Charles:

I enjoy your comments, but I must be a stickler on this one:  in China
today, the most important commandment is "Thou Shall Not Be Tibetan Or
Believe As Tibetans Believe".

Racism. Extermination. Genocide.  A complete eradication of a people and a
culture.  As terrible as any crime in history, such as the successful U.S.
genocide against the North American Indigenous Peoples or the attempted
genocide by the Germans of the Jewish people, to name just two extremely
evil enterprises. Science and progress have been invoked since 1954 as
excuses to eradicate the Tibetans.  To me it makes the Fa-Lun Gong
controversy seem relatively light.

Also can't help wondering how Pound's attitude toward Buddhism may have been
different had he encountered some of the more serious Tibetan Buddhist works
instead of Confucian works attacking the popular and superstitious Chinese
expression of Buddhism.  I am NOT saying that all Chinese expressions of
Buddhism were either popular or superstitious (nor that much of the Tibetan
expressions aren't popular or superstitious), but these are certainly the
forms of Buddhism that are attacked in the Cantos via the Confucians.
...incense... Buddh rot ...burnt paper.. gets mad if he doesn't get it...

Man by negation is a more serious (also Confucian) charge, but one based
upon false and superficial readings of Buddhist philosophy.  At least if Ez
had become infatuated with Buddhism instead of with Confucianism he would
have been less likely to become obsessed with economics and less likely to
go down the path of perdition so well described by Leon Surette in _Pound in
Purgatory_.

Tibetan Buddhism is certainly more "mytho-poetic" than Confucianism: art,
dance, poetry, music, theater, sculpture, philosophy, history, and so forth
are not separate disciplines, but mutually expressive.  Though the various
differences between them are obvious, the Tibetan culture is the closest
survivor in the world to the pre-Classical Greek cultures in the sense of
not being fragmented while at the same time being exceptionally literate.
(If there is another equally similar or more similar, I'd love to be
enlightened.)

I've long though that Pound missed a great opportunity to encounter a
living, unified cultural tradition when he chose confucianism over Buddhism.
The mis-translated _Tibetan Book of the Dead_ would have served him far
better than Mencius and Muss, especially since the resonance with Canto I
would have been superb.

Of course, then we wouldn't have the Pisan Cantos, the lack of which I
wouldn't REALLY wish on anybody.

Dirk

-----Original Message-----
From: charles moyer [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, January 26, 2001 1:08 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Julius Evola


Wayne,
    Thank you for that information. You write, "I wonder why you link this
'high-minded' racist (Evola) with Robert Graves?"
    It seems to me that in the sense of being traditionalists, looking
beyond and above any charges of "racism", Pound, Evola, and Graves had a
similar view of the value of ancient wisdom. Call it mytho-poetic,
Hyperborean, or Celtic- whatever-it translates somewhat  the same; that it
is something in the past worthy of examination and even perhaps of revival.
Progress, however, teaches us to formulate new "crimes against humanity" as
recently in China where now it has been decreed "Thou shalt not not believe
in science".  How's that for high-mindedness?
    I would like to see your notes on Evola. I leave it to you as to the
venue.

CDM