Nine Lives

We have a lot of misery to bear. But that is our tradition. That is our karma.

LA) soldiers lined up outside Lhasa, the Chinese pressured the Tibetans to sign the Seventeen Point Agreement

The world is on fire and every solution short of Nirvana is like trying to whitewash a burning house.” Everythi

The main struggle, especially when you are young, is to avoid four things: desire, greed, pride and attachment. Of course you can’t do this completely

nese soldiers were committing the most sinful of all crimes – trying to destroy Buddhism. And I knew that it is written in our scriptures that in certain circumstances it can be right to kill a person, if your intention is to stop that person from committing a serious sin. You can choose to take upon yourself the bad karma of a violent act in order to save that person from a much worse sin.’
‘So inspired by these teachings,’ I asked, ‘you took up a gun and fought the Chinese?’

tween the strictly regulated ways of the Wahhabis and the customs of the heterodox Sufis lay two entirely different conceptions

The end came on 4 March 2009, a week before my visit to Sehwan. A group of Pakistani Taliban arrived at the shrine before dawn, and placed dynamite around the squinches of the dome. No one was hurt, but the shrine chamber was completely destroyed. The Taliban issued a press release blaming the shrine for opening its doors to women, and allowing them to pray and seek healing there. Since then several other shrines in areas under Taliban control have been blo

Soviet–mujahedin conflict in the late 1980s from Pesha

as Indian society transforms itself at speed.