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  hardie karges 5:03 am on August 28, 2016 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 280 ), Kopan, Monastery ( 3 ), Nepal, Tantric, Thailand ( 64 ), Vajrayana ( 6 )   

  Buddhism and Rebirth: Karma Crushes Dogma in 3-Body Pile-Up 

  Dear Readers: If you happen to follow my other (travel) blog, backpackers-flashpackers.net/, then be forewarned that I’ll repeat some of the same material as in my last post there, so I’ll understand if you have other fish to fry. It’s not that I’m lazy, but rather that the issue that presented itself last week I believe is worth repeating, since it affects my future and the future of this blog…

  As you know, if you follow me here, I’ve been moving steadily toward a life of Buddhism over the past year or two, to the point of spending sessions in actual temples, in study of the Dharma, but also to prepare myself for eventually following the monk-hood myself, on a sporadic, if not permanent basis, something you can do in Thailand, whose Forest Tradition is extremely attractive to me… (More …)
   

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  hardie karges 10:13 am on February 17, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Bolivia ( 2 ), Nepal, Peru ( 5 )   

  BOLIVIA 

  Peru’s okay, and Bolivia one of my favorite countries of all time, always a poor man’s Nepal, and now a smart one’s also, what with the Marxist insurrection in the Kingdom, not so different from Peru itself circa 1990.  You’ve got to be pretty pathetic to be ‘going Marxist’ in the 21^st century, socialist maybe, but not Bolshevik.  Tourists notwithstanding, Nepal is so poor that Nepalese go to India to work.  I was in Kathmandu a week and didn’t see the mountains till the plane took off.  I thought for sure that I’d be going back; maybe I will.  La Paz is already there amongst the peaks.  The plane lets you off at 13,000 feet in El Alto where Teodora lives; then you go down 1500 feet to La Paz, skyscrapers rising up toward you from below.  It can be quite an effort just to breathe sometimes, especially after climbing the steep sidewalks.  But Bolivia’s another world, almost.  There is not a paved road crossing any border into Bolivia, at least not the last time I crossed.  Yet, they have buses more modern than any in North America.  There’s logic there somewhere.  You cruise across the lunar landscape as though there’s nothing more normal than riding a bus at an altitude higher than some airplanes fly.  The local Indians look like leathery-skinned Martians with pointy caps serving as secret transmitters to the mother ship.