Buddhism

The phoney mystics who fooled the West

In recent years when we’ve talked about the relations between India and the West, we’ve gone back to stressing the impossibility of interchange. A hundred years ago, E.M. Forster ended A Passage to India with the certainty that Aziz and Fielding could not be friends. Forster thought things would be different after Indian independence, but the spectres of cultural appropriation and the assertion of ongoing imperialist guilt have discouraged equal exchange.  Meher’s spiritual energy was soon devoted to persuading Hollywood to make a massive movie about his life That may explain why the excellent story Mick Brown tells in The Nirvana Express has hardly been covered in the past. How

Finally, the Sherpas are heroes of their own story

John Keay has for many years been a key historian and prolific contributor to the romance attaching to the highest mountains on Earth. His latest book is described as a summation of that lifetime’s contribution, offering an overview of the Himālaya – the Sanskrit version (‘Abode of Snow’) that Keay bids us use – both as a physical place and as a realm of intellectual inquiry. The book opens with a bang. Its first theme is the astonishing mountain-making forces that created the region. Specifically, Keay gives us the prolonged intellectual skirmishes among geologists as they tried to piece together the formative processes. The one who unpicked their genesis was

The amazing grace of Bruce Lee’s fight scenes

Early on in Enter the Dragon our hero, the acrobatic Kung Fu fighter Bruce Lee, tells a young pupil to kick him. Needless to say, the kid’s kick comes a cropper. ‘What was that?’, Lee sneers, clipping the lad’s ear. ‘An exhibition? We need emotional content, not anger.’ Even at 12, when I first read about this scene (in the poster magazine Kung Fu Monthly, whose first 26 issues are handsomely reproduced in Volume I of Carl Fox’s Archive Series), I thought it sounded like a load of chop suey hooey. An exhibition is precisely what I’d have wanted, if by some miracle I could have wise-guyed my way into

Spectacular and mind-expanding: Tantra at the British Museum reviewed

A great temple of the goddess Tara can be found at Tarapith in West Bengal. But her true abode, in the view of many devotees, is not this sacred structure itself but the adjacent, eerily smoking cremation ground. There she can be glimpsed in the shadows at midnight, it is believed, drinking the blood of the goats sacrificed to her during the day. Many holy men and women live in that grisly spot too, adorned with dreadlocks, smeared with ash, and dwelling in huts decorated with lines of skulls painted crimson. As a domestic setting this wouldn’t suit everybody. But the varieties of religious experience (to borrow the title of

Oracles, perverts and the Dirtbag Left

For 500 years the State Oracle of Tibet has worked as a kind of angry immortal advisor to the Dalai Lama, a Tibetan hybrid of Dominic Cummings and John Dee. The current incumbent, like all previous ones, alternates between his human incarnation and his spirit version. ‘In Tibetan Buddhism, the unseen parallel world of spirits is not to be taken lightly,’ explains anthropologist David Sneath on Heart and Soul (BBC World Service). ‘There are so many other living species,’ the Minister of Religion and Culture tells Sneath, ‘many of which we don’t even see.’ Sneath interviews the cheerful sixty-something State Oracle (living in exile in Dharamsala), various government ministers, sincere