Tibetan Buddhism

Subject: Tibetan Buddhism.

One of the characteristics in human beings  is our slavishness to hierarchy. This willing placement of people in a position where their pronouncements, even their personage radiate a special glow in our own psyche. Leadership throws up personalities, or is it the other way around and whilst I have a natural urge to avoid the cult of worship, there have been people who I deem wise and therefore I look up to.
But politics and religion seems to accentuate this search in people  for a figure-head to place on a pedestal and salute as being so very special that we become absorbed in their persona.
The cult of Stalin and particularly Mao, religious leaders such as Christ and Mohamed, and on a lower scale business leaders, investment gurus, people who mark scientific milestones in who's presence one shrinks into a follower. It is said that the moment he or she walk into a room their presence is felt, the conversation quietens and eyes turn.
As I say I, generally speaking, am a sceptical bloke who usually try's to put some sort of perspective, my own perspective, into my thoughts when turned towards a mortal star of what ever persuasion. Their very mortality should tell us something. No one is so special that the they avoid death.
It is argued amongst some religious groups and famously amongst the non religious group of Buddhist teaching where rebirth is the foundation of the philosophical reasoning for our life on Earth, that death is an opportunity to progress be it to heaven or to hell or simply rebirth, carrying the teaching you had observed in this life into your next stint on earth in a progressive enhancement.

Watching a program on the lives of Buddhist nuns who dedicate their actions in this world, not only to contemplation of the holy scripts as the monks seem to do but also, as a woman in Asia, where they are deemed lower than a man in human hierarchy, for her to also engage in the menial  tasks around the home and out in the fields. Even in and around the monitory she has to take second best, the scraps of what's on offer.

These women who have dedicated their lives by an initiation of three years solitary meditation, possibly in some remote cave high on the mountain side. These women, unlike many of their self possessed male counterparts radiate a benevolence towards themselves and towards others. They have the happiness of school girls on an outing, a self revelationary outing which never stops and absorbs them completely.

In the high altitude of the Tibetan mountains, their skin takes on a translucence a sort of watered down complexion through which the eyes shine. It is said the eyes are a conduit to the soul and here in their case they certainly seem to have found enormous inner peace..
In the film a group of American middle class women who at home had found a need to study Buddhism were trekking into this inner kingdom to find out more. The contrast was interesting. The West had provided a wider experience, an intellectual consumerist experience remote from the simplistic experience of these village women.
And yet it was the West searching for answers, turning their back on the confusion of our busy overloaded life. The transition from being a member of society into a nun was never an objective only the opportunity to pick up a few scraps from the table of a commitment none of them would contemplate taking on.
The Rinposhe (a lama or teacher who has been defined at birth as a rebirth of a special personage) is in charge of the nuns and it's this adoration in the form of hierarchy that I found disturbing. This particular branch of Buddhist teaching the Gelugpa Tibetan tradition makes great play on a hierarchical contextual affirmation of who is who in the zoo.
I saw it when the Karmapa, the leader of another strain of Tibetan Buddhism, when he visited London earlier this year.  His followers were in as it were, seventh heaven to be so close to his presence and I felt uncomfortable at this adulation, as a secular onlooker.
The adulation in the faces of these nuns as the Geshe moved amongst them tended for me to think that once again the ritualistic pageantry, the clashing of symbols, the grunting of mantras, the overt headdress, the symbolism, was designed for an illiterate present stock who's tenacity for study and self emulation had brought them to a high point in their spiritual lives not the show put on at the monitory by men.
Perhaps mankind needs a club tie to indicate their speciality but I think the concept of Buddhas teaching has been somewhat lost, as Christianity was lost in the church's pomp  and the finery of its bishops, so the individualistic self examination is lost in the significance of the pageantry.