[Buddha-l] NYTimes Tibet China Anti-British

[JKirkpatrick]

Interesting about Younghusband's epiphany. I really do think that
this experience is a psychodrama, a psychological syndrome:

"...Outside the village of Guru, they encountered an encampment
of 1,500 Tibetan troops.... In four minutes, 700 poorly armed
Tibetans lay dead or dying. Later, at Red Idol Gorge, a narrow
defile just 20 miles from Gyantse, the British slaughtered
another 200 Tibetans. [In other words, a bloody slaughter of
almost 1000 men.]
... Two months later, the evening before leaving Lhasa for good,
Colonel Younghusband rode out to a mountain and gazed down at the
ancient city, where he experienced a curious epiphany that
inspired him to end all acts of bloodshed and found a religious
movement, the World Congress of Faiths. 
"This exhilaration of the moment grew and grew till it thrilled
through me with overpowering intensity," he wrote in a memoir,
"India and Tibet." "Never again could I think evil, or ever again
be at enmity with any man. All nature and all humanity were
bathed in a rosy glowing radiancy; and life for the future seemed
naught but buoyancy and light." "

It also happened famously to Emperor Ashoka. Probably to a few
other world heroes.

Perhaps this sort of post-bloodshed epiphany could be viewed as
the bloody slaughter part of the psychodrama ridding by catharsis
the perpetrator of his sub-conscious evils --sins & negativities
of various sorts -- thus resulting in a blissful purification
experience of justification and good intentions. 
Analogs to this real-world experience are all the digital games
online and for sale, which only go half-way: they allow for the
catharsis but do not provide the purification. Instead, they are
addictive, repetitive indulgence in virtual acting out.

Another reason for ending wars. The couch or cushion would serve
the war-mongers and the world  more humanely and safely. Of
course, the other main problem is that since the 19th c it's a
hugely profitable, world -encompassing business. And IMO the new
great gamesters are getting ready for the next one.

Joanna

________________ 


Latest from the NYTimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/world/asia/10gyantse.html

Dan
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