The government of China is in possession of a particular golden urn. This urn, it is alleged, is essential to choosing the tulku, or rebirth, of a Dalai Lama. You may be hearing a lot about the urn within the next few years. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, is 87 years old. With all sincere wishes for his good health and long life, it must be acknowledged that he doesn’t have a lot of years left. And... Read more
China’s claim to Tibet as a territory of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is an ongoing controversy. According to China, the invasion of Tibet by PRC troops in 1950 was not an invasion but a liberation. China and Tibet have been one nation since the 13th century, according to China. As you might have heard, Tibetans tend to see things differently. A large part of China’s claim to Tibet involves the lineage of Dalai Lamas. The last post, on... Read more
The Sixth Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso (1683–1706) didn’t want the job. He was enthroned as the Dalai Lama at age 16, but he wanted only to be a teenager. He renounced monastic vows and preferred to spend evenings in taverns with his friends to studying Buddhist philosophy. Today he is sometimes called the Playboy Dalai Lama. But the Sixth Dalai Lama’s life story is more of a tragedy than a joke. The existence of the Sixth Dalai Lama was a... Read more
The Fifth Dalai Lama, His Holiness Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso (1617–1682), was the first Dalai Lama to become the highest spiritual and political leader of Tibet. He is remembered by Tibetans as the Great Fifth. The boy who would be the Fifth Dalai Lama was born into a wealthy and aristocratic family in central Tibet. He also was born into a time of instability. Tibet had only recently been reunited after a period of fracturing, and the new King had ordered... Read more
In the years before the U.S. Civil War, three major Christian denominations split over slavery. These were the Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist. In all three denominations disagreements over the morality of slavery began in the 1830s, and in the 1840s and 1850s factions of all three denominations left to form separate groups. However, the circumstances that caused the splits were unique to each denomination. Some background: The Atlantic slave trade that took people from Africa to be enslaved in the... Read more
Misunderstanding abounds about the role of Christianity and the abolitionist movement, the 19th century movement to abolish slavery, in the U.S. People who don’t care for religion do love to mention that many Christian ministers of the U.S. antebellum South supported slavery. And that is true. However, they don’t seem to know that more U.S. Christian ministers opposed slavery. Indeed, northern evangelical and other Christian clergy were organizers and leaders of the abolitionist movement. The organized abolitionist movement in the... Read more
Ikkō-ikki was a name given to peasants’ revolts in 15th and 16th century Japan. Most of the organizers and leaders of the revolt were Buddhist priests of the Jodo Shinshu school. The fighters, mostly farmers, merchants, and artisans, were revolting against the dominance of the samurai. For a time the revolts succeeded. Some parts of Japan in effect became independent states governed by councils of commoners, free of shogun and emperor. The ikkō-ikki revolts would eventually be brutally suppressed by the... Read more
The short list of Popes Who Resigned has only three names. These are the late Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI who resigned in 2013; Pope Gregory XII, who resigned in 1415; and Pope Celestine V, also known as Saint Peter Celestine or Saint Peter Morrone, who resigned in 1294. And if we compiled a list of popes whose resignations were entirely voluntary, there would be only two names, Benedict’s and Celestine’s. The story of Pope Celestine V is a poignant one... Read more
Pope Joan was a woman disguised as a man who allegedly became Pope John VIII in the year 854. Let me be clear right now that this never happened. Yet the story of Pope Joan, the woman pope, was so widely believed that for a time it was written into official church history. According to author Eamon Duffy (Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, Yale University Press, 2015), the story of Pope Joan first appeared in a Dominican... Read more
Newspaper obituaries of the late Pope Emertus Benedict XVI (1927-2022) mention that he was the first pope in nearly 600 years to resign from the papacy. The last pope to resign was Pope Gregory XII, in 1415. And since papal resignations hardly ever happen, I wanted to know why Pope Gregory XII resigned. So I looked it up, and it’s a wild story. I understand that when a pope voluntarily resigns from his office, the proper term for this act... Read more
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