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Today's
Stories
February
2, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Hollow Candidate:
The Trouble with Howard Dean
Jan.
31 / Feb 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
January 30, 2004
Saul
Landau
Cuba High on Neo-Con Hit List
Michael
Donnelly
Bush's Second Front: The War in
the Woods
Elaine
Cassel
Worse Than Jacko: Child Abuse at Gitmo
David Vest
More Halliburton News, Brought to You by Halliburton
Mike
Whitney
The Kay Report: Still Defending Aggression
David
Miller
The Hutton Whitewash
Sam
Husseini
How Many People Must Die Because of This "Mistake",
Senator Kerry?
January 29, 2004
Patricia
Nelson Limerick
John Ehrlichman, Environmentalist
Ron
Jacobs
Homeland Security and "Legalized"
Immigration
Rahul Mahajan
New Hampshire v. Iraq
Greg
Weiher
Bush Calls for Preemptive Strike on
Moon and Mars
Norman
Solomon
The State of the Media Union
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Does NH Mean Anything?
January
28, 2004
Kathy
Kelly
Bearing Witness Against Teachers of
Torture and Assassination
January
27, 2004
Steve
Philion
Ritter Was Right: My Exchange with
CNN's Aaron Brown
Daniel
Ellsberg
Leak Against This War: Expose the
Lies from the Inside
C.G.
Estabrook
Can George Ever Really be Elected
President?
Josh
Frank
Hot Coals in Vermont: Dean's Smoke
Screens
Greg
Moses
Racism 101 All Over Again
Gilad
Atzmon
Blood, Soil and Art
Mike
Ferner
"We're All Lied To": an
Interview with Bruce Cockburn in Baghdad
Hammond
Guthrie
General Disorders of the Day
January
26, 2004
Sean
Donahue
The Toxic Career of Rand Beers: Kerry's
Drug War Zealot
Gary
Leupp
David Kay's Admission
January
24/5, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Iraq's Shia: "Our Day Has
Come"
Laura
Flanders
State of the Conservative Union
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Enter Berger: Signs of Hope in
Guatemala
Dave
Lindorff
Ground Control to Maj. George
Susan Davis
The Birdwatcher Menace
Alexander
Cockburn
The Fog of Cop Out: McNamara 10,
Morris 0
January
23, 2004
Yonathan
Shapira
An Israeli Pilot Speaks Out
Standard
Schaefer
Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben
Protests US Travel Policy
Josh
Frank
In Defense of Polluters: Howard Dean's
Vermont
William
A. Cook
Rule by the Corrupt and the Capricious
January
22, 2004
Sam
Smith
Howards End?
Patricia
Koyce Wanniski
Lost in Space
Alexander
Lukin
Putin and the Clans
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk Confirmed: O'Neill's
Revelations and Bush's Mind
Forrest
Hylton
The Prisoner, the President and the
Mafia
January 19, 2004
Justin E. H. Smith
Inside
America's Prisons: From Corrections to Retribution
Richard W. Behan
The GOP, Inc.
Ray McGovern
Bush's
State of the Union: Humility or More Hyperbole?
Werther
SOTUS:
the Stalin Moment of America's Nomenklatura
Phillip Cryan
Media Collusion in Colombia's War
Lee Sustar
A New Strategy to Reverse Labor's Decline?
Arthur Versluis
Great Lakes as Commodity: Privatizing Water
Uri Avnery
Anti-Semitism:
a Practical Manual
Steve Perry
Fresh Crack from Hawkeye State
January 17 / 18, 2004
Fadi Kiblawi and Will
Youmans
The
Use and Abuse of MLK Jr by Israel's Apologists
Joshua Muldavin
and Joseph Nevins
Blaming the Symptoms
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bad Days at Indian Point: Inside America's Most Dangerous Nuclear
Plant
Brian Cloughley
Iron Hammers in Iraq
Saul Landau
Fog of War: Vietnam and Iraq
M. Shahid Alam
Lerner, Said and the Palestinians
Richard Manning
Food Poisoning as Background Noise
Marjorie Cohn
The Guantanamo Concentration Camp
Mike Whitney
Scalia and Opus Dei: Radicals on the Court
Sadik Kassim
Meet Our New Saddam: Islam Karimov
Carol Norris
Arnold
and Bush's Numbers Don't Add Up
Joe Quandt
Suicide
Bombers: The Clash of Absurdities
David Krieger
Imagining MLK Jr at 75
Bruce Jackson
Making War, Making Movies
Ron Jacobs
Revolution in the Air: a review
Richard Edmondson
Rupert Murdoch and My Sister
Richard Forno
Apologizing for Preemption: Evil, Perle and Frum
Poets' Basement
Holt, Mickey Z, Albert & Guthrie
January 16, 2004
Kathy Kelly
A Visit
to Umm Qasr Prison
William S. Lind
More
Thoughts on 4th Generation Warfare
Gillian Russom
So.
