Long time since I've done one of these, and the subject of this post is another intelligence operative working on SNS trying to "control the narrative," so to speak, with respect to any given topic.
I'm very busy will legal proceedings, maybe that is why this woman thought it was her chance to go for the gusto. She is a linguistically incompetent individual that has been trying to create a niche for herself as some sort of Eastern Spiritualism guru or the like. She's like a wannabe Bari Weiss of Zen and Daoism. Go figga.
As you can see below, she operates a blog called:
Buddhism: The Way of Emptiness (https://buddhism-thewayofemptiness.blog.nomagic.uk/)
There, she describes herself:
My name is Nicole Bea. Formal studies in comparative literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure. A Buddhist all of my life and a Zen practitioner since the 90s. A long-standing interest in philosophy, including 25 years devoted to the Kyoto School of Philosophy and East Asian thought.
She's a 'devotee,' 25 years, all for nought.
She has become increasingly annoying with spammy posts in a FB group called Ancient Chinese Philosophies, where she is a Moderator. She aims to channel David Hinton's dubious pseudo-theories on the relationship between Daoism and Chan/Zen Buddhism and had recently spammed a run of about 7-8 posts about certain spurious claims he has made with which she is enamored, in all her shiny ignorance. She like to name drop books or scholars she has read, trying to compensate for her lack of basic requisite skills.
Another individual (i.e., another suspected CIA pseudo-scholar) she promotes is Bret Davis.
She tries to pretend she's into Zen and Daoism while promoting theism and mysticism, is one angle she works. Davis is one of her vehicles for this, and he, in turn, seems to have influenced a scholar from Kyoto University--who had also studied Eckhart and practiced Zen--that Zen was the same as mysticism, or utter words that he has transmitted to that effect.
She has carried this out across a couple of Groups on Facebook, which I will treat in different posts, with the Davis related post taken up here, first, as it is shorter.
Hinton and Davis are, of course, more important than she is, because they are the people with status as academicians that she is tasked with promoting, and their ideas, in turn, reflect the geopolitical machinations of the CIA/MI6/DGSE et al.
Hinton is a mediocre (at best) translator, and outright horrendous (bastardized translations) at worst. But that is not all, he has written a couple of books beyond translation into scholarly realms that he has a poor grasp up but thinks he has hit on a linguistic trick to make inroads. I actually have had one of his translations on my shelf for many years, which I will now have to compare against another, when I have time.
Ms. Pastoukoff is also involved on the Kyoto School group page as a Moderator, and there she is also engaged in trying to promote the work of an American named Bret Davis. Some of work seems alright, and some not.
Ms. Pastoukoff claims to have been a Zen practitioner, but she tries to promote philosophers from the Kyoto school who were proponents, to one degree or another, of Jodo-shu (Pure Land) Buddhism or even Christian mysticism.
Nicole is of African descent who moved from France to England where she is married to an Englishman and has a small family. She has blocked me, at this point, for criticizing her specious posts, so I will have to push back on that, but I've long suspected she was either an MI6 or DGSE operative, so it is time to expose her as such.
All I have time to do is throw up some screenshots at the moment, as I have to get some sleep.
The Bret Davis thread:
Page on her blog:
Pages in FB thread (Kyoto School)