CNN’s Belief Blog Reviews Tetsu Saiwai’s The 14th Dalai Lama: A Manga Biography
Read Gabe Le Monica’s write-up here.
Rev. Danny Fisher
Just a Buddhist Minister Trying to Benefit Beings
Month: September, 2010
September 23, 2010
Being a Bodhisattva Is Like Being Batman?
As regular readers know, I was (like many, many others) a big fan of Christopher Nolan’s 2008 Batman film The Dark Knight. Among other things, I gave it a rave review for The Journal of Religion and Film, and it topped my list of the ten best films of 2008 at elephantjournal.com.
As an admirer of the film — an unsettling, affecting, surprising, and masterful piece of post-9/11 art that sends the audience away mulling over important questions about values, violence, and civic responsibility — I was intrigued and delighted by Markus “Uku” Laitinen’s most recent post at Zen – The Possible Way: “Being Bodhisattva Is Like Being Batman”. Check it out.
I’d say it’s probably an open question just how heroic (or enlightened) Batman is in Christopher Nolan’s vision of Gotham City, but that’s part of the point of The Dark Knight. So Batman as Bodhisattva? Bodhisattva as Batman? Why not?
September 23, 2010
Former Prisoner of Conscience Releases Film, Tibet in Song
This via Human Rights Now – The Amnesty International USA Web Log:
Ngawang Choephel, a Tibetan entho-musicologist and Fulbright Scholar, set out to make a film about traditional Tibetan music and dance. A year later, he was wrongly convicted of “espionage and counter-revolutionary activities.” China announced that he had been sentenced to 18 years in prison for spying. The trial was closed, and no evidence has ever been made public.
Ngawang Choephel was held in Powo Tramo prison and was reported to be in poor health, suffering from ”bronchitis, hepatitis and respiratory infections”.
Choephel’s conviction and imprisonment spurred an outcry from human rights groups around the world, including Amnesty International. Many wrote letters pleading for his release as Amnesty considered him to be a prisoner of conscience.
These efforts paid off at last in January 2002, when Choephel was granted his freedom, after serving more than six years in Chinese prisons. “You just can’t believe he got out,” said Kate Lazarus, Amnesty’s Tibet specialist, who met Choephel soon after his arrival. “You dream and you hope that these people will be released, but you never know.”
At the time of his detention he had been gathering material for the production of a documentary film about traditional Tibetan performing arts.
The documentary he was working on prior to his arrest in China is finally being released in the U.S. on September 24th. Tibet in Song is a feature length documentary that celebrates the traditional Tibetan folk music and encompasses a harrowing journey into the past fifty years of cultural repression inside Chinese controlled Tibet.
Read the rest of the story here, and watch the trailer below.
September 23, 2010
The It Gets Better Project
This via Dan Savage:
If you’re gay or lesbian or bi or trans, and you’ve ever read about a kid like Billy Lucas and thought, “Fuck, I wish I could’ve told him that it gets better,” this is your chance. We can’t help Billy, but there are lots of other Billys out there—other despairing LGBT kids who are being bullied and harassed, kids who don’t think they have a future—and we can help them….
READ MORE about the It Gets Better Project, in Savage Love, here: http://bit.ly/bYtxBd
Visit the It Gets Better Project’s YouTube Channel here.
September 22, 2010
A Gift of Dharma for 9.22.10
Today’s quote is from Issan Dorsey Roshi, the late founder of the Hartford Street Zen Center and Maitri Hospice. The story of his extraordinary life is told in David Schneider’s Street Zen: The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey. This is it — from the book:
The path is always right beneath your feet.
