Siddhartha is the story of a young Brahmin and his search for a meaningful way of life. His journey takes him through periods of harsh asceticism, sensual pleasures, material wealth, self-revulsion and eventually to the oneness and harmony that he had been seeking. The story is based on the best-selling novel by German Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse.
Directed by Conrad Rooks.
Based on the 1922 novel by Hermann Hesse.
Photographed in luminous Eastmancolor by Sven Nykvist.
Colour. 82 minutes.
Filmed on location in India, both in Bharatpur, Rajastahn and in the holy city of Rishikesh, Uttar Pradesh.
Ladakh, or 'Little Tibet', is a wildly beautiful desert land high in the Western Himalayas. It is a place of few resources and an extreme climate. Yet for more than a thousand years, it has been home to a thriving culture. Traditions of frugality and cooperation, with an intimitate and location-specific knowledge of the environment, enabled the Ladakhis not only to survive but to prosper. Then came 'development'. Now in Leh, the capital, one finds pollution and divisiveness, inflation and unemployment, intolerance and greed. Centuries of ecological balance and social harmony are under threat of modernization.
Ancient Futures is much more than a film about Ladakh. The breakdown of Ladakh's culture and environment forces us to re-examine what we really mean by 'progress' - not only in the 'developing' parts of the world, but in the industrialized world as well. The story of Ladakh teaches us about the root causes of environmental, social and psychological problems, and provides valuable guidelines for our own future.
I travelled in Ladakh in 1996 between September and November, spending time in Leh, the Nubrah Valley, Shey, Thiksey and Hemis monastries and on the road back to Manali, which I hitchhiked along for three days, travelling 500 kms. I worked for Helen Norberg-Hodge's Ladakh Ecological Development Group (LEDeG) while I was in Leh, selling water in the street. It was a life changing experience.
I spent three nights in Diskit Gompa, built by Changzem Tserab Zangpo, a disciple of Tsong-kha-pa, the Diskit Gompa dates back to the 14th century. In this recording there are around 70 monks chanting in the main hall of the monastery. Bowls of butter tea and sampa can be heard occasionally sliding along the benches as some monks take a break and others step forward to take their place. The chanting went late into the night from very early in the morning for three days.
Presentation of the Kathmandu Valley, in Nepal, and of the restoration work carried out by UNESCO with the Nepalese government to preserve the Buddhist and Hindu temples of this sacred valley where faith plays an important role. Explanation of the architectural achievements and the artistic and artisanal work on images of the various sites with a commentary on the images of Bakthapur, Patan and the temple of Nyatapola.
The visit continues with comments on images of Bodnath, the Hindu temple of Pashupatinath populated by monkeys, the sacred rituals of the people in the Bagmati River, the Hanuman Dhoka temple and the immense work of the craftsmen who contribute to its restoration to using ancient techniques.
HISTORY of INDIA LEH LADAKH full length new edit, better colours, photos, longer documentary 1979. This is Ed van der Kooy's video diary made with an 8 mm camera in 1979. Ed made his first trip to Ladakh and filmed and photographed a beautiful country. He hopes you like it. The music is added later but the movie was shot just after the Indian government opened the road to the capital Leh, Ladakh in 1978. The 1979 8mm film The Last Shangri La by Ed van der Kooy is a 1950s Old Nepal full documentary.
Promiscuous drunk who liked guns, and incarnated Bodhisattva.....
A provocative account of Trungpa’s global odyssey, Crazy Wisdom offers a perceptive, if one-sided, perspective on Trungpa’s impact on American spirituality and the arts. Well before American Buddhists and New Age acolytes began flocking to the feet of Tibet’s Dalai Lama, hippies and spiritual seekers were following in the footsteps of Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan lama who took up residence in the U.S. during the 1970s.
Born in Tibet in 1939, Trungpa was identified as a reincarnate lama (“rinpoche”) before he was two years old and completed ecclesiastical studies within the Kagyu branch of Tibetan Buddhism before escaping his homeland in 1959 and resettling in India following China’s invasion of Tibet. A move to London to study at Oxford University eventually led him to Scotland to cofound the first Tibetan Buddhist center in the West and the decision to give up his monastic robes to become a lay teacher and marry Diana Pybus, a 16-year-old follower.
In 1970, Trungpa and Pybus moved to the U.S., where they settled rather incongruously in Vermont, establishing a rural meditation center. Trungpa began teaching a growing following of lay meditation practitioners, many of them counter-culture refugees seeking spiritual inspiration, and expanding his interest in the arts. Wherever he traveled around North America, however — eventually settling for a time in Boulder, Colo., where he founded the renowned Naropa University — Trungpa provoked controversy and intense curiosity, as well as devotion.
