Word: ritual
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Finally, last week began the Dhukor Wangchen (the sermon of the Wheel of Time), one of Buddhism's most elaborate rituals. For each of three days, the air exploded with the bellowing of conch shells and rhythmic prayer chants. Then, in the hush that followed, the Dalai Lama delivered an eight-hour discourse on tantrism, the most magical form of Mahayana Buddhism. Renunciation, enlightened motive and a correct understanding of sunyata (nothingness) are the three prerequisites for the tantric practice, he explained. Disciples were given two reeds to sleep on, one under the pillow, the other under the mattress...
...rite takes its name from the Latin Tridentum, for Trent, Italy, site of the 16th century counterreformation church council that authorized a newly uniform Mass ritual. It is the Tridentine rite that is forbidden, not Latin. The original version of the new rite, from which all vernacular versions are translated, is, in fact, in Latin...
...that Mao Tse-tung attempted to justify the violent birth of his new China with a culinary image: "A revolution is not a dinner party." After all, for thousands of years, Chinese civilization centered on the problem of food. Eating developed into the country's most important social ritual. Farming and eating not only bound countless generations together, but also resulted in one of the world's most highly evolved cuisines...
Knives slashed across the throats of two sheep, and their blood gushed out onto the quay jutting into Istanbul harbor. The traditional Moslem ritual of sacrifice was supposed to guarantee a safe voyage for a blue-and-gray-hulled exploration vessel named Sismik-1. As the 1,200-ton Turkish ship steamed toward the Dardanelles, she was saluted by a cacophony of ship's whistles...
...bureaucracy and licentiousness became the ordure of the day. "We are arrived at the zenith of vice," boomed Juvenal, "and posterity will never be able to surpass us." Perhaps not, but it seems to be making a vigorous effort. The massage salons of American towns are versions of Petronian ritual; Penthouse and Hustler proliferate on New York newsstands; Pompeii had its pornography memorialized in frescoes...