Frequently Asked Questions by Charles Carreon
Q: What is American Buddhism?
A. Some people are afraid of the "A"-word. America is a country named after an Italian mapmaker by a Spanish freebooter who enslaved natives, and worse yet, mistreated them without generating profit, and thus was harshly chastised by the Spanish nobility who funded his expeditions. The country grew in a rough and ready fashion, becoming a hothouse for cultish innovations like Quakerism and Puritanism, which found out how pleasant religious intolerance can be when the whip is in your hand. The most successful businesspeople were smugglers, who were put out with the British Crown for extracting taxes on pricey wares like tea, fabric and other basic luxuries. They were also handy with their firearms, which emboldened them to the point of rebellion.
Seeking to dress up their "revolution," these so-called "Founding Fathers" engaged in vandalism (the Boston Tea Party and other outrages involving destruction of property including the homes of British-appointed tax-collectors). Not above planting evidence, these "freedom fighters" dressed up like "Indians" before looting the British tea-packets.
In a further effort to put a moralistic spin on their outrageous refusal to tender taxes due for the defense of the colonies, the smugglers got together, called themselves a Congress, and put together a fine little piece of excuse-making that they had the audacity to call a Declaration of Independence. For sheer arrogance and presumptuousness, this document has not been exceeded in history. It begins:
"When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitled them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to Separation."
In short, these smugglers said, "We're outta here, we're on our own trip now, and here's why ..."
What reasons would motivate smugglers to revolt? Oh, the usual -- unwillingness to pay debts lawfully owed to the government. Preference to risk prison rather than loss of profit. But what justification did they assert? All manner of moralistic tripe, I assure you, against a government that the citizens of the British mainland had found more than adequate for their needs. Not good enough for these belly-aching smugglers, though, who cast stones at the monarchy like this:
"[W]hen a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security."
While we can only look back at the intemperance, the hyperbole, characterizing this document, and shake our heads at the folly of our ancestors, we are still their descendants. We cannot avoid the shame of realizing now that, had we remained British subjects, we would have such an illustrious monarch as Elizabeth, so fine a PM as Tony Blair, so noble a royal as Charles, so marvelous a knighted minstrel as Sir Paul McCartney. Instead, we have Hollywood. Just punch yourself in the face.
But we must face the fact that we are Americans, and that throwing off imagined oppression is our path to glory. Would we be worse off if we were Canadians? Of course not. We would still speak the same language, although I daresay we would've sorted that thing with the Frenchies rather differently. You know, one Union, one Language, no Mason-Dixon line, "Fourscore and seven years ago ..." And of course, Rhett, the quintessential northern guy's final goodbye to the Southern Belle: "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn!"
As they say in New Age empowerment seminars, we've got to "Go with our strengths!" And when it comes to blowing through new fads, trying on another culture for size, and giving it back to them with the butt all stretched out, no one can do it like Americans.
It's only been a few years since rice crackers were introduced to this country, and now soccer moms are thinking of new ways to combine them with tofu. Yoga used to be something that swamis did to read minds, but now you do it to get your health premiums down, just like you reduce your auto premiums by buying a car alarm for your car. Acupuncture used to be that scary thing that Chinese people did with needles, likely unsanitary and useless, and now some health plans actually pay for it! But remember, this is also the country where smoking tobacco was once considered a healthful habit that even women could safely indulge in, the same country where marijuana is still illegal. We are exceptionally adaptable, not necessarily extraordinarily smart.
When it comes to beliefs, you might say we're promiscuous. A drive down the full length of a major metropolitan avenue in many an American city will take you past ashrams, dojos, mosques, Buddhist centers of many types, not to mention as many new age babas as a dog has fleas. Thanks to those old smugglers who wrote that crazy Constitution, they all live in relative peace in the same city.
Meanwhile, back in the bosom of "spiritual enlightenment," India, interfaith warfare is a given, and if a mushroom cloud appears over Karachi, it will undoubtedly bear Lord Shiva's face. In many Asian countries, Buddhism is the state religion, as in Burma, with attendant social benefits, such as large temples and a thriving mining economy in which you can conveniently collect your wages in heroin.
Arrogantly put, American Buddhism might be just that basic spirit of good humor and toleration that lets all the coreligionists engage in their doctrinal competitions, neither backing nor inhibiting any of them in their debates.
But we can also look at what an Asian Buddhist said about American Buddhism. Trungpa Rinpoche said that it's the only Buddhism Americans will ever practice. And now, the floor is his:
TRUNGPA RINPOCHE: The conventional moral law purely has to do with relating with your conscience rather than dealing with situations. If you relate with a situation in terms of your conscience or your perceptions, it means you don't actually relate with the situation at all. For example, if you had to investigate a murder case, you might want to dissociate yourself from the case altogether, thinking, "I don't want to be involved with murder at all." Then you have no way at all of understanding how and why one person murdered the other. You could let yourself become involved with that murder case and try to understand the rightness and wrongness of what was done as scientifically as possible. You could look into the situation in terms of cause and effect and gain some understanding of it. But on the other hand, if you think, "Becoming involved with murder will just get me in contact with bad vibrations, so I'll have nothing to do with that," then you seal yourself off completely.
This is exactly the same thing that seems to be happening in present day society. Particularly the young generation doesn't want to have anything to do with society--let alone understand it--because it's something ugly, something terrible. This creates tremendous confusion and conflict. Whereas if people were to get into society and try to understand what is wrong, there might be some intelligence coming out of that. Complete rejection without discrimination seems to be the problem.
STUDENT: Don't you think there have been some things we've all learned from that rejection you were just talking about?
TRUNGPA RINPOCHE: Yes and no--both. A lot of people have rejected Christianity and gone to Hinduism or Buddhism. They feel that they no longer have any associations with Christianity at all. Then later--from the point of view of aliens--they begin to realize that Christianity speaks some kind of profound truth. They only see that from the point of view of aliens, having gone away. They begin to appreciate the culture they were brought up in. Finally they become the best Christians, people with much more understanding of Christianity than ordinary Christians.
You can't reject your history. You can't say that your hair is black if it is blond. You have to accept your history. Those wanting to imitate Oriental culture might go so far as to become 100% Hindu or 100% Japanese, even to the point of undergoing plastic surgery. But somehow denying your existence--your body, your makeup, your psychological approach--does not help. In fact, it brings more problems. You have to be what you are. You have to relate with your country, the state of your country, its politics, its culture. That is extremely important, since you cannot become someone else. And it is such a blessing.
If we could become someone else, or halfway someone else, that would provide us with a tremendous number of sidetracks and possibilities for escape. We should be thankful that we have a body, a culture, a race, and a country that is honestly ours, and we should relate with those. We can't reject all that. That represents our relationship to the earth as a whole, our national karma, and all the rest of it. That seems to be the starting point for attaining enlightenment, becoming a buddha, an American buddha.
