Tag: Karmapa
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The Road to Mudville
Merhaba from Konya! Arriving in this ancient Anatolian city, once a fertile garden of cross-pollination among the great mystics and scholars, philosophers and poets from all over Eurasia, my warm-hearted tram driver, Mehmet, asked my views about Islam and Linux… I grinned. I had spent the whole night on a bus to reach this place…
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A Joyful Noise!
Sawadee khap from the warm waves of Thailand! Happy to be hOMe again. Conveniently, i feel that way almost anywhere i go… and yet there’s this familiar flavor of effortless contentment on some of my favorite patches of Asian soil. The static subsides… Mozzies & the Matrix Last month in Bodhgaya (where the Buddha formerly…
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Dubya & the Sublime Lotus
After the intensity of our inner and outer experiences of recent weeks, my friend Artyom and i were ready for a holiday. We hired a jeep to Sikkim, had good talks and good momos, and then he caught a jeep eastward to Rumtek Monastery (the exile HQ of the previous Karmapa, though the Indian government still…
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Kalimpong Recon
Being in India again is enough of a gift, but the unexpected bonus prize is a reunion with Nepal as well — not geographically this time, but culturally. This whole chunk of the Himalayas from Sikkim to the northern West Bengal hills (from the Bhutanese border in the east to the Nepali border in the…
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Rocked in the Many Arms of Mama India
As the sagacious space swami Bonzai Baba taught (in the Garland of Pop-Culture Pith Sutra, IIRC), “Wherever you go, there you are.” Well, one thing about India is, somehow, wherever you go, there’s even more of you. More than any other place i’ve been, India has the mysterious power of reflecting whatever one brings to…