Tibet - In English

Tibet - In English: Encyclopedia II - Tibet - Status

While there is little dispute that Tibet was once an independent country, there is intense dispute over the legitimacy of the PRC's rule over Tibet today. Since 1959 the former government of Tibet, led by the 14th Dalai Lama, has maintained a government in exile at Dharamsala, in northern India. It claims sovereignty over Tibet, with borders defined as the entirety of what it terms "Historic Tibet", although it controlled only about half of that area before 1959. The Government of Tibet claims Tibet to be a distinct nation independent ...

Including:

Tibet - Evaluation of PRC rule

Tibet - Further reading & media

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Tibet - In English: Encyclopedia - Chögyam Trungpa

Chögyam Trungpa (1940 - April 4, 1987) was a Buddhist meditation master, scholar, teacher and artist. Born in Tibet, Chögyam Trungpa was the eleventh in a line of Trungpa tülkus, important figures in the Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. In 1959, after having already achieved wide renown for his teachings in his native country, he fled the Chinese invasion and crossed the Himalaya on foot into India. After familiarizing himself with the English language he studied Comparative Religion at Oxford and then came to t ...

Including:

Chögyam Trungpa - Chronology

Chögyam Trungpa - List of published works

Tibet - In English: Encyclopedia - Yak

B. g. grunniens B. g. mutus The yak (Bos grunniens) is a long-haired humped domestic bovine found in Tibet and throughout the Himalayan region of south central Asia. In Tibetan, the word yak refers only to the male of the species; a female is a dri or nak. In English, however, yak is usually used for both sexes. Wild yaks (Bos mutus) stand about two meters tall at the shoulder. Domesti ...

Including:

Yak - Trivia

Yak - External link

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Tibet - In English: Encyclopedia - Tea

Tea is a product made from the leaves or buds of the tea bush Camellia sinensis. It is commonly consumed in the form of a beverage made by steeping it in hot water for a few minutes. The English word tea derives from the Chinese 茶, pronounced te in the Min Nan dialect. The flavour of the raw tea is developed by processes including oxidation, heating, drying and the addition of other herbs, spices, or f ...

Including:

Tea - Cultivation

Tea - Processing and classification

Tea - Blending and additives

Tea - Content of Tea

Tea - Tea origin and early history in Asia

Tea - Tea creation myths

Tea - China

Tea - Japan

Tea - Tea spreads to the world

Tea - Commonwealth countries

Tea - Tea preparation

Tea - Enjoying tea the modern way

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Tibet - In English: Encyclopedia II - Tibetan Mastiff - Temperament

The native strain of dog, which still exists in Tibet (though sparsely), and the English breed are very different in temperament. Elizabeth Schuler states, "The few individuals that remain in Tibet are ferocious and aggressive, unpredictable in their behavior, and very difficult to train. But the dogs bred by the English are obedient and attached to their masters." As a sheepdog and guard dog, it is ferocious in its ability to tackle even wolves and leopards. As a domestic dog, it requires at least a yard; it is not an appropriate dog ...

Tibet - In English: Spiritual Theosophical Dictionary on Chohan

Chohan (Tibet, Tibetan) "Lord" or "Master" ; a chief; thus Dhyan-Chohan would answer to "Chief of the Dhyanis", or celestial Lights - which in English would he translated Archangels.

Tibet - In English: Spiritual - Theosophy Dictionary on Nyingpo, snying po

Nyingpo snying po (Tibetan) Essence, pith, heart, equivalent to the Sanskrit hridaya; has all the senses of the English word heart. Applied particularly to the universal intelligent essence, alaya, which is "the basis of every visible and invisible thing, . . . though it is eternal and immutable in its essence, it reflects itself in every object of the Universe . . ." (SD 1:48). Hence it corresponds to the world-soul. In Tibet it likewise frequently is called tsang.

(See also: Nyingpo, snying po, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary)

Tibet - In English: Spiritual Theosophical Dictionary on Vedas

Vedas (Sanskrit). The "revelation". the scriptures of the Hindus, from the root vid, "to know ", or "divine knowledge". They are the most ancient as well as the most sacred of the Sanskrit works.

The Vedas on the date and antiquity of which no two Orientalists can agree, are claimed by the Hindus themselves, whose Brahmans and Pundits ought to know best about their own religious works, to have been first taught orally for thousands of years and then compiled on the shores of Lake Manasa-Sarovara (phonetically, Mansarovara) beyond the Himalayas, in Tibet. When was this done? While their religious teachers, such as Swami Dayanand Saraswati, claim for them an antiquity of many decades of ages, our modern Orientalists will grant them no greater antiquity in their present form than about between 1,000 and 2,000 B.C.

