Admiral Tibet Quotes

Heinrich Harrer: That's the Olympic gold medal. Not important. Pema Lhaki: This is another great difference between our civilization and yours. You admire the man who pushes his way to the top in any walk of life, while we admire the man who abandons his ego.

It is America (or Israel) at war, not just any war, that disturbs the Left. That is why there have been few demonstrations, and none of any size, against the mass murder of Sudan’s blacks; the genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, or Congo; China’s crushing of Tibet; or Saddam Hussein’s wars against Iran, Kuwait, and Iraq’s own Kurds. Though there are always admirable individual exceptions, the Left has not been nearly as vocal about these large scale atrocities as it is about America’s wars. One additional reason is that, in general, atrocities committed by non-whites rarely interest the Left—and therefore ‘world opinion,’ which is essentially the same thing as Leftist opinion.

use plants indigenous to Tibet, Tibet, and Bhutan.  A few of them are very rare, and frankly, I’m not even sure if they can be found in the wild any longer.  There is one particularly hard-to-find species that only reproduces every twelve years.  I have a large garden where I continually grow the plants needed.  They must be harvested, dried, and stored.”               “Would it be okay if I took a look at your page?  That way I’ll recognize the book  if I ever find it.”               “I memorized the formula and no longer need to refer to the page, though I do look at it from time to time to admire its beauty. 

The Buddha‘s life is not just something in a historical past, with us left behind and lost here. The Buddha is not meant to be envisioned as a presence whom we will encounter in some world in the future. We should, rather, make the Buddha immediate for ourselves. We should connect ourselves to the Buddha‘s immediate presence in our minds, intentions, and actions. We do not just aim to emulate or admire the Buddha, the ancient saints, and bodhisattvas. We aim to become buddhas today, saints today, bodhisattvas today, at our level of ability. (p. 39)

One must admire the achievement of Padmasambhava and Shantarakshita and their disciples, for it must have been difficult to persuade the rough warrior population of Tibet that nonviolence is the way to live, that self-conquest is more important than military conquest, that enlightened humanity is more important than national gods, and that the purpose of life is evolutionary merit and transcendent wisdom, not power and pleasure.