Cold Mountain

 

World/Spirituality

There's an article about a sect of Buddhist monks in Thailand that is a grift. Reddit is going bonkers over it, so many people imagined Theravada was the holiest of the holies. 

The Dhammakaya tradition: It's a yogavacara tradition founded by Luang Pu Sodh Candasaro. You can watch a 10 minute video about him.

There's a page of articles in the Bangkok Post about the current leader Phra Dhammajayo "Luang Por Dhammajayo's approach to Buddhism seeks to combine the ascetic and meditative life with modern personal ethics and social prosperity." I guess you can go too far blending in with modern times.

Such a wide variety of reactions from "that's not Buddhism" to "yea, that shit happens all the time."

This always brought up the question: Is it not Buddhism if it's worldly? Do the crimes people commit as Buddhists stick to their non-Buddhist parts? That goes along with the idea that Buddhist's can't engage in war. If you were in Ukraine would it be right to fight tyranny over democracy? Or should you retreat further into the woods to meditate?

The boy Buddha rising up from a lotus. Crimson and gilded wood, Trần-Hồ dynasty, Vietnam, 14th-15th century.

I've seen one to many plea to buy a Buddhism course

The majority of Buddhism on the internet is a plea to buy a course of the teachings, and/or trying to establish a brand for a book or a course or a retreat, or all three. I don't really think you need to buy anything, but if you do, buy a hard copy of the word of the Buddha to carry with you, though more than likely you already have a smartphone with a free app that accesses the Pali Canon, for free.

Next maybe spend the minimum to go on retreat.

Of course transport to sangha night costs.

I get it that people try to make a profession out of something they love. Best wishes to you. I don't think you have to be chronically poor either. I have no problem supporting teachers for your sangha, not saying don't do that.

Buy whatever you want. Not trying to control you. Expressing my feeling of distaste for social media in Buddhism to be all about selling. Perhaps I'm wrong to look at social media for teachings, true. Need to get off social media. 

Friday sundown to Saturday sundown is a media cleanse for me. I end up reading a lot more.

Bonus Link: Upali's Becoming a Monk (YouTube)

 

 

Sukavati

 

Reddit quote from u/huianxin 

I studied a bit of East Asian and Buddhist art history in college as an undergrad.

The picture from OP is a copy of  Ding Guanpeng's (丁観鵬) 1758 painting, Supreme Bliss World. Ding Guanpeng was one of the Qianlong Emperor's favorite court artists. As one of the Imperial academic artists, Ding Guanpeng was known for his landscape paintings, as well as paintings of Buddhist subjects.

This one specifically appears to be a copy of the original painting. Digging around some academic papers, I found a 2018 Masters thesis discussing this painting and its copies, and this specific one appears to be credited as

Anonymous, Weaving a Brocade Scroll of the Supreme Bliss World on an Azurite-colored Ground (Shiqing di jile shijie zhichengjin tuzhou 石青地极 乐世界织成锦圖軸). Song brocade tapestry. 448 x 196 cm. In the collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing.

The Masters thesis is quite excellent and contains very detailed analysis of the work, so I won't say too much here. Here are some main points. Ding Guanpeng was commissioned by the Qianlong Emperor, who was a devotee of Tibetan Buddhism, to create a painting of the Western Paradise modeled after Guanxiu 貫休 (832-912)’s painting. Guanxiu's painting of the Western Paradise unfortunately does not exist today. As others have identified, the central figure is Amitābha, the figure to the left is Avalokiteśvara, and the figure to the right is Mahāsthāmaprāpta. On the flanks of Amitābha are two groups of five arhats, below them, two groups of eleven arhats. Between Amitābha and Avalokiteśvara and Amitābha and Mahāsthāmaprāpta are groups of several bodhisattvas. Behind Avalokiteśvara is a group of eighteen individuals that appear as officials, one appears taller than the others, likely the male patron of the piece. Behind Mahāsthāmaprāpta is a similar group, with a central female patron. At the bottom in the lotus pond are figures standing on lotus flowers, likely devout practioners reaching the Pure Land.

This painting was copied a couple times and reflected the Qianlong Emperor's interest and devotion to the Western Pure Land. The painting by Ding Guanpeng used historical pieces as reference, but added unique elements for its imperial and Manchu patrons.