As compiled in their final form by Veda-Vyasa, however, the Brahmans themselves unanimously assign 3,100 years before the Christian era, the date when Vyasa flourished. Therefore the Vedas must be as old as this date. But their antiquity is sufficiently proven by the fact that they are written in such an ancient form, of Sanskrit, so different from the Sanskrit now used, that there is no other, work like them in the literature of this eldest sister of all the known languages, as Prof. Max Muller calls it. Only the most learned of the Brahman Pundits can read the Vedas in their original. It is urged that Colebrooke found the date 1400 B.c. corroborated absolutely by a passage which he discovered, and which is based on astronomical data.

But if, as shown unanimously by all the Orientalists and the Hindu Pundits also, that

(a) the Vedas are not a single work, nor yet any one of the separate Vedas; but that each Veda, and almost every hymn and division of the latter, is the production of various authors; and that

(b) these have been written (whether as sruti, "revelation ", or not) at various periods of the ethnological evolution of the Indo-Aryan race, then - what does Mr. Colebrooke’s discovery prove? Simply that the Vedas were finally arranged and compiled fourteen centuries before our era; but this interferes in no way with their antiquity.

Quite the reverse; for, as an offset to Mr. Colebrooke’s passage, there is a learned article, written on purely astronomical data by Krishna Shastri Godbole (of Bombay), which proves as absolutely and on the same evidence that the Vedas must have been taught at least 25,000 years ago. (See Theosophist, Vol. II., p. 238 et seq., Aug., 1881.) This statement is, if not supported, at any rate not contradicted by what Prof. Cowell says in Appendix VII., of Elphinstone’ History of India: "

There is a difference in age between the various hymns, which are now united in their present form as the Sanhita of the Rig Veda; but we have no data to determine their relative antiquity, and purely subjective criticism, apart from solid data, has so often failed in other instances, that we can trust but little to any of its inferences in such a recently opened field of research as Sanskrit literature. [ a fourth part of the Vaidik literature is as yet in print, and very little of it has been translated into English (1866).] The still unsettled controversies about the Homeric poems may well warn us of being too confident in our judgments regarding the yet earlier hymns of the Rig -Veda. . . . When we examine these hymns . . . they are deeply interesting for the history of the human mind, belonging as they do to a much older phase than the poems of Homer or Hesiod." The Vedic writings are all classified in two great divisions, exoteric and esoteric, the former being called Karma-Kanda, "division of actions or works ", and the Jnana Kanda, "division of (divine) knowledge", the Upanishads (q.v.) coming under this last classification. Both departments are regarded as Sruti or revelation.

To each hymn of the Rig -Veda, the name of the Seer or Rishi to whom it was revealed is prefixed. It, thus, becomes evident on the authority of these very names (such as Vasishta, Viswamitra, Narada, etc.), all of which belong to men born in various manvantaras and even ages, that centuries, and perhaps millenniums, must have elapsed between the dates of their composition.

Tibet - In English: Mysticism Magick Dictionary on QLIPHOTH, QLIPPOTH

QLIPHOTH/QLIPPOTH

Lit. "shells" (singular: qliphah). Shades of the dead whose names appear in the books of Dyzan or Thoth, or the Book of the Law (AL). They may contain formulae of magical powers. RAW calls them "souls of those who died insane... the tulpas of Tibet... avatars of Coyote, the American Indian prankster-god." RAW also identifies them with the Celtic "little people" or faeries. Some of the twenty-two qliphotic entities of the Black Tarot, as envisioned by Grant, are defined herein under separate entries, although strictly speaking, the qlippoth are the names of the guardians of the tunnels, not the tunnels themselves. To understand the qliphothic atus fully and to do them justice can be more deleterious to the artist or researcher than one might suspect. Conceivably, such complete understanding could result in the destruction of the ego without restoration in the Oversoul and therefore lead to actual madness. Dealing with the Qliphoth is the psychic equivalent of working with toxic wastes, dangerous animals or high voltage wires.

To invoke any force is to invoke automatically its opposite as well. In the more conventional sense, qliphoth are negative cosmic energies equating with the ten positive Sephiroth (e.g., Lilith is the evil counterpart of Malkuth). All positive aspects of divinity have their "excremental" sides, or demons: Beelzebub, Satanas, etc. The difference between metamorphosis and excretion is thinner than you might guess.

