Word: priestcraft
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...that includes religious visualizations, philosophical debate, ritual, yoga and the energies of tantric sex. Buddhism typically took on some of the color of local faiths, but Vajrayana's incorporation of Tibet's gods and demons was especially dramatic, resulting in what Fields describes as "a baroque exuberance [of] priestcraft, rituals, mantras, magic, monasteries, mystics and hermits." Another singularity was the succession process for a ranking monk: upon his death, associates used dreams and portents to locate the child deemed his next incarnation, whom they then groomed to "resume" his "old" duties. The search took on political ramifications in Tibet, where...
...fortunately, we've seldom had to go that long. Ten years after the Revolution, there was Shay's Rebellion, in which poor farmers challenged the new Republic's monied elite. In the 1820s and '30s, there was the Workingmen's Movement, pitted against the evils of "kingcraft, priestcraft and lawyercraft." That fed into the abolition movement, which in turn helped launch the women's suffrage movement in 1848. Near the turn of the century, there was the middle-class Progressive Movement for civic reform and a near insurrection by the new industrial working class. In our own time...
WHAT IS New Orleans jazz, anyway? What made it different? What made it great? Who were these old men? What priestcraft and sorcery had it worked on me and my counterparts overseas...
...story, "Zen, with a Difference" [Oct. 18], regarding the ritualistic activity at the Tassajara Monastery in California, makes any knowledgeable Zennist smile, since Zen has no form, no ritual, no church, no creed, no "Bible," no authority or priestcraft administering it and is devoid of images and the adoration of them. It has as its main objective the concentration of the mind-without lotus positions, kneeling, closeting, bending, stooping or praying. This results in the person's becoming more aware of life, all life, and the process by which it flows without beginning...
...office of America is to liberate," said Emerson, "to abolish kingcraft, priestcraft, caste, monopoly, to pull down the gallows, to burn up the bloody statute-book, to take in the immigrant, to open the doors of the sea and the fields of the earth." No nation has ever undertaken a similar task, and it is hardly surprising that the American path has often been strewn with monumental confusions as well as good intentions. Wilsonian idealism did not make the world safe for democracy in World War I; it wound up driving disillusioned Americans into an isolationism that probably helped pave...