Tragedy-Santa Fe: Dalai Lama's friend, advisor, and translator dies from injuries sustained over the weekend; wife was driving, and pickup truck littered with empty beer cans slammed into them; was major figure in Creating Tibetan Government in Exile; Lifetime of Publishing, Scholarship, and Translating from Tibetan and Teaching Tibetan Culture and Philosophy; Driver of Pickup was Inebriated Santo Domingo Repeat Offender

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http://www.prlog.org/10068000-dalai-lama-translator-and-top-tibetan-scholar-lobsang-lhalungpa-T-boned-by-dwi-in-santa-fe-dies.html

Rupturing his pancreas immediately, the pick up truck spun his car around 180 degrees on a heavy trafficked busy street; the Pueblo driver from Santo Domingo ran away and has not yet been apprehended as of this writing....

Being killed by in a DWI fatality at 82, Santa Fe Living Treasure Lobsang Lhalungpa was one of my first Tibetan friends, and certainly by far the wisest and scholarly among my Tibetan friends. He was always the most polite and most scholarly of them all. He accomplished a world of good in his educating and through his translating.

He translated extensively over the past 40 years for the Dalai Lama, and also translated his English speeches into Tibetan. Many of Lobsang's books were introduced with a short preface by His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. He was monumentally instrumental in setting up the Tibetan Government in exile, and also for many years in India coordinated a Tibetan language program on All India Radio, for refugees and exiles, to keep up with the news from their former land.

Lobsang's scholarly efforts were formidable; he often declined contact
with the world and its repetitive news, good or bad, when he was in a state of spiritual retreat.

Not many know this, but it was Lobsang's father, who, as Chief Tibetan State Oracle, strongly advised His Holiness to leave Lhasa right away, to escape the Chinese, rather than wait a day or two, as many were advising him. I am sure His Holiness has never forgotten this brilliant stroke of genius, and of course, always conferred with Lobsang Lhalungpa in many matters. Lobsang was very humble about this fact.

He was the best top-knotch translator between Tibetan and English in the
world, and his scholarly work included a life of Milarepa, and many others,
some of which are shown here:

http://images.google.com/imageshl=en&q=lobsang+lhalungpa&btnG=Search+Images&g
 
bv=2&safe=active

This tragic hit-and-run is a devastating and terrible tragedy for his widow,
Gisela, and for his children. However, knowing Lobsang, he would not want
any of us to be disconsolate; life is fleeting; death comes unpredictably,
and that is much the nature at the heart of his faith in Buddhism.

I hope the Tibetan Association of Santa Fe, to which he was a Senior Advisor for many years, as the Olympics  draw near, will rise to the occasion and will have a few memorial service and many more marches around the Plaza, in honor of this great great man, Lobsang Lhalungpa, who so tremendously enriched the lives of so many that he touched with his infinite calm, reasoning, and brilliant insights.

We will all miss him terribly.

Surely, this level of tragedy might impel the New Mexico Legislature to "tighten up the screws" on DWI, close up some looming loopholes, and keep inevitable killers off the streets and away from driving automobiles!

 Everyone in New Mexico has some personal experience with a family or friend or neighbor getting killed or maimed by a drunk driver....it is time we put an end to this pathology, or like a cancer, it will come back and destroy us.

This is how it should be in New Mexico and every other state with serious drunk driving/fatality statistics:

 Drive Drunk once? You lose your car for six months and you go to jail.

Drive Drunk Twice? You lose your car and your assets, and you to go jail for 1-2 years

Drive Drunk Three Times? You stay in jail for a long time, like 3-6 years, lose your car and all of your assets.

I have asked several New Mexico State Senators to ask the Cabinet Secretary for Public Safety and the New Mexico Attorney General to prepare a personal report on the past 100 incidents when someone has been killed by DWI, to see what it might reveal: about repeat offenders, or how many are out on appeal, their right when going from our failed Magistrate Courts in New Mexico to District Court, even if they were convicted and still obviously a danger to life and limb amond the rest of the population.

Watch for some powerful legislative solutions (in memory of Lobsang Lhalunpa) in the 2009 New Mexico Legislature!

Stephen Fox, Founder, New Millennium Fine Art and Managing Editor, Santa Fe Sun-News

Authors Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups/592985284186083/

Authors Bio:

Early in the 2016 Primary campaign, I started a Facebook group: Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win! As the primary season advanced, we shifted the focus to advancing Bernie's legislation in the Senate, particularly the most critical one, to protect Oak Flat, sacred to the San Carlos Apaches, in the Tonto National Forest, from John McCain's efforts to privatize this national forest and turn it over to Rio Tinto Mining, an Australian mining company whose record by comparison makes Monsanto look like altar boys, to be developed as North America's largest copper mine. This is monstrous and despicable, and yet only Bernie's Save Oak Flat Act (S2242) stands in the way of this diabolical plan.

We added "2020" to the title.


I am an art gallery owner in Santa Fe since 1980 selling Native American painting and NM landscapes, specializing in modern Native Ledger Art.


I have always been intensely involved in politics, going back to the mid's 1970's, being a volunteer lobbyist in the US Senate for the Secretary General of the United Nations, then a "snowball-in-hell" campaign for US Senate in NM in the late 70's, and for the past 20 years have worked extensively to pressure the FDA to rescind its approval for aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener metabolized as formaldehyde. This may be becoming a reality to an extent in California, which, under Proposition 65, is considering requiring a mandatory Carcinogen label on all aspartame products, although all bureaucracies seem to stall under any kind of corporate pressure.


Bills to ban aspartame were in the State Senates of New Mexico and Hawaii, but were shut down by corporate lobbyists (particularly Monsanto lobbyists in Hawaii and Coca Cola lobbyists in New Mexico).


For several years, I was the editor of New Mexico Sun News, and my letters to the editor and op/eds in 2016 have appeared in NM, California, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and many international papers, on the subject of consumer protection. Our best issue was 10 days before Obama won in 2008, when we published a special early edition of the paper declaring that Obama Wins! This was the top story on CNN for many hours, way back then....


My highest accomplishments thus far are

1. a plan to create a UN Secretary General's Pandemic Board of Inquiry, a plan that is in the works and might be achieved even before the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020.


2. Now history until the needs becomes clear to the powers who run the United Nations: a UN Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, strongly supported ten years ago by India and 53 cosponsoring nations, but shut down by the US Mission to the UN in 2008. To read it, google UNITED NATIONS UNDERSECRETARY GENERAL FOR NUTRITION, please.


These are not easy battles, any of them, and they require a great deal of political and journalistic focus. OpEdNews is the perfect place for those who have a lot to say, so much that they exceed the limiting capacities of their local and regional newspapers. Trying to go beyond the regional papers seems to require some kind of "inside" credentials, as if you had to be in a club of corporate-accepted writers, and if not, you are "from somewhere else," a sad state of corporate induced xenophobia that should have no place in America in 2020!

This should be a goal for every author with something current to say: breaking through yet another glass ceiling, and get your say said in editorial pages all over America. Certainly, this was a tool that was essentially ignored in 2016, and cannot be ignored in the big elections of 2020.


In my capacity as Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev