquaintance added that Takhon had been suffering from a physical condition, adding that he could not even "stand or walk properly", though no further details were given.

However, they said he had been "aware of the consequences" that awaited him, adding that he was "not scared at all". Both his mobile phones were taken along with him, they added.

What had he said about the coup?
The 24-year-old had previously been seen participating in several demonstrations and marches.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/16C71/production/_117879239_gettyimages-1231096313.jpgAFP
Paing Takhon had been seen joining several recent protests
He had also posted images of ousted civilian leader and pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi.

"We strongly condemn military coup. We demand immediate release of state counseller [sic] Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, President U Win Myint, civilian government ministers and elected members of perliment [sic]," Mr Takhon is said to have written in an online post which has also been taken down.

"We demand to respect 2020 election results and form new civillian [sic] government soonest by NLD led perliment [sic]."

What's the context to all this?
His detention is the latest in a sweeping crackdown on celebrities in recent days.

It also comes a day after Myanmar's ambassador to London said a military attaché had taken over the embassy and forced him out.

It comes after Kyaw Zwar Minn, who has now been removed from his position, called from ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi to be released.

Arrest warrants for around 100 filmmakers, actors, celebrities and journalists have been issued for speaking out against the coup.

Earlier this week security forces arrested the country's best-known comedian Zarganar.

Last week, Myanmar beauty pageant winner Han Lay, spoke out against the coup in a speech at an event held in Thailand.

Mass protests have been taking place across Myanmar, also known as Burma, since the military seized control on 1 February and declared a year-long state of emergency.

The armed forces claim there had been widespread fraud during a general election late last year which had returned elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy party (NLD) to power.

Myanmar in profile
Myanmar, also known as Burma, became independent from Britain in 1948. For much of its modern history it has been under military rule
Restrictions began loosening from 2010 onwards, leading to free elections in 2015 and the installation of a government led by veteran opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi the following year
In 2017, Myanmar's army responded to attacks on police by Rohingya militants with a deadly crackdown, driving more than half a million Rohingya Muslims across the border into Bangladesh in what the UN later called a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing"
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/D410/production/_116888245_35f3e811-8146-486e-9fb7-b4436df69f41.jpg

GeneChing

05-12-2021, 09:48 AM

...but this one is happening in Fremont, which is where Tiger Claw (https://www.tigerclaw.com/home.php)HQ is.

Buddhist Temple Takes on Fremont Over Unpermitted Buildings (https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/east-bay/buddhist-temple-takes-on-fremont-over-unpermitted-buildings/2542232/)
By Marianne Favro • Published May 11, 2021 • Updated on May 11, 2021 at 6:40 pm

The co-founder of a Buddhist temple in the Fremont hills is now threatening to sue the city for religious, gender and racial discrimination. She claims the city is unfairly forcing her to demolish much of her private religious facility. Marianne Favro reports.

The co-founder of a Buddhist temple in the Fremont hills is now threatening to sue the city for religious, gender and racial discrimination. She claims the city is unfairly forcing her to demolish much of her private religious facility.

Fremont said the temple's co-founder has been building on her property for years without proper permits.

"Why are they doing that to me? It's because I am Asian, a religious woman and they don't want a temple here," said Miaolan Lee, temple co-founder.

Lee owns 29 acres off Mill Creek Road in the Fremont foothills where she co-founded the private Temple of 1001 Buddhas. Her attorney said the city now wants her to demolish her main temple hall - a Hindu God house - and four other structures.

The city said the requests are due to Lee building without needed permits for years.

"After an investigation that lasted several months and included multiple inspections with other government agencies, including the state water board and Alameda County Environmental Health, the city determined multiple buildings had been constructed without building permits and in violation of city zoning regulations," the City of Fremont said in a statement.

Lee's legal team, however, claim their client repeatedly tried to get permits.

"Our client began permitting in 2011-2014 and has been trying to get permits ever since," said Tal Finney, Lee's attorney. "And the city has been obstructionist about granting permits."

Attorney Angela Alioto said she has taken the first steps to file a federal civil rights lawsuits against Fremont "because she is an Asian, who is a religious woman building a temple to Buddha -- she is being discriminated against."

City officials will hold a hearing on May 18 to discuss whether to move forward with the order to demolish the structures.

Note that I've never been to Temple of 1001 Buddhas. I didn't even know it existed until this. There's a lot in the Fremont foothills that I never explored. I was closer to the Bay side of the city.

threads
Buddhists-behaving-badly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68723-Buddhists-behaving-badly)
Stop-Asian-Hate (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?72003-Stop-Asian-Hate)

GeneChing

09-26-2021, 12:35 PM

Buddhist poseurs, not bad Buddhists. I know so many Buddhist poseurs but they don't make the news.

Chinese influencers who go to Buddhist temples find themselves in crosshairs of online crackdown (https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/china-personalities/article/3150010/chinese-influencers-who-go-buddhist-temples?module=perpetual_scroll&pgtype=article&campaign=3150010)
Fouyan perform traditional Buddhist activities while sporting a flashy bag or fancy jewellery
If they gain enough online attention, the influencers begin to use their accounts as online shops