Reference: Shiyu Zheng, Emperor Qianlong’s Pictorial and Physical Sites for Western Paradises, University of Washington 2018 (may be downloaded for free)

Enfeoffed

 Enfeoffed means to get land, to be given land in exchanged for a pledge of service.

NIMBY

This is part 2 of another essay I wrote.

Not In My BackYard is the idea where you don't want things in your neighborhood because you want it pristine and pure. No group homes for disabled people. No foster homes for troubled youths. No sober houses. No sex offenders. 

Those people should go elsewhere. I deserve a pristine untroubled place. It's a natural instinct to protect you home, and by extension neighborhood, and to keep things the way they are.

They want to build an 8 story building near me. It's been approved for 2 floors, which they've already built. There's a town hall meeting to discuss. This is the second one. I can't make it, so it's a moot point whether I go.

My daughter had the ethical clarity to say, "why not, people need places to live." She doesn't think about crowding, parking issues, crowding at the park. She can't anticipate problems. Mo people mo problems. 

My nature loving relatives built houses where there were none, and decreased the amount of wild land. I think living in the city is the best thing, after going vegan and not flying a lot, for the environment. But living in the city you are alienated to some extent from more wild settings in nature. Those are important too.

Gated communities are the fantasy of NIMBY. Controlling who can even walk down the street. 

As the climate changes, if income inequality increases, these problems are just going to be exacerbated. 

In a way going to a monastery is about choosing conditions for your spiritual growth. It's not at the expense of others, hopefully. They seem so infrequent and benign. They were repositories of learning and culture in a crazy wild world. One of my favorite movies is The Secret of Kells.  

Yesterday was Kwan Yin's birthday. She who hears the cries of the world. Needless to say Nimby isn't a kind stance, but to an extent an understandable one and not bad in certain circumstances like a monastery. 

Happy Birthday Kwan Yin!

Links:

Photo on Reddit

Dates of holiday in upcoming years.

Wikipedia

Cold Mountain

 

Draug Srin Mo

(Milarepa: source)

It's cool Tiban culture, to some extent, hasn't embraced the internet in English. 

I'm reading chapter 4 of Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa by Tsangnyön Heruka, and it's about the demon Draug Srin Mo who pestered Milarepa, but he won her over with his songs. 

When I think of Milarepa, I think of this fierce meditator who lived in caves in rural Tibet, and would go into town and talk to people and sing these songs to them. People always wanted him to live outside their village.

(I have the old translation by Garma C.C. Chang. Chang studied with the 9th Gangkar Rinpoche Karma Chokyi Senge at Gangkar Monastery for 8 years. He has an interesting biography as well but you can't get a lot of information about him. I was thinking I should get another translation, and then I wondered if I read it enough to justify. You can see updated translations online.)

There's one scholarly article in English on Draug Srin Mo by Carla Gianotti, an Italian scholar. While you can have Google translate her webpage, there are no books for sale in English by her. 

The book lists an alternate name of Padmasambhava, Bedma Tutrin, and there's no entry found on google. It got me looking at alternative search engines to see if I could find anything. Alternative search engines seem to be obsessed with privacy, the environment but seem to offer little else. Even the Rigpa Shedra wiki doesn't have an entry for Draug Srin Mo. Maybe there's another spelling just like there's another spelling of Padmasambhava.

Reminds me of the Brothers Karamazov, when everyone had all these kind of weird nicknames. I'll never understand how Richard transforms into Dick.

This also reminds me of the importance of language. I was listening to Sangharakshita talk about Dardo Rimpoche and how he give him sadhana practices in Tibetan and to some extent he was struggling to understand.

 

 

Interesting post on rebirth

"The world is full of traps. Things that want to stick to you. You can identify them as something that makes you feel good for attaining. Knowledge is one.

knowledge is additive. You collect it and add it to “you.” In buddhism teaches you to build a chisel, a tool to help you carve things away. Koans are knowledge used to make you realize you can never know for example.

You will never understand rebirth. And if you do, you are very likely wrong. So why bother? No one here knows. We can quote you things from subjectively wise people, but again, it’s all additive. I assume you know this but havent incorporated it fully. Either take the idea of rebirth to such an extreme that you get frustrated and realize conscious overthinking is useless (Take it “into your heart”) or just plain let it go."

