Tuesday, October 13, 2009 at 9:04 am (buddhism, practice)
Tags: air force, army, chapel, military, soldiers, tolerance
Air Force Cadets can practice inside a 300-square-foot Buddhist chapel at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., according to National Public Radio.
The chapel was paid for by the Frederick P. Lenz Foundation for American Buddhism.
Out of 1.4 million people in the military, 5,287 identified themselves as Buddhists as of June 2009.
In September, NPR broadcast a story about the first-ever Buddhist chaplain in the U.S. Army.
Breathe.
Friday, September 11, 2009 at 2:26 pm (buddhism, practice, zen)
Tags: Leonard Cohen, monastic, monks
A long 1998 article about Leonard Cohen’s Zen practice appears in Utne Reader:
Apart from Cohen’s 26-year-old son, Adam, and his 23-year-old daughter, Lorca, the Japanese roshi, or spiritual teacher, seems to be the one still point in his endlessly turning life, and now he accompanies Sasaki to Zen centers from Vienna to Puerto Rico and endures punishing retreats each month in which he does virtually nothing but sit zazen 24 hours a day for seven days on end.
And later:
… Cohen is telling me that he makes no claims to piety or knowledge; his training here, he says, is just a useful response to the “predicament” of his life. At times, as I listen, I can see the coyote trickster who has been working the press for decades. I feel disconcerted, almost, by his very niceness, his openness, his courtesy, as he keeps thanking me for “being kind enough to come here” and tends to my every need as if I were the celebrity and he the journalist …
And my favorite:
“For me,” he says, his voice soft and beautiful, a trace of Canada still in it, “the process is really more like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I’m stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it’s delicious and it’s horrible and I’m in it and it’s not very graceful and it’s very awkward and it’s very painful” …
It’s delicious and it’s horrible. Hallelujah.
Breathe.
Friday, September 4, 2009 at 8:21 am (buddhism, practice, quotations)
Tags: chant, chanting, compassion, dharma, metta, sutra, teachings
Only recently was I introduced to the Metta chant. The practice of chanting these words reinforces our aspiration to feel true compassion for all beings — and very specifically, not only the nice ones, but also including the most horrible, awful people we can imagine.
The chant starts with us, ourselves:
Aham avero homi
May I be free from enmity and dangerabyapajjho homi
May I be free from mental sufferinganigha homi
May I be free from physical suffering
Then it continues:
Sabbe satta
May all beingssabbe pana
all breathing thingssabbe bhutta …
all creatures …avera hontu
be free from enmity and dangersabyapajjha hontu
be free from mental sufferinganigha hontu
be free from physical sufferingsukhi – attanam pariharantu
may they take care of themselves happilyDukkha muccantu
May all being be free from sufferingYattha-laddha-sampattito mavigacchantu …
May whatever they have gained not be lost …
You can read the complete chant here, at BuddhaNet.
The Metta Sutra is a different text (read a good English translation here). The teaching is the same:
As a mother would risk her life
to protect her child, her only child,
even so should one cultivate a limitless heart
with regard to all beings.
With good will for the entire cosmos,
cultivate a limitless heart:
Above, below, and all around,
unobstructed, without enmity or hate.
Breathe.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009 at 8:16 am (buddhism, practice)
Tags: history, nonreligious, religion, religious, secular
This blog post by Vince Horn of Buddhist Geeks strikes a lot of notes that I hear people asking about when they are curious about Buddhism in Western countries. Or maybe I should say, people who are not familiar with Buddhism — and who live in non-Buddhist countries — frequently ask about these matters:
Secularizing Buddhism — Making It Accessible, or Stripping the Roots?
One of the clearest things I ever read on this topic was in Brad Warner’s book Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate — which I lent to a friend and may never see again, so I’m not able to quote it exactly. Warner is not the most reverent or traditional Buddhist teacher you’ll ever meet (not by a long shot!), but at one point in the book he goes off on a short tangent about people who believe you can reap the benefits of Zen meditation without including any Buddha-Dharma.
He finds that idea baseless and unsupportable, basically saying that the people who are trying to do that are eating a sandwich made of bread with nothing in the middle.
Warner is a Zen teacher who’s not fond of days-long silent retreats, endless chanting, or even wearing his official teacher robes (this is all in the book). He’s not talking about rituals; he’s talking about Dharma, about fundamental teachings, when he says it’s no good to cut the religion out of Buddhism.
Vince Horn is on the same track when he writes about secularization of Buddhism in the West. But at the same time, he points out that Buddhism, in its 2,500 years of practice, has been adapted to many different cultures:
If you’ve spent anytime studying the history of Buddhism, you’d see pretty quickly that it is an ancient and constantly evolving religious tradition. It has a series of both practices and beliefs that have spread and mixed with many other influences. Buddhism as it entered Tibet from India melded and mixed with the Shamanistic Bon tradition there. As it entered China it mixed with Confusionist and Taoist influences, and now as it enters America it is mixing with our scientific culture and strange beliefs about the extreme difference between religion and science.
