essential message

the teachings i'm sharing today are from a visit on march 14 by venerable ani pema, who taught in place of bhante (who was visiting cancer patients in canada) that evening. let me start with a short biography before moving into her teachings.

Ven. Ani Pema was born in India and studied in a Catholic school through her childhood, of which she said she received a good education. In 1988, she came to the United States to visit a Benedictine community for five months. Over time, she began to feel that Christianity was overall something of an extensive misinterpretation of the Benedictine tradition and teachings. One day, Ani Pema saw the Dalai Lama and from that moment on wanted to become a Buddhist nun (which she later felt had been her destiny all along as determined by a previous life connection she witnessed). She became a Buddhist nun at fifteen years old and immediately began to acquire responsibilities she had never had before.

Today, Ani Pema works in the community of Mankato, training students in meditation and studying with Native Americans in shamanism. She believes that she has made a beneficial habit of asking for blessings in the holy places of wherever she is, Christian, Buddhist or other.

Gathering the lessons from her multicultural life experiences, Ven. Ani Pema teaches that even among different religions there is an essential message whose tenets they all tend to share: loving kindness, compassion, and wisdom. These tenets are what give us values and eventually bring us to enlightenment. The message they comprise teaches us yet another valuable lesson, the subject of today's teaching: nun, monk, or layman, there will always be emotions and suffering and pain. Against common assumptions, the lives of nuns and monks too have their sufferings. Perhaps the difference we can observe, however, is that they particularly practice and take the opportunity to overcome their sufferings, to gain lessons from their turmoil. This is in fact hardly a selfish endeavor on their end, for the lessons they discover can be used and practiced by all who listen.

As spiritual practitioners, we must realize that suffering is not negative. Sufferings provide us the opportunity to learn and discover enlightenment. It is indeed favorable to have these sufferings to overcome for this purpose.

We are most often burdened by the five poisons,[1] so we must train through awareness to learn of the essential message (loving kindness, compassion, and wisdom). We must learn forgiveness like that which Christ demonstrated. For those who we often think of as ‘evil’ are in fact those worst poisoned, trapped in their own prisons, and thus need our forgiveness more than anyone else. The peaceful demonstrations of the Tibetans in their conflict with China today provides a good example of this. In the same manner that we should be grateful for our sufferings for the opportunity toward enlightenment they provide, so should we recognize our enemies as our best teachers, for it is from their poison-induced mistakes that we learn what not to do.

Acknowledging our sufferings and our enemies as our teachers is the way of discipline for the spiritual practitioner. Among the six realms of existence,[2] humans are the most fortunate (especially with having body, intelligence, and etc.). Through these lessons and capabilities, only we among the beings of the realms have the opportunity to reach enlightenment.

Through our training, however, we must remember that it is not our responsibility to worry on others, for this only causes more confusion for us all. Whether we are on the right path and using our time meaningfully is our business. Where we worry on others, we condone expectations, which become obstacles to our practice. We must instead remain diligent to our own path, which eventually brings insight into the essential message. The way is always a discipline. Remember that Buddha too was like us in understanding life as a never-ending practice.

In our diligence to our path, we may not see the full extent of our work as it affects others around us and far from us. However, once we have committed dutifully to our path, secure in our diligence, then, we can become closer to one another to generate the loving kindness we discover through it. Thus, the value of intimacy is to share the benefit you reap with others through the diligence you alone must sow.

This benefit can come from anywhere, depending on who we are; you do not have to be Buddhist or Christian necessarily so long as the path you follow brings you to what is holy. As not all of life is suffering, we should remember as well our good qualities such as our Buddha nature, our ‘God-in-us’. At the very least, our training brings us personal satisfaction, but through it we also encounter this potential to become like Buddha, to become like God. In becoming Buddha or God, the essential message works through us into those around us in loving kindness, and so we build our pure motivations to help ourselves for the sake of helping others. Like the always smiling Dalai Lama, we too can create positive energy and harmony through our training. This is the power of our discipline and our prayer.