From the universal lexicon:

scall English scab

chale Cupeno husk, shell

skalli Icelandic a peeled head

geled Hebrew skin

kulit Malay skin

skull English the "shell" of the brain

azal Basque peeling

soale Hausa to peel off

scale, shell English

scalp< shell a Dutch M. schelpe Qabalah the of ?demons? or refuse? ?peelings, Qlipphoth discard husk, Hebrew qliphah husk peel; skin; to Malay kupas sheath English Middle>

In the waning years of Alchemy, occultists were fond of saying that the Philosopher's Stone was "that which all men despise" -- and this in turn led the puffers to experiment with various types of excrement in order to see if that substance, perchance, could possibly yield the Secret of the Ages, since nothing so far had succeeded in doing so. And of course all such experiments accomplished was to mark the nadir of human folly.

What is this word "excrement", after all? It's from Latin, excernere, "to separate." It is a separation, a peeling away, as when we peel away a scab or a blister, making it no longer a part of ourselves. German scheiden/schieden (divide, separate, divorce) is simply another form of the word Scheisse (Fr. chier, Engl. shit) or its Greek equivalent schizo, "to split."

Latin cutis (skin), we should notice, first of all, is a cognate of Greek skatos (dung). Like the snake, what we throw away begins with the "skin" -- a word which probably represents a form of one of the universal roots. Compare Peruvian kina (the bark, or tree peeling, whence we get quinine) and Malay sisek (fish scales). Perhaps even the Austrian Kakadu word, k…ngir meaning "skin" is distantly related. At any rate, k…ngir is almost certainly the origin of "kangaroo," particularly since the Australian Warramunga word, nguru, meant "foreskin." These two are clearly connected and the marsupial associations are plain enough.

The puffers didn't understand that excrement isn't exactly what all men despise. Or to be more precise, what matters isn't so much what is discarded and thrown away, but the value we place on the kept, as opposed to the trash. That faulty decision itself is where the problem lies. In fact, the Finnish proverb: Kulta kultainen v„lkkya roskatta, "gold glitters in what is thrown away", is a sentiment well understood by shamans, witches and other marginal people, who are drawn to the rubbish heaps and middens, much as the money-vultures circle the stock market.

What all men despise is "that out there," that is to say, the world. And they try incessantly to dissociate themselves from it. Yet, obviously, if we really were one with the world, then we'd have in hand "the universal solvent," we'd have immortality because the world is immortal. In the world's all-powerful Nature is the very secret of turning lead into gold. Instead man tries desperately to throw out everything that is not self.

Part of the problem is that the verb "to be" has two meanings (as in Spanish): one is an expression of permanent identity or equivalence to something else and the other an expression of a changing, on-going process. When we accept the error that we are not gods, we cease all self-examination, self-disciplines and self-improvement. We define god as an embodiment of "pefection" (or completion) instead of as the avenue of evolution and becoming. Only idols are perfect. Not even Odin ever thought of himself as perfect: he had to make many sacrifices in order to gain wisdom. Ditto Osiris, who was so far from being "together" that he was chopped up into little pieces. Granted, Jehovah is perfect, or thinks He is, but He is also a difficult God to respect, for that same reason. When you say we are not gods, you mean we are not idols. But an idol is precisely what modern man has made of himself. He worships himself, even though gods never worship themselves. Obviously, they don't have to. Only man worships himself, though not really as a god or potential god. He worships himself just as he is: as a fatted, golden pig wearing Gucci shoes.

The reason people push gods "outside" is the same reason they shove everything else outside, separating everything and calling it evil because it is unwanted. Anything which is not self, including the planet earth, is felt to be of no real value. In fact, matter is simply unwanted "dirt." Most of the self is thrown away, at least that part of the self which demands the most work or struggle. All that may remain is the momentary gratification of physical need: food, drink, sex, rest, entertainment. To put a god into that strait-jacket, even a minor one, is to disrupt the routine, to interfere with the direct line of ice cream to mouth. Besides, the puffing up of an imaginary personal ego is a thousand times easier than the expression of difficult, real Divinity. Standing far enough away from the world empowers objectivity to serve as the perfect defense of the ego. Here ego cannot be challenged and "Science" and "Reason" become the last refuges of Subjective Solipsism.

In the Qabalah this peeling away of the self, this separation or "excrement" is called a Qlipha (pl. qlipphoth). The qliphoth are the negative personifications. All the expressions of Divinity have their "qlipphoth": Samael, Beelzebub, Satanas, etc., as we've said. And, in truth, these are what people actually bow down to: these idols that are made up out of excrement. Divinity that lies outside of self is not divinity.

In contemporary Occidental man's desperate struggle to separate himself we would do well to remember Alan Watts' comparison of the self to an onion. You can peel and peel until there is nothing left.

(See also: QLIPHOTH, QLIPPOTH, Magick, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body Mind and Soul, )