(Source)

Cold Mountain

 

The Story of Some Bhikkhus

While residing at the Jetavana monastery, the Buddha uttered Verses (271) and (272) of this book, with reference to some bhikkhus.

Once, there were some bhikkhus who were endowed with virtue; some of them had strictly observed the austere practices (dhutanga), some had wide knowledge of' the Dhamma, some had achieved mental absorption (jhana), some had achieved Anagami Phala, etc. All of them thought that since they had achieved that much, it would be quite easy for them to attain Arahatta Phala. With this thought they went to the Buddha.

The Buddha asked them, "Bhikkhus, have you attained Arahatta Phala?" Then they replied that they were in such a condition that it would not be difficult for them to attain Arahatta Phala at any time. To them the Buddha said, "Bhikkhus! Just because you are endowed with morality (sila), just because you have attained Anagami Phala, you should not be complacent and think that there is just a little more to be done; unless you have eradicated all moral intoxicants (asavas), you must not think that you have realized perfect bliss of Arahatta Fruition."

Then the Buddha spoke in verse as follows:

Verses 271 & 272: Not only by mere moral practice, nor by much learning, nor by acquiring concentration, nor by dwelling in seclusion, nor by assuring oneself, "I enjoy the bliss of Anagami Fruition that is not enjoyed by common worldlings (puthujjanas)," should the bhikkhu, rest content without attaining the extinction of moral intoxicants (asavas) [i.e., without attaining arahatship].

At the end of the discourse all those bhikkhus attained arahatship.

End of Chapter Nineteen: The Just or the Righteous

by Karma Phuntsok

This beautiful magazine showed up today

Check out this new Buddhist art magazine

Wabi Sabi

 

 

Pickup

 

A line of thinking

So there's the case where the monk's family doesn't have an heir, and the family wants a grandson. The fellow has already robed, and taken vows. But he goes off into the woods and fucks his ex-wife three times, and she has a baby. 

The coda to the story is that his wife and child later become monks, so in a way the family didn't get a heir even though they got another child. (source)

The Buddha is upset. He's more worried about the reputation of the sangha it seems. Now the sangha is seen as something more flexible than he intended. 

He says it would be better to put your dick into a snake, a fiery pit.

Now maybe that only applies to a monk, sure. But doesn't he recommend becoming a monk if you're really serious? Lay Buddhists are nice and all, but the whole program is set up for a kind of goal and the goal kind of invites one, like a slippery slope, to go for it. 

Later on in Mahayana it might be a bodhisattva act to fuck an ugly old woman. Sangharakshita thought a monk who had a family secretly on the side was a better monk than the other monks who didn't have a family on the side. Who knows if these thoughts violate the Buddha's intentions. He could not have anticipated the developments and worldviews of the future. Was the Buddha's attitude only of that culture, of those times? How much does it enter into our own times.

That gets me to the question: Is anything but a monk's life for a Buddhist? I mean I know there are millions of people who think they're Buddhists, but their adherence to the teachings are minimal at best. A culture developed around lay practice, ethics, and such. 

I reject the duality of monastic versus lay. But would you ever really progress with anything unlike a monk's life. I mean I'm sure you can have deep meditative experiences, a level of insight that is useful and pragmatic to a worldly life.

There's the image of a rubber band snapping back to its original shape. Is that what the lay Buddhist does when they go on a retreat, and re-enter their lives? 

Cold Mountain has a poem that disabuses us of the idea of a kind of spiritual bypass of practice. To imagine some amazingly wild mental state for a devoted monk is a bit hopeful. 

Ths shame the Buddha puts on the monk is quite extraordinary, if that's what he really said. It makes you think of the sex scandals in sanghas in America. They really put the sangha in danger. Richard Baker's expose in the book Shoes At The Door for the San Francisco Zen Center. Yashamitra's letter to the order about Sangharakshita in Triratna. A Shambhala temple in Boulder just filed for bankruptcy. It's hard not to imagine Chogyam Trungpa's parties where 7 year olds snorted coke aren't part of that. 

