Post Vajrayana in Kampuchea

When, as a young person, a most excellent and auspicious opportunity to take monastic vows arose, I balked. Even though it was under the auspices of the then senior Sakya scholar-monk, the Encyclopedic Deshung Rinpoche, Kunga Tenpay Nyima, and His Holiness the present Sakya Gongma Trichen, one of the greatest Sakya Trizins of a millennium long lineage. This too, even after it had rightly been said by His Holiness’s sister, Jetsunma, that I had ‘monk’s mind.’  In truth, I mostly declined because I thought I knew myself, at twenty-seven, well enough to say, ‘Who are you kidding? You could never keep all those vows. Especially celibacy.’ I was certainly not alone in thinking this. At that time, the mid-to-late 70’s, during the Sakya’s germinal development in North America, many New York Dharma students embraced the Nyingma school precisely because their vowed lamas could take mates or consorts, known as khandros. Now I’m more inclined to think taking on monastic discipline, even with ...

  12/11   Is it time to switch over? Time to let the drudge work be done completely for us? If labor is the fulfillment of mankind, its path true peace and prosperity, why should we then let it be done by someone or some ‘thing’ else? Is that something else AI? More simply put, is it really, as Sundar Pachai of Google suggests, our profoundest—thereby most ‘rewarding’— technology?  Humans desire to know and express all information. It does as they say want to be free. One reason is because information is power. Omniscience equals omnipotents. Is this the wheelhouse of AI, the so-called ‘artificial’ intelligence, capable of processing pages and pages of information, at lightening speeds, for whatever one’s heart desires? On a more collective level, as in the wealth and power of nations, it trains other models of itself, now internationally, as Google goes to Britain planning to boost their status to the number three (behind America and China or China and America) super com...