When you admit to yourself, “I must make this change to be more happy”—not because the Buddha said so, but because your heart recognized a deep truth—you must devote all your energy to making the change. You need strong determination to overcome harmful habits.
Monday, October 11, 2021
Sunday, October 10, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Turn On Your Light
Simply
by turning on the light, you can instantly destroy the darkness.
Likewise, even a rather simple analysis of ego-clinging and afflictive
emotions can make them collapse.
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - October 10, 2021 ð
When we have the compassion that comes from understanding how it is, we
don't lay a trip on anybody else as to how they ought to be. We don't
say to our parents, "Why don't you understand about the spirit and why
I'm a vegetarian?" We don't say to our husband or wife, "Why do you
still want sex when all I want to do is read The Gospel of Ramakrishna?"
A conscious being does all that he or she can to create a space for being with God but does no violence to the existing karma to do it.
- Ram Dass -
Saturday, October 9, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Real Kindness
Kindness
doesn’t mean just being nice or pretending like you care. Cultivating
kindness means opening your heart, with patience and attention, to your
painful feelings—and to other people’s painful feelings.
Friday, October 8, 2021
Four myths about Zen Buddhism’s “Mu Koa
Four myths about Zen Buddhism’s “Mu Koan”
Dogen: Historical and Textual Studies
By Steven Heine
The Mu Koan (or Wu Gongan in Chinese pronunciation), in which
master Joshu says “Mu” (literally “No,” but implying Nothingness) to an
anonymous monk’s question of whether a dog has the Buddha-nature, is
surely the single most famous expression in Zen Buddhist literature and
practice. By virtue of its simplicity and indirection, this expression
becomes emblematic of East Asian spirituality and culture more
generally. Entire books have been published on the topic on both sides
of the Pacific.
However, in conducting research for a new monograph titled Like Cats and Dogs: Contesting the Mu KÅan in Zen Buddhism, I have been surprised to find how little seems to be known about the origins and implications of the koan case record. My studies suggest that this is one more example of commonly-held myths based on long-held beliefs and customs often overtaking and suppressing investigative scholarship.
Myth One. An Expression by Joshu
Although almost all commentators attribute the word Mu to Joshu, who was said to have lived for 120 years and died near the end of the ninth century, the case is not mentioned in the earliest records of his teachings composed in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Joshu was better known at the time for many other famous koans, including a case in which his master Nansen cuts a cat in two and Joshu, in response to this violent act, puts his sandals on his head. Early Zen records do include a dialogue about the dog’s Buddha-nature involving another monk who lived a generation prior to Joshu, which concludes in a much more open-ended and ironic fashion, as well as a dialogue about the Buddha-nature in relation to an earthworm being cut in two featuring yet another disciple of Nansen.
Myth Two. Doctrine of Unapologetic Denial
While commentators generally refer to Joshu’s unapologetic denial in response to the monk’s probing query about the doctrine of the universality of ultimate reality, reading over the voluminous Zen texts from China and Japan reveals that the koan tradition holds at least a dozen versions of the case. These include: (1) the Mu response accompanied by a dialogue probing why not (there are at least two variations of this dialogue); (2) two versions of the case where the answer is positive, one of these with “Yes” (Jpn. U, Chn. You), and including a brief dialogue searching for the reason; and (3) several versions combining the positive and negative responses with or without the follow-up dialogues, and with the No answer appearing either prior or subsequent to the Yes answer.
Myth Three. Mu Must Not be Analyzed
The main interpretations suggest that the term Mu puts an abrupt end to any discourse or analysis of the meaning of the question and response. However, the classical records reveal that there are dozens or even hundreds of verse and prose commentaries in Chinese and Japanese texts. Many of these do support the head-word method, while countless others, which prefer one of the other versions of the case, tend to bypass, disagree with, or even contradict that outlook. In one example, a Zen master says simply, “Daie affirms No, but I affirm Yes.” It becomes clear that the head-word device is rooted in a particular era of Chinese religious and cultural history. Daie’s comments on the koan probably originally targeted an audience of lay disciples whom he accumulated during his abbacy stints in both the remote countryside, while he was exiled for political reasons for over fifteen years of his career, and the capital, when he regained the favor of the authorities during the final period of his life. However, other important texts from the era, such as the Record of Serenity (Chn. Congrong lu, Jpn. Shoyoroku) in addition to the “Bussho” or “Buddha-nature” fascicle of Dogen’s Shobogenzo, both of which are available in several English translations, reveal multiple possibilities for interpreting one or more versions of the case, especially the rendition that has both positive and negative responses as well as additional dialogues about each of these alternatives.
Myth Four. Conceptual Entanglements are Wrong
In light of the tremendous degree of variation and variability in koan commentaries, we must ask what has led to many interpreters insisting that the true message of the case is absolute nothingness, which might result in a reification of nihilism, while others argue that the point of the case is the relativity of affirmation and negation, which might result in a antinomianism. It seems clear that the full implications are not revealed by translations/interpretations focusing exclusively on the emphatic “No” response, which is sometimes given with an exclamation point or a transliteration of the Sino-Japanese original for stress (as in “Mu!” or “ç¡!”). Instead of remaining bound to one view or the other, the conceptual entanglements indicated by contradictory or paradoxical versions of the koan can be continually explored without seeking a firm conclusion.
The reason for apparent misconceptions is the extent to which one specific view of the case has been portrayed in numerous writings as the only valid approach by leading contemporary scholar-practitioners who represent three different schools — Korean Zen, the Rinzai (Chn. Linji) school of China and Taiwan, and the Japanese Soto sect. The standpoint they endorse focuses exclusively on appropriating the best-known version of the case from the Gateless Gate (Chn. Wumenguan, Jpn. Mumonkan) kÅan collection of 1229. The common approach espoused by three different advocates emphasizes a particular understanding of the role of the koan based on the “head-word” or “critical phrase” method developed by the prominent twelfth century Chinese master, Daie. This approach takes the “Mu” response in a non-literal way to express a transcendental negation that becomes the topic of an intensive contemplative experience, during which any and all thoughts or uses of reason and words are to be cut off and discarded for good rather than investigated for their expressive nuances and ramifications. Yet, historical studies demonstrate quite persuasively that an overemphasis on this single approach to one version of the kÅan is somewhat misleading.
Steven Heine is an authority on Japanese religion and society, especially the history of Zen Buddhism and the life and works of Dogen. He is the editor of Dogen: Textual and Historical Studies. He has published two dozen books, including Did Dogen Go to China? (2006); Zen Skin, Zen Marrow (2010); and Zen Masters (2010).
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Via White Crane Institute -- Today's Gay Wisdom
2017 -
"In such a toxic environment, the poor, the minorities, and the politically vulnerable populations will be the first to exhibit signs and symptoms of the deteriorating immunological picture. It is the canary-in-the-mines syndrome. When miners wanted to know if a particular mineshaft was safe from poisonous gases, they sent a canary in first. If the canary returned, the miners felt safe to go in. On our planet today, poor people, people of color, women and children, and gays and lesbians are the canaries (or sitting ducks if you prefer). Those who have any kind of privilege (gender, race, class, sexuality, age) are better able, for a time, to buffer and insulate themselves from the toxic environment — from AIDS, cancer, and other diseases. But not forever.
"There is also a moral and religious toxicity in reaction to so much upheaval, change, and worldwide political challenges. This phenomenon is called in many religions fundamentalism. In a century of increasing relativity in values, morality, and religion, fundamentalism provides absolutes and identifies the enemies. It is a kind of collective mental illness that includes obsessive thinking, tunnel vision, and functions much like other addictions."
- Rev. Nancy Wilson, Our