Photo by Clementrossignol.

Wade-Giles or Pinyin?

Singaporean Taoists are moving to provide all their literature (canonical texts, websites, etc.) in English as well as Mandarin, and the newest priest-training college also plans to be bilingual. This is no huge surprise in an ex-British colony, but I was surprised to see the breakdown according to the 2000 census cited on the CIA Factbook (not Facebook). Mandarin is the most spoken language at 35% of the population, followed by English at 23%. Hokkien comes in 4th at 11.7% and Cantonese 5th at 5.7%. The article, from the Straits Times, gives the Taoist segment as 9% of the population, but they’ve clearly rounded the census figures up from the actual figure of 8.5%.

Singapore’s dominant religion is Buddhism, at 42.5%, although even they have moved to include English-speaking devotees with one monastery launching a magazine targeting young people, as well as what the Straits journo describes as “the Net”.

Yen Feng ‘English-friendly religion‘, Straits Times (4/10/09)

I’ve decided to keep all my posts on religion and videogames for my gaming blog, but I’ll link to them and make any further comment I think is more appropriately placed here.

I may be rather late to the party, but I’ve only just discovered “Buddha Mode” mods for gaming. Read all about it in my latest thrilling post.

Pitcure derived from:

And I can understand why. I’d totally tap that.

Cursed Mountain, due out in Australia some time this quarter but released in Europe on the 21st of August, takes place on the fictional Himalayan mountain “Chomolonzo”. Deep Silver Vienna (formally Rock Star Vienna) have set their horror story of Scottish mountaineer Eric Simmons’ search for his lost brother in the 80′s, an age before mobile phones and GPS technology, to heighten the sense of isolation and terror.

More important for our purposes here, however, are the Tibetan and Buddhist elements present in the game. Eric’s brother became lost because he interfered with a Buddhist artefact that sent him into the Bardo – a state in Tibetan Buddhism immediately after death but just before reincarnation that I’ve never fully wrapped my head around, mostly because I never read the Tibetan Book of the Dead properly – which in this game represents some sort of afterlife. This act brought down the wrath of the mountain’s goddess, and as Eric ascends the peak encounters vicious ghosts he can’t be sure aren’t just the fabrications of his oxygen-deprived brain. The main combat mechanic of the game apparently revolves around subduing enemies with a climbing pick and then performing exorcism gestures with the Wiimote and nunchuck.

I’m particularly intrigued by the developers’ understanding of Tibetan Buddhism. At one point in the game, a mountain spirit says toEric:

You think of Buddhism as a religion of peace. Did you never wonder why all our monks learn to fight?

Now, perhaps this is just one of those things I never learned about Buddhism, but as far as I know “all” of their monks DON’T learn to fight. I imagine they’re talking about the Shaolin Ch’an monks in China, but they’re pretty removed from Tibetan Buddhism. This conversation with “Developer Relations Manager” Martin Filipp sees him describe things as “Buddhist” things that are often very specifically “Tibetan”. They’re not all quotes, so it’s possible the journalist got the terms mixed up and glossed one term for the other, but a browse through the protagonist’s “diary” on the website suggests otherwise.

Scroll to the bottom of the page for a typically Internetian discussion of religion in the comments section.

Twitter have suspended an account that purported to belong to the Dalai Lama, although there has been no report as to how they discovered it wasn’t genuine. In only a few days the account had attracted tens of thousands of subscribers, making it probably Twitter’s highest-profile suspension.

I can only assume this anti-Dalai Lama will set up some sort of Micro-Blog in Exile on Jaiku.