Must have felt good for him to drop the f-bomb. Inside all that vague space of harmony has to be a seething mass of rage somewhere within. Buddhism has been so commodified by American pop culture, it has spawned an industry form self-help, to spas and yoga, and apparel etc., all invested with the aura of social capital and status.Obviously Allen Ginsberg was on to something.Read his lips….carefully…
(see link at end)….It is a phrase you would not associate with one of the holiest men alive.
Indeed, it must have caused the stenographer a little consternation when the Dalai Lama apparently finished his speech with a very frank ‘f*** it’ to an audience of students at Brown University in Rhode Island….
—Since the 1960s,
there have been intermittent studies of Buddhist themes, imagery, and allusions in the
works of Beat writers and their consociates, but no book-length work on the extent to
which Buddhist philosophical and/or religious practice informs the works themselves.
Phrasing the relationship between Ginsberg and Buddhism as “Ginsberg’s struggle with
Buddhism” allows Trigilio to problemmatize Ginsberg’s practice beyond the simplistic
portrayal of Ginsberg (or the other Beats for that matter) as an “easy Easterneness” (191).
Furthermore, Trigilio’s study shows how Ginsberg’s interest in Buddhism gave him a
philosophical and religious basis from which to offer a revision of Western ontology and
religious exceptionalism; in short, Buddhist perspectivalism as a corrective to
universalism.—Read More:http://www.beatstudies.org/pdfs/TonyTrigilio.pdf image:http://melancholicalcholic.blogspot.ca/2012/10/the-allen-ginsberg-project-trungpa-and.html
Still, the stenographer had to transcribe what he heard – or thought he had heard – and flashed the phrase up on the closed caption video screens.
So those relying on the screens for dialogue heard His Holiness finish his message of peace by telling them them they could do the unspeakable.
Embarrassingly, the His Holiness was just being polite, telling the audience that if they did not agree with his views on world peace, they could just … forget.
The offending phrase came towards the send of the speech, when the 77-year-old said: ‘If you feel these points are not much relevant – not much interest – then forget.’
But the now presumably-blushing stenographer had to go with his first instinct, and the exact phrase he wrote on the screens in the hall was ‘f— it’. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2220076/Dalai-Lama-did-say-f–world-peace-lecture-says-Brown-University.html#ixzz29zCsF68M
A good deal of the appeal of the Dali Lama corresponds to the cult of personality, a hook to hang a search for authenticity, in this case a pseudo religious authenticity, and much of the culture built around it a fraud and one of many authenticity hoaxes. There are no shortage of Arnie Shankman’s lurking within…
ADDENDUM:
Steven Pinker:But perhaps the greatest mystery is why politicians, editors, and much of the public care so much. Clearly, the fear and loathing are not triggered by the concepts themselves, because the organs and activities they name have hundreds of polite synonyms. Nor are they triggered by the words’ sounds, since many of them have respectable homonyms in names for animals, actions, and even people. Many people feel that profanity is self-evidently corrupting, especially to the young. This claim is made despite the fact that everyone is familiar with the words, including most children, and that no one has ever spelled out how the mere hearing of a word could corrupt one’s morals.
Progressive writers have pointed to this gap to argue that linguistic taboos are absurd. A true moralist, they say, should hold that violence and inequality are “obscene,” not sex and excretion. And yet, since the 1970s, many progressives have imposed linguistic taboos of their own, such as the stigma surrounding the N-word and casual allusions to sexual desire or sexual attractiveness. So even people who revile the usual bluenoses can become gravely offended by their own conception of bad language. The question is, why?
The strange emotional power of swearing–as well as the presence of linguistic taboos in all cultures– suggests that taboo words tap into deep and ancient parts of the brain. In general, words have not just a denotation but a connotation: an emotional coloring distinct from what the word literally refers to, as in principled versus stubborn and slender versus scrawny. The difference between a taboo word and its genteel synonyms, such as shit and feces, cunt and vagina, or fucking and making love, is an extreme example of the distinction. Curses provoke a different response than their synonyms in part because connotations and denotations are stored in different parts of the brain. Read More:http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/stuff/media_articles/TNR%20Online%20%20What%20the%20F%20%281%20of%203%29%20%28print%29.htm
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