I feel distinctly uncomfortable whenever I hear someone say, “Buddhism is not a religion.” Horn wrote:
… there is a kind of violence in trying to strip something from its historical roots, and also a kind of arrogance in thinking that we can even do that successfully.
Yes, yes — that matters, and it matters very much.
Now, just as Protestants started practicing Christianity without the Latin Mass, without celibate clergy, and without swinging a censor full of incense around inside their churches, I think Buddhists in the West can change some of the external practices of Buddhism as well without destroying (or forgetting) the foundations and the essential teachings, such as the Four Noble Truths. There is a living, breathing baby who must not be thrown out with the bathwater.
This is not to say that secular practices adapted from Buddhist practices (e.g., Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) should be scrapped or changed. However, I think it’s essential to make a distinction and say clearly that there is Buddhism, which is a religion, complete with practices and beliefs and history — and there are other techniques and programs, possibly inspired by Buddhism, which are neither religious nor based in religion.
So, don’t say, “Buddhism is not a religion.” If you’re doing something that’s not a religion, please don’t call it “Buddhism.”
Breathe.
Monday, August 31, 2009 at 8:38 am (buddhism, practice, zen)
Tags: learning, parable, stories, teachings
One of the basic teachings of Zen Buddhism is letting go. Sometimes when I am having trouble letting go, I hold my fist in front of me. My thumb points away from me and my four fingernails are visible in a row parallel to the ground. I look at that closed hand, and then I fling open all five fingers, my palm to the sky.
Let go, let go.
Two monks, Tanzan and Ekido, were walking down a muddy street in the city. They came upon a lovely young girl dressed in fine silks, who was afraid to cross the street because of all the mud.
“Come on, girl,” Tanzan said. He picked her up in his arms and carried her across.
The two monks did not speak again till nightfall. Then, when they had returned to the monastery, Ekido couldn’t keep quiet any longer.
“Monks shouldn’t go near girls,” he said, “and certainly not beautiful ones like that one! Why did you do it?”
“My dear fellow,” Tanzan said, “I put that girl down hours ago, back in the city. It’s you who are still carrying her!”
I first found this story here. It is also at Wikipedia in a slightly different form.
Breathe.
Saturday, August 29, 2009 at 8:52 am (buddhism, meditation, practice, quotations, self, zen)
Tags: buddhist, Dōgen, japanese, Shōbōgenzō, teachings
Experience the oneness of all things and all beings:
All the universe is an unceasing process, pursuing things and making them the self, pursuing the self and making it things.
This comes from the chapter titled Ikka Myoju in Dogen’s Shobogenzo (The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, tr. Norman Waddell and Masao Abe, p. 33). Dogen said the only way to experience this truth is through zazen, or sitting meditation. We can read and study and chant and listen to Dharma talks for 1,000 years, but without zazen, we realize nothing.
He was, in fact, rather insistent on this point. Not only did he compose the Fukanzazengi to praise the benefits of sitting meditation; he also spent the first chapter of Shobogenzo doing the same.
I keep working on the teaching of no-self.
“Pursuing things and making them the self”: This begins when we are babies. I think it might start when we grab our toes and perceive them as our own, as part of the body, connected to us. We construct a self with I, me, mine — my toes, my hunger, my contentment, my toys. We add things to the heap as we grow older — my accomplishments, my pain, my money, my car. All of this adding is done with the mind only.
“Pursuing the self and making it things”: What am I? Am I this house, this son or daughter, this husband or wife? Am I this gun or computer or cash register or mixing bowl? Am I this set of beliefs I have adopted? Am I these clothes I wear? Am I these shoes?
The story of the fire-boy is retold here.
Breathe.
Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 8:36 am (buddhism, practice, quotations)
Tags: dharma, Diamond Sutra, mind, study, sutra, teachings, wisdom
As I continue to study the Diamond Sutra, I encounter references to “wisdom” quite often in the commentary. Of course this makes a lot of sense if you know that the Diamond Sutra is also called “The Perfection of Wisdom.” This sutra is the pithy condensed version, by most accounts — we also have the “Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines” and even longer versions, about two dozen in all, according to the Buddhist scholar Red Pine. The Diamond Sutra is complete in only 300 lines.
At the excellent blog thinkBuddha, author Will Buckingham recently considered the distinction between knowledge and wisdom. He was mulling over a politician’s lament that kids nowadays do not know some of the important dates and events in their national history.
Given the innumerability of the objects of knowledge, establishing if there are things that are worth knowing for everyone, and establishing what these things are is a difficult process … Nevertheless, just for the time being, I want to leave this question to the educationalists and policy makers, and to ask another question, a question that I think is often overlooked: the question of what exactly we do with the things that we deem worth knowing.
Here, I think, things become more interesting, because this question forces us to deal with the ethics of our relationship with those things that we know, or that we claim to know. Because it seems to me to be more important, in the long run, that we should treat each other well, than that we should know any particular facts about battles, commandments or laws of nature. [Source]
In other words, all that knowledge in your head, or my head (and they are the same thing, are they not?), is not good for anything at all unless we use it for good.
There’s a line in the Temple Rules of the Kwan Um School of Zen that often floats up into my thinking:
If a snake drinks water, the water becomes venom. If a cow drinks water, the water becomes milk.