The story of Buddhism in America is almost a story of sexual misconduct and failure. The internet has been scrubbed of many of these stories by well meaning people who hope to grow the sangha. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism is still recommended in book recommendations of r/Buddhism on Reddit. All that makes me think it's easier to say things, harder to actually do them. It turns out that Trungpa was perhaps the most spiritually materialist person out there. The legacy he left to his son is that his son copied his behavior and leads a faltering sangha. 

Now I think when people do worldly things, that doesn't take away from spiritual ideals, it only tells us to be wary of others manipulation, and how hard it is. Never discount your feelings of what is right and wrong, don't do something that feels wrong. Especially young women. But there are other abuses. I read about a woman who sold her house and gave the money to the sangha and then they charged her rent to live in the temple. That's assuming something without getting it in writing, but still I wouldn't put the fault on her.

How did I spin off onto things that take you away from the ideals. The Dhutanga monks.

The middle way can justify anything, but there's difference between almost starving to death and having some rice milk, and having another bowl of ice cream after a hard day. Not to diminish psychic suffering. I think the suffering in middle class America is quite intense. The pressure to live up to a certain standard of living is immense. 

This tension plays out in the Theravadin prohibition on music, versus the love of music as pointing to the beauty of the spiritual life. Banning of music seems extreme. Monks doing heavy metal seems kind of silly but harmless.

So as always, with something deep, the question is do you just leave it alone or do you go deeper and deeper? Is there something wrong with the dilettante path? Some Zen people would have you believe the life of a flaneur is also part of a Buddhist path. You can't just snap it together and be good for a week or a lent's worth of abstinence. Every second of every day has to be a pitched battle of vigilance and confrontation?

Isn't a worldly life also enhanced by some lent like abstinences, temporary forays into controlling our wants. We do the best we can and are the judges of what is useful to us. There are no shortcuts and easy workarounds. Spiritual bypassing is a mistake. Most of the professional Buddhists in America are lay and they lead fairly conventional lives with meditation retreats mixed in. Maybe mappo is among us and nobody can get enlightened. 

People try to find out who's enlightened on the internet. Is it an urban legend? Who's really enlightened right now? Cause maybe I'd go learn from them. The hope that someone else can give you something you don't have. And yet the Buddha shared what he'd learned and others got it. 

I don't know if I'd notice if someone is enlightened. I've had a really good meditation next to someone with a deep practice, and I think I distracted someone with my distracted practice once. How much is projection and how much is whatever, I don't know. I'm disinclined to go for the magical elements and shamanism of Buddhism. 

People fear, what if everyone joined the path and we didn't have any children any more, wouldn't humans die out? I think the path is so subtle and hard, it seems unlikely, more likely is that enlightenment will leave this earth and the prophecy of mappo will come true.

Some people say I don't know what enlightenment is, I just want to be a little kinder. That's a good goal and if more people were like that, that would be great, but enlightenment is kind of a lynch pin of Buddhism, even if you can't describe it with words, only define it negatively.

Which is to say I want to try harder in the spiritual life by my worldly life distracts me, and I lose focus. 

Cold Mountain

 

Zen Buddhism for anybody Vol. 1:

Halos by day; horns by night

There’s a long boring argument among scholars, over the enlightenment or non-enlightenment of some legendary Zen poets.

Their arguments cover a large, varied and curious field of nonsense, but most agree on accusing the work of poets like Cold Mountain, Ikkyu and Ryokan of quite regularly expressing feelings of sadness and desire, which, according to these funny scholars, are not compatible with the Buddhist ideal of detachment.

That is: “They wrote poetry about feeling sad, or hungry, or lonely... Enlightenment is supposed to transcend these feelings; thus, they were not enlightened!”

One might immediately notice here how these poor dummies are beating their heads against the very same barrier that blocked our friend Ming in the previous koan. They are wrongly interpreting Buddhism as an escapist idealization of some “fantastical rainbow world” with no blockages, no sadness, no desires... This is the kind of mistake which could get a fool reborn as a fox five hundred times...

Attached to the fantasy that “it would be far better never to get yourself dragged by the net to begin with”, we block ourselves from understanding the freedom of the golden scaled koi fish as it jumps out of the net.

Of course that Ryokan and Cold Mountain and Shakyamuni and Bodhidharma and me and you – each and every person was and is exposed to the countless nets in the sea. We’re all affected by pain and hunger; by frustration and misfortune...