---

[1] Confusion (Skt.: moha), pride (mana), envy (irsya), hatred (dvesha), and desire (raga). (http://www.khandro.net/about_numbers.htm)

[2] Gods (devas), demi-gods (ashuras), humans, ghosts, tormented/‘hell’ beings, and animals. (http://www.khandro.net/about_numbers.htm)

明るくても、暗くても

thanks to BibleGateway.com

Psalm 139 (from New International Version [NIV])
copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society

For the director of music. Of David. A psalm.

1 O Lord, you have searched me
and you know me.

2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.

3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.

4 Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O LORD.

5 You hem me in—behind and before;
you have laid your hand upon me.

6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.

7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?

8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,

10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.

11 If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,"

12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.

[...]

明るくても、暗くても、神光に導いてもらうさ。

standing fast

i've wanted to share some insights by bonhoeffer i've picked up through reading his Letters & Papers from Prison (p.348-9 and 4-5, respectively). his tribulation at the time of these writings is evident in the title of the book: bonhoeffer was imprisoned for evidence of his aid to jews escaping the nazis' 'Final Solution.' (later we've also discovered his intimate participation in a conspiracy -- with his brother klaus and his brother-in-law hans von dohnanyi -- to assassinate hitler.) from his cell, he informed his loved ones of his condition and of his theorizing in regard to the state of the ("religionless"-inclining) christianity of our age.

(please, by the way, forgive the gender-biased vocabulary: it certainly isn't [nor shouldn't be] limited to men.)

at the end of this post, i've included a short report i've written concerning a few key themes in bonhoeffer's theology of this time of incarceration.....


Christians and Pagans

I
Men go to God when they are sore bestead,
Pray to him for succour, for his peace, for bread,
For mercy for them sick, sinning, or dead;
All men do so, Christian and unbelieving.

2
Men go to God when he is sore bestead,
Find him poor and scorned, without shelter or bread,
Whelmed under weight of the wicked, the weak, the dead;
Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving.

3
God goes to every man when sore bestead,
Feeds body and spirit with his bread;
For Christians, pagans alike he hangs dead,
And both alike forgiving.◊



Who stands fast? (from "After Ten Years")

The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical
concepts. For evil to appear disguised as light, charity, historical
necessity, or social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethical concepts, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Bible it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil.

The ‘reasonable’ people’s failure is obvious. With the best intentions and a naive lack of realism, they think that with a little reason they can bend back into position the framework that has got out of joint. In their lack of vision they want to do justice to all sides, and so the conflicting forces wear them down with nothing achieved. Disappointed by the world’s unreasonableness, they
see themselves condemned to ineffectiveness; they step aside in resignation or collapse before the stronger party.

Still more pathetic is the total collapse of moral fanaticism. The fanatic thinks that his single-minded principles qualify him to do battle with the powers of evil; but like a bull he rushes at the red cloak instead of the person who is holding it; he exhausts himself
and is beaten. He gets entangled in non-essentials and falls into the trap set by cleverer people.

Then there is the man with a conscience, who fights single-handed against heavy odds in situations that call for a decision. But the scale of the conflicts in which he has to choose — with no advice or support except from his own conscience - tears him to pieces. Evil approaches him in so many respectable and seductive disguises that his conscience becomes nervous and vacillating, till at last he contents himself with salved instead of a clear conscience, so that he lies to his own conscience in order to avoid despair; for a man whose only support is his conscience can never realize that a bad conscience may be stronger and more wholesome than a deluded one.

From the perplexingly large number of possible decisions, the way of duty seems to be the sure way out. Here, what is commanded is accepted as what is most certain, and the responsibility for it rests on the commander, not on the person commanded. But no one who confines himself to the limits of duty ever goes so far as to venture, on his sole responsibility, to act in the only way that makes it possible to score a direct hit on evil and defeat it. The man of duty will in the end have to do his duty by the devil too.

As to the man who asserts his complete freedom to stand four-square to the world, who values the necessary deed more highly than an unspoilt conscience or reputation, who is ready to sacrifice a barren principle for a fruitful compromise, or the barren wisdom of a middle course for a fruitful radicalism — let him beware lest his freedom should bring him down. He will assent to what is bad so as to ward off something worse, and in doing so he will no longer be able to realize that the worse, which he wants to avoid, might be the better. Here we have the raw material of tragedy.

