[Buddha-l] As Swami goes, so goes the nation? (Dan Lusthaus and Richard P. Hayes)

[Mitchell Ginsberg]

Hello Richard and Dan and all, 
Thank you very much for these comments about the terms I was asking about. It is mostly clear (well, more a broth than a stew by now, in any case). I did come across tantra as loom (its concrete sense as an instrument for stretching or expanding) and some senses, but not as part of this syntactic structure. So thank you for that in particular. 
Ah yes, irony and sardony, as you say. I suppose I've been away from the Northeast Corridor (I think that's what that region from DC up through Boston via Philly, Princeton, and New Haven is called) for too long. Even my friend Bob Solomon once commented he missed that part of my repartee. Oh well. 
I know in some circles, people are requested to add a marker that they are being witty, so that others are clued into their attitude explicitly. I realize that is quite primitive, but then again, email is not the most elegant of channels of communication. 
And for the Chinese, the question marks that I see and the pinyin transliterations even without tones indicated have been enough for me to figure out what the Chinese characters in question are, so thank you for that. Just an extra few steps to get from these emails to that information! ;o) 
(Using one of those primitive emoticons, as they're called; I refrain from commenting on the degree of elegance of the neologism there)
Mitchell  ==========
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