Q. In Buddhism, one is supposed to look to see if there is a real "Self" only to discover that it's unfindable as a solid object, and therefore non-existent. But actually, the Self does exist as a "Concept." And it is because we have this concept of Self, that we are able to manifest and project the experience of that Self as a being and a personality in the world. So even tho' the experience is not a real, solid object, it's the only reality that we can ever know.
A. The Sutra of the Cup
Polonius: What think you, Verbonious, is a cup a cup?
Verbonius: Like that one you hold, made of clay?
P: Yes, like this one.
V: No, it is not.
P: Why is that, Verbonious.
V: Lend it me.
P: You have it.
V: (Placing cup inside a cloth, he breaks it, then opens the cloth to show his friend.) Where is your cup?
P: You've broken it.
V: So it's not a cup.
P: Yes, it is, it's just that you've broken it.
V: (Shaking the cloth holding the shards.) There now, it's merely shards of clay.
P: Shards of the cup. (Turning to a friend, Neutronious) What think you, N?
N: I think Polonious makes the shards real to prove the cup unreal.
V: There, well spoken, you make one thing real to make another unreal.
N: Further, he makes the shards equal to the cup, but the cup and the shards have never been in the same place together. How then can they be equal?
V: Well, I'm vexed.
P: Makes two of us.
V: Things can only be themselves, for once they become something else, they cannot be equal to another thing. These seeming "transformations" of things are apropos of nothing, for a thing can only be equal to itself, and what it becomes when broken tells us only the nature of new thing, which has always been broken, never otherwise.
Q. In the saying, "form is emptiness; emptiness is form," doesn't appearance depend upon emptiness, rather than emptiness depending upon appearance.?
Answer 1:
From Suzuki Roshi (more or less)
When we sit
We have something
(right hand rests in left palm)
We have our body
And we have our mind.
Sometimes when we sit,
We forget we are there.
Then we resume our ordinary life
and everything appears .
This is the first creation.
Building on this first creation,
we can create things,
like pots or poems or political machines,
But all of them depend on this first creation.
Answer 2:
From Lao Tze (more or less)
When we say do the practice
Wave Hands Like Clouds,
we do not really mean that "you"
"wave" your "hands."
The description is to remind you
to look into the sky
where the vast circulation of the clouds
provides the pattern for your own
natural pattern of breath
Let your hands float like clouds
on the gentle wind of continuous awareness -- a unity
Answer 3:
From Trungpa Rinpoche (more or less)
Trungpa Rinpoche used the term "touch and go" to describe how to use awareness meditatively.
A questioner asked him how to know when to "touch" and when to "go."
Trungpa Rinpoche answered: You've missed the point completely -- the point is touch and go happen at the same time."
Q. It is necessary to receive dharma from a pure source that is unmixed with other traditions.
A. The stinginess of the Indians in trying to "prevent the dharma from leaving India" was as inane as people thinking that being photographed would result in the theft of their souls. The obsession with "keeping Dharma pure" in Tibet became a cover for de-legitimizing various valid schools of practice. It is preferable to listen with an open mind especially toward your own thoughts.
Q. Teachers, lamas, gurus and authority figures are necessary to teach you the path of dharma.
Many people hope to find someone who embodies their ideals of spiritual attainment. It's not easy trying to find a person who can do that, and you're always likely to suffer disappointment, because our hopes are rather high. If you need a godlike guru, your demands are going to be hard to meet. If you want to be sure your teacher has experienced "higher levels of spiritual awareness," you may well have been born during that particular moment allotted for the birth of a sucker. If you're satisfied with someone who has achieved less than something substantial, then why bother finding a teacher at all?
Increasingly, I look at my fellows, thirsting for spiritual realization, and conclude that they are actually distracting themselves from less exciting concerns that, however, genuinely affect their happiness.
Many people seem very concerned simply to be on a spiritual path -- I can understand feeling that need. I felt it most acutely for years. Why? The answer generally does not become evident until one has been on the path for a while, the hidden, less spiritual reasons begin to appear.
When the less spiritual reasons for being a practitioner appear, it is something like getting a hay fever attack when you go out to see the pretty blossoms. You don't welcome the discovery. You consider the arising conflicts to be "obstacles to practice." You identify with the "good practitioner" and dis-identify with the distractions and obstacles. However, the obstacles are really the truer you. The "practitioner" is a total johnny-come-lately from a psychological point of view. You may tell yourself that your spiritual yearnings are actually the deepest aspect of your nature, but that's not likely true.
Get to know your bad boy or naughty girl. They have so much to tell you about why you're on the spiritual path. They're into it -- you just don't know why ....
As soon as anyone wants to be Chief, the relationship becomes questionable. People can get into that if they want, but the risks are so high, I can't imagine why they would. The source of the tradition may be scriptural, but its current condition is so uninspiring as to justify its total abandonment. What is it that cannot be taught in a simple, dignified, eye-to-eye relationship? Special things, of course, magical things, Koresh things, Jim Jones things, Osel Tenzin things. I can do without these things.
Q. How can you choose a spiritual path?
A. The problem with trying "methods" and evaluating their effectiveness is that all you can do to see if they are working is to look in the mirror. Then you don't know if you've tried hard enough, or long enough. And you can't tell if the benefits you feel today are lasting, transient, or even the precursors of new problems.
But almost certainly, miracle cures will elude you. You will probably never feel a huge root of guilt suddenly pulled out of your heart whereafter guilt, shame and embarrassment will never bother you again. The loneliness that ties you to the earth will probably never dissipate, allowing you to float into the zero gravity of limitless space. Probably nothing really permanent or amazing will ever happen.
What will happen? You will get older, your skin will sag, your hair will turn gray, and your memory will get poorer. You will discover the transiency of relationships, the evanescence of situations. You will see days turn into months and years, and you will see your term on the earth growing shorter and shorter.
In the midst of this, you will have the opportunity to live. It's like that story about the fellow who got chased off the cliff and hung onto a strawberry vine. While the tiger roared above, another appeared below. A black mouse and a white mouse began to chew on the vine. He spots a strawberry and pops it into his mouth. It was delicious.
Q. Should I renounce worldly existence?
A. Ramana Maharshi said, if you remain as you are, you will think you are a layperson. If you renounce the world, you will think you are a renunciate. Better than changing your label is knowing yourself.
Q. How can we develop goals for the future while at the same time living in the present moment?
A. If you take that approach, you will treat "spiritual life" and "worldly life" as fundamentally antagonistic. Worldly life requires planning. Spiritual life "requires " spontaneity. An interesting alternative to this approach is proposed in the works by Takuan Soho, in which he shows how the meditative state of awareness is the most effective survival/competitive condition. In a series of letters to a feudal Japanese lord, he used a didactic technique of established effectiveness, linking something the lord knew about (swordsmanship), with what he wanted to instruct him about (meditation). Thus, he explained that to be a faultless swordsman, one must utilize the mind that abides no place, the same mind of nonattachment that one practices in zazen. The lesson of the book? Samadhi is to the mind what edge is to a sword. And best of all, a sword wielded with the power of samadhi will not betray either the holder of the sword, or even the foes s/he faces.