Here and there people flee from public altercation into the sanctuary of private virtuousness. But anyone who does this must shut his mouth and his eyes to the injustice around him. Only at the cost of self-deception can he keep himself pure from the contamination arising from responsible action. In spite of all that he does, what he leaves undone will rob him of his peace of mind. He will either go to pieces because of this disquiet, or become the most hypocritical of Pharisees.

Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God -- the responsible man, who tried to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God. Where are these responsible people?◊

On Bonhoeffer

I.

Who is the responsible individual? Bonhoeffer establishes Europe’s (particularly Germany’s) post-war survivors as his subjects, whose “fellowship of spirit and community of life[…]have been proved and preserved throughout these years” (3). We, then, as these subjects, are asked to look with him at the situation within the changing times and ask ourselves collectively ‘who is the responsible person?’

Furthermore, to fully address this question, Bonhoeffer tells us that, “we are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious [anymore]” (279). Thus, we must also ask, as responsible persons (if indeed that), ‘what is a “religionless” Christianity’?

II.

The “responsible man […]tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God” (5). It is the person “whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue” but takes responsible action by sacrificing all of these points in his “faith and exclusive allegiance to God.” Anyone who is willing even to become a sinner in acting in her faith, in following her calling from God, is the responsible person and may have solace in God’s promise of mercy for her. (6)

As such, the responsible person must ask the ultimate question of “how the coming generation is to live” (7). Times have changed, says Bonhoeffer, and we must observe the state of religion as it loses its grounding. He feels the weight of not understanding “what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is for us today” (279), and contemplates how those words used by theologians and the pious that once held the be-all meaning for us all now do not convey what we need to understand these realities. Christianity, as the form or “religious a priori” (280), has maybe been the greatest form of religion; regardless, though, the absence of religious response to the events of the war and its evils is a sure sign that this form no longer holds a meaningful content.

Granted we are capable of being responsible people, we must consider what this means for the future, what the instantiation of a “religionless Christianity” might look like and how to address, then, God’s unique transcendence to “the midst of our life” (282) in the community.

III.

The significance of these problematics concerns the role of God and Christ in the emerging age. As Bonhoeffer says, “[r]eligious people speak of God when human knowledge […] has come to an end, or when human resources fail – in fact it is always the dues ex machina” (281) which exploits either our boundaries or our weaknesses. The religious people (the pious) distorts the community by founding itself on its edge (at the boundary lines) instead of at its center (where the true church is and should be). It cannot, in this way, (unless it changes) provide us the depth of meaning in God and Christ as it used to, and so we are left to our own resources.

loving kindness

this weekend gave me the opportunity to help bhante by manning a booth for taking pledges and donations for the meditation center -- and displaying several splendid piles of books. i'd never seen any of them before. i credit my focus on the more mahayana branch forms of buddhism to be a culprit in my ignorance concerning the 'smaller vehicle,' the theravadan teachings of the buddha. this is bhante's field of study and practice, and getting to help him give out books and take donations and pledges for the meditation center he's composing, i'm thankful to get to interact with this slightly more foreign kind of lessons.

after contributing a bit of monetary means to the end myself, i was sure to take some of his selections home with me to give a closer look. a couple are particularly appealing, including The Buddha and His Dhamma by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, A Tree in a Forest (A Collection of Ajahn Chah's Similes) edited by Dhamma Garden, and What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula (all which may end up on the 'engaged reading' list if i ever get past a mere skimming of their contents). i'm intrigued by how much more attention this tradition seems to give to the scriptures, compared to the 'do-it-yourself' ambience of the zen (禅) influences i've known. there's still, always, so much more to learn.

on to this week's reflections by bhante, march 7:


We must remember: the rendition of meditation we so often see in pop culture -- that is, through television, magazines, and advertisement -- is not representative of the meditation Buddhism teaches, nor the breathing meditation we wish to practice. Neither is it something altogether esoteric from the world; it is something we do in as action response to the observation of our wandering mind. We do not meditate to become like the people we see in the ads, but to habitually exercise our control over mind. The moment that we feel that our involvement with a thought is more important than our practice -- this is the moment, over all others, for us to let it go, and we do this by meditating.

