Mesoscope > Recent Status Updates

Having studied Mipham Rinpoche's "Movement, Stillness, Awareness," I'm quite interested to learn that this framework for practice has foundations that stretch back at least to Manjushrimitra, and receive an important commentary in Rongzompa's work.

It seems that the long section on deviations from the view is basically a commentary on key sections of the All-Creating Sovereign Semde tantra.

Turns out that the author is publishing a separate commentary to this book, which in some places is clearly badly needed. It's due to come out in a couple of weeks, so I may put it on hold, even though I'm 3/4 done.

I love this book, but ... I think translating sangs rgyas pa as "perfecting" is flat-out wrong. Sometimes you have to grit your teeth and translate this as "buddhafied" or similar. Otherwise, you have to say Rongzompa wrote that all things are already "perfect" (sangs rgyas) when he wrote that all things are already Buddha. That is not fair to the reader.

'Wenn die Luna im völligsten Schein uns erstrahlt, ist ihre andere Seite am völligsten verdunkelt.' There's so much sheer poetic power in this volume, it has to be read with great care. Very powerful stuff, and an excellent companion piece to the Dzogchen material I'm reading.

The difficult fourth chapter is uncanny in its similarity to Hegel's Science of Logic - more similar than any Buddhist treatise I've seen, by far.

"It is by realizing that the two truths are indistinguishable that one becomes capable of entering into the nonduality of phenomena. Thereby, one may be described as “abiding in the view of the Great Perfection," which is the act of simply being divorced from all clinging to views."

Note to the author: you are using the term "burden of proof" incorrectly. It refers to which party in a debate bears responsibility for establishing their position, and it makes no sense to talk about something being able to "withstand the burden of proof".

I have to say I think it's a very serious omission that this book doesn't include a glossary.

Point three of Mipham's eight points is much more helpful and interesting - he clarifies the difference between the correct view and, for example, conceiving of an inexpressible ultimate that exists but is indescribable, or imagining nothingness. Those may sound like simple errors, but they can be very subtle - this is an exceedingly important clarification.

Reading Mipham's critique of Tsongkhapa carefully, it does not obviously hold. In "Beacon," as in his commentary to the Madhyamakavatara, his critique depends on a formulation that Tsongkhapa made only once, to my knowledge, in "Illumination": that "a pot is not empty of pot, it is empty of inherent existence." If you substitute Tsongkhapa's usual language, Mipham's argument doesn't obviously make contact.

Now this is interesting: "Moreover, if negation applies only to true existence, and the appearance of the basis of negation is not eliminated, then emptiness of true existence would require the existence of something else—the basis of negation. Thus, emptiness would not be an absolute negation, as Gelugpas hold it to be, but an implicative negation (ma yin dgag)."

Hey folks, just an FYI that I haven't received any notifications from Goodreads on site activity for many months. If I haven't responded to a comment you made, that's why.

It's pretty frustrating - I contacted support and I got a boilerplate reply that they're "aware of the issue," but it's probably been about a year since this core piece of functionality hasn't worked.

Sebald, in a nutshell:

"I spent six weeks living
in the wreck of a marooned barge,
staring at the walls as they gathered rust,
and I thought about the bombing
of Hamburg and Dresden during
World War II. Then I moved
into an abandoned zoo and spent
each day staring into empty cages,
imagining how it must have felt
to be a tiger in that time and
place, and I thought about
Poland during World War II...."

Still rather unclear what she's even talking about when she refers to the "disintegration of nation-states" that putatively occurred in the early 20th century.

The Eurocentrism of this book defies belief. She talks about the French Revolution as if the American Revolution never happened, and all of its ideas were new. Focusing heavily on autocratic states in WW II, I don't think the word "Japan" has appeared once so far. And, like a great many Germans, when she says "European" she means "French, German, and English," and when she says "global" she adds Russia and the US.

'...ich wollte mich rächen, ich wollte mich an den Schweinen rächen, aber man rächt sich immer nur an den Falschen."

Disappointing. So far, there is virtually nothing in this book that was not already known to me.

The introduction is somewhat unfocused and scattershot. I'd note that Gessen references Schmitt's "state of exception" but did not really understand it, or especially, how he tried to leverage it within the Nazi state.

Koeppen seems to believe Santa Ana is on the ocean - it is not. That seems to be a bit suggestive for his treatment of Americans more generally - he doesn't seem to quite have it. It's a bit weird to become the object of a stylized literary appropriation-cum-exoticisization. Usually we Americans are the appropriators!

Oof. Rumors of Koeppen's problematic treatment of race are not exaggerated. It's painful, and disappointing - I'm so much enjoying the book, otherwise.

'Erschöpfung perlte auf ihrer Stirn, jede Perle ein Mikrokosmos der Unterwelt, ein Gewimmel von Atomen, Elektronen und Quanten, Giordano Bruno sang auf dem Scheiterhaufen das Lied von der Unendlichkeit des Alls, Botticellis Frühling reifte, wurde Sommer, wurde Herbst, war es schon Winter, ein neuer Frühling? Ein Embryo eines Frühlings?'

I don't think anyone could mistake this book for objectively-written or dispassionate. I don't disagree with that per se, but she does tend to systematically idealize things that interest her, particularly shamanism.

I honestly didn't think there was another take on the trickster motif out there that would be worth reading. I've probably read at least 15 different takes on it by now, but she's got something new.

This book is extremely interesting.

Initial impression - Martin is extremely gifted as a field ethnographer and memoirist, but on shakier ground as a theorist. Like many anthropologists and sociologists, she seems to think that evidence of the porous nature of dichotomous categories means the whole edifice is naively reductive, and an arbitrary western construction.

I have seen two such sights, by sea and by land! But I am not to say it is a sea, for it is now the sky, betwixt the firmament and it you cannot thrust a bodkin's point.