A handsome but controversial young Tibetan lama has emerged on the local music scene by releasing his first CD — a collection of rap and hip-hop songs that he claims can help promote Buddhism.
Singa Rinpoche (盛噶仁波切), 30, who is barred from entering Taiwan due to his flamboyant behavior on a visit to the island last year, released the CD — Wish You Well (我要你幸福) — on Saturday through Taiwanese Forward Music company.
Since then, several TV channels have been airing the MTV spots promoting Singa's album — showing Singa recording songs in the studio, running in a forest and releasing a bird into freedom.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FORWARD MUSIC
Wearing his trademark white shirt and blue pants, Singa, 179cm tall and weighing 63kg, shows a natural talent for performing by flashing smiles and making poses, showing off his youth and confidence.
Singa signed a contract with Forward Music last April and began recording at a Beijing studio in July.
"We were surprised by the public response to this CD. It is selling extremely well. We have opened a blog for Singa Rinpoche and within a week, 100,000 people have browsed it," a Forward Music (豐華唱片) press officer said.
Most of the 12 songs on the CD were written and composed by a Taiwan musician and two were written and composed by Singa.
They are: Reincarnation, Wish You Well, Let Me Take Care of You, Fashion, It's the Light, Girl Quji Zhuoma, Starting to Realize, Leave Love to You, Today, Lama Chino.
In the songs, Singa mixes rap and hip-hop with chants of Buddhist sutras, and switches from Chinese to Tibetan and English.
The songs deal mostly with love, but he also preaches his philosophy. The song Leave Love to You has this rap line: All the pain in this world is caused by seeking happiness for himself/All the joy in this world is caused by seeking happiness for others.
Born in Qinghai Province, China, in 1970, Singa claims a rainbow appeared in the sky when he was born. At 16, a Tibetan monastery confirmed he was the reincarnation of a high lama.
Singa claimed he spent three years studying Buddhism in Nepal, Tibet and Thailand, before traveling around the world to spread Buddhism.
But when he visited Taiwan from February to April last year to promote his book, This Is Me, a living Buddha, he caused controversy because he acted more like a film star than a monk. He wore trendy clothes and received his disciples wearing a shirt and jeans, not the red cloak worn by Tibetan lamas.
Some Taiwan disciples alledged Singa had not finished Buddhist studies in India and had not been ordained, prompting the Interior Ministry to bar him from entering the country for one year.
Cheng Chen-huang (鄭振煌), a internationally recognized Buddhist scholar, believes Singa Rinpoche has violated Buddhist precepts, or moral codes.
"There are 250 precepts for a Chinese Buddhist and 253 precepts for a Tibetan Buddhist. For a Buddhist, these codes are very important and must be observed," Cheng said.
Agga Wandha, a 59-year-old Burmese monk in Taipei, agreed.
"The essence of Buddhism is to quench desires in order to achieve inner peace. Singa Rinpoche's wearing fashionable clothes and driving fancy cars shows he is feeding these desires," he said.
But Singa Rinpoche's behavior is nothing new to Tibetan Buddhism. Three hundred years ago, the sixth Dalai Lama raised eyebrows because he frequented Lhasa's red light district at night and wrote love poems.
A more recent example is Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche from the Himalayan Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, who directed two films — The Cup in 1999 and Travellers and Magicians in 2005.
Dzongsar Khyentse received world acclaim for his films and continues to travel around the world to preach Buddhism.
This is the year that the demographic crisis will begin to impact people’s lives. This will create pressures on treatment and hiring of foreigners. Regardless of whatever technological breakthroughs happen, the real value will come from digesting and productively applying existing technologies in new and creative ways. INTRODUCING BASIC SERVICES BREAKDOWNS At some point soon, we will begin to witness a breakdown in basic services. Initially, it will be limited and sporadic, but the frequency and newsworthiness of the incidents will only continue to accelerate dramatically in the coming years. Here in central Taiwan, many basic services are severely understaffed, and
Jan. 5 to Jan. 11 Of the more than 3,000km of sugar railway that once criss-crossed central and southern Taiwan, just 16.1km remain in operation today. By the time Dafydd Fell began photographing the network in earnest in 1994, it was already well past its heyday. The system had been significantly cut back, leaving behind abandoned stations, rusting rolling stock and crumbling facilities. This reduction continued during the five years of his documentation, adding urgency to his task. As passenger services had already ceased by then, Fell had to wait for the sugarcane harvest season each year, which typically ran from
It’s a good thing that 2025 is over. Yes, I fully expect we will look back on the year with nostalgia, once we have experienced this year and 2027. Traditionally at New Years much discourse is devoted to discussing what happened the previous year. Let’s have a look at what didn’t happen. Many bad things did not happen. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) did not attack Taiwan. We didn’t have a massive, destructive earthquake or drought. We didn’t have a major human pandemic. No widespread unemployment or other destructive social events. Nothing serious was done about Taiwan’s swelling birth rate catastrophe.
Words of the Year are not just interesting, they are telling. They are language and attitude barometers that measure what a country sees as important. The trending vocabulary around AI last year reveals a stark divergence in what each society notices and responds to the technological shift. For the Anglosphere it’s fatigue. For China it’s ambition. For Taiwan, it’s pragmatic vigilance. In Taiwan’s annual “representative character” vote, “recall” (罷) took the top spot with over 15,000 votes, followed closely by “scam” (詐). While “recall” speaks to the island’s partisan deadlock — a year defined by legislative recall campaigns and a public exhausted
RSS