A documentary titled Tibet – History of Tragedy outlines the history of Tibet during the 20th Century. This film will give you an overview of the social and political conflict behind the story told in Windhorse Warrior.
The documentary comes in four parts on YouTube:
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Part 4:
Posted by Rishi on October 26, 2018
https://friederishi.wordpress.com/2018/10/26/tibet-history-of-tragedy/
My novel has been published by Niyogi Books India!
Windhorse Warrior offers an inside look at the struggles and aspirations of the Tibetan people during the 1950s. It is a tale that weaves together the politics of occupation and resistance, an other-worldly romance between a Chinese communist and an educated Tibetan woman, and the soaring vision of the Tibetan spiritual heart.
Chuang Wei Ming, a young zealot from Shanghai, arrives in Lithang—on the eastern Tibetan plateau—with a mission to prepare the people for Maoism but soon outgrows its limiting worldview. Chuang falls in love with the beautiful and intelligent Dechen, who introduces him to the richness of Tibetan Buddhism. Palden Rinpoche, Dechen’s spiritual teacher, includes Chuang in their plan for a general spiritual awakening based on the Legend of King Gesar of Ling. Together, they pursue a pure communism infused with Buddhist teachings to create an ‘enlightened society’.
This is a story that extends beyond the decade in which it is set. Its message is true today in the global context of oppression and disparity, fake news, and injustice. Those who believe in a just and beautiful world will find themselves longing for an ‘enlightened society’ filled with spiritually awakened women and men, free to pursue their true potential and eager to enrich the lives of others.
I have 100 books for sale locally now. Books will not be readily available in the US until next spring. By then you should be able to buy one from Amazon or order through your local bookstore at $25.00 for hardcover. It will eventually be available in paperback and as an ebook (Kindle). A photo of the cover is below. Go to the Book page for details on purchasing a copy.
Read it and write a review on Goodreads.com.
Or ask questions and make comments below.
Posted by Rishi on October 23, 2018
https://friederishi.wordpress.com/2018/10/23/windhorse-warrior-2/
Shamatha, which means calm, is the practice of meditation to develop the ability to focus the mind in single-pointed concentration. This is practiced as a pre-requisite for mindfulness or insight meditations. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition this practices is described as a nine stage progression beautifully depicted in this thangka showing a monk chasing and finally capturing an elephant. 
The elephant is being led by a monkey. The monkey represents distractions. How well we know this scenario! This is ordinary mind or conventional mind mired in the Babylon Matrix (Jonathan Zap). But through study of the writings of Wisdom Teachers and mediation practice, the monk is able to capture and subdue the elephant. Gradually both the monkey and the elephant turn white representing the meditator’s ability to maintain the power of concentration.
Stages three and four represents the meditator’s ability to fix and hold his or her concentration steady. The meditator has lassoed the elephant and gradually the monkey, elephant and even a rabbit turn and look at the meditator to indicate that distractions acknowledge who is in charge.
In stages five and six the meditator begins to lead the elephant and the monkey of distraction follows the mind rather than leading it. The mind is controlled; the meditator uses a goad to discipline the elephant. The rabbit disappears and the mind is finally pacified.
In the seventh stage the monkey leaves the elephant and stands behind the meditator and pays homage. In stage eight the meditator is in complete control. Single-pointed concentration is achieved.
The ninth is the stage of mental absorption. Perfect equanimity is found and the path has ended. The elephant rests beside the meditator who sits at ease. Now out of the meditator’s heart streams a rainbow like ray.
Stages ten and eleven represent crossing over into mental bliss. The meditator rides the elephant along the rainbow path into the perfection of the transcendent realm and returns bearing the sword of Wisdom. Samsara’s root is severed by the union of shamatha and vipashyana or insight meditation with emptiness as the object of contemplation. Aware of pure awareness, the meditator is now equipped with Compassion and Wisdom to guide others on the path to enlightenment. 
In the Chinese Chan (Zen) tradition this concept is illustrated through the Ten Ox Herding images by Master Kakuan in 12th Century China. There is a similar progression to the pictures to depict levels of realization.
The meditator (1) searches for the ox, (2) sees the tracks and follows them until (3) the ox is discovered in its hiding place. Once the ox is captured (4), the meditator is able to lead (5) and (6) then ride it back home. (7) Once home, the meditator achieves perfect concentration in non-duality (8). The next step, according to the Chan tradition is to realize the underlying, unshakeable unity of the cosmos (9); there is no separation between created (samsara) and uncreated reality (nirvana). Once realized, (10) the meditator returns to the marketplace. His Compassion compels him to help others on the path to enlightenment by offering his Wisdom.
The difference between the Tibetan and Chan illustrations reflects the cultural orientations of each rather than significant differences in the path or outcome. The Tibetan thangka, a sacred painting on cloth, is colorful and highly mythological while the Chan has an earthy pastoral flavor. Of course, there are no elephants in Tibet – nor in China – but Tibetan Buddhism was highly influenced by Indian culture. The Ox Herding pictures on the other hand demonstrate the Chinese orientation to nature beautifully and simply represented in ink drawings.
Both of these are examples of sacred or visionary art created for the purpose of teaching or clarifying the path of spiritual development. (See previous post: The Mission of Art.) Sacred art is purposeful and often uses high levels of logic as it in these illustrations. At the same time it is visionary and uses archetypal images from the realm of myth. Sacred art at its best is a union of logos and mythos.
Posted by Rishi on September 24, 2013
https://friederishi.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/the-nine-stages-of-mental-development/
Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Others call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has roots that go deep.
I have just three things to teach;
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thought,
you return to the source of your being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.
– Tao Te Ching, trans. Stephen Mitchell
This summarizes the ancient Chinese Taoist Master Lao Tzu’s philosophy of education. It was based on his contemplative approach to life. Parker Palmer makes a similar point in The Courage to Teach,
“As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together.”
Along with communicating course content, communicating the teacher’s soul through a unique connection with each student is vitally important. Simplicity, patience and compassion, as Lao Tzu states, must be the true contents of the courses we teach. How else can schools genuinely produce the “well-rounded student” most Student Learning Results asks for?
At most private schools the “well-rounded-student” is steeped in academics and gets a liberal balance of athletics, the arts, and social service activities. Throughout the learning experience the hope is that students will also develop positive character traits, leadership skills and a degree of religious, gender, political and racial tolerance. As worthy as these goals may be, I believe it produces one-dimensional individuals who, though they will surely succeed in our competitive world, lack the ability and motivation to “see inside themselves”.
We are great at helping students form the container that will define them as unique individuals and we help them learn how to maintain the container (Richard Rohr, Falling Upward) but we don’t do a good job of showing them the true purpose of this container. We need to put a more deliberate emphasis on people as “homo-duplex” or “two-tiered beings” (Emil Durkheim). What we are neglecting is deliberate discussion and education regarding authentic self-hood that transcends (yet includes) individual identity and we neglect emphasizing to students that the true purpose of their container is to fill it with compassion rather than the “stuff” of this world.
Acknowledging that we are two-tiered means we recognizes that we are “spiritual beings having a human experience” (Teilhard de Chardin).
“If we want to grow as teachers — we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives — risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract.”
Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach
If teachers are socialized to ignore what it means to be fully and authentically human how can we be equipped to guide students into the upper tier of human life? Jesus’ rebuke in Matt. 23:13 aptly applies to us.
“Woe to you teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.”
The kingdom of heaven is within and among us. It is entered through a contemplative practice of one’s own and becomes the root source of compassionate activity in the world. Obviously teachers need to enter the kingdom of heaven themselves so they can open the gates to others.
“Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks–we will also find our path of authentic service in the world.” Parker Palmer
As I teach I try to maintain a vision of both levels of being human, the ordinary and the transcendent. I do so by living out of my own contemplative practice to maintain a compassionate perspective. Living into the kingdom of heaven is the goal and joy of my life. I try to share with my colleagues and students the exuberant energy and joy this practice gives me . My collaborations and communications with my peers and with students becomes a matter of projecting the “condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together.”
Those focused on success in a worldly sense might say that “my teaching is nonsense” and “impractical” but those who can “look inside themselves” will see that “this nonsense makes perfect sense”.
