Dimensionally Barrett

Gomchen Karma Yogi, a Nepalese friend of mine, reminded me of a kind of quid pro quo that might help the President understand what quid pro quo means and why it is often seen as a type of subterfuge. This is no less pernicious than anything he'd use to pressure foreign powers. In Nepal, Christian organizations and missionaries will rebuild villages, provide education, do solildly good work on infrastructure BUT it comes with a caveat. Typically, there is some amount of evangelizing, if not outright conversion-by-obligation. The numbers vary but in one article, the number of converts might be as high as three million or almost ten percent of the predominantly Hindu population. At issue is that Nepal is a poor country, stuck between a rock and a hard place: a corrupt government and the encroaching influence of Xi Jinping's China. Nepalese are frustrated by the lack of support from the government in almost all areas of polity and if rebuilding from the 2015 earthquake ...

In two days, it will be 60 years to the date that Tibetans rose up en masse against the invasion and occupation of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). The uprising was crushed, the Dalai Lama and tens of thousands of Tibetans fled their homeland and thus began the decades-long repression of a people by an invading power. For sixty years, the Tibetan people in Tibet have endured being patronized and marginalized in their own country by an imperial – despite all the communist rhetoric of liberation and throwing off the chains of the oppression of exploitation – and illegitimate, force. The recurring from China is that Tibet has always been part of China and this is so easily refuted as to be laughable but for one thing: most people don’t know or simply accept that this is the case. To be sure, relations between the two countries has not always been exactly cozy; the Tibetan Empire expanded and invaded China during the Tang dynasty and captured the capital of Cha...

Today is International Mother Language Day, a day cited by UNESCO and one that you would think would be celebrated by all people across the globe. Language is the marker that identifies our commonalities and our diversities in a way that no outward appearance can. Learning a language other than one’s own breaks down barriers and builds an appreciation for and a sense of communion with other humans. Learning another’s language is a true sign of some degree of empathy. Or so I think it should be. Others don’t feel that way It goes without saying that if you can eradicate a language, you have effectively eradicated a culture. The government of the People’s Republic of China has been attempting to do this with the Tibetan language (and by extension, Tibetan culture) for decades. It has stepped up its machinations a good bit in the past couple of years with a measure of success. Across a spectrum of cultural areas (music, language, nomadic traditions, religion, and for that mat...

From "The Demon in the Diagram" by Matthew Ritchie, Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University Over the past forty-plus years, I’ve watched conceptual art become increasingly multivalent and more accomplished, in terms of bring together multiple disciplines. If Duchamp’s “Large Glass” was the initial point of departure for modern/post-modern works, then installations like Matthew Ritchie’s “The Demon in the Diagram” is an example of one of the points of arrival. On view at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts, Ritchie’s installation is an immersive experience of the shifting sands of interpreting, describing, and diagramming existence in the world and how reality will win out over our strategies to encapsulate it in words/images. Each strategy we devise to formulate some structure of reality is altered by successive interpretations. Ritchie begins with Hesiod and the adoption of mythology to construct a meaningful interpretation of human experience and c...

Wednesday presented another scintillating evening at the Baker Institute; the focus was on cultural diplomacy and celebrated with a panel discussion between moderator Alison Weaver, executive director of the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Ellen Susman former director of the U.S. Department of State’s Artists in Embassies program as an appointee of President Barak Obama’s and Haruka Fiji and Danny Mekonnen, percussionist and saxophonist, respectively, from the Silk Road Ensemble. The panel discussion and Q and A was bookended with performances from the five members of the Silk Road Ensemble currently in Houston as part of a three year residency at Rice University. Briefly, it was wonderful and a much needed light, particularly during these times. The central question was “what role does art and culture play in modern society, in this increasingly contentious world?”  The answers were thoughtful and inspiring. In a keynote, Eduardo Braniff, the Silk Road En...

Trying to get a perspective/John Barrett It’s not personal, unless we let it be: dealing with the political scene from a Buddhist perspective Today, the President took another step toward authoritarianism by declaring via Tweetthat he has absolute power to pardon himself . Let’s stop there for a minute. He followed this with additional words that rendered his whole tweet somewhat silly. What I want to examine, for the moment, is this idea that our President believes he has absolute power to do something. He does not, but this won’t stop him from saying he does and acting as if he does. What makes this pronouncement extremely problematic, if not outright dangerous, is that the assumption of any absolute in leadership capability paves a path to corruption and, well, dictatorship. I’m not going to weigh in right now on the administration in great detail; I’ll save that for later. What I do want to look at are the consequences of personalizing enmity against a person or pers...

I'm wrapping up a three-month-long project exploring a series of visual analogs/interpretations of the "completion stage"/rDzogs-Rim in Vajrayana practice. The images that follow point to the luminositythat is inherent in the process of dissolving a visualization and reposing in mind-as-such/mind-in-itself/sems-nyid. The completion stage follows the generation or creation stage/sKye-Rim, in which an image of a buddha, bodhisattva, yidam, or other figure is held in mind. The visualizations may be quite complex or quite simple. They may be generated in steps (first a lotus seat, then a seed syllable atop the seat, and so on) or they simply appear to the mind to be meditated on, in the nature of light and therefore, translucent. I've had it explained to me that this is the "shamatha" or single-pointed or calm abiding aspect of Vajrayana practice and indeed, there's much to be said of it and for it, but the completion stage is not often remarked on in...