Breathe.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009 at 8:47 am (buddhism, practice, zen)
Tags: compassion, dualism, duality, empathy, kindness, learning
The longer I practice, the more I realize about the connections that link all of us. My ability to experience compassion increases bit by bit.
One thing that has struck me repeatedly in recent months is that the more we are able to see and feel the suffering that others have experienced, or are experiencing, the less patience we might have with people whose lives are (or have been) relatively easy and secure. This feeling of impatience makes me want to shout: “Oh, just get over it!” That, of course, would not be very compassionate! Also, it shows my tendency to create dualism. My mind separates people into “those who have really suffered” and “those who have not suffered much.” That’s a mistake. Buddhism teaches that one is not different from the other.
So, I need to find a balance — or keep a middle position — so that I can recognize that someone’s little minor problems really are large and insurmountable to him or her.
For some people, every little thing is the biggest tragedy to them, and the only thing they can see in front of them. Meanwhile, there are people all around us who have lost everything, or who never had much of anything to begin with. It seems as if those who are privileged cannot see that.
But in fact it’s not an inability to see — it’s a lack of compassion. This is not at all unusual, so there’s nothing there to condemn or judge. This lack is the usual state for most beings.
It’s strange to realize that compassion has to be built up like muscles. But as my weak and flaccid “muscles” start to gain a little tone and strength, I appreciate just how weak they were to begin with.
As this process goes on, it becomes more difficult, in some ways, to stay in the middle. I catch myself making new judgments and comparisons. (Thankfully I do catch myself doing it, at least some of the time.) The changes in one’s own self keep shifting the center of balance. That is part of this path that I never expected.
Breathe.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 1:17 pm (buddhism, meditation, practice)
Tags: attention, brain, neuroplasticity, science
Do you think attention is the same as mindfulness? I don’t. I think attention is something more specific than mindfulness.
What’s more, attention can actually alter the structure of your brain.
This was indicated in a scientific study conducted with monkeys. All the monkeys were subjected to the same two kinds of physical stimuli, which were concurrent — they heard sound through headphones, and their fingers were in an apparatus that caused the fingers to tap. All the monkeys were listening and tapping for 100 minutes each day, for six weeks.
The sound and the tapping were not synchronized, however. Imagine yourself reading a book in a noisy coffee shop. You can hear conversations all around you, and there’s probably music too. If you’re really absorbing what you are reading, then you must be shutting out the sounds, which are unrelated to your text. If not shutting them out completely, at least you have downgraded them. You have relegated them to the background.
Half of the monkeys were rewarded with tasty juice if they made a sign when the rhythm of the sound changed. The other half were rewarded the same way, but only if they made a sign when the rhythm of their tapping motion changed. The two halves of the group kept the same roles for the six-week test, so presumably the listeners got better at recognizing the change in sound rhythm, and the feelers got better at noticing the change in motion rhythm.
In this way, with the yummy reward for doing the right thing, all the monkeys had an incentive to pay attention. But half of them were paying attention to sound, while the other half were paying attention to the motion of the finger apparatus.
The researchers had scanned all the monkeys’ brains before the test. After the test, they scanned the monkeys’ brains again.
The difference between the two groups of monkeys reflected the effect of paying attention: In the group that listened for rhythm changes, the area of the auditory cortex had increased. In the other group (which had heard all the same sounds, at the same volume, for the same length of time), there was no change in the auditory cortex. But in those monkeys, who had been rewarded for catching a change in the rhythm of their fingers’ movement, the area of the somatosensory cortex had increased. In the other monkeys, there was no change in that region of the brain. Wah!
I read about this experiment in Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, by science journalist Sharon Begley (pages 156 – 160). Begley attended a conference at which a group of neuroscientists presented some of the latest findings about the brain to the Dalai Lama; later she wrote this book, with additional reporting, based on those presentations. It’s highly readable and altogether fascinating!
Breathe.
Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 8:47 am (buddhism, practice)
Tags: books, daily life, Diamond Sutra, study, sutra, teachings
In the first chapter of The Diamond Sutra, the Buddha goes about his normal day. He puts on his traveling robe and picks up his bowl and goes to town, to beg just like any monk would. Then he eats. Back in the forest with the monks, he puts away his robe and his bowl. He washes his feet. Then he sits down in the meditation posture and “[turns] his awareness to what [is] before him.”
The translator, Red Pine, tells us:
In the first chapter, we see what a buddha does, which is not so different from our own daily round of existence, if we could only do what we do unhindered by attachments and see what we do unobstructed by delusions. What this sutra teaches us is how to transform attachments and delusions, how to be a buddha. And it begins with a patched robe, an empty bowl, and the Buddha’s daily practice of his teaching. (pp. 39-40)
A long time ago in a Zen center, I heard someone ask the teacher how she should spread all this wonderful Buddha-dharma to her friends and neighbors. She wanted to share it, but she didn’t know what she should say to them.
The teacher told her not to worry about telling other people about the dharma. He said if she would simply live her practice, then by her example, others would come to know the dharma.
Breathe.
The Diamond Sutra, translated by Red Pine (2001)