The elegance of this solution is obvious. We solve all of our problems one way -- through right action (which incorporates right view). We develop our natural endowments because it feels right. Trusting your inherent sense of what feels right suggests that we might want to try this road, which is neither offensive nor defensive with relation to "samsara" and leads right to the target -- happy living.
Q. All worldly appearances arise from conditioning, so there is nothing special about our experience. Why make a big deal about the "wonders of "nature" and such? Isn't that just glorifying the sensual world?
A. A Sufi once said "miracles are not to impress the credulous or encourage the faithful -- they are a means of transmitting understanding."
We behold a miracle that transmits understanding when we look up through our protective blanket of air, at the sun's blazing disk, from a vantage point on a rock spinning about a thousand miles an hour, using an optical device about the same as that used by an octopus, processing photon stimuli into neural impulses that are organized by a bio-supercomputer into a display of color, depth and form that appears as a relatively accurate 3-D holographic representation of the physical world to an awareness that is still uncertain of its own origins or identity.
If you can get this type of transmission just from contemplating a basic sensory activity -- seeing light -- how can you call it "glorifying the sensual world?" It is a question of how you approach the experience, isn't it? We can put on analytical, sensual, aesthetic, or possessory "lenses" and then we'll see the world and ourselves in that light. Those are all choices, human choices. If we think that Buddhists must decline to see the world because it will trap them into sensuality, that seems cowardly. The brave choice would be to keep seeing, and to learn more about how to successively use all of these "lenses" and also how to take the glasses off altogether. That "lense-free" seeing might be an analogy for a meditative view. But we never stop seeing.
JOKE:
Q: Why don't Buddhists ever make any progress in their practice?
A: They're always in retreat.
Q. Aren't gurus "life experts" who provide the most important life guidance?
It is probably a mistake to assume that spiritual teachers know more about what is important for human life than all of our other advisors. Most gurus are useless to advise us about how to find a job, fix the bugs in our computer, or locate a good, cheap rent-controlled apartment. And yet, getting each one of those taken care of is a building block of modern happiness. In fact, gurus are forever asking for assistance to get just these elements of their life in place. Many Buddhist meditation centers end up being primarily focused on satisfying the housing needs of the teacher and his entourage.
What precisely is so precious that we have to process one entire guru in order to extract it? Simply this: a dose of self-confidence. That's it. It's what almost everyone gets from their guru that keeps them coming back.
It's like "before and after" advertising: Before I had a guru, I was totally lost. I had headaches, and drank too much, never got a date and felt bad about it. After getting a guru, I still have the headaches, I drink only when I fall off the wagon, and I don't feel bad about not getting a date, because I can always go meditate. What's the big difference? I'm willing to give myself a good pull out of bed in the morning and face the grind again. I have hope.
Why do I have hope? Because without it, I would be lost. Is this guru anything other than a placebo? Is there any milk coming out of that nipple? I don't know, but there's a sucker born every minute. Just don't pay for the milk until you see it.
Q. Is it reasonable to try to hold teachers accountable for their actions?
Answer 1:
It depends on how we view the teacher. If we deify the teacher, believing that he must be infallible or we wouldn't bother receiving his teachings, then to judge his actions seems absurd, like Adam talking back to God about the apple dispute.
My view is that infallibility and omniscience are themselves absolutely untenable notions. God-kings and godling-nobles are nonsense.
Up here in Oregon we say, "Keep 'em honest." Guess that means, "Don't trust 'em."
Lying is very human. Lying is what we do rather than comply with social constraints. We fabricate a little image that blocks people's view of a part of our life. An embezzler creates an image of honesty, behind which she mines out the accounts. A cheating spouse creates an image of faithfulness behind which to engage in extramarital liaisons.
Therefore, whenever we see that someone has an appearance that is quite perfect, quite in conformity with our expectations, we should give it the 360 walk-around.
It is easiest to deceive people who don't ask questions. Deception is made easier for the deceiver who is free to define their own version of good conduct.
One of the bummer things about being deceived is that somehow the message of the truth still keeps leaking through the deception. The dissonance is disturbing. The deceiver keeps denying what the deceived person is feeling, claiming it's groundless, but conflicting messages keep coming through. If it's not about anything too important, it's tolerable, but if it's about the pristine honesty of the teacher, it can be very disturbing.
Students who suspect they're being deceived, but can't cope with the realization, will go even farther to help maintain the deception. Then the deceiver has achieved the ultimate triumph -- the victim's aid in maintaining deception.
Answer 2:
By withdrawing support from those who abuse trust. By sharing the bad news as well as the good news. The good news is that life is a doable situation, with room for failure, discovery, learning and development. The bad news is the institution of religion has often been the vehicle for many a scoundrel to dupe their prey. We're familiar with Jimmy Swaggart, but vulnerable to Sogyal Rinpoche, because it's a new style. We just have to out the stinkers, and those who remain might just have some worth.
Q. Isn't keeping one's mind in the present a necessary exercise in concentration, for taming the wayward mind?
A. Before we decide, let's consider what's been said.
Keeping -- Stopping
mind -- me
the present -- where I don't want to be
necessary -- but have to ...
exercise -- it's not the real thing
concentration -- but have to stay focused
taming -- back, beast!
the wayward -- never could teach her anything!
mind -- "Bad, bad brain!"
Yes, with sufficient moral resources we can tame the wayward minds, get them off the streets of our awareness, and return this consciousness to the control of decent people everywhere!
Q. Can Alan Watts be considered a Buddhist authority? Remember, Alan Watts had a fraction of the resources we have now. He had D.T. Suzuki, Rhys Davids, and relatively few others writing in English who had any direct contact with Buddhism. Watts did quite brilliantly with what he had access to, but since Alan's death (1973), we've had dozens of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's books to read, we've had Naropa Institute, we've had all of Nyanaponika Thera's writings published by Western publishers, Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Bhikkhu Bodhi, Stephen Batchelor (who was taught in the traditional Tibetan, Korean and Theravedan systems), Lama Surya Das (who was the disciple of "Hindu" Holy man Neem Karoli Baba --Baba Ram Das' guru-- and studied under at least five of the giants of 20th century Tibetan Buddhism: HHDudjom Rinpoche, HH Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, HH the XVI Karmapa, HE Kalu Rinpoche and Dzogchen master Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche), the irrepressible Pema Chodron, Richard P. Hayes (schooled in Korean Zen and Theravadin systems and a true Pali scholar), Tsultrim Allione, Thich Naht Hanh's amazing books and lectures and retreats, Sogyal Rinpoche, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Robert Thurman, Susan Salzberg, Shinzen Young and many, many other Westerners and non-Westerners who have earnestly studied and practiced buddhadharma and have shared their experiences with us in the English language.
A. I remember reading Alan Watts in many places on the road throughout the US and Europe and the East all the way to India, wandering around looking for the crazy shit these people all talk about.
