I live in a town where there is only one TV station. Thanks to some creative marketing it didn't have technical difficulties during a program that defied the local edict that there is only one "Tibetan culture" having long been a Norbu town. So a show about the Mustang region of Nepal might have slipped past without too much notice except for this blog and specific references in the piece to a man who left a noble family to travel the world among the common people who started Bonpo across all of central and eastern Asia who was an exact contemporary of Moses and another reference to events coinciding with the rampage and reign of Emperor Qin.
I told Dad and Mom that I thought I might be Bon or something like that. But I pronounced it like bonbon and not like bun so Dad immediately impressed upon me that I am definitely chen and made sure that I understood him regarding that, and while I was looking surprised about what he had just told me having grown up in a pretty bon circumstance, Mom was explaining to him that I probably meant Bun and he said something along the lines of duh but that it was a more pressing matter that I thought I was bon because I could end up in some real trouble regarding that and besides that I was already up to golums and levitation and could stand to slow down a bit to work on my emotional issues.
Now as for the Bun/Nyingma thing apparently National Geographic was warned not to mention that the "Bun Lamas" were also known as "Nyingma lamas" except I've never heard one call themselves a lama and not to bring up anything mentioning the reformation or any of the conflicts between the groups and the different ways of seeing government and stuff like that, and I suppose it was convenient they were politically in Nepal for this documentary.
Apparently the people they were interacting with asked why they were using such terms and it was explained to them and they in typical relative truth style said it was well enough because it meant that they could still do all the things people of that culture were known for magically speaking while the Dali Lama's crew cant do any of that. Well, actually sometimes when I see them on TV one of them will speak to me too, but not in the friendly conversational community way but in a I will disavow this conversation later kind of way and the conversation is just to tell me to go away. I cant imagine what life would be like for a real monastic kind of person without recourse to so much as telepathy.
My mom is also a Kenpo, which I'm pretty sure means mom, so I'm assuming the people around her also wearing red were her kept children and that she also has a husband. I was drawing parallels in behavior because I don't see other kids' moms too often. They said if the same people keep coming back year after year they will have to start pretending to age, but really they would probably leave and come out here into the application. I may have missed some messages because the locals got a pre-warning and before the stove caught fire they were whispering mean things at me (they keep people in their periphery to do things like that, which they officially don't condone and make all the contracts in the vaguest terms).
So going back to applying things, if you still have a place to hole up in might as well use it, but it wont last forever. Thats how the Jews split in the first place, some desired to apply what they knew and others wanted to give up most of that and avoid anything challenging and we are the people who wanted to apply what we know in real situations, who then got chased up into the hidey holes of the earth for doing it. Then got sought after whenever anyone had a neighbor dispute. So people would spread rumors of our continued existence that would bend and twist and people wouldn't know us to look at us for all the red hair and fabric in the world, and sometimes even red eyes of various forms.
This post twists a little but there are plenty of good segways in my other posts. Relative truth is an important concept when dealing with the people up in the mountains who wear red a lot. People from different places get confused about what names apply to which specific people and so we ourselves use names that are false in one sense but who you really mean in another. It happens so much we don't get nearly as upset about these things as other people do when you get their names wrong, but we also have a close relationship with the yetis who don't use names at all but still manage to communicate information concerning areas and relative individuals. The whole idea of identity and word meaning gets a lot of attention here which is why when free to do so people will go on long explanations of history and wars and cultural interaction and how one group generates offshoots and when those offshoots really become other people. And most of the time this all has to take place in an environment where a lot of the truth we know upsets people, sometimes to the point of homicide state sponsored or otherwise. So back to Bunpo, which during the time of emperor Qin existed from central Asia to Korea, which is now considered a "Tibetan religion" when I say Tibet like I have something to do with it, I mean the remnants of that experience in all the more transitory forms, and when I say Red Jews I include Japan which stayed in place and had another experience without entirely becoming something else and apparently has the part of our joined experience that will lead the take over of the world, and anyone saying "global Tibet" isn't understanding me at all.
Now, as the natives seem to be a little more restless than normal tonight and there is only one TV station in my town, which as people gradually start to realize how little Norbu now owns in comparison to Pema will be changing to a completely different place, though it will take a while.