Mandy Zuo in Shanghai

Published: 9:00am, 25 Sep, 2021https://img.i-scmp.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1098,format=auto/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2021/09/25/c2edcf52-1d1d-11ec-897a-4119d31a6faa_image_hires_093218.jpg?itok=WQwcDJlj&v=1632533551
Buddhism influencers often visit temples and perform traditional acts such as praying. Photos: EPA-EFE
Another category of online influencers has run afoul of Chinese regulators amid the government’s internet clean-up campaign: people who are seen as exploiting Buddhist temples for attention.
The influencers, who do not appear to be monks, typically share social media posts showing them performing “Buddhist activities”, such as praying, meditating or practising calligraphy in temples.
https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2021/09/25/d0947de6-1d1c-11ec-897a-4119d31a6faa_1320x770_093218.jpg
Buddhist temples have become a trendy place for influencers to try and gain attention. Photo: SCMP
They are often women dressed to the nines and flashing expensive handbags.
Some simply walk into a Buddhist temple and do nothing, but feature a jade bracelet or an Hermes bag in the photos.
After gaining enough online attention, they start selling clothes, jewellery, cosmetics and other consumer items via their social media accounts.
Several major social media platforms have banned such users, known as foyuan in Chinese, after official media criticised the trend, saying it exploited the temples to gain fame and make money.
Douyin, China’s TikTok, said on Thursday that it had punished 48 foyuan accounts and banned seven of them permanently. A search for the word on Kuaishou, another live streaming platform, yielded no results on Friday.
Xiaohongshu, a lifestyle sharing app, deleted 70 posts and banned three accounts.

The bubbles of a false image will finally burst.
A warning on Kuaishou against Buddhism influencers
All three platforms mentioned similar warnings against using temples as a marketing tactic.
“The bubbles of a false image will finally burst. There’s no long-term business by marketing this way. Please be your true self,” a warning on Kuaishou read.
Chinese state media pulled no punches in its criticism.
“It is truly sinful that a group of ladies who seem to stand aloof from worldly success, but in fact are full of material desires, sneak into these supposedly quiet temples,” the Workers’ Daily wrote in a commentary on Tuesday.
https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2021/09/25/70291686-1d1e-11ec-897a-4119d31a6faa_972x_093218.jpg
Chinese official media criticised people who take advantage of temples to make money. Photo: SCMP
State broadcaster CCTV ran an article on its website saying the influencers have “greed that is like a valley that can never be filled”.
In recent months, Beijing has launched a crackdown on the internet to regulate its unruly fan groups, badly behaving celebrities and influencers with “low taste” or “bad moral values”.
The National Radio and Television Administration issued a directive this month that said the entertainment industry should resist the temptation to show off wealth, spread hedonism and gossip about others’ personal business.

Mandy Zuo
Mandy Zuo joined the Post in 2010 and reports on China. She has covered a wide range of subjects including policy, rural issues, culture and society. She worked in Beijing before relocating to Shanghai in 2014.

GeneChing

12-30-2021, 08:45 AM

More on Paing above (https://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68723-Buddhists-behaving-badly&p=1320706#post1320706)

Most handsome face in 2021 belongs to Myanmar actor turned political prisoner Paing Takhon (https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/lifestyle/content/816325/most-handsome-face-in-2021-belongs-to-myanmar-model-turned-political-prisoner-paing-takhon/story/)
Published December 29, 2021 2:11pm
https://images.gmanews.tv/webpics/2021/12/Screen_Shot_2021-12-29_at_2_2021_12_29_14_08_56.png
Photo: Paing Takhon/Instagram
Paing Takhon, Myanmar actor turned political prisoner, has been named the "most handsome face in 2021."

According to TC Candler's coveted annual "100 Most Handsome Faces" list released Tuesday, he bested 130,000 celebrities from 45 different countries.

"Free this man," the organization urged. "Free Paing Takhon, political prisoner of Myanmar."

Paing Takhon was arrested by around 50 soldiers in April and sentenced to three years in prison for taking part in mass protests against the military coup that rocked Myanmar, according to a BBC report.

Prior to his imprisonment, the actor, model, and singer joined marches and was vocal in condemning the coup and the government.

"We strongly condemn military coup. We demand immediate release of state counseller [sic] Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, President U Win Myint, civilian government ministers and elected members of perliment [sic]," Takhon was said to have written in an online post.

"We demand to respect 2020 election results and form new civillian [sic] government soonest by NLD led perliment [sic]."

Myanmar's military seized power in February following a general election where Aung San Suu Kyi's NLD party won by a landslide. Claiming election fraud, the military declared a year-long state of emergency.

Faced with massive protests, the military has implemented a bloody crackdown, with thousands of lives lost and thousands more imprisoned. – Kaela Malig/RC, GMA News

GeneChing

06-03-2022, 08:29 AM

Sex scandal monk may be victim, say police (https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/2307698/sex-scandal-monk-may-be-victim-say-police)
PUBLISHED : 10 MAY 2022 AT 17:35
WRITER: WASSAYOS NGAMKHAM
https://static.bangkokpost.com/media/content/20220510/c1_2307698.jpg
Pongsakorn Chankaew, 23, better known as Phra Kato (Photo from his Facebook account)
Central police have taken over the investigation into alleged embezzlement by a former monk who engaged in sexual misconduct with a woman while ordained in Nakhon Si Thammarat province.

The ex-monk may himself be a victim, according to a police commander.

Pol Maj Gen Charoonkiat Pankaew, commander of the Anti-Corruption Division, said on Tuesday the Anti-Corruption Division and the Crime Suppression Division would jointly handle the embezzlement case.

The central police units were looking into information related to the sex scandal involving Pongsakorn Chankaew, 23, who was previously known as Phra Kato. He was reportedly the acting abbot of Wat Pen Yat in Chawang district of Nakhon Si Thammarat, and during that time had a sexual relationship with a 37-year-old woman.

Pol Maj Gen Charoonkiat said police recently found that after the former abbot of Wat Pen Yat died, no one was appointed as acting abbot.