In Goa I once made a find on the beach: Michener's "The Source," his magnum opus, stuffed with a now-debunked version of Hebrew history. Somebody left it out on the beach to weather. It had about 1,200 pages, so it became an Asian traveler's luxury item -- toilet paper.
Now if that had been "The Way of Zen," I would not have wiped my ass with it. In fact, I had my copy of TWOZ in my little hut, where I enjoyed reading about Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Han Shan , Ta Fan, Ryokan, Basho, and many other Japanese and Chinese Zen authors. Isn't it true that Watts could actually read some of the Chinese and Japanese stuff? Didn't he like go guesting around in monasteries all over the world? Didn't he sit, and talk, and do tai chi and get laid by models, and everything else that gurus are s'pozed to do? But he's a white boy, and everybody knows white boys can't get guru status unless they cut their hair, shave their scrota, wrap themselves up in a monk's robe so they look like a bald tamale, and go hole up in a cave for an extended period of time. Then they got credibility. But they still fulla shit.
Alan Watts, that guy had style you should envy. When he talked, people listened, and that wasn't because they was stupid. It's because he had writing ability, speaking ability, a love of humanity, and was enough of an Englishman to take everything with a grain of salt.
Alan Watts was one of the Pied Pipers of that time period. Leary, Alpert, Shunryu Suzuki, Kesey, those guys lit fire to history, backed up by throngs of Dylans, Donovans, Country Joes, Grace Slicks, etcetera. Yeah, they all got old and their hair went gray and their guts got flabby and their teeth fell out and their wives died and they got cancer, whatever. That's a given. Happens to everyone. But they were alive in the life of the day, and gave us all reasons to look a little deeper, even if it was just the LSD 25 making the sky look bluer, and maybe the Grateful Dead weren't even a very good band, whatever!
So the question really isn't whether Alan Watts was an authority of Buddhism. He wasn't. He didn't want to be. He wanted to share the beauty of humanity's treasures of philosophy, art, aesthetics, and expression. Probably all of the Westerners since then are better at playing the authority game.
But even if you buy into their authority games, it's still good to read and listen to Alan Watts and his type. It's the territory. It's the fertilizer. It's the graveyard, the archives, the records. Take it and build with it as ye will. Maybe you care not about it, but I hear the voices of Ginsburg and Kerouac and Morrison and all o' them secret voices in the graveyard. They were bad. And they wish the same for you.
A. What do you think about making wishes such as "May all beings be happy" and all of that other well-wishing on a cosmic scale?
Q. May-be I missed the point of all this May-saying, but this seems a lot like praying, except that instead of assuming that God can grant the prayers, Buddhists assume that God is out of the picture, so we address our prayers to ourselves. But the basic psychology of prayer, which is to express our wishes and try to hope them into existence, seems to still be operative in the Buddhist version.
Let's take a classic Buddhist prayer -- "May all beings be happy ..." How likely is it that 's going to come true, either now or in the future? Well, the possibility is nil, as noted by the Buddha when he said "All life is suffering."
So, unless you somehow eliminate this nagging doubt about the viability of what you're wishing for, this is going to be a sort of rickety prayer.
The first, and possibly correct way, to eliminate the doubt, is to discover that you don't really expect the wish to come true -- you just want to be able to wish it. Indeed, when you think about it, the fact that something is unattainable doesn't negate the value of wishing for it. Indeed it is how we push the envelope of the possible. By hoping for universal happiness, justice or peace, or for ecological preservation of the planet as a vital living habitat, for that matter, we align our wills with positive forces.
You might ask, then, why do we have to wish for such big things? Why not wish for something arguably achievable: "May the global population of humpback whales increase by 20% each year for the next ten years."
Well, one of the famous big wish-mongers, the Siddha Busuku, laka Shantideva, in his classic Bodhisattvacharyavatara, advises us to wish for the greatest good for the greatest number of beings because the karmic effect on one's own mind is thus the greatest. He claims that if you wish for total enlightenment for all beings, that the benefit of this wish is incalculable. Smaller wishes, such as to gain enlightenment for oneself only, have accordingly much smaller benefits.
Do you believe in Shantideva's calculus? Well, whether you do or not, if you attempt to put it into action by encouraging yourself to really make his "biggest, bestest wish," you will discover a substantial resistance to the idea. I personally discovered a nagging doubt about the practicality of the whole idea. How, I kept thinking, could we even get hunger, homicide, and disease under control, much less provide religious instruction to lead all beings to enlightenment? And suddenly I realized that the same degree of effort that is required to make our world a hell would be sufficient to turn it into heaven, if only we all applied ourselves correctly. That last "if" is huge, of course. Like a gigantic key bigger than any hand that could ever lift it. And yet, if we could just change our minds.
Q. Don't you think rules are necessary for all realms of human conduct?
A. Allow me to simply refine this question. What do you think does more for the common person -- rules or understanding the reasons for the rules?
Do you think people obey rules because they are rules or because they make sense?
Does the persistence of a rule eventually reduce appreciation of the reason for the rule?
Does anything foster understanding of the reasons for rules better than open discussion?
Can people usually devise their own codes of conduct when presented with circumstances requiring controlled behavior?
If people fail to regulate their conduct in accordance with the wishes of others, at what point is it appropriate to regulate it for them?
Q. We have a right to be happy.
A. Let's concede this. Nevertheless, people are unable to assert this right very effectively. Our efforts to pursue happiness and overcome suffering are at best qualified success. We need to be more strategic in our pursuit of happiness. The Way is taught to help us take note of the factors that increase happiness and diminish suffering. The steps to take are commonsense, but they still run counter to impulse. Trying to escape from the net with too much fervor causes it to grow tighter. Thus, skill in applying ourselves to the work is required. As Suzuki Roshi said, "we make effort to get rid of effort."
Q. How much autonomy should we expect to give up when learning and practicing Buddhism?
I was never into religion. I was into mysticism. When I first started getting teachings from my lama, it was Buddhist mysticism. Fifteen years went by, and it began to be more and more about Buddhist religion. In the early days, there was no authority except for the lama's mental clarity, serenity, and joy. Twenty years later, we've got Steven Segal sitting in the temple with Catherine Burroughs. We went from inherent authority, that inspired immediate respect, to purported authority that earned automatic contempt.
When structures, rites and personages become more important than what is being heard and practiced, then the sacred company seems a bit less sacred. When money, corporate structure and mandates from on high become part of the routine, it's time for an early exit. Loss of autonomy is only part of it -- loss of dignity as you become a pawn in a numbers game is also part of the package. Ya gotta pick your sangha carefully -- which, depending where you live, might land you without any sangha at all, given nothing but undesirable choices.
There shouldn't be any need to surrender spiritual freedom to realize Buddhist mystical insights, at least if the Diamond Sutra is any authority.