Posted by Rishi on October 13, 2012
https://friederishi.wordpress.com/2012/10/13/a-philosophy-of-education/
Interview with a Han Chinese woman who discovered that the Tibetan people are different than the image propagated by the Communist Party.
Posted by Rishi on October 3, 2008
https://friederishi.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/epoch-times-the-distorted-image-of-tibet-part-i/
vLog with Tibetan Connection Radio reporter Lhakpa Kyizom about staged news events, violence, continued repression and a new Chinese Policy implemented to gain control of selecting the next Dalai Lama.
Chinese Policy: “Order Nr.5 is all the reincarnations of the high lamas are selected by the Tibetans (…) but now the Chinese they want to control that reincarnation through their Order Nr.5 and want to put their control over the reincarnation of the lamas. If his Holiness passes away they have the control of the next Dalai Lama.”
Go to the Digg story below to see the video.
Posted by Rishi on October 2, 2008
https://friederishi.wordpress.com/2008/10/02/tibet-report-chinese-government-a-la-gorwells-1984/
Forty five years ago I came in direct contact with Tibetan culture for the first time. Prior to that I had seen Tibetan caravans traveling through Tansen, Palpa, Nepal. I was well aware of the situation on the other side of the Himalayan mountains and I had even been in the audience when the Dalai Lama visited my school in Mussoorie, U.P. India soon after his escape from Tibet in 1959.
It was December, 1964. I was sixteen then. We had holidays in the winter because the school was in the mountains and I had been invited on a bird collecting expedition up the Kali Gandaki River. We hiked from Pokhara up over the Ghorepani pass to the Kali Gandaki and then up the river from Tatopani to Lete, Ghasa, and the amazing bend in the river at the foot of Dhaulagiri. (I’m sure I can claim to be one of the very first expatriates on what has come to be known as the “Annapurna Curcuit” and very definitely the first teenager.)
Trekking in Nepal, age 18
At this point I stood in the deepest gorge above sea level; the river runs at 6,000 feet above sea level while both Dhaulagiri to the west and Annapurna further to the east are above 26,000 feet. Another amazing thing about this bend in the river is the abrupt climate and ecological change from subtropic and temperate to desert alpine; from the lush southern slopes of the Himalayas that get drenched with monsoon rains to the arid trans-Himalayan plateau of Tibet. Culturally, of course, there is also a remarkable abrupt change – from Indian Subcontinental to Central Asian.
Now I’m sixty one. It’s been forty five years since I was on that expedition. Further up the Kali Gandaki River, just beyond Jomsom on our way up to Muktinath, the three of us – two Americans and a Briton – found ourselves surrounded by armed men on horseback. They demanded to know where we were going and what we were doing with guns. I wasn’t carrying one, but the other two had shotguns for bagging larger birds we would be sending off for the Chicago Natural History Museum’s collection of Himalayan birds. One of the men on horseback rode over and grabbed a shotgun and examined it. It was passed around and examined carefully. My collegue opened up one of the shotgun shells and showed the horseman the tiny birdshot inside. We were suddenly surrounded by horsemen howling with laughter when it was clear to them we were hunting and collecting birds. We showed them a few specimens.
In broken English and Nepali we managed to communicate with these rough riders. We discovered – and had already guessed – that they were Khampa warriors who were engaging and harassing the People’s Liberation Army across the border inside Chinese occupied Tibet. When they learned that two of us were Americans they did the thumbs up sign and said, “America, good!” They pointed to the sky and indicated supplies were dropped by American planes.
The conflict between Tibetans and Chinese Communism has been going on for over fifty years. The armed struggle by this tiny group of warriors stopped ten years later (by 1974). That is an interesting story all its own. Since then the Dalai Lama has tried to reach an understanding with the leaders of China about the occupation of Tibet. But this is a story that many people are well aware of especially since the world wide protests against Chinese suppression of Tibetan human rights during the Olympic Torch Relays earlier this year.
I have visited Western Sichuan, or Kham – where the Khampa warriors come from – but I have not been to Lhasa or any part of the TAR. Someday I would like to go there, someday when both Tibetans and Chinese recognize their interdependence and can live with mutual respect and affection for each other.
Posted by Rishi on September 29, 2008
https://friederishi.wordpress.com/2008/09/29/forty-five-years/
An article in the Guardian today reported that two of the top people in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) have been sacked – Wang Binyi, police chief and Qin Yizhi, deputy governor of the region. Qin made the world media last summer when the Olympic torch relay went through Lhasa for saying the Communist party would “smash the scheming of the Dalai clique”.
We can only wonder why these two were sacked. Hopefully, it is a sign that the Communist Party finally realizes they can’t tolerate bullies if they want to become full participants with the rest of the world. We can only wait and see how their successors behave.
Posted by Rishi on September 29, 2008
https://friederishi.wordpress.com/2008/09/29/lhasa-leaders-sacked/
Another friend of mine, John Chaffee, who is a professor of Chinese Studies sent the following series of pictures that were sent to him by a Taiwanese friend. The friend was taking pictures of a young couple at the White Deer Chapel in Pengzhau, Sichuan when the earthquake struck. The photographer was able to keep his wits and capture these very dramatic images.
The Great Earthquake of Sichuan, May 12 2008
It happened when we were taking wedding pictures.
We were taking pictures for a new couple in White Deer Chapel in Pengzhou, Sichuan. Suddenly there was an enormous quake, and the hundred-year old church was wiped out in a split moment.
It is May 12. We were there to take wedding pictures. The session began at two and after only a few pictures were taken, the catastrophe struck. When we saw big chunks of stone falling off the church and the earth was shaking, we realized there was an earthquake. Knowing that there was no place to hide, we lay on our stomach and used hands to protect heads. It is the end of the world, I thought. Not courage, but the seeming loss of hope that, while crawling on the ground, I managed to raise my camera to take these pictures.
It was chokingly dark. all I could hear was the sound of falling buildings.
As the shaking came to an end and the dust began to settle, we all stood up to see what had happened, despondently horrified.
In a split second, the church that only recently celebrated its 100th anniversary became a pile of rubble.
We helped each other to stand up; looking around we could not believe what we saw.
2:41 in the afternoon of May 12. The camera recorded the time. Inset is the church before it fell.
We thought the quake was only limited to this area and tried to call for help.
There was no way that we could secure help and then there were continued aftershocks.
We started to retreat from the rubble. On the way all we saw were despondent scenes; the neighboring villages were severely damaged.
We and the villagers immediately started self-rescuing actions. Fortunately all 33 people taking pictures in the chapel were not hurt.
The fire that evening was the only consolation for the terrified visitors. We thank the hospitality of the kind villagers. Since the roads were all damaged we had to leave the car behind and walked home.
Posted by Rishi on June 7, 2008
https://friederishi.wordpress.com/2008/06/07/wedding-pictures-in-an-earthquake/
Gao Li Qiang sent another eye witness account – but not his own. This time it was a friend of his who went into the mountains after the earthquake to see what had happened there. Gao writes the commentary for the following pictures:
The following below pictures were not taken by me – they show another face that we do not see on TV.
This woman pointed to where she just finished her work in the field. On her way home, she saw something she would never forget. It took only one second and the whole village was buried.
She said there is always a chance for people to escape if there was one landslide but this was too sudden, no time for people to do anything to save their lives.
A local villager said this small stream was deep. Now the pile of earth is quite level and the plants don’t look demolished, everything looks that normal. But this pile of earth was not here before. The local villager said that the mountain was like “bombing out” and this earth was thrown here. There was blare coming from inside the earth and then the mountain spurted out red magma several decameters high!
With the eruption a large crack opened and the village fell directly into it.
A young witness said there were several houses still there and people came from the houses running directly to the river. Unfortunately all of them fell into the crevasse. Very soon another toneless blare came out of the earth and the crevice closed.
The trail on this small hill is new. The valley was over 100 meters deep. Now the valley has been filled up with soil. A village has been buried under it.
This was a large flat field of wheat. Now it is covered by one pile of earth that was blasted off the side of that mountain several kilometers away.
Villagers who have been living here since birth cannot find where their houses were located because the land has changed so tremendously.
Posted by Rishi on June 7, 2008
https://friederishi.wordpress.com/2008/06/07/the-power-of-nature/
Threshold 