There is a story of an old man who interrogated the Buddha regarding happiness. The Buddha told him to venture out into the world and find out. On the man's journey, he met a young girl, whom he asked regarding happiness. She told him that happiness is love. He then carried on to meet a king, who told him happiness was surrendering. Finally, a passing soldier confided that happiness was nothing other than peace.

The young girl's answer, love, comprises today's lesson. Love is a single word with many, varied meanings. A sense of love we can all likely identify with, however, is one that is in near proximity to its seemed opposition: hate. How is this so? How is it we can feel such love for someone, to then be capable of turning against them -- or them against you -- in the flash of a moment's passing? How is it that we can feel such love for our parents, our siblings, our children, and yet discover tempered resentment toward the object of our passions, our lover, our partner?

Love is certainly emotion; we feel it in the presense of someone we care for. Just as well, we can feel hate, and even for the same person for whom we felt love. Love of this sort is addressed in the teachings of the Buddha in the same fashion other emotions are. They are all capable of controlling us, puppeteering us, making us lose sight of what is happening beyond our tantrums and yearnings. Love of this sort, like all things, is subject to change, and like everything else, it does just this. Love transforms into one of two particular other emotions (though anyone can also easily experience both of these at a given time): pain, and fear.

Where love induces pain or fear, one can be sure to trace it to a fundamental problematic for all sufferings: attachments. Where love really takes the form of lust (though we may not immediately recognize it), one experiences attachment to the object of passions, which brings suffering as both loved and lover change through time. This is a limited love, one that can easily, and intermittently, become hatred for the other, a self-induced estrangement by the nature of attachment.

However, if one really come to understand love, as we strive to do in our personal development through meditation, we can recognize a righteous sort of love, one that bears no hint of attachment but merely an unconditional respect for one's partner. There is another story that the wife the Buddha left in his search for truth eventually became a nun under his teachings and practiced techniques of personal development as we do today.

As the two became older, the Buddha's wife realized that she would soon die and sook the Buddha out to tell him of her vision. The Buddha, whose immense respect for his wife helped him see her unconditional respect for him, weighed this new information and decided he too would leave this world. Together, they escaped samsara, leaving with what they had the good fortune to discover before their end: their undying love that, like them, took no part in the attachments of those who suffer, but in the transcendence of those who recognize the unconditional truth.

If one can cultivate a love of this second sort, they will never encounter through it the pains and fears the former love entails. The love between the Buddha and his wife is the sort that a parent feels for their children, or a sibling for another sibling. It stems from the righteous act of giving and forgiving, and in this way love resembles no emotion but deliberate, intentional action. This comparison demonstrates the difference between having love and giving love; for one can never truly 'have' anything, including love, but can always be in the ever perpetual and ever rewarding process of giving. Giving is kindness, and together we recognize the manifest characteristic of unconditional love: loving kindness.


bhante then ended with a song in his native tongue, which seemed to last forever. it was beautiful, and it made me wonder if the buddha had ever been inclined to sing that way in the midst of his enlightened understanding.

これは歌をうたうようのための感応は知慮のおかげでみつけるぞ。

progressive events

a dedication this evening to progressive events...




8th March, marked International Women's Day. Churches, aid agencies and human rights activists joined the voice of all women across the world to fight for equality and protection. Yesterday, saw massive campaigns being held in both Western and Eastern countries.

Women’s rights have been, in fact improved a lot throughout the past few decades, proved by the increasing role of women in society. However, sexual abuse, violence, human trafficking and many other issues continue to exploit the rights of females in many developing countries or in times of war. ...

-- Christian Today


two sites devoted to revolutionary design community (both thanks to Inhabitat)...