He freely slept with other women besides Pybus — many of them his students — and smoked and drank openly. Trungpa’s spiritual methods were often as divisive as his lifestyle, prompting followers to identify him as an embodiment of “crazy wisdom,” a traditional teaching style involving unconventional ideas and practices that shock students into new realizations of Buddhist principles.
Whether a lifestyle or a religious choice, Trungpa’s excesses led to his death in 1987 from cirrhosis of the liver at age 48, after he had established a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, a network of Shambala meditation centers and published dozens of English-language books on Buddhism.
Jetsun Milarepa (Tibetan: རྗེ་བཙུན་མི་ལ་རས་པ, Wylie: rje btsun mi la ras pa, 1028/40–1111/23) was a Tibetan enlightened Yogi, who was famously known as a murderer when he was a young man, before turning to Buddhism and becoming a highly accomplished Buddhist disciple. He is generally considered one of Tibet's most famous yogis and spiritual poets, whose teachings are known among several schools of Tibetan Buddhism. He was a student of Marpa Lotsawa, and a major figure in the history of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. He is also famous for the feat of climbing Mount Kailash.
The isolated region of Ladakh in northern India has changed rapidly in the past two decades due to sudden and shocking contact with the outside world. Tourists love to frequent the unique Himalayan region wedged between Tibet and Kashmir, but their presence is not without consequences.
This is an extraordinary documentary film from the year 1966, portraying the lives of various people in many Tibetan communities in exile. The documentary touches upon every single aspect of traditional Tibetan life and culture, including Music, Medicine, Food, Art, Architecture, Religion, Yoga, Meditation and more. The film is by acclaimed French director Arnaud Desjardins. Here it is dubbed into English for the narration, with original sound for the voices of the subjects and music.
Here is an episode from the 1960 season of Alan Watts' KQED television series, Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life, entitled "Mahayana Buddhism".
The seminar or teaching as it is really, is very good - clear, concise and using diagrams/art as examples with terms explained and parallels drawn from science and philosophy. His references to physiology are very informative, and his explanations regarding patterns and memory are very clarifying. "Feedback is the system whereby any system of energy is able to record its own action, make plans for the future, and thereby correct itself". - Alan Watts
A native of England, Alan Watts attended the King's School near Canterbury Cathedral, and at the age of fourteen he became fascinated with the philosophies of the Far East. By sixteen he regularly attended the Buddhist Lodge in London, where he met Zen scholars Christmas Humphries and D. T. Suzuki. As a speaker and contributor to the Lodge's journal, The Middle Way, he wrote a series of philosophical commentaries and published his first book on Eastern thought, The Spirit of Zen, at age twenty-one.
In the late thirties he moved to New York, and a few years later he became an Episcopalian priest. In 1942 he moved to Illinois and spent the wartime years as chaplain at Northwestern University.
Then, in 1950, he left the Church, and his life took a turn away from organized religion back toward Eastern ways and expanding horizons. After meeting author and mythologist Joseph Campbell and composer John Cage in New York he headed to California and began teaching at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. There his popular lectures spilled over into coffeehouse talks and appearances with the well-known beat writers Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. In late 1953 he began what would become the longest running series of Sunday morning public radio talks, which continue to this day with programs from the Alan Watts tape archives. In 1957 he published the bestselling The Way of Zen, beginning a prolific ten-year period in which he wrote Nature, Man and Woman; Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen; This Is It; Psychotherapy East and West; The Two Hands of God; The Joyous Cosmology; and The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are.
By 1960 Watts's radio series Way Beyond the West on Berkeley's KPFA had an avid following on the West Coast, and NET television began national broadcasts of the series Eastern Wisdom in Modern Life. The first season, recorded in the studios of KQED, a San Francisco television station, focused on the relevance of Buddhism, and the second, on Zen and the arts.
In the monasteries and villages of the Ladakh region of India, Buddhist lamas chant sacred texts representing the spirit, philosophy and teachings of the Buddha. The monks wear ritual clothing and use hand gestures and various musical instruments while praying for the spiritual and moral well-being of the people, for purification and peace of mind, to appease the wrath of evil spirits or to invoke the blessing of various Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, deities and Rimpoches. Acolytes learn under the rigorous supervision of senior monks.
A BBC documentary film produced in conjunction with the British Film Institute. The 90-minute film was broadcast on BBC Two in November 2006. The film is presented by Dan Cruickshank and features footage shot in Tibet prior to the 1950s with commentary from Tenzin Gyatso, the present 14th Dalai Lama, and other people featured. This is one of a number of BFI television series featuring footage from the BFI National Archive and produced in partnership with the BBC.
