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The Taipei Economic and Cultural Center in New Delhi is expected to issue a visa for the Dalai Lama to visit Taiwan, according to a TECC representative.
“We have asked the Dalai Lama’s office to prepare the necessary documentation for his visa application,” said TECC official Ong Wenchyi. “We are likely to follow the 2001 process used to issue a foreign visitor visa for the Dalai Lama so as to avert any unnecessary complications.”
Ong said the Dalai Lama was issued an overseas compatriot visa by the Ministry of the Interior and Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission for his first visit to Taiwan in 1997. “He seemed to be unsatisfied with this arrangement at the time.”
In keeping with President Ma Ying-jeou’s wish to see the Buddhist spiritual leader visit disaster-stricken areas in central and southern Taiwan, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is expected to instruct its New Delhi office today to issue visas to the Dalai Lama and his entourage.
According to officials at TECC in New Delhi, the Dalai Lama used an ID issued by the Indian government to apply for his visa. But as of 10:30 p.m. Aug. 27, MOFA’s Bureau of Consular Affairs in Taipei had not received any related applications. However, the secretary-general of the Dalai Lama’s office has been issued with a visa and arrived in Taiwan yesterday to make arrangements for the spiritual leader’s trip.
Let's see now... where did we leave off?
"Thus, if a person is self-righteously claiming to practice the buddhadharma, is using his practice as credentials, then he is simply playing ego's game."Ah, yes... the text continues from there:
"If a group of people do this together, then they reinforce each other in the same game. Inevitably they will pick a leader. Then the leader will have as his credentials the title 'head of the flock.' Then the members of the flock will have as their credentials the title 'member of such-and-such organization.' The leader and his flock reinforce each other's identities. As is said in the Sutra of the Treasury of Buddha, 'If someone teaches with ignorance, it is worse than if he took the lives of the inhabitants of three iniverses, because his ability to teach the dharma is impure.' Inevitably this organization, this collective ego, will look for further confirmation of its health and existence. It may even take as its credentials the transmission of the lineage, the teachings of the great masters, but it will be a prostitution of those teachings. It will involve itself in the ever-escalating game of one-upsmanship in order to enlarge its congregation. This one-upsmanship may take the form of collecting endorsements and diplomas, as well as the form of ambitious practice and adherence to the teachings. It will also see the success of rivals as a threat. The Buddha said that his teachings, like a lion, would never be destroyed by outsiders; it could only be destroyed from within like a lion's corpse consumed by maggots. This is the perversion of sangha. It is the dark-age style of spirituality, the operation of spiritual materialism."
"One serious concern I have is that though the West is known for having thousands of experts and educated people, as yet I have heard of very few westerners who have achieved any degree of realization through practice."
"Let us present the definition of buddhadharma," he wrote. "In the sutras, dharma is referred to as the 'path' and 'that which is knowable.' It is 'passionless.' Passion in this case refers to the dualistic fixations of the ego, which has two aspects. The first aspect is the ego of conceptualized confusion -- the notion of the other, that form exists. The second is the ego of personality -- if form exists, then there must be a perceiver of the form, an individual knower. These two aspects of ego are mutually dependent and constitute the samsaric mind. The seeming existence of other is a continually repeated proof of the existence of I, which is actually another other. I does not exist but takes the seeming existence of form as its credentials. The existence of form, credentials, is what maintains the illusion of I. Thus, if a person is self-righteously claiming to practice the buddhadharma, is using his practice as credentials, then he is simply playing ego's game."In another post, elsewhere in this blog, I ventured the opinion that there are dramatically opposing currents developing in Tibetan Buddhism as expressed in America.
FOR THE BENEFIT OF ALL SENTIENT BEINGS