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Critics on the Pursuit of Happiness

Posted on by Posted in Culture, Economics, Education, Politics, Researches, Social

There are critics on the theory of Maslow. Many scholars affirmed that “the pursuit of happiness” is not hierarchical at all. Among them, Manfred Max-Neef said satisfactoriness is the state of happiness (read this summary).

I am thinking about the adaptation of Bhutanese government to convert GDP to GDH. As the world is hugely influenced by materialism, the Buddhist country like Bhutan embarked on a different approach to answer a question that “Happiness of human beings really constructs on material or psychological satisfaction?”. For Max-Neef, he listed many domains and sub-domains of human’s need and his conclusion to satisfactoriness as the state of happiness for human beings arguably coincides with the teaching of Lord Buddha.
 
Dr. Richard Davidson who is the American neuroscientist believes that the spot of happiness of human beings is on the brain. He used lab to experiment happiness. There are exact spot of brain movement to show happiness. But in general, common people show their happiness spot unstable. After spending many years for his research, finally he met with Somdech Dalai Lama and got advice on taking monks to the lab to experiment happiness. 
 
Two monks who have deeply pursued into Dhamma stream from their Vipassana show their brain absolutely stable. Dr. Richard called this spot “Nibbana”.
 
So what is the true commodity of happiness? GDP or GDH? However, I am considering “four necessities” is the basic need for all human beings. Buddha said “Subbe Satta Ahaarakitikaa” or means that “All Beings Survived by Food”.
 
With this statement, common people understand that food means rice or other edible substances to swallow through mouth. But for Buddha, at least there are four types of food. Among those foods, the food of freedom is very substantial. 
 
Western philosophers adopted “freedom” as the factor of development since the end of crusade era. Allow people to act and speak freely is the diversification of human capital and social capital. As a teacher, if you don’t allow your student to approach their own thought and finding, how can the knowledge being obtained? As the parents, if they cope strictly their children, those children might not be able to develop their own potential at the highest. As a country leader, do you want to see your citizens being silent in order to develop a country?
 
For Western countries, the freedom of press, the freedom of speech, and the freedom of participation etc. are the core value of “development states”. 
 
To end the above point, “the pursuit of happiness” might be not motioned far from the “Vimutti” or “Freedom” Buddha addressed.
 

CAMBODIA: New Year 2013: Opportunities for another 365 days to make a difference

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Buddha says, “Each morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.” Suu Kyi told Burmese in their struggle for rights and justice, “Don’t just sit there. Do something!”

Buddha teaches mankind to do all good, avoid all evil, and purify the mind. He provides mankind with an eight-fold path to follow. Gandhi exclaimed, “Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well,” as he applied Buddha’s teaching to himself: “I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal . . . I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.”

Whereas Buddha preaches, “Pay no attention to the faults of others . . . Consider only what by oneself is done or left undone,” and, “It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one’s own faults . . . one conceals one’s own faults as a cunning gambler conceals his dice”, Gandhi explains: “I look only to the good qualities of men. Not being faultless myself, I won’t presume to probe into the faults of others.”

FOR PUBLICATION
AHRC-ETC-001-2013
January 03, 2013

An article by Dr. Gaffar Peang-Meth published by the Asian Human Rights Commission

CAMBODIA: New Year 2013: Opportunities for another 365 days to make a difference

Happy New Year 2013!
The New Year brings each of us a new beginning. What has happened in the past year is behind us; neither the good nor the bad can be erased. Instead, we confront 365 days of opportunity to demonstrate that we have learned from the successes and challenges of the year — of the years — through which we have come.

The past is a guide to the present, the present a springboard toward the future. We learn from the past to improve today. Men and women are capable of change. Those who study human behavior suggest ways to accelerate change in how we manage our day to day interactions and long term decision making.

Since humans are creatures of habit, we are likely to think and behave the same way as we have done in the past. We reproduce the old because it takes no effort to repeat what we have always done. Much of our behavior is on autopilot. Remember Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Some Cambodian readers told me that they believe it to be a “safe bet” that their compatriots’ thinking and behavior in the next 365 days are likely to be the same as last year’s. A Khmer septuagenarian, a former instructor at the Khmer Military Academy, lamented that this very way of thinking is outmoded and unchanged from the patterns of behavior of earlier generations of Cambodians. It was he who sent me the poem, O Khmer oeuy Khmer, chous ach knong srae, which was the focus of my article in February 2012. The poem is about an ignoramus who does private business in the rice field and cleans himself with an ivy leaf. . . His ignorance is one aspect of the poem. The other aspect is Einstein’s definition of insanity. The septuagenarian wrote, it is “same old, same old for generations.” I am optimistic, however, that each of us has the capacity to change how we analyze and respond to people and events around us.