Here's a couple of quotes:
Chapter 14 -- Perfect Peace Lies In Freedom from Characteristic Distinctions
Therefore, Subhuti, bodhisattvas should leave behind all phenomenal distinctions and awaken the thought of incomparable enlightenment by not allowing the mind to depend upon notions evoked by the sensible world -- by not allowing the mind to depend upon notions evoked by sounds, odors, flavors, touch contacts or any qualities. The mind should be kept independent of any thoughts that arise within it. If the mind depends upon anything, it has no sure haven.
Chapter 10 -- Setting Forth Pure Lands
Therefore, Subhuti, all bodhisattvas, lesser and great, should develop a pure, lucid mind, not depending upon sound, flavor, touch, odor, or any quality. A bodhisattva should develop a mind that alights upon nothing whatsoever; and so should he establish it.
As far as the interdependence of everything, try:
Chapter 20 -- The Unreality of Phenomenal Distinctions
Subhuti, what do you think? Can the Buddha be perceived by his perfectly formed body?
No, World-Honored One, the Tathagata cannot be perceived by his perfectly formed body, because the Tathagata teaches that a perfectly formed body is not really such; it is merely called a perfectly formed body.
Subhuti, what do you think? Can the Tathagata be perceived by any phenomenal characteristic?
No, World-honored One, the Tathagata may not be perceived by any phenomenal characteristic, because the Tathagata teaches that phenomenal characteristics are not really such; they are merely called phenomenal characteristics.
For a good closer, let's try an excerpt from this chapter, the apex of humility without pretense:
Real Designation Is Undesignate
Subhuti, what do you think? Does a holy one say within himself, "I have obtained perfective enlightenment?"
Subhuti said, "No, World-Honored One. Wherefore? Because there is no such condition as that called "perfective enlightenment." World-Honored One, if a holy one of perfective enlightenment said to himself, "Such am I," he would necessarily partake of the idea of an ego entity, a personality, a being, or a separated individuality. World-Honored One, when the Buddha declares that I excel among holy men in the yoga of perfect quiescence, I do not say within myself, "I am a holy one of perfective enlightenment, free from passions." World-Honored One, if I said within myself, "Such am I," you would not declare, "Subhuti finds happiness abiding in peace, in seclusion in the midst of the forest." This is because Subhuti abides nowhere: therefore he is called "Subhuti, Joyful Abider in Peace, Dweller in Seclusion in the Forest."
Q. Where can we learn about compassion?
A. When I was fourteen I was taken out to a ranch by Pete Noli, my Nanny's son. She had lots of kids, but mostly girls. Navajo/Mexican stock, and plenty big Pete was. A real cowboy, quiet, good natured, playful. Sometimes a little too playful, like when he'd shoot out a lariat from his hand and it would snag my little four-year-old foot and yank me to the ground like a calf. Pete would laugh. His sister Patsy was beautiful. A beautician, actually. She chewed gum and saved her dimes in large thin decanters and eventually married a German jet pilot.
Pete didn't exactly lift up a flower, but he did show me a lesson of total everyday compassion once, when we were out at his uncle Elias' ranch riding the range in four-wheel drive pickup. He'd heard there was a cow stuck in the mud and was going to go get it out. He grabbed a shovel and we took off.
Driving through the savage waita-minute bushes and the baking sun out to the big sandy river, I believe he called it. I don't know exactly -- it was sure big and sandy.
He found the cow and man was it stuck. It had been there a couple of days maybe, and it was stuck up to its armpits sittin' in a lake of shit. So Pete just pulls on some waders and grabs the shovel and steps in next to the cow and starts shoveling shit. I sort of commented that that was a lot of gross shit, and he just said like it was nothin', "It's just a little hay." Kept right on digging, and I noticed it really did look like hay, a bit stinky, but still hay.
Well Pete's labor there was not short. He dug like a half-acre of shit, and then hooked up a harness under the cow, hooked that to a block and tackle, hooked that to the winch on the truck, and pulled that cow out of the river and over onto dry land where it could get its legs back, which was several hours. I couldn't believe how much work it was.
Never in all that time did Pete blame the cow. Cows will do that sort of thing. It's a cowboy's job to get them out of it. Apparently without making a big whiny fuss. I wish I had learned that lesson, but now that I remembered it, I think I'll give it a try.
Q. Which works better in practice: positive or negative reinforcement?
A. Put crudely:
Encouragement works on pride.
Correction works on shame.
Both pride and shame balance on the single fulcrum of self-love.
Like every other teeter-totter, it works from both ends.
Q. Would it be helpful for Buddhists of various sects to look for areas of commonality in their practice?
A. A fair number of people seem to looking for practice encouragement. Given what we all face each day -- weird political news in a retrograde era, job stress, relationship stress and all that -- we could sure use some encouragement to build our individual practice.
There is a lot for dharma practitioners of all types to agree on, like:
That it is beneficial to sit with yourself and remember the sources of your positive motivation.
That we possess a calm center of our being that wordlessly expresses something meaningful, and which we all experience continuously and moment-to-moment.
That while the plight of sentient being seems hopeless, the miracle of existence is a challenge we cherish and an opportunity that we should develop to the fullest.
That every day and every moment provide a new opportunity to plant the seeds of what we wish to harvest for ourselves, and for others.
That whatever we are presented with, we wish to meet it with nobility of spirit, even unto our last instant and beyond.
That we can always express what Trungpa Rinpoche called "basic warmth" -- fundamental human kindness.
Q. What makes "American Buddhism" distinctively Buddhist in nature?
A. To think of the source of positive motivation is refuge.
Continuous awareness of wordless meaningfulness is meditation.
To never abandon sentient beings or faith in our ultimate enlightenment is the bodhicitta.
To assert one's power to create reality is discipline.
To aspire to nobility is to be a child of the Noble One.
To be just plain decent is the most basic Buddhist virtue.
Is this too generic? Possibly not restrictive enough? You wish to find that which is "uniquely" Buddhist? This might be like trying to find a good, thirst-quenching drink that is unique. None are unique. All contain water. So many spiritual disciplines have a similar character ... because they all arose from efforts to satisfy the same basic human need.
Q. What is the relationship between physics and dharma? Shouldn't the saying "form is emptiness, emptiness is form" actually be rendered "matter is empty, emptiness is matter?"
Answer 1:
I don't think that Avalokiteshvara was talking physics but rather psychology, when he said:
"Here, O Sariputra, bodily-form is voidness; verily, voidness is bodily-form. Apart from bodily-form there is no voidness; so apart from voidness there is no bodily-form. That which is voidness is bodily-form; that which is bodily-form is voidness. Likewise (the four aggregates) feeling, perception, mental imaging, and consciousness (are devoid of substance)."
This seems clear, since the sutra leads off with "bodily form" as the first of the "aggregates," i.e., one of the skhandas, the five psychological constituents of fictitious identity.
Thus, the empty "form" is our experience of concrete selfhood. This form experience is very concrete, but purely psychological. I think meditation helps us both to emphasize our experience of the skandha of form and simultaneously perceive its transparency (emptiness). When we practice simple awareness of physical sensations, while taking a walk, or engaged in sitting practice, or in the practice of mindful sexual experience, to name my three favorites, we experience the ephemerality of our concreteness.
