Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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From a Western point of view, the Dalai Lama is a deposed king, an exiled leader of the world's last theocracy. Tibet, ringed by the highest mountains on earth, suspended midway between the imposing civilization of India and China, was for hundreds of years a land of mystery, effectively keeping out intruders. In the early 1950s, however, China began to push for the annexation of Tibet. The current Dalai Lama, then 15 years old, was still undergoing monastic training as successor to the previous Dalai Lama and had not yet assumed leadership of the country. After consulting with...
...life the soul within its body acts on the environment for a limited time, until, like a lightbulb, the body burns out, allowing the soul, or electricity to flow on. This soul is born again and again in material form, until it has learned all the lessons of the earth. Then it becomes a Buddha, a pure spark of compassion, love, and joy. The cycle of reincarnation completed, the Buddha is free to return to the universal energy source--God, or the Void-- to enjoy the eternal bliss of Nirvana...
Tibetan Buddhists feel that throughout history many souls who approach Nirvana decide to return to earth to help others in times of need. A person who turns down Nirvana to help others is called a Bodhisattva. To Tibetans. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is just such a Bodhisattva. Tibetans consider him a "living Buddha," the fourteenth consecutive incarnation of Avalokita, "spirit of infinite compassion...
...against the grain of the common good. Life-spans, which had stretched to a thousand years, begin shrinking dramatically; natural fulfillment is replaced by restless desires and dissatisfactions. The Canopean overseers sadly change Rohanda's name to Shikasta, "the hurt, the damaged, the wounded one." The period of earth's recorded history is about to begin...
Thus passages that infuriate can be endured in the knowledge that enchantment is on the way. The book's allegory points insistently to earth, and the history of Shikasta as seen from Canopus is often, by earthly standards, particularly hamhanded: "For a couple of centuries at least, then, a dominant feature of the Shikastan scene was that a particularly arrogant and self-satisfied breed, a minority of the minority white race, dominated most of Shikasta, a multitude of different races, cultures, and religions which, on the whole, were superior to that of the oppressors." Such polemics alternate with passages...