New Year, “new soul”? 

As Cambodians write to me, it is not unusual for them to blame the country’s political status quo on the absence of a Khmer Mahatma Gandhi or Aung San Suu Kyi. Were there such a person, they say, everything would be different. Does the alleged absence of such a leader justify the lack of effective progress in the Khmer struggle against Cambodia’s “kleptocracy”? It’s worth noting that both Gandhi and Suu Kyi embrace the philosophy and teaching of Gautama Buddha, the same principles in which nearly all Cambodians profess to believe, and that permeate Khmer society.
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Monarchic manipulation in Cambodia

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Monarchic manipulation in Cambodia
By Geoff Gunn
Source: Asia Times
The survival of the monarchy in Cambodia is little short of remarkable in the light of that country’s modern history. French manipulation of the monarchy and attempts to buttress religion and culture alongside the rise of nationalist youth and Buddhist radicalism was an important precursor to postwar events.

No less momentous for modern Cambodian history was the Vichy French installation of Norodom Sihanouk as king and the elevation under Japan of the putative republican Son Ngoc Thanh. Facing down an armed Issarak-Viet Minh challenge also joined by a dissident prince, it is no less significant that the young King Sihanouk successfully trumped French ambitions by mounting his own “royal crusade” for independence even ahead of the Geneva Settlement of 1954.

Undoubtedly the passing of Norodom Sihanouk on October 15, 2012, at the age of 89 after six decades of close involvement in Cambodian politics has served to refocus attention upon the status of the monarchy in that country, facts not diminished by the actual succession in October 2004 to his son Norodom Sihamoni (b. 1953).


A phoenix float carries the casket of Sihanouk

Though much exoticized and othered as a peaceful realm under the French protectorate, at least alongside the challenges imposed by Vietnamese nationalists, dissent always simmered beneath the surface calm in Cambodia, whether from the overburdened-over taxed peasantry, from the major immigrant communities, from religious radicals within and without the Buddhist hierarchies, or even from scheming royal princes.

Given French manipulations of religion, tradition and even the royal line, a complex political picture emerges, even prior to the Japanese occupation. Japan was even more successful in Cambodia than in the other Indochina states in installing an anti-French republican demagogue, an enigmatic figure whose name recurs in Cambodian history down until the US-backed military coup in Phnom Penh of March 1970.

Thanks to Anglo-French intervention, and Sihanouk’s personality, the post-war outcome in Cambodia was a “royal road to independence” although even that pathway was severely challenged by the Viet Minh and their sometime Issarak (Free Khmer) allies. Yet the royal ascendancy around the Vichy French-anointed monarch, Sihanouk, would also come back to haunt Cambodia, not only in striking a neutral course in the maelstrom of the American war, but also in lending his name to the China-backed anti-Vietnamese communist movement that triumphed in Phnom Penh in 1975.

As this article develops, below the politics of culture or the tendency of the French to buttress neo-traditionalist trends wherever they saw them, emerges a byzantine crossover of royal dynasties, powerful families and cliques that, in many ways, continued to define Cambodian politics through the modern period. It is also true, as Roger Kershaw (2000; 6; 17; 19-20) unveils in a comparative study on the “fortunes” of monarchy in Southeast Asia, that analysis of surviving monarchies (as with Thailand and Brunei alongside Cambodia), should at least account for the “synthetic” alongside the “authentic traditional values” (not excepting even Britain from this analysis).

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Great Khmer Empire : King Jayavarman 7

Posted on by Posted in Culture, Education, Researches

Watching this movie clip remind me of a project released by the news on “shooting a movie by Hollywood team about the Great Khmer Empire Leader of King Jayavarman VII”.

Among other documentaries on Ancient Khmer and the Great Civilization of Angkor Wat, this movie/documentary is closest to the reality happened during the Angkorian Era especially the reign of King Jayavarman VII. The exposing on the records of base-relief, inscription, stone arts and description of a Mongolian ambassador officially visited the Kingdom including the feature of actual images during that period, make this movie clip extra-ordinary…All Khmers must watch this one.

 

Watch the movie clip below: