Today is the 90th birthday of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama . To celebrate this I am republishing, without further editing, the 2014 photo essay about my close encounter with His Holiness at the Kalachakra Initiation in Ladakh, northern India. The Paradox of Our Age , a short but powerful essay credited to the present Dalai Lama, is widely available in Ladakh in northern India, a region known as 'Little Tibet'. The text ends with the observation that: 'These are times of fast foods but slow digestion/Tall men but short characters/Steep profits but shallow relationships/It’s a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room'. Tibetan Buddhism is widely viewed as an appealing alternative to materialistic Western society, so, not surprisingly, The Paradox of Our Age is widely circulated on the internet and Twitter - see photo tweet below . I bought The Paradox of Our Age on an exquisitely printed little scroll in the Tibetan refugee market in the re...
Comments
Good thing they were not playing any Johann-Joseph Fux!
I remember years ago seeing an advertising brochure for the Vancouver Symphony of their upcoming season. Writing about the Beethoven Ninth, they said :
"Beethoven wrote 9 Symphonies, 111 Piano Sonatas and 136 String Quartets"!
WOW! So much repertoire that I missed!
Cheers
David Cavlovic
One of my many eagle-eyed readers has just emailed me to point out I made the classic faux pas of awarding William Howard Schuman a second 'n' in my birthday post.