- The Urban Voids competition, an idea generating process, is the second phase of Philadelphia LANDvisions. For this phase of the competition, entrants are free to suggest program elements that best express their idea and are in keeping with the competition aim (specific program elements will be developed in the next phase). ... -- Urban Voids
- The Front Studio team is among five finalists. As a full-service architecture firm that always keeps at least one foot in the speculative and conceptual realm, they have both the technical credentials and the imaginitive wherewithal to pull this whole thing off. ... -- Inhabitat


and finally, a little more scientific demonstration of genetic diversity and geographical differentiation (though it still shouldn't go to say that race is anything much more than a sociopolitical instantiation -- also see "Gender and the Deconstruction of the Race Concept").

surrendering versus self-victimizing

surrendering to christ and self-victimizing oneself before christ are two very
different things, and that difference must be recognized. self-victimizing before christ is to
intentionally bear the punishment of suffering we cause one another. but to
surrender to christ is to open one's heart out to the world, ready and willing,
without a motive for self-advantage, to follow one's god-chosen path to helping
relieve that suffering -- to eventually reunite, as we might say, with god. surrendering to
christ means allowing the possibility -- the likeliness even -- that one is wrong,
such that eventually we might all endorse in the teleology that there may one day be no wrong.

mind and mirrors

a second sharing of bhante's teachings, from feb.28:

What is mind? Is it of the heart? The head? Some say both. But we can really best understand the mind by our emotions. When you become angry, you think and feel in anger. When you are sad, the entire world seems sad to you. Our emotions shape our world according to their orchestration.

The mind, says Buddha, has three specific attributes: (1) it is always running and quick; (2) it is never in the same place moment to moment; and (3) it is completely without form. In this way, it is a distraction, a faculty of control by the emotions over our sensibilities. We cannot see the world clearly by fault of the mind.

In a story of a group of monks attempting to identify mind in competition for the position of the monastry's head master, it was mistaken that the mind is the mirror to ourselves. Only the monastry chef, completely unconcerned with any aspiration for the position, conceived correctly that the mind is in fact the dust on the mirror that is ourselves.

Those who understand the Way can clean the mirror of mind, for only then can we see our reflection and who we really are. Until then, we are slaves to the puppetry of other forces and particularly our emotions. One reason is that we are cognizant of qualities of pleasure versus pain and naturally incline towards pleasure and away from pain. But when we look into ourselves deeply, looking past the dust of mind controlled by determining forces of pain and pleasure, we can see that these feelings are the effects of such causes.

We experience pain or pleasure by effect. Meditating and looking deeply disciplines us to identify pain before its effect, freeing us from the constraints of manipulating forces, freeing us from the role as the puppet.

Noticing our comforts and discomforts around whom we are with is a good way to observe how we react to different stimuli and are manipulated by the causes. Sitting with a group of similarly devoted meditators is recognizably different than sitting, for example, on a public subway train in the heart of Los Angeles. When we are surrounded by strangers, by the unknown, we become anxious and often even scared. We cannot predict what will happen to us, what someone may do to us.

This has intimate connections to our fear of death. But when we come to know ourselves, through wiping the dust off the mirror and seeing our true face, we no longer have to be afraid because we realize that death is not what we thought it was. We see into and past ourselves into the world, and not even death can play a contingent role to our contentment and service in life. When we are ready to die, nothing nor no one can kill us.◊

another transcultural warrior

despite all praise and connections, i have yet to introduce master thich nhat hanh.

Zen Master, poet, peace and human rights activist, Thich Nhat Hanh was born in central Vietnam in 1926 and joined the monkhood at the age of 16. In Saigon in the early 1960's, he founded the School of Youth for Social Services (SYSS), a grass roots relief organization that rebuilt bombed villages, set up schools and medical centers, resettled homeless families, and organized agricultural cooperatives. Rallying some 10,000 student volunteers, the SYSS based its work on the Buddhist principles of non-violence and compassionate action. Despite government denunciation of his activity, Nhat Hanh also founded a Buddhist University, a publishing house, and an influential peace activist magazine in Vietnam. ... -- Mindfulness Bell

hanh is an indirect mentor of mine -- at the very least, a hero passed down by mentors to me. his books -- including Peace is Every Step and No Death, No Fear -- are some of the freshest writings i have encountered among the less hardcore (and often esoteric) works of other buddhists, philosophers, and social activists. they have also been a deep influence to my personal philosophy.


also, a small list of recently added links dedicated to environmental awareness (and not merely the kind the 'environmentalists' advocate):

• Environmental Working Group
• Terrain.org
• Union of Concerned Scientists
  

more to come as i explore these and others