“Concert Still Shines a Light on Tibetan Culture”
by Danny Fisher
"The composer Philip Glass at Tibet House US, a beneficiary of a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall." Photo by Ruth Fremson for The New York Times.
The New York Times has a terrific piece in today’s paper about the concerts held at Carnegie Hall to benefit Tibet House US. (The next one will be their twentieth.) Frequent performer Philip Glass had a particularly powerful reflection for the Gray Lady:
…Mr. Glass said the concerts represented the survival of Tibetan culture in a changed world and its gradual embrace as part of the fabric of American society.
“It might be a slightly cruel thing to say,” he said, “but we’ve been the beneficiaries of an exiled community, as we have been with the Italians, and with the Ukrainians, or the Jewish people, or the African cultures that came here through slavery. America is a very dynamic and vital place and partly because of our ability to absorb these kinds of things.”
The concerts “began as a kind of beacon — ‘Here we are, don’t forget us,’ ” he added. “Now it’s like a celebration of a culture which is surviving in a way no one expected it would.”
Read the rest here.
Funny how my Zen teachers have distanced themselves from Japanese culture, but the transmission of vajrayana practice is very wrapped up with the preservation of a rich culture. Socio-political circumstances probably explain that.