The commander said Phra Racha Worayan, abbot of Wat Buppharam Worawihan in Bangkok, filed an embezzlement complaint against Phra Kato. The abbot was a relative of the late abbot of Wat Pen Yat. The complaint concerned Phra Kato's withdrawal of money from Wat Pen Yat, allegedly to cover up his sex scandal.

Police officially summonsed Phra Kato to answer interrogators' questions.

"The former Phra Kato kept many secrets... If Phra Kato is listening, please come and give information right away to protect the religion and finish the case soon. Phra Kato may be a victim in the case," Pol Maj Gen Charoonkiat said.

The commander said his subordinates had collected information about several financial transactions in Nakhon Si Thammarat and found useful facts about criminal offences related to the case.

Phra Kato left the monkhood on April 30 following the leak of an audio recording of a conversation concerning a secret sexual relationship between him and the older woman. The leak led to reports that the monk had on several occasions had sex with the woman in a car on the crest of Kathoon dam in Phiphun district of Nakhon Si Thammarat.

Phra Kato admitted to his misconduct over the previous three months and to giving about 300,000 baht to the woman to end their controversial relationship after she made repeated demands for money.

There were also reports that he paid another 300,000 baht to a reporter to keep quiet about the affair, but the money never reached the reporter.

Mr Pongsakorn entered the monkhood in 2017 and had many followers, attracted by his entertaining way of teaching Buddhism over social media. Thai monks...:rolleyes:

GeneChing

11-30-2022, 09:31 AM

Every monk in Thai temple defrocked after testing positive for meth (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/monks-meth-temple-thailand/?ftag=CNM-00-10aac3a)
NOVEMBER 29, 2022 / 11:03 AM / CBS/AFP

A Buddhist temple in central Thailand has been left without monks after all of its holy men failed drug tests and were defrocked, a local official said Tuesday.

Four monks, including an abbot, at a temple in Phetchabun province's Bung Sam Phan district tested positive for methamphetamine on Monday, district official Boonlert Thintapthai told AFP.

The monks have been sent to a health clinic to undergo drug rehabilitation, the official said.

"The temple is now empty of monks and nearby villagers are concerned they cannot do any merit-making," he said. Merit-making involves worshippers donating food to monks as a good deed.

Boonlert said more monks will be sent to the temple to allow villagers to practice their religious obligations.

Thailand is a major transit country for methamphetamine flooding in from Myanmar's troubled Shan state via Laos, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

On the street, meth pills, called Yaba, sell for less than 20 baht (around $0.50).

"Meth and particularly Yaba can be easily found in every corner of [Thailand] — supply is up everywhere, and at this point a tablet is cheaper than a beer," UNODC's Jeremy Douglas told Thai Inquirer.

Authorities across Southeast Asia and around the globe have made record meth seizures in recent months.

Last month, Hong Kong reportedly made its biggest ever seizure of meth, finding 1.8 metric tons of liquid meth hidden in cartons of coconut water en route for Australia.

In August, authorities found 2 tons of meth hidden in marble tiles shipped from the Middle East to Sydney in what police describe as the largest-ever seizure of the illicit drug in Australia.

Also in August, Mexican soldiers seized almost 1.5 tons of meth and 328 pounds of apparent powdered fentanyl at a checkpoint in the northern state of Sonora.

In July, more than 5,000 pounds of meth was found in a record-breaking seizure in Southern California.

Having visited Thailand and spent some time in Thai Wats, I get it...:o

GeneChing

01-01-2023, 07:00 PM

Thai Buddhist monk claims whiskey helps prevent COVID-19 after being busted for DUI (https://nextshark.com/drunk-monk-believes-whiskey-prevents-covid)
A Buddhist monk in Thailand claimed that rice whiskey with lemon prevents Covid-19 after police caught him driving a pickup truck while intoxicated.

Ryan General

July 22, 2022

https://nextshark.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdata.nextshark.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2022%2F07%2FDUImonk.jpg&w=1920&q=75

Phra Thanakorn, 63, is a Buddhist monk from Thailand’s Mueang Loej district who recently got caught driving intoxicated by local police.

The police officers said they received a report of a monk "causing mayhem" by driving around drunk and asking people for money in the market area.

When questioned by authorities, Thanakorn admitted to being drunk but said he drank rice whiskey mixed with lemon because he believes it helps prevent COVID-19.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “drinking alcohol does not protect you against COVID-19 and can be dangerous.”

Thanakorn is set to be kicked out of monkhood for breaking several monastic rules, such as leaving the temple grounds during the rain retreat, asking for money, getting intoxicated and drunk driving.

A Buddhist monk in Thailand claimed that rice whiskey with lemon prevents COVID-19 after police caught him driving a pickup truck while intoxicated.

According to local authorities, they received a report that a monk had been “causing mayhem” by driving around and asking people for money in the market area of Thailand’s Mueang Loej district on Wednesday.

At around 9:30 a.m., officers from the Loei Provincial Police Station found 63-year-old Buddhist monk Phra Thanakorn drunk while sitting inside a bronze-colored pickup truck parked outside the market. The vehicle had the name of a Buddhist temple emblazoned on its door.

Thanakorn, whose surname was withheld in local reports, was identified as a Buddhist monk from a local temple.

Upon questioning, Thanakorn admitted that he was drunk, saying that he did two shots of “40 Degrees” rice whiskey mixed with lemons before driving because he believed it helps prevent COVID-19.

On its website, the World Health Organization called such a belief a myth, warning the public that, “Drinking alcohol does not protect you against COVID-19 and can be dangerous. The harmful use of alcohol increases your risk of health problems.”

