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RESOURCE GUIDE FOR TIBETAN MEDICINE

Link: RESOURCE GUIDE FOR TIBETAN MEDICINE.

RESOURCE GUIDE FOR TIBETAN MEDICINE by Subhuti Dharmananda, Ph.D., Director, Institute for Traditional Medicine, Portland, Oregon The practice of Tibetan medicine has hovered near extinction for the past forty years, though there are increasing efforts under way now to preserve it, with some success. This active tradition was suddenly disrupted in the 1950’s with the Chinese communist invasion of Tibet, followed by destruction of the monasteries, the killing of the Tibetan monks and professionals, and forced exile of the leadership. The main medical school, founded in 1696 A.D., was built on Iron Hill (Chakpori) opposite the Potala Palace in Lhasa; it was reduced to dust by the shelling of the Chinese army when rebellious monks took refuge there in 1959. A second school, Men-Tsee-Khang, was built in Lhasa in 1916, founded by Kyenrab Norbu (1883–1962), on the plains nearby the Potala. It was intended to adapt Tibetan medical education to the demands of the 20th Century. The school has not been destroyed and continues to operate, though only a few remaining elderly Tibetan doctors are available to provide the original teachings. A combination of Tibetan and Chinese medicine is now taught and practiced, but due to limitations of resources, new doctors graduate with less training than in earlier decades, as they readily admit.

Bruce Ross: On Defining Haibun to A Western Readership

Link: Features: Simply Haiku.

Kenkyusha’s New Pocket Japanese-English Dictionary defines haibun as a “terse prose-poem.” The “hai” part relates the form to haikai or a loose style of writing. The “bun” part designates it as some sort of composition. Haibun does not appear in English dictionaries and, probably, as well in other non-Japanese dictionaries. In Japan it is apparently thought of as an ancient form of diary, say from the 10th-century “Tosa Diary” of Ki no Tsurayuki, which incorporated tanka into its prose to Basho’s 17th-century Narrow Road to the Interior, the masterpiece of world literature, to Shiki’s early twentieth-century diaries of his illness, although Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) adapted the form to fiction writing. Only very recently have Japanese writers, inspired by worldwide contemporary experiments with haibun, begun to practice the form anew.

Heaven

blue patches

scratched by wavering branches

shrink and expand

Erie Canal 12.28.04

Three days after Christmas, I have been cooped up in a full house for too long. I head out for a much needed solitary walk. As I reach to the Erie Canal the snow slants out of the Southeast. I turn onto the towpath where I can only hear the wind, the occasional bird, and the crunch of my boots in the snow. I find myself squinting a bit as I peer ahead. The canal is not completely frozen and there are large dark patches where the ice is thin revealing the darker water below.

Although there are foot prints of people and dogs in the snow, even a set of cross country ski trails off to the right, the path is deserted. The light is starting to dim in the late afternoon leaving enough to see but also creating the solitude that I crave. Not bound for anywhere but this long arc that skirts away from town, I walk at a slow pace. As I round the first curve the canal broadens and is banked by snowy fields that are not quite barren.

red fruit dangles

from black winter branches

four sparrows startle