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.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
RSS