When the police asked him to exit the vehicle, the monk reportedly staggered and tried to talk but was “speaking nonsense.” He also did not have his ID card when the officers asked for it.

The police confirmed that he was indeed under the influence of alcohol after they breathalyzed him at the police station.

Thanakorn explained to the officers that he was observing the Buddhist retreat “Pansa” in the Na Din Dam subdistrict, which involves monks staying on temple grounds for three months.

The monk said that he and two other monks left the temple that morning to seek alms at the market. The other monks with him had already left, leaving Thanakorn to drive by himself as their usual driver had been in an accident.

Thanakorn’s stunt makes several offenses to monastic rules, including leaving the temple grounds during the rain retreat, asking for money, getting intoxicated and drunk driving.

Leoi’s Provincial Office of Buddhism will reportedly ask Thanakorn to leave monkhood for good due to his misdemeanors.

Featured Image via Thairath Online

Buddhists-behaving-badly (https://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?68723-Buddhists-behaving-badly)
Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia (https://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71666-Coronavirus-(COVID-19)-Wuhan-Pneumonia)
Let-s-talk-Whisky! (https://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?59392-Let-s-talk-Whisky!)

GeneChing

04-10-2023, 08:51 AM

Dalai Lama apologizes after video asking child to ‘suck’ his tongue sparks outcry (https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/10/india/dalai-lama-apology-kissing-boy-video-intl-hnk/index.html)

Rhea Mogul
By Manveena Suri, Rhea Mogul and Tenzin Dharpo, CNN
Updated 9:58 AM EDT, Mon April 10, 2023

Dalai Lama apologizes for video of him kissing boy
03:05 - Source: CNN
New Delhi and Dharamshala, India
CNN
—
The Dalai Lama has apologized after a video emerged showing the spiritual leader kissing a child on the lips and then asking him to “suck my tongue” at an event in northern India.

In a statement Monday, the office for the Dalai Lama said he “wishes to apologize to the boy and his family, as well as his many friends across the world, for the hurt his words may have caused,” adding he “regrets” the incident.

“His Holiness often teases people he meets in an innocent and playful way, even in public and before cameras,” the statement said.

His apology comes after a video of the exchange, which took place during an event in the hillside city of Dharamshala in February, went viral on social media with many users criticizing the Dalai Lama’s actions.

In the video, the young boy can be seen approaching the Nobel Peace Prize winner before asking, “Can I hug you?”

The 87-year-old spiritual leader then invites the boy on stage and points to his cheek and says, “first here,” prompting the boy to give him a hug and a kiss.

The Dalai Lama then points to his lips, and says: “then I think finally here also.” He then pulls the boy’s chin and kisses him on the mouth.

“And suck my tongue,” he says after a few seconds, poking his tongue out.

The identity of the boy is not known. He was at an event with the M3M Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Indian real estate company M3M Group, based in Dharamshala, where the Dalai Lama lives in permanent exile. CNN has reached out to the M3M Foundation for comment.

In response to the incident, prominent Delhi-based child rights group, Haq: Center for Child Rights, told CNN in a statement it condemns “all form of child abuse.”

It added: “Some news refers to Tibetan culture about showing tongue, but this video is certainly not about any cultural expression and even if it is, such cultural expressions are not acceptable.”

The current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, is the best-known living Buddhist figure in the world.

The principal spiritual leader of the “Yellow Hat” school of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama is revered by millions as the reincarnation of his 13 predecessors.

The spiritual leader has been based in India since 1959, following an unsuccessful Tibetan uprising against Chinese occupation forces. He later established a government-in-exile in the northern Indian city of Dharamshala, leading thousands of Tibetans who followed him there.

February’s incident isn’t the first time the octogenarian has sparked controversy in recent years.

He apologized after a 2019 interview with the BBC, during which he said if a female Dalai Lama should succeed him, she “should be more attractive.”

The previous year, he suggested Europe should be kept for Europeans, when speaking about the rising level of African refugees entering the continent.

“The whole Europe (will) eventually become Muslim country? Impossible. Or African country? Also impossible,” he said, adding that it’s better to “keep Europe for Europeans.”

What the heck? Oh man...

GeneChing

04-17-2023, 09:38 AM

I've been wondering about this. It seemed like a cultural translation issue.

Tibetans Explain What ‘Suck My Tongue’ Means. It’s Not What You Think. (https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg5854/tibetans-explain-what-suck-my-tongue-means-dalai-lama-viral-video)
“It seems that many people, forced into an environment of e-connections, have completely forgotten what human connection means.”

By Pallavi Pundir
JAKARTA, ID
April 14, 2023, 5:42am

https://video-images.vice.com/articles/64393201e3e1da5de6da738e/lede/1681469988885-gettyimages-1035344220.jpeg
OLD INTERVIEWS OF THE DALAI LAMA QUOTES HIM AS SAYING THAT HE STARTED LEARNING ENGLISH AT THE AGE OF 48, AND THAT HIS BROKEN ENGLISH OFTEN LEADS TO HUMOROUS MOMENTS. PHOTO: BORIS ROESSLER/PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY IMAGES
The viral video showing the Dalai Lama asking a kid to “suck” his tongue—and the subsequent public outrage—has led to hundreds of Tibetans to come out and tell the world: It’s not what it sounds like.

Over the weekend, an edited video of a Feb. 28 interaction between the 87-year-old spiritual leader and an Indian boy went viral, leaving many of the 6.7 million Tibetans across the world in distress and shock over the way their language and culture were misinterpreted.