You can’t “meditate yourself” to some inhuman world that is absolutely free from difficulties and from suffering.

It should be stressed that Zen’s ideal (or, at least, Zen’s ideal as described by some of its most renowned masters) rejects none of our natural human conditions. It actually employs, in this non-rejection, the same stubbornness that it dedicates towards its non-attachment to them.

In a good mood,

The enlightened person becomes a Buddha;

In a bad mood;

Fur and horns grow on the body.

“Detachment” does not mean “rejection”.

Should we really reject part of what we are, so that we maybe correspond to some imaginary ideal; or should we just be exactly who we are?

To hope for a river where no nets are falling from the sky, or to develop the art of jumping out of the net? One of them is the essence of Zen; the other one is a prejudice from people who know nothing about the essence of Zen.

In a nutshell, the idea of Buddhist detachment and enlightenment as “beds of roses”, different from our daily experience – different from the natural world, and independent from it – corresponds to the “kitsch” interpretation of Zen Buddhism.

The kitsch is like covering the ears and screaming LA LA LA at the same time, trying to block the problems of the world by isolating oneself in a cozy and frail fantasy-bubble where feces don’t exist.

Zen Buddhism, in the opposite direction, is a school notoriously known for its contempt towards fussiness and sanctimony; a school from which some of the most prominent masters were making poetry about feces.

An old Chinese saying preached:

"Never fix your sandals when crossing a field of melons, and never straighten your hat when you’re under a peach tree. People will think that you are stealing fruit."

Well, it was precisely a Zen Buddhist monk who replied to this saying with a poem, like this:

Brothels and bars!

No tree and no fruit

Should ever prevent a Buddhist

From straightening their hat!

Savannah Brown

 

Lora Mathis

 

Parasite (2019)

I really liked the 2019 Foreign Film Oscar winning movie, despite it's gruesomeness. 

There's one scene that reminded me of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. There's a story in there. A person is chased by a lion, falls off a cliff. Catches a vine. Elephants down below roaring at the person. Ants crawling, gnawing away at the vine. A bee hive is jostled, and a bit of honey drips into the mouth. 

That is what life is like. Soon to be dead, in great danger, and we focus on a bit of honey. Pleasure is very important to humans and perhaps our downfall. And yet asceticism works, never mind few Americans try it. I mean Americans as north Americans, Mexico and Canada joined in with the USA.

There's this one scene in Parasite. The toilet is squirty shit water as the sewers are backed up, and the sister just climbs a little higher, shuts the toilet seat, and enjoys her cigarette as the shit water squirts out.

Cigarettes aren't pleasurable, but the release from the nicotine withdrawal, is close to pleasure. The release from pain is very close to pleasure and good enough for most humans. It must be wonderful to have that as an option of release of pain. And to join the cool people who smoke. I used to go out on smoking breaks but not smoke. It's a glorious social time. But I hate smoke, I was a runner, and love my lungs too much.

The new moon of February is the New Year day for Tibet. Happy Tibetan New Year!

My take on whether secular Buddhism is real Buddhism.

I think this is a battle of worldviews, culture and the battles inside us.

In modernism, a modern view of the world takes up Buddhism, westerners are skeptical, scientific, often refuges from a Christianity that insists of belief. Seems like Buddhism doesn't have orthodoxy, but orthopraxy, where it's what you do that counts: Meditate, study, reflect, commune, be kind. With the perfection of wisdom tradition there's even a sophisticated almost postmodern viewpoint. A leading spokesman is Stephen Batchelor who broke with Tibetans and went to Korean Soen. He articulated it beautifully, but when he got more into the Pali Canon faltered a bit.

Then you have credulous traditional eastern Buddhist who are rightly twitchy about colonialism and people thinking they know better. They run into the western modernist and don't recognize the Buddhism that is deeply embedded in the culture they hope to preserve. They might insist on a more literal polytheistic worldview, maybe haven't read the perfection of wisdom tradition, and they can behave like an orthodox Christian who focuses on believing questionable metaphysical things literally, in this day and age. They go hard on right view and say modernism just isn't even Buddhism, too much syncretism. Are they protecting the tradition or gatekeeping and confused?

