Talk:Bidia Dandaron

Page Revision

Hello!

It's good to see that there's a page being built up for Bidia Dandarovich- hats off to Tar-ba-gan for leading the way. Putting together a bibliography of Dandaron's published works is a good next step that shouldn't be too much trouble, so I will start posting some stuff soon.

I have a few thoughts about the present page that I wanted to discuss before we do any big edits.

- A lot of what is here right now might be original research, etc. If it is not, we should dig up references for it.

- In general, much of what is said about Dandaron is oral history and needs to be reported as such- so we can't just say "He did this", we need to say "So-and-so says he did this."

- It seems like there's information in this page that is not directly relevant. In particular, the information about Gyayag Rinpoche and the Panchen Lama connection (although very interesting) seems like it could be its own page.

- I would like to use the biographical materials in Montlevich's 2006 compilation as our main reference for biographical information. I think it's a pretty good source, but I'm open to discussion on this count. Cheers, James Meador (talk) 09:09, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Thank you James. This entry seems mostly based on the said Montlevich compilation. I am not sure every single phrase should be referenced to it though. As for what I did, I made a shortened translation of this article from the Russian Wikipedia, with some changes. If you point directly on the phrases that should be referenced, I and most probably the author of the original Russian version User:TheNeon are sure to provide at least most of the references. Please understand that it is not an unwillingness to get the article to follow Wikipedia standards, but rather a problem recognizing what causes the problem: I first read Montlevich's articles more that 10 years ago, and since then, nobody has put to light a thing that would contradict views he expressed (as this article is mostly factological).

As for Gyayag Rinpoche, a paragraph about him highlights the views inside the Balagat Movement and L.-S. Tsydenov on the very essence of Buddhism, that were (and are) different from the mainstream Buryat Buddhism: non-institutionalized Buddhism with an uncommon stress on tulku system and strong involvement of Tibetan high lamas (that would be an attempt at international standing, if we speak in terms of "original research"). I tried to be as brief in this respect as I could though, as long as sources for a separate article on Gyayag Rinpoche or his lineage do not seem to be forthcoming.

A while ago I made an entry about Tsydenov on Russian wiki and I am thinking about making its English version. This time it ios also based on Montlevich'2006 alone. If verifiability of this compilation is problematic please tell what to do about it. --Tar-ba-gan (talk) 20:26, 21 November 2010 (UTC)