"Our understanding (of the meaning of Being) is an understanding that we share understanding between us and, at the same time, because we share understanding between us: between us all, simultaneously — all the dead and the living, and all beings." JEAN-LUC NANCY, BEING SINGULAR PLURAL (2000) p99
The film is unusual in that it is not a ethnological report by an outsider as is usually the case, but the story of one man’s entry into religious experience.
The film was made as part of his seven part series The Light at the Edge of the World, which was about remote communities around the world.
The film is shot mainly in Nepal, and follows Davis’ journey to Thubten Choling to meet Trulshik Rinpoche, who was one of the main teachers of the Dalai Lama.
He also meets up with Matthieu Ricard, who comes apparently to help with the translations, and ends up as one of Davis’ best guides to the tradition.
In order to prove self-nature to be inherently real we rely on sensual experience. This equation is not logical. In this video from 1989 Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo takes us on a journey into our assumptions of our nature and contrasts them with enlightened mind and supreme generosity. Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo is an enthroned tulku within the Palyul lineage of the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. In the late 1980s, she gained international attention as the first Western woman to be named a reincarnate lama.
The Buddha teaches that there is a nature that is the true nature that cannot be understood in terms of understanding 'something'. This nature is not contained within a conceptual, and therefore aberrant, framework. This nature as a state of awareness is not 'from something to something' it does not posit an object outside experience. It is an awareness that is free from ideation. There is not a specific subject and object within this state of awareness. It is not intellectual, nor is it emotional. There is no separation from it within it. Every thought we have about what supreme generosity should be about is based on our sole desire to prove self-nature. It is understood in such a way to cause us to believe generosity as a set of rules (like a moral code) that one has to follow in order to 'be generous'. Utilizing supreme generosity in that way makes for a lesser accomplishment. It is too superficial.
Part 1: A Way Of Life
Death is real, it comes without warning and it cannot be escaped. An ancient source of strength and guidance, The Tibetan Book of the Dead remains an essential teaching in the Buddhist cultures of the Himalayas. Narrated by Leonard Cohen, this enlightening two-part series explores the sacred text and boldly visualizes the afterlife according to its profound wisdom.
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Part 2: The Great Liberation
According to Buddhist scholar and translator Robert Thurman (father of Uma), The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Bardo Thodol, “organizes the experiences of the between—(Tibetan, bar-do) usually referring to the state between death and rebirth.” While The Book of the Dead has, of course, a long and illustrious history in Tibetan Buddhist life, it also has its place in the history of the West, particularly among 20th century intellectuals and artists. In the 1950s, for example, there was talk among Igor Stravinsky, Martha Graham, and Aldous Huxley to turn the Bardo into a ballet with a Greek chorus. Huxley, who famously spent his final hours on an acid trip, asked that a passage from the book be read to him as he lay dying: “Hey! Noble one, you named Aldous Huxley! Now the time has come for you to seek the way….”
In another, less trippy, example of Eastern mysticism meets Western artist, the video above (continued below) features poet and troubadour Leonard Cohen narrating a two-part documentary series from 1994 that explores the ancient Tibetan teachings on death and dying. As Cohen tells it above, in Tibetan tradition, the time spent in the between supposedly lasts 49 days after a person’s death. During that time, a Buddhist yogi reads the Bardo each day, while the consciousness of the dead person, so it is believed, hovers between one life and another, and can hear the instructions read to him or her. The film gives us an intimate look at this ceremony, performed after the death of a villager—with its intricate rituals and ancient, unbound, hand-printed text of the book—and touches on the tricky political issues of Buddhist practice in largely Chinese-controlled Tibet. In this first installment above, The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Way of Life, the Dalai Lama weighs in with his own views on life and death (at 33:22). Before his appearance, the film provides some brief context of his supposed incarnation from the 13th Dalai Lama and his rise to governance, then exile.
The second installment of the series, The Great Liberation (also above), follows an old Buddhist lama and a thirteen-year-old novice monk as they guide another deceased person with the text of the Bardo. The National Film Board of Canada, who produced the series (you can purchase the DVD on their website), did well in their choice of Cohen as narrator. Not only is his deep, soothing voice the kind of thing you might want to hear reading to you as you slipped into the between realms (or just slipped off to sleep), but his own journey has brought him to an abiding appreciation for Buddhism. Although Cohen has always identified strongly with Judaism—incorporating Jewish themes and texts into his songs and poetry—he found refuge in Zen Buddhism late in life. Two years after this film, he was ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk at age 62, at the Mount Baldy Zen Center east of Los Angeles (where Ram Dass, Oliver Stone, and Richard Gere also practiced). Cohen’s “Dharma name”? Jikan, or “Silent One.”