In the video, the boy is seen asking the Dalai Lama for a hug, following which the leader blessed him, asked him to kiss him and stuck out his tongue saying, “Suck my tongue.” People across the world are blaming the Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader for behaving inappropriately, and even being a paedophile.

Tibetans told VICE World News that the meaning of this common expression used to tease and teach children is completely lost in cultural interpretation and its English translation. The correct phrase in Tibetan for this joke is “Che le sa”, which roughly translates to “Eat my tongue.” English is the Dalai Lama’s second language and Indian news outlets have previously reported that the leader speaks in broken English at public events.

In 2000, the Dalai Lama was quoted by The Indian Express as saying that he started to learn English at the age of 48. “Broken English helps me communicate better and creates laughter when I make mistakes,” he is quoted as saying.

In a Youtube video, Jigme Ugen, a second-generation Tibetan refugee living in the U.S., explains how this display of affection was born out of a game played between the Tibetan elderly and children. Kids who go up to their grandfather, for instance, are asked to kiss their grandfather’s forehead, touch their noses and kiss them.

“Then [the grandfather] says that I’ve given you everything so the only thing left is for you to eat my tongue,” Ugen said. “The child probably never gets the candy or money but gets a beautiful lesson about life, love and family.”

“It seems that many people in these turbulent times being forced into an environment where we’re meeting people virtually and making e-connections, have completely forgotten what human connection means,” Ugen added in the video.

Tsering Kyi, a U.S.-based Tibetan journalist, told VICE World News that in Tibetan culture sticking out the tongue is a “sign of respect or agreement” which goes back to the legend around a cruel 9th century king, Lang Dharma, who had a black tongue.

“Since then, people have shown their tongue as a way of saying that they are not like Lang Dharma,” she said.

“It’s a sign of blessing,” she added. “When a kid wants to hug an elderly man, the old man complies, and then gives a kiss as a grandfather or a father would, and plays with the kid.”

Kaysang, who goes by one name and is a Tibetan feminist educator in India, told VICE World News that “suck my tongue” in Tibetan is also a game for the elders to deter cheeky kids from pestering them.

“The word ‘suck’ in the Tibetan language is ‘jhip’, and this is not a word that is sexualised in our culture,” she said.

Kaysang works on the prevention of child sexual abuse in the Tibetan and Himalayan communities and said that it’s “distressing” to see an innocent expression in their culture being equated with act of pedophilia.

The Dalai Lama retired as the political head of his exiled government in 2011 but remains the spiritual leader for 6.7 million Tibetans worldwide and a symbol of their struggle. His work spanning several decades involves drawing global support for the linguistic and cultural autonomy of his remote, mountainous homeland, which was annexed by China in 1951. In 1989, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

“He’s the only reason that the world has given our struggle any weight,” Kaysang said. “Without him, all these mindfulness and meditation apps and Tibetan Buddhist culture being commodified and sold wouldn’t exist.”

“This is not just a religious guru we‘re protecting. He’s the reason for our very existence that we so desperately want the world to see through our eyes.”

VICE World News did not get a response from the child’s family, who run the M3M Foundation that organised the Feb. 28 meet-and-greet in Dharamshala, the Indian city that is the seat of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile. But in an interview clip released by Voice of Tibet, a Dharamshala-based media outlet that live streamed the event too, when the reporter asks the boy how it feels to be hugged by the Dalai Lama, he said it was an “amazing” experience meeting the Dalai Lama and that he experienced “high positive energy” from the interaction.

Shenpenn Khymsar, a Tibetan filmmaker and music composer, told VICE World News that there are immense geopolitical repercussions of the misinterpretation of that video.

“Everybody knows China is behind this,” he said, without giving any evidence that China was involved.

At a press conference on Thursday in Delhi, Penpa Tsering, a political leader of the exiled Tibetan government, said their investigations showed “pro-Chinese sources” being involved in making the video go viral. “The political angle of this incident cannot be ignored,” he said.

Tibetan human rights groups have previously documented online campaigns aiming to discredit the Dalai Lama and paint occupied Tibet as a “contented and idyllic Chinese province.”

The most prominent campaign is called the 50 Cent Party, internet commentators who are paid “wu mao,” or 50 U.S. cents, by Chinese authorities to post pro-China messaging. In 2020, this army was linked to 7,000 troll attacks and over 50,000 comments at a Geneva forum run by the Tibetan parliament-in-exile. The session was on the persecution of religious minorities—Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims, Christians and Falun Gong practitioners—in regions under Chinese control.

In his YouTube video, Ugen linked the virality to a significant development last month where the Dalai Lama named a Mongolia-born American boy as the third highest spiritual leader in Tibetan Buddhism. China has consistently asserted its role in choosing the next Dalai Lama, and to have this position enshrined in Chinese law.

“The ceremony shook them to speculate that the now-retired Dalai Lama still continues to remain a political religious force to reckon with across Buddhist nations including Tibet,” said Ugen. “The video surfaced literally a week after this ceremony. The timing was, once again, like clockwork to sway the public’s opinion about Tibet and His Holiness.”

Ugen said that the “horrifying” accusations by trolls, media and influencers are “clearly led and paid” for by China.

“[China] has successfully weaponized social media at an unprecedented scale,” he said. “The most successful propaganda is the one that doesn’t pose as such.”

GeneChing

07-31-2023, 08:02 AM

Man Steals Cash From China Temple, Says Buddha Statue Gave Him ‘OK’ Sign (https://mustsharenews.com/man-steals-temple-buddha/)
https://mustsharenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/MSN-Featured-6-2.jpg
LATEST NEWS
He has been sentenced to 12 days of administrative detention.