Thus, we feel that form is concrete, particularly if someone parks a truck on our foot, but the actual experience of pain is transparent, empty, transitory awareness. Only a fool would hesitate to say "Get that truck off my foot!" Only a Bodhisattva will simultaneously experience no attachment to the injury or anger toward its cause. That is because the Bodhisattva, like the Buddha (in a prior incarnation) when the Raja of Kalinga cut off his limbs, was free from attachment to the skandha of form.
It is understandable that Gary Zukhov and other people whose first love is science may misunderstand the Heart Sutra's teaching that "form is emptiness, emptiness is form" as a statement of scientific fact.
It is for people like ourselves, whose first love is dharma, to gently emphasize that the Buddha was the Great Physician, not the Great Physicist.
Buddha's insights were into the human mind, not into the arcana of physics -- which has the marvelous task of describing a world where the speed of light is finite, but space is limitless, and curved as well!
You will recall that, when Jesus was asked whether Jews should pay taxes to Caesar, he asked to see a coin, and indicating that the coin itself was impressed with Caesar's image, he responded, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's." Looking within our soul, we see that it is the very image of the divine. We give our coins to the economy, and dedicate our spirit to its pure source.
Similarly, the Buddha had his sphere of activity -- the realm of the human mind. Einstein, Fermi, Bohr, etcetera, have their own realm. As fair-minded Buddhists, we should have no trouble allowing scientists to explain what matter is, while leaving it to Buddha to clarify what our perception of matter is.
Buddha is Lord of the Mind, which is the only realm he explored or endeavored to explain. To make him the Lord of Form will lead to an unfair loss of credibility for the Lord of Mind.
Answer 2:
Physics should not be confused with Dharma. I object to the misuse of the concept of emptiness to discuss the nature of purported "objective phenomena."
Dharma is applied psychology for uncovering the dynamics of the mind, which siddhas surf with unerring exactitude and complete abandon.
The emptiness we are lacking is emptiness of preconceptions, which leaves us posing rigid like chesspieces on eternity's gameboard, or attempting to take leave of ourselves, but always leaving our hat behind. Eventually the hats disappear, but still they leave a ghostly afterimage.
To expound the emptiness of things is to presume their existence. How can such refutation succeed?
Once you posit the existence of anything beyond yourself, the "hair's breadth difference" of which the Third Patriarch spoke has been established, and "Heaven and Earth are set immeasurably apart."
If you accept yourself and do not attempt to refute your own existence out of fear of yourself, and accept all appearances and do not attempt to refute their existence out of fear of them, you are an ordinary man. How fortunate.
Answer 3:
Certainly "both ends" of the sensory experience -- "perceptive organ" and "perceived object" are part of the skhanda of form. But as Professor Guenther noted, when you see red, there is no patch of red stuck to your eye. The Buddha's effort was to show us the transparency of the whole process of perception by making the image and the image-perception part of a single flow. Realizing the unitive nature of the mental process of perception, from which neither subject nor object can be abstracted, we move towards dissolving the imputed separateness of perceiver and perceived.
Buddha's effort was not to explain how the eye functions with a lens made of water, focusing light on a retina infused with rods and cones, connected to an optic nerve that feeds impulses to the visual cortex.
That's for the neurobiologists.
Without particle accelerators, microscopes, gas chromatographs, and radio telescopes, Buddha could only be the Great Hypothesizer of physical reality.
Without deep meditative insight, Einstein could not teach the Heart Sutra.
Render unto Einstein what is Einstein's; render unto Darwin what is Darwin's; render unto Leary what is Leary's, and unto Buckminster Fuller what is his; also and always render unto Budhha what is Buddha's. This does not reduce the Enlightener of all Humanity to a lesser status, if indeed you see Shakyamuni that way. But you do not want to make the same error the Pope made when he forced Galileo to retract his description of a heliocentric universe.
Absolutism, omnisciency-mongering, arrogation of all-knowledge to the exalted ones -- these are the products of dogma.
Humble acceptance of the limits of inquiry, and acknowledgment that one cannot know what one has not inquired into -- these are the marks of honest intellectual labor.
Q. The Buddha's teaching is not rocket science.
A. But every bit as ambitious. If Buddha was correct, and Nirvana exists, with perhaps additional Mahayana and Siddhayana plugins, then it's big news in my little patch of dirt, where death still reigns supreme. If indeed there is a path beyond sorrow, let's find out what it is, and implement it.
But it is possible that what Buddha discovered has been lost. We really don't know . Maybe we are consuming substitutes developed over the years. They are all so interesting that it doesn't really matter.
Perhaps Buddha discovered something personal, and all of his followers also discovered something personal, as Buddhism has continued to be understood by everyone in their own way. Perhaps Sangha is good for supporting each other in their personal quest, as distinct from trying to conform to a shared external vision.
Perhaps removing impediments to thinking altogether is a good first step toward allowing all the elements in our minds to circulate to that new arrangement that is more satisfying and less anxious. I think it helps if we intuit and affirm the existence of a better way to be, and then go there, right away.
Maybe there is a mental corollary of physical gravity that gives your mind inherent stability.
As Chuang Tzu said, "If a drunk man falls out of a cart, he will not be hurt, or if he is hurt he will not be killed. This is because his spirit is in a state of security. If such security can be gotten from wine, how much more so from the Tao?"
Q. What is gravity in a spiritual sense?
A. "To him that hath, more shall be given, and to him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which he hath."
This sounds like "an hard saying," a lot like the "eat my flesh, drink my blood" speech, "after which, many more walked not with them." One of Jesus' more punk days.
Yet true in the case of gravity's effect upon small objects, which "lose themselves" to the larger gravity of the planet. The planets themselves are in bondage, unable for all their velocity to escape the grip of the sun. The sun is unable to alter its place in an outer arm of the galaxy. The galaxy is unable to change its place in the meta-galaxy. Thus all is in order, and all are subjects of the larger order.
"Just remember that you're standing
on a planet that is spinning
approximately 1,000 miles an hour,
which is orbiting a star..."
Yet gravity is called "the weak force."
This is to distinguish it from "the strong force."
The strong force is that existing in electron bonds.
Boom! Gunpowder -- nitrates. Sodium explodes on contact with water.
Gravity is weak by comparison.
But it has a characteristic that the strong force does not.
It aggregates.
Because gravity aggregates, it is actually the first stage of the process of stoking the solar furnaces, the cradles of all creation.
The hydrogen of space gets pulled together. The big clumps have more gravity. They overpower comparatively smaller clumps. Aggregation proceeds at faster rates. Gravity continues to aggregate, and overwhelms the atomic structure of the hydrogen atoms, causing them to release their internal fire. The subatomic volcano inside the star will ultimately be the laboratory in which all of the atoms in the Periodic Table are constructed.