Cal Grocery Strikers Speak Out: "We Need Action!"
Ari Shavit
Survival
of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris
Adi Ophir
Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion: a Response to Benny Morris
Dave Lindorff
The General's Henchman: Michael Moore Smears Kucinich
Steve Perry
Iowa Death Trip 2
January 15, 2004
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Memo
to the President: Your State of the Union Address
John Chuckman
Dry
Hole in the Oval Office: President from Podunk Drilling, Inc
Chris Floyd
Mind Over Matter
Gil-Scott Heron
Whitey on the Moon
Gary Leupp
The
Silk Road: Random Thoughts on the Bam Earthquake and Satan
January 14, 2004
Greg Moses
Happy
Birthday, Dr. King: To Write Off the South is to Surrender to
Bigots
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Supremes: Amputating the Bill of Rights
Dave Lindorff
Preview of Iowa? Pennsylvania Straw Poll Spells Trouble for Traditional
Dems (and Dean)
Jason Leopold
O'Neill Claims Backed by Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz War Letters to
Clinton
Alexander Cockburn
Bush,
Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last
January 13, 2004
William S. Lind
How 2004
Looks from Potsdam
M. Junaid Alam
Do Iraqis Have a Right to Resist?
Mickey Z
Snipers:
No Nuts in Iraq
Adolfo Gilly
Chonchocoro:
The Prisoner and the Presidents
Steve Perry
You Love God, Right?
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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February
2, 2004
A Buddhist's Nun's
Long Pilgrimage
A
Prisoner of Tom Ridge
By GARY LEUPP
"I have committed no crime, and
yet I am taken prisoner."
Lotus Sutra,
Chapter 4
I wouldn't call myself a Buddhist, but I've been
a student of Buddhist thought for a long time, and have high
appreciation of its essential teachings as I understand them.
Teaching Japanese history semester after semester, I engage the
Zen school in particular: objective, rational, dispassionate
yet compassionate, true, I think, to the spirit of primal Buddhism
as it emerged in India some two and a half millennia ago. I confess
I'm not a big fan of Tibetan Buddhism (Lamaism), and am
always amused when I encounter people who sincerely believe it
is the oldest and purest variety of Buddhism within the immense
welter of sects. I've talked to students who have spent semesters
in Nepal, imbibing Lamaism, who are persuaded of this. In Lhasa,
in 1987, I met a group of Japanese pilgrims in a hotel lobby;
one of them told me they were there in Tibet to "get back
to the original Buddhism." I had to point out that, actually,
Buddhism had made it all the way across Central and East Asia
to Japan by 538, and was officially embraced by the court in
588, long before the faith was known in nearby, but forbiddingly
elevated, Tibet.
The first Buddhist missionaries known
to visit Tibet arrived in 763, and the version of the faith that
materialized thereafter was a unique blending of the indigenous
Bon religion with Mahayana Buddhist teachings. Buddhism was already
a thousand-year-old belief system (or rather, web of often contradictory
belief systems) by the time it reached the Tibetan plateau, and
once arrived, the Dharma, the Teaching, got all mixed up with
native beliefs about disposal of the dead ("sky burial"---the
feeding of corpses to carrion, rather than cremation), about
the relationship between the religious Order and the state (the
concept of the Dalai and Pancham Lamas, living Buddhas as political
administrators), about the sacred nature of the yak and its butter
burned as incense, etc. These are features specific to a highly
idiosyncratic religious tradition, and certainly not the purest
or most ancient Buddhism, whatever Richard Gere might want to
believe.
Tibet for some is a Shangri-La, an earthly
paradise ravaged by cruel Chinese predation, whose religieux
heroically maintain their pure faith in the face of persecution
and occupation. Maybe. What I saw in Tibet was great poverty,
terrible hygiene, naïve faith inclining herders from the
boondocks to sell all they had upon arrival in Lhasa to gift
the monks of Jokhang Temple and purchase yak butter to burn in
front of temple images. I recall the prostrating faithful in
the Jokhang Temple courtyard smacking their foreheads on the
pavement or on pillars until the blood flowed (a practice I've
seen in no other Buddhist context), while all around the inevitable
hawkers offered jewelry to the tourists with un-Buddhist pushiness.
I recall, too, the beggars at the airport, and how riotously
they responded when a Newsweek journalist, thinking he
was doing a good deed, started distributing photos of the Dalai
Lama among them. (Must be a really objective journalist, I thought
to myself.) Anyway, while I'm not knocking it, Tibetan Lamaism's
not my personally preferred variant of Buddhism.
And its pontiff is not among my heroes.
The Dalai Lama (or, as the mainstream media invariably calls
him, as though desperate to posit some [Orientalistically exotic]
hero, "His Holiness the Dalai Lama") is, I understand,
a likeable man. I personally find his writings philosophically
parochial, comparatively speaking, rather like those of His Holiness
the Pope. On the really mundane side, one point about his career
little noted among the fans is that during the 1960s his operation
received $1.7 million from the CIA every year to arm, train and
pay military forces in Tibet to militarily confront the People's
Liberation Army (New York Times, Oct. 1, 1998). The Dalai
Lama himself received an annual paycheck of $180,000 from the
U.S. You don't usually think of Tenzin Gyatso, avatar of Avalokitesvara,
as a
CIA operative heading up a Contra-type operation, but that's
one aspect of his career. While he no longer promotes Tibetan
independence, many of his adherents in Tibet do so, risking torture
and death. Reports of Tibetans "tortured for their faith"
seem to me implausible; Beijing doesn't much care about Tibetan
religious practices per se, and I've even seen Lamaist
masses featured on Chinese television. Political opposition to
the status quo is another matter.
The Washington Post (January 28),
carried a story about a 30-year old Buddhist nun named Sonam,
whose family and friends had somehow fallen
afoul of the authorities in Tibet three years ago.
She felt obliged to flee her village
at the base of Mt. Everest, walking eight days while avoiding
police patrols into Nepali territory. Last August, as Nepal's
government, cozying up with China (with which it shares an interest
in crushing the locally mushrooming Maoist insurgency), began
to repatriate Tibetan refugees back to the PRC, she
left Nepal, taking her first airline flights and reaching
Washington's Dulles Airport. Reaching the Shangri-La of America,
land of freedom, land of the CIA, land friendly to His Holiness,
with naively high hopes for political asylum, she was immediately
apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and incarcerated
in Riverside Regional Jail in Hopewell, Virginia, just outside
of Richmond. She was an illegal alien, lacking proper documents,
and a potential terror threat.
After three months in jail, Sonam was
allowed a hearing in Arlington, where a federal immigration judge
granted her asylum. But, according to the Post, "even
as she was hugging her attorney in celebration, the lawyer from
the Department of Homeland Security announced that she was appealing
the case." That lawyer, Deborah Todd, argues that Sonam
had lived in Nepal for three years and could have stayed there.
So the nun was shackled again and sent back to jail, to await
her next court date, which, according to her attorney, won't
happen before this fall at the earliest.
Journalist David Cho was recently allowed
a visit with her. "It's so lonely. It's so hard," she
told him through a translator, sobbing uncontrollably. "Why
is this happening?" Homeland Security won't say; a spokesman
said the department doesn't comment on ongoing cases. We don't
know how many poor souls have been randomly consigned to the
post-9-11 gulag. But really. A young refugee Buddhist nun, jailed,
granted political asylum, then re-incarcerated by U.S. government
appeal? In this world of suffering, in this imperialist country
wrapped in religious-like delusions, one can only hope that in
her cloister-like cell Sister Sonam finds political awakening,
if not spiritual enlightenment.
* * *
(A prayer): May Ms. Todd and her bosses,
especially Tom Ridge, who has harmed so many, someday understand
the Dhammapada verse (125): "Whoever harms a harmless
person, one pure and guiltless, upon that very fool the evil
recoils like fine dust thrown against the wind."
Gary Leupp
is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor
of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Male
Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa, Japan
and Interracial
Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900.
He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for February 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
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