By Amanda Yeap - 16 Jul 2023, 4:48 pm

Man Steals Cash From China Temple After Praying To Buddha

Let this be known: a crime is a crime.

The law governs the human realm, and we should never commit a crime, especially not in the name of a religious deity like Buddha.

This common sense seemed to have eluded one man in China.

He decided to steal cash from a temple after praying to Buddha, thinking that his actions were condoned.

Man caught acting suspiciously after looking at donation box many times

According to Jimu News, police officers in the Jiangxi province of China caught the man for stealing from a temple’s donation box.

https://mustsharenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/yemou.jpg
Source: Yiyang Public Security via Jimu News
On 8 July, they received reports from the public about repeated theft occurrences at Shuangyan Temple in Yiyang City and launched an investigation.

After rushing to the scene, the police found a man in a black and red T-shirt who had frequented the Earth deity temple on the premises in recent days.

He often looked at the donation box and showed suspicious behaviour.

Man steals temple money after telling Buddha he would return it

Further probing brought the officers to the house of a man called Ye Mou, a nearby villager.

Upon questioning, Ye admitted that he only “borrowed” the money after praying to Buddha.

Before being arrested, he maintained that Buddha gave him an ‘OK’ sign to take the money as he said he would return it.

Based on the report, it is believed that he was referring to this gesture.

https://mustsharenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/buddha-OK-sign.jpg
Source: Yiyang Public Security Online via Jimu News
For his actions, Ye was given 12 days of administrative detention for stealing other people’s property.

Started facing financial constraints in June

Jimu News also reported that Ye would wash his clothes at the ponds around the temple on weekdays.

Over time, he observed that the donations box was usually unattended and unlocked.

When he started experiencing financial constraints at the start of June, he took some money from the box when no one was around.

Since nobody called the police then, he returned to take more money from the box whenever he had time.
Slight OT.
I can't even...:rolleyes:

YinOrYan

07-31-2023, 09:34 AM

Slight OT.
I can't even...:rolleyes:

That guy would have made a fortune at the Garden of a 1000 Buddhas in the Montana wilderness. There are literally over 1000 Buddhas forming a giant Mandala that can been seen from space. I actually found it by accident when looking for roads with Google Maps. There's maybe a visitor every few hours and the money placed on the statues must accumulate for weeks at a time. Cannot imagine what sort of karma one would get if they took any of it...

GeneChing

12-01-2023, 09:45 AM

Late South Korean Buddhist monk’s alleged misdeeds back in spotlight after shocking death (https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/people/article/3243556/late-south-korean-buddhist-monks-alleged-misdeeds-back-spotlight-after-shock-death)
Venerable Jaseung’s death through self-immolation came at the peak of his popularity
The influential monk’s passing has brought renewed attention to allegations of corruption and misconduct
South Korea

Park Chan-kyong
Published: 7:09pm, 1 Dec, 2023

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/canvas/2023/12/01/6db21f8b-2d9d-44e7-8c45-875d91f4e542_cf8ec7fd.jpg?itok=bEp_IitG&v=1701428944

The death of an influential South Korean Buddhist monk by apparent suicide through self-immolation has cast the spotlight back on allegations of corruption and misconduct that have plagued him for years.

The 69-year-old Venerable Jaseung’s charred remains were discovered on Thursday among the burned ruins of a temple dormitory, at Chiljang Buddhist Temple in Anseong city, around 80km south of Seoul.

News of the religious leader’s passing made headlines across South Korea, because Jaseung appeared to have taken his life at the peak of his popularity.

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/2023/12/01/895be4fe-2771-4756-8590-32fb0ec3363a_59bccbe6.jpg
Police officers and firefighters examine the site of a fire at a dormitory for Buddhist monks inside Chiljang Temple in Anseong, South Korea, on Thursday. Photo: EPA-EFE/Yonhap

Forensic analysis confirmed the recovered remains belonged to Jaseung, who, for many years, held considerable influence within South Korea’s predominant Buddhist sect, the Jogye Order.

“I’m sorry for causing a lot of trouble by ending my life here … This building will be restored by my disciples. I’m both sorry and grateful,” read a note, apparently handwritten by the monk, that was left in his car parked nearby.

In his farewell message to Buddhists, Jaseung left a Zen-style Nirvana chant that read: “There exists neither life nor death, but there is no place without life and death either. As nothing is left to pursue further, my existence in this world disappears accordingly.”

Surveillance footage reportedly showed Jaseung carrying two plastic containers filled with combustible liquid into the dorm before a blaze whipped through the single floor structure late on Wednesday.

“Venerable Jaseung has awakened all Buddhists with his self-immolation, praying for the stability of the Jogye Order and the salvation of the world through the propagation of the Dharma,” Venerable Wubong, the Jogye Order spokesman, told journalists.

Jaseung had been concerned about the status and role of Buddhism. He had a strong will to solve the problems facing the order, such as the declining population
Venerable Jugyeong

The Jogye Order said it would hold a five-day funeral led by its current leader, Venerable Jinwoo, at Jogye Temple situated in downtown Seoul. A funeral ceremony will take place on Sunday morning.

His death has puzzled many, as he expressed a strong will to help spread Buddhism among young people in the future.

“Jaseung had been concerned about the status and role of Buddhism. He had a strong will to solve the problems facing the order, such as the declining population,” Venerable Jugyeong, head of the order’s legislative organisation, told Yonhap news agency.

Jaseung became a Buddhist monk at age 19 and served two terms as the head of the Jogye Order’s administrative headquarters from 2009-2017, a powerful post with authority to appoint and dismiss abbots at some 3,000 temples nationwide. The position also allowed him to control the financial affairs of the Order and temples.

Buddhist monks and nuns during an ordination ceremony at Jogye Temple in Seoul. Photo: YNA/DPA
The quadrennial election for the post, popularly known as president of Buddhists, which controls both power and money, has been marred by allegations of vote buying and violence in the past.

Jaseung was credited with unifying the country’s strife-ridden Jogye Order under his leadership.

He introduced a rule that would see the Order receive the private assets of a monk following their death. He also increased retired monks’ pension funds and helped spread Korean Buddhism abroad.

But his critics pointed to his apparent hunger for power, accusing him of continuing to wield influence by appointing his followers to key posts even after concluding two consecutive terms as the president – an uncommon occurrence within Buddhist history that dates back centuries.

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/2023/12/01/aca46499-b414-46e9-a501-edd224e9dd8d_9566144a.jpg
Buddhist monks place flowers at an altar for Venerable Jaseung. Photo: EPA-EFE

His eight-year leadership of the sect was also marred by numerous allegations.

In 2018, MBC TV’s investigative news programme, PD Notebook, claimed Jaseung and 15 other senior monks were involved in habitual gambling, and a whistle-blower – a monk named Jangju – was beaten by other monks. A few other senior monks were also accused of secretly keeping wives in breach of celibacy.

Jaseung also allegedly helped arrange a massive monks’ rally last year to protest against the former liberal government’s move to restrict the Order’s right to collect fees from hikers who pass by Buddhist temples located on hills and mountains.

The rally took place only two months before the tightly contested 2022 presidential election, which was won by a razor-thin margin by conservative Yoon Suk-yeol. Since then, he has allegedly remained close to Yoon.

Buddhism was for centuries prominent in South Korea before the country was open to Western influences in the late 19th century, including successful proselytising by Christian missionaries.

A 2021 Gallup Poll showed among the country’s 51.2 million people, Buddhists accounted for 16 per cent of the population, down from 22 per cent in 2014.

Protestants fell to 17 per cent from 21 per cent and Catholics edged down to six per cent from seven per cent during the same period, with non-believers growing from 47 per cent to 60 per cent in the cited period.

If you are having suicidal thoughts, or you know someone who is, help is available. For Hong Kong, dial +852 2896 0000 for The Samaritans or +852 2382 0000 for Suicide Prevention Services. In the US, call The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on +1 800 273 8255. For a list of other nations’ helplines, see this page.

CONVERSATIONS
Park Chan-kyong

Park Chan-kyong is a journalist covering South Korean affairs for the South China Morning Post. He previously worked at the Agence France-Presse's Seoul bureau for 35 years. He studied political science at Korea University and economics at the Yonsei University Graduate School. Seems like a hectic tale...:(

GeneChing

05-09-2024, 09:33 AM

South Korean DJ NewJeansNim faces calls for ban in Malaysia after performing in monk robe at dance club (https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/3261950/south-korean-dj-newjeansnim-faces-calls-ban-malaysia-after-performing-monk-robe-dance-club?campaign=3261950&module=perpetual_scroll_0&pgtype=article)
Lawmaker Wee Ka Siong said NewJeansNim should be blocked form performing again at an entertainment venue in Kuala Lumpur to preserve religious harmony
A group accused the DJ of ‘harming and disrespecting’ the Buddhist way of life with his act
The Star

Published: 11:20am, 9 May 2024

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/canvas/2024/05/09/4d90ac8b-c904-4373-96d4-141fe8d6298a_1d974579.jpg?itok=Gek_y8gL&v=1715223116

Malaysian lawmaker Wee Ka Siong has chided a South Korean DJ for his recent performance in a Kuala Lumpur dance club while dressed as a monk.

Wee said that DJ NewJeansNim has angered the Buddhist community in Malaysia when he “disguised” himself as a Buddhist monk and performed at the club, which gave a wrong perception of Buddhist values and teachings.
“I agree with the Young Buddhist Association Malaysia (YBAM) and Fo Guang Shan Malaysia which have called for action to be taken by the authorities to ban a DJ from Korea from performing again at a dance club in Kuala Lumpur,” he said in a statement.

The DJ had performed at the dance club on May 3 and was seen wearing a monk dressing gown and using Buddhist prayer items during his performance in a viral video.

“His controversial acts have hurt the feelings of the Buddhist community, which will celebrate Vesak Day (the festival commemorating the birth, enlightenment and death of the Buddha) in two weeks’ time,” the Malaysian Chinese Association president said, adding that the DJ was expected to perform in Malaysia again on May 21 – a day before Vesak Day.

“I appeal to the home affairs minister to instruct the immigration department, the police and the Puspal secretariat (the central committee for the application for filming and performance by foreign artistes) to prevent the entry of the DJ into Malaysia in order to respect the sanctity of Buddhism and preserve religious harmony in Malaysia.”

“If the DJ did not disguise as a Buddhist monk during his performance and incite religious sensitivity and cause unnecessary controversy, the Buddhist community will not have any intention to block the performance of any artists,” Wee added.

YBAM was reported saying that it has received complaints from devotees who believed that the DJ had “harmed and disrespected” the Buddhist way of life with his performance.

Note to self - refrain from wearing my robes (https://martialartsmart.com/collections/default-category-shop-by-categories-uniforms-kung-fu-uniforms/products/shaolin-style-warrior-monk-robes-gray-orange45-001) whilst DJing in Malaysia.

