quote (from me)
all those illustrations in the Temple of Dendera are a cosmology of some sort
from yesterday's post
unquote
I've never occasioned to write the word 'cosmology' before...best, I thought, to look it up and get a handle on what it is!...wiki's cosmology take lists all the scientific notions of what the universe is down through the ages...I glanced through those, like at midnight last night!, and refined the search, insomuch as I was going on about Ancient Egyptian cosmology...searched: religious cosmology...
It may be that the universe is finite, or infinite, but one thing seems certain, there are no boundaries to our cosmological imagination!
The Jains have it that animals are in equal standing with human beings...
quote
Literally translated, Ahimsa means to be without harm; to be utterly harmless, not only to oneself and others, but to all forms of life, from the largest mammals to the smallest bacteria.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/jainism/living/ahimsa_1.shtml
unquote
The movie Seven Year's in Tibet has the scene where some Jain monks are traveling a Tibetan mountain path very slowly, as they have to sweep the ground in front of them so as to avoid stepping on critters.
Jain cosmology seems to be derived through logic...if a is like b, and b is like c, then a and c are alike too...we live and breath and are aware, animals live and breath, animals must be aware too...then there's the big jump...we have souls and are on a spiritual path, animals must be too....glancing through their cosmology, there looks to be a lot of reasoning like this...one I don't get is this...Jains don't believe in God, but do believe we all have souls, animals and plants and such as well!...seems their logic would include the universe having a soul too...but it's a tangle, and likely troubled by western interpretation of eastern imagination!
In the movie there is the 'worm scene' ...the hero wants to build a movie theater for the young Dali Lama, and the Dali Lama insists that all the worms in the ground of the building site be removed for the worms' safety...
don't know but something like this goes on today in Israel when ever a bulldozer unearths an archaeological treasure!
trying to find that worm scene in the movie, I happened on another story about worms...
quote
The thing Silang is searching for, on hands and knees, 15,000 feet above sea level on the Tibetan plateau, is extraordinarily strange. The part that’s above ground is a tiny, capless fungus—just a brown stalk, thin as a matchstick, poking an inch or two out of the muddy soil.
Tibet's Golden Worm
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/08/tibetan-mushroom/finkel-text
The little worms have what is thought to be curative properties, and are selling for a high price, more than their weight in gold. Science hasn't determined yet if they are really helpful...but the worms have captured the imagination of the Chinese, along with a lot of other creatures...Chinese have become a menace to species on the edge of extinction, and are ruthless in their pursuit of unproven medicinal properties in all kinds of animal parts...
The rich become sots, and indulge in all manner of selfishness...
One review of Seven Years in Tibet has a telling insight...and I can't find it again to quote it, but it was like this...movie stories like this one often show another culture through western eyes, specifically the eyes of a white westerner...Dancing With Wolves, an example...rather than through the eyes of the foreigners....oh...remembering the Dancing comparison I fashioned a search: Dancing With Wolves Seven Years in Tibet...and first hit is the review!
quote
If you accept Hollywood's version of things, history -- particularly the uglier parts of history -- is what happens while white people are watching. It's not terribly surprising, since studios generally balk at anything remotely depressing; fears can be allayed if an established Anglo actor anchors such projects. So we end up with revolution in South America through the eyes of James Woods in SALVADOR, the plight of Native Americans as seen by Kevin Costner in DANCES WITH WOLVES, upheaval in Burma as it affects Patricia Arquette in BEYOND RANGOON...not one of them a terrible film, but each one compromised by the sense that we couldn't be trusted to identify with a dark face.
http://www.imdb.com/reviews/92/9292.html
That movie I just saw, or partly saw!, No Escape, is like that too...and a terrible film!
And National Geographic is like that too!...it's a looking on at the world through Western eyes...through Western imagination...
and a subscription is only twelve bucks...I need to re-new...
Oh...I have an imagination...then animals must too!
DavidDavid
No comments:
Post a Comment