Gravity is just the "in door" for cosmic sex.
Gravity and space are inseparable.
Anything that exists within space is subject to gravity.
All things that are subject to gravity will aggregate.
As the aggregation process proceeds, the structure of those things, atoms, subject to aggregation, is destroyed.
In the cosmic smelters of the stars, atoms are melted and the resulting stew radiates energy.
Energy, as we know, is not subject to gravity.
Q. Indians are superior to Whites.
A. Racial superiority
Defined by
Cranial size
Or
Penis size
Take your prick!
Not to leave the women out
What's the value of a pout?
Or the meaning of a smile?
Big hips or small tits
Frizzy hair
or silky locks
You couldn't choose
or you would lose.
Genetic adulation
primordial undulation
As Iggy sez
"We're mixin' the colors"
Q. There's no question that the Buddhist scriptures accurately relate the Buddha's teachings.
A. History is a farce,
the weaving of generations
of con-men,
deluding their fellows.
Q. The Dalai Lama is Buddhism's living symbol of non-violence. Yet even he has indicated that if it had been practical for the Tibetan army to stop the Chinese, he would have ordered it to do so to prevent the resulting suffering.
A. I think if we examine this statement, it says, "If I thought I could have won, I would have ordered my soldiers to fight."
Pretty simple philosophy, and one most people would agree with.
Q. Does Buddhism have soul?
A. The soul rap is that the Buddha's somewhere, hummin' not bummin', crusin' not bluesin', diggin' not dissin', and so he's still got a heart. The soul rap is that you still gotta be good 'cause UR Somebody. Well maybe I ain't done the math good, but every time I look in the mirror I see one face gettin' older everyday. No more, no less. Not two, not zero, just me, the unsung hero.
So I'm stuck with one, that's 1 for those who count, and it's an infinite amount. Loosen up, I say, and I can play 2-for-1, 4-for-1, or 32 or 64-for-1 (beats per bar, I mean). My mind can split time like a cesium clock, land on the moment like a seagull on a floating raft, when I let go and say yes.
Q. How should we relate to our "special" experiences?
A. The door through which I've most often passed to reach an end of striving is humongous striving. Taking all-day law exams or trying lawsuits. When you're done, you're done, and you know you did your all, and you just let go. Everything's okay then.
As far as great epiphanies go, I've utterly ceased to look for them. Chasing insights gives me a pain. Be straight, be simple, be surprised.
Q. How did lefties became Buddha-bots before righties?
Answer 1:
Poets read haiku.
Poets smoked pot.
Poets wore berets.
Poets played bongos.
Once they did all of these things, they became beatniks.
Beatniks listened to jazz.
Jazz was cool.
Musicians smoked pot.
Beatniks smoked pot.
Musicians and beatniks sat around in a stoned reverie listening to cool jazz.
While they were sitting around stoned, they began to discuss some heavy shit.
They had already lost their moral allegiance to anything associated with White Anglo Saxon Protestantism by practicing (or aspiring to practice) interracial sex.
Thus, they didn't consult Gerard Manley Hopkins when trying to unravel the mysteries of life.
There had recently been a war with Japan, which facilitated cultural interfusion.
Also, many servicemen brought home mementos of Japanese culture, bought at fire sale prices from war-ravaged civilians.
DT Suzuki wrote a book about Zen that was very popular with pot smoking beatnik jazz hipsters, but barely made a dent in the farm-belt reading market.
Then there were the Beatles, and their Maharishi and their Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds code.
Then there were the Leary and Alpert duo, who were so far left they got run out of Harvard in disgrace, and that's way fuck'n left, I'm sure you'll agree.
That's where we got Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. In that order.
Next there was the Summer of Love, 1967, when LSD dropped like a bomb on the brains of thousands of young people, and suddenly a guy who set his guitar on fire was front page news. Not in Peoria, however.
Then there was nudity, free sex, Students for a Democratic Society, and airline stewardesses on holiday with Mick Jagger at the Playboy mansion with Gloria Steinem. All roundly frowned on by the moral majority.
Now we have all the post-acid heads fanning out across the land, thinking they can grow shit, like they are Amish or something. That sort of impracticality doesn't afflict your average redneck.
Confused, poor groups of drug-addled, sex-crazed, hot-tub-hopping, peyote-munching question-asking, dome-inhabiting, spiritual questing fools! Gathering together like clumps of moss on fallen trees in the damp areas of the Pacific Northwest, these communities of people, often indistinguishable from Dead Heads, played host to the foreign spores of bald-headed, robe-wearing, Nibbana-talking groovy guys. Plenty more stupid hippies where they came from, like an infinite supply of mulch. Meanwhile, the decent people in the trailer parks kept their distance from all of this.
Then after some time, the foreign spores multiplied, completely overwhelming the peace and love Ph level in the original nutrient mass. The hippies were required to turn in the keys to their heads by their gurus, senseis, sifus, etceteratum. Bathing in the new flow of "nothing matters" consciousness, they lost all meaningful attributes of leftiness, becoming some of the most tight-assed neo-Calvinists on the planet, focused on ruling their own little flocks with the whip of Doctrinal Correctness.
Still, in matters political, due to long Pavlovian conditioning, these psychological geldings still make their way to the trough of common liberalism and whiney good will. Buy a Volvo and all will be well.
Thus, you need fear nothing from these Buddhists except social rejection, for that is the entirety of their range of influence. They snub like pros.
Q. Why does it matter if self is "empty" or not?
A. To say that it doesn't matter whether self is empty or not is like saying, "I don't care whether an airplane has wings or has wheels, because I'm going in the airplane, whatever it is!"
Q. If compassion, wisdom and clarity were inherent to emptiness, everything empty would already be enlightened, even rocks.
A. Gyatrul Rinpoche once told me, around 20 years ago, as we were standing together in the place where he later built the Tashi Choling temple: "The Chinese are really good at understanding emptiness, but they go too far. They think that emptiness is just empty, without any qualities. No compassion, no luminosity!" He seemed to think that such a notion was preposterous. He advised me further not to make that same mistake. This explanation helped me a lot, because until then, I had been confused about the subject of emptiness "versus" compassion. Fortunately, the emptiness that I had thought was "absolute" really is not, as his explanation made clear.
Q. Isn't compassion really just renunciation of our own selfish perspective?
A. Would that it always were.
Joke:
A kid discovers his kitten lying on the floor stiff and cold. He begins to cry. His dad tries to comfort the boy. "Look," says the father, "we'll give your kitten a big funeral. I've got a fancy wooden cigar box, and we'll put him in there on some velvet scraps from your mother's sewing box. Then we'll dig a hole in the backyard and we'll write a special burial service and say it over the casket. And then we'll make a cross down in my workshop and put the kitten's name on it in gold paint."
Just then, the kitten begins to stir and wiggle and come back to life. The kid sees this, and says, "Dad, can we kill it?"