You're allowed to make sense of the tradition and think for yourself. I interpret the story where the Buddha whisks a monk off to the realm of 33 gods as a lovely mythological story that isn't literally true. When I called them the 33 Hindu gods, I was corrected, Hinduism didn't really exist then and they wouldn't have gone away in Buddhism, if you believe in them. I think the mythology of Avalokita and archetypal Bodhisattvas is beautiful and a Jungian could go nuts. So it's not like we're really stripping away that kind of thinking, it's just we don't think you need to pay some kind of belief price to enter. This makes a traditionalist uncomfortable, and the different ways of using language clash in a kind of misunderstanding that seems like there are two different ways of being, and the traditionalist can be persuasive to the insecure who distrust their thinking and want to be obedient. To the modernist it looks a lot by all the harping on obedience in Christianity, regardless of your own thinking.

Buddhism is rooted more in your experience because meditation is about your experience. Christians who went on long meditation retreats have said this is what spirituality is really about. We can't talk about the transcendental because it's beyond words, but I see all the God talk as trying to connect to the transcendental and the mysterious.

On top of that the Pure Land tradition smacks of a trying to get to heaven thing. I don't believe mappo, that the world has degenerated so that nobody can get enlightened any more. That seems like a statement that you can't prove, and a self fulfilling prophecy. I get it that it takes the foot off the pedal and you can just try for enlightenment in the next life, and it brings in more Buddhists. Pure Land is the most popular form of Buddhism. I love the Pure Land sutras, but I take them as inspiration to get on the cushion. And since USA is a Christian nation, Thich Nhat Hanh used to use Christian language to communicate the Dharma in English. To the anti-Christian that's hard to swallow.

Then to accuse the person who rejects the Christian power games, to be called a colonialist is quite challenging. I'm not trying to influence anyone's practice and I'm not a teacher, I'm just discussing how it all makes sense to me. I'm not going to get upset if you call me not a Buddhist. But I also don't think it's a philosophy, I do think it's a religion. And most secular Buddhists are folded into a traditional sangha, and just don't talk about that stuff.

Buddhism has interacted with Confucianism and Taoism in China, and it must interact with the modern world. It must stand the buffeting of ideas the Buddha never commented on, forms of government, scientific advances like DNA, and the rapid change due to technology, and social media. We can see through the patriarchal systems of power. A Buddhist informed westerner with a highly educated and sophisticated worldview is welcome in Buddhism I hope.

Some of the newer forms of Buddhism are marginalized because they try harder to modernize, and they have good teachings, but NKT and Triratna have been marginalized on this subreddit because there have been very human growing pains and abuses of power. There are other traditions that maybe should die because of the level of abuse. The very public scandals that are well documented show the abuse of power and exploitation, and traditional forms seem to do better in fighting an anything goes abuse of power, so there might be some wisdom in being a traditionalist.

Even if Chinese immigrants brought Buddhism to North America 500 years ago, Buddhism is very new in North America, and there are many things to figure out. Add to that in the USA we are battling a political worldview that spits personalities in half, those who want a minimalist government and those who want to try to ameliorate some of the systems that hurt people, modify capitalism into a kinder form. There is a lot of confusing manipulation to try to get their way, information wars. And the leave-me-alone ideology has won a lot lately, it's almost an anti-awakening movement. There is great turmoil in the USA at the moment, growing pains for a young nation. And traditionalism versus progress is part of that. Traditionalism isn't bad, my relatives who stayed in the church don't have drug problems, they build stronger families. And yet I've lost 40% of my friends lately because of politics and culture wars. America is deeply troubled and I almost could see mappo. The pandemic has been very stressful. Then look at what is going on in Ukraine.

There are still monasteries and great teachers who haven't been disgraced or abused power, and many foreign teachers who are willing to try and seed Buddhism in North America. America has an intellectual meditation focused Buddhism, but is weak on community because our society is so fractured at the moment, our rugged individualism, and traditional sanghas are foreign, cling to foreign culture. There is no true American sangha, except maybe new movements in a lay Theravadan tradition in IMS, where you're also allowed to have a secular bent. I have no wonder that traditionalist eastern Buddhist are shaking their heads at the wooly headed Americans. Meanwhile after years of horrible Civil War, Sri Lanka is on the brink of financial collapse. If only the chaos in my head and the chaos in the world would go away. And yet, that is the very mud for the lotus.