GeneChing

05-18-2024, 11:22 AM

Make Buddhism cool again: South Korea's controversial DJ 'monk' (https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240514-make-buddhism-cool-again-south-korea-s-controversial-dj-monk)
Seoul (AFP) – With a shaved head and flowing monk robes, a South Korean DJ chants traditional Buddhist scripture mixed with Gen-Z life advice over a thumping EDM beat, as the crowd goes wild.

Issued on: 14/05/2024 - 12:55
Modified: 14/05/2024 - 12:53
4 min

https://s.france24.com/media/display/708dcd2e-11e0-11ef-929b-005056bfb2b6/w:980/p:16x9/5e7d8779a56202eaa24d1bc2a680d2738bb74ad6.webp
A senior monk bestowed upon Youn the monk name NewJeansNim, under which the 47-year-old now performs © Jung Yeon-je / AFP

Meet Youn Sung-ho, a comedian-turned-musician whose viral Buddhism-infused sets are credited with reviving the religion's popularity among young South Koreans, even as his performances have ruffled feathers regionally, including triggering police reports in Malaysia.

In South Korea's Zen Buddhist tradition, which holds that the religion's truth transcends the physical, Youn has been welcomed with open arms by senior clergy, who see him as a means to engage with young people.

A senior monk even bestowed upon Youn the monk name NewJeansNim, under which the 47-year-old, who is not ordained, now performs.

The moniker is a mash-up of "Seunim", a respectful Korean title for Buddhist monks and other devotional words -- with no connection to K-pop girl group NewJeans.

"Pain! Because I don't get a raise. Pain! Because Monday comes too quickly," NewJeansNim chants on stage as hundreds of mostly young Korean revellers dance, waving their hands in sync.

https://s.france24.com/media/display/6ec1b00a-11e0-11ef-874e-005056bf30b7/7f64a09faea67f56f93e32169bc07b4d432137d3.webp
Youn Sung-ho's viral Buddhism-infused sets are credited with reviving the religion's popularity among young South Koreans © Jung Yeon-je / AFP

"This too shall pass! We will overcome!" he adds, citing classic Buddhist tenants, as the beat drops at an electronic dance music (EDM) event marking a lantern festival for Buddha's birthday, which falls on Wednesday.

Footage of his quirky, high-energy performances has gone viral, with striking visuals of a be-robed, shaven-headed Youn dancing, singing and spinning turntables.

"Never did I expect this reaction. It's overwhelming," Youn told AFP ahead of his performance in Seoul at the weekend.

He says he comes by his Buddhist DJ identity honestly.

"My mother was a Buddhist and I also went to temples from a young age so Buddhism comes naturally to me."

And his motivational lyrics are "just what I said to myself last year when I had no work and was really struggling -- good days do come".

Malaysia ban?

For many South Koreans, his words have resonated.

https://s.france24.com/media/display/6f764236-11e0-11ef-b4d8-005056a97e36/e144defac4316b39ca9dadce80bcacc917bf58d4.webp
For many South Koreans, his words have resonated © Jung Yeon-je / AFP

"His messages provide comfort to those in their twenties and thirties who are burnt out and feel hopeless," says Kang Min-ji, a 26-year-old, who said they did not have any interest in Buddhism before watching NewJeansNim.

"I always thought Buddhism was conservative until I saw his DJ performances," she added.

But in neighbouring Malaysia, a Muslim-majority country with a significant Buddhist minority, where NewJeansNim performed in early May, a second gig planned for later this month was cancelled after his performance offended local Buddhists.

"There have been police reports lodged against DJ NewJeansNim's performance in Malaysia by Buddhist societies and individuals," Eow Shiang Yen, secretary-general of the Young Buddhist Association of Malaysia, told AFP.

"The way he chooses to perform and his dress is not appropriate to Buddhist beliefs and practices," he said, adding: "We do not want others to misinterpret Buddhist practices."

One Malaysian lawmaker has said NewJeansNim should not be allowed to perform in Kuala Lumpur using the trappings of Buddhism.

Buddhism for all

But in South Korea, the president of the country's largest Buddhist sect, the Jogye Order, has urged NewJeansNim to continue, seeing the DJ as a means of attracting new, younger followers.

https://s.france24.com/media/display/7019562e-11e0-11ef-9b50-005056a97e36/47d6a4c06a33bc4de77b03b760bccfba0cc8bb97.webp
As in many advanced economies, religious interest has dwindled along with South Korea's population © Jung Yeon-je / AFP

"Young people think that Buddhism is difficult and old," the Venerable Jinwoo Seunim has said.

"In order to break this, it is better not to be too bound by tradition," he added.

As in many advanced economies, religious interest has dwindled along with South Korea's population, official statistics show, and "Buddhism is the religion that is suffering the most," said Ja-hong Seunim, a 33-year-old monk.

"We are not in a position to stop anyone from spreading Buddhism to young people," he told AFP.

The non-traditional approach could also be seen at the International Buddhism Expo this year in Seoul, when attendees could pray with an AI Buddha, buy scripture clothing and eat Buddha-shaped chocolates. NewJeansNim played a set for the grand finale.

Attendance was up threefold from last year, with 80 percent of attendees in their twenties or thirties, event organisers said.

"There are definitely more Buddhist events for young people to enjoy, and basically they are 'hip' now," Choi Kyung-yoon, a 28-year-old who lives in Seoul, told AFP.

NewJeansNim himself downplays his contribution to making Buddhism cool again in South Korea.

"I didn't do anything really," he told AFP.

"The monks are very open-minded, and I am just flowing with them." This guy's gonna need his own indie thread soon.