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.