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.
It is often thought that government housing policy has been aimed at fostering widespread home ownership, but as University of Wyoming academic Chen Yi-ling (陳怡伶) points out in a superb analysis of house prices and public policy in the March 2020 edition of the journal Housing Policy Debate: “It would be more apt to describe the Taiwan case as a laissez-faire situation: people had no choice but to solve their housing problems themselves due to the lack of government assistance.” The issue of housing and house prices has been an important one in the current presidential and legislative election campaign.
It is the thing every mother of a teenage girl dreads. Taylor Swift is coming to your city — and you don’t have tickets. I scoured high and low for what has become a precious commodity in Singapore these days, without success: They’d all been snapped up in a buying frenzy for The Eras Tour last year. The going rate on the resale market is anywhere between S$3,000 (US$2,253) to above S$5,000. Luxury VIP packages can go up to S$50,000. You would think with six shows — in a stadium that holds 55,000 in a city of under 6 million
Wrapping bamboo leaves around a nugget of sticky rice, cooking instructor Ivy Chen tries to replicate the recipe of a Taiwanese-style dumpling — a distinct cuisine integral to the democratic island’s identity. She has spent nearly a quarter-century championing Taiwan’s cuisine and teaching recipes to tourists and sometimes locals, explaining how a dish that originated from across the strait in China has transformed into a Taiwanese staple. The idea of a distinctly Taiwanese identity is looming large in the minds of some voters as the country prepares to go to the polls on Saturday to elect a new president and choose the
Deep in the mountains of Kaohsiung’s Maolin District lie Taiwan’s only known petroglyphs, whose origins and meaning still remain unclear Centuries ago, a Bunun woman who had married into the Rukai tribe was banished for eating snake meat. For the Rukai, the snake is a sacred animal from whom they are descended and hunting or eating it is forbidden. The exiled woman agreed to wait for her husband at a rock on a remote mountain, but he never came. As she waited, she passed the time drawing figures in the rock, before finally returning to her community. This is the legendary origin of Taiwan’s only known prehistoric rock carvings: the Wanshan petroglyphs (萬山岩雕) in Kaohsiung. Archaeologists are still unclear who
RSS