From PJ O'Rourke's Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut 1995. (Coincidentally, I bought this copy in a used bookstore in Ocean Beach, San Diego while Bush was stealing the 2000 election. It comes complete with the following inscription: "Dad -- As long as you continue to be on this conservative kick you may as well read someone with a sense of humor. Happy birthday, Love, Tony."
Q. What's the best way to get enlightened as soon as possible?
A. When I got into this quest for enlightenment thing I was about fourteen years old. It got worse all through my late teens, early twenties, and finally cooled off when I had my third child and went to law school to pay the bills.
Man, when I was nineteen I was sure I would be enlightened soon. Went to India that year, and went to Bodhgaya, and thought I would get there for sure.
In my early twenties I started getting antsy.
By my mid twenties the anxiety got extreme, with very disturbing physical sensations -- anxiety about not meditating at least two hours a day, compulsive ideation about spiritual topics, obsession with reading spiritual books, physical tension surrounding breath and posture.
I'm not here to give a life story, so I'll spare you the rest of it. I still suffer from the hope that I'll get enlightened, or at least that I won't suffer endless torment. But I'm not driven by it very much.
Believe me, there's no front of the line in this enlightenment thing. No point in pushing to the front of anything. Might as well be nice and tell newbies a nice, self-deprecating joke, for all the good your tight-assed piety will do 'em.
Q. Isn't the essence of Buddhism to let go of everything, to cease clinging desperately to transient, woeful, empty phenomena?
A. My own experience with the exhilarating feeling of jettisoning every attachment has turned out to be something like that of a little boy who puts on a towel, calls it a cape, and jumps over his bed, proclaiming it is a tall building that he is leaping at a single bound. "I'm SUPERMAN!"
If you love this little boy, it's beautiful, and you don't say, "No you're not, there is no Superman." In fact, you don't even worry about it, since you know he knows he's not Superman, and there's no risk he'll try the same trick with a ten-story drop.
Except in the case of the Buddhist who wants to abandon everything, the big test is to try the leap off the Empire State Building. I just got a call last night from a nun who can't deal with her needs for a place to live. The kind people of our old Buddhist Center in Southern Oregon decided to evict her from her trailer where she'd lived for years (just not cool enough, I guess), and now she's just trying to make it on the outside. She wanted some legal advice about tenants rights. I referred her to the right people, but let's face it, this is not dignified for her. She's in her fifties, and she's cut every string that binds her to the survival and support systems of the 21st century.
Don't let it happen to you.
Q. Buddhism is about letting go of all of the misconceptions, ideologies, and egotistical attachments that Americans hold so dear.
A. True also of Tibetans, Italians, Nova Scotians, etcetera. No use setting sail for far lands if what you really need to do is go someplace entirely other. No sense adopting foreign customs if customs altogether are the problem.
But actually, I disagree completely. I don't think Buddhism is "about letting go." It's about letting go of letting go.
Q. What about the four sublime states: love, compassion, joy and equanimity?
A. Once, walking on Venice Beach and back up toward Santa Monica, I thought perhaps maybe the four minds are ways of seeing the four types of people we see: the ones we like, the ones we don't like, the ones we don't care about, and the ones we care about extremely much.
And by mixing up the mind-states you have for these different types of people, you can loosen your fixed ways of relating to people.
So for example, you don't care about someone, so try feeling love for them ... or you hate someone, try not caring about them ... or you love someone intensely -- try not caring about them.
Maybe this is just applied insanity of course.
Q. What is engaged Buddhism?
A. If engagement implies dualistic effort, then engaged Buddhism is not Buddhism at all. If engaged Buddhism is a preparatory form of Buddhism that leads to higher Buddhism, then the higher Buddhism is making a distinction that makes it not the highest Buddhism.
Dana prajna paramita per Suzuki Roshi is just having no self-concerned attitude. Then all is given without thought of giving.
Q. Traditional Buddhist scriptures are meant to be repetitive in order to facilitate meditation.
A. The issue is one of rhetoric. The argument can well be made that the instructions for a practice should be as brief as possible so you will have the most time left for practice. "Just sit."
The ponderous style of repetitively presenting one new concept every fourteen lines, sandwiched between rotating drums of repetitive terms, has always annoyed the holy excreta right out of me.
After years of reading and writing law, I've come to appreciate it deeply when someone can just spit it out. Then we can get on to testing and practicing.
On the other hand, just because I don't like a rhetorical style doesn't mean it has to change. If other people like it, I can find something else to read, eh?
Q. Is it typical for a newbie visiting a Tibetan-style dharma center to be advised to take refuge in the three jewels before they will be allowed to practice certain sadhanas? I attended a refuge ceremony, which took place in a foreign language, and after the ceremony was over I found that in addition to having taken refuge in the 3 jewels, I also took refuge in the lamas, yidams and protectors. I didn't receive any further instructions, but was told to simply show up for practice, and that is when my feelings of disorientation and abandonment began. The other students emphasized devotion to the guru, and practice, but there was no graduated or beginning level teachings, just mainly tantric. I begin to hear about the dangers of breaking my vows, including insanity and vajra hell, but I didn't know who to turn to with my questions, because the lama was away, and the students weren't capable of answering them.
Answer 1:
Advice to Newbie: Surely you merely imagine that something is amiss at this center where you took refuge in the Three Jewels and it turned out you were taking refuge also in the Lama and the Protectors.
Surely you have incurred no samaya with the Protectors, as we know they are very forgiving about their relations with newbies.
Surely any suspicions you feel about your fellow-students' inability to answer your questions are the result of your own confused mind.
The answer, and the problem, is always with the student. Wherever this Dharma center is, whoever the teacher is, whatever the approach, the organization need never be questioned.
There are those who speak with authority concerning vows. As everyone knows, the Buddha's pre-enlightenment Sangha (the ascetics) said he had broken his vows by eating food, and refused to associate with him. In response to this, the authorities will argue that the Buddha's vow to not eat food was not a very important vow, and that whatever vows you took were much more important. Also, the authorities will note that you can always break a vow to save your health, and Buddha was starving to death. Unfortunately, many Tibetan prayers say "even at the cost of my life, I will keep this commitment," and the protector prayers specifically wish bloody death on "vow breakers."
Short answer to your question, Newbie -- take vows SERIOUSLY. Don't ever let anyone say "You took a vow" if you didn't know you were taking it, or you "took it" in a foreign language.
Common sense here. A vow is a promise to yourself. If you don't know what you've promised to do or not do, then you haven't made a promise. Don't let anyone tell you "your commitments." You wouldn't marry someone if they said you promised to marry them, but couldn't remember it, even if they showed you a videotape of you making the promise. You'd say, "That's not voluntary. You drugged me or something. I'm not marrying you."
So Just Say No to Promiscuous Vow-Making!
Answer 2:
Many Buddhists push their minds and bodies too hard. To hang on to commitments beyond the point of utility, particularly out of the fear of supernatural consequences, is foolish, the same kind of foolishness the Buddha abandoned when he broke his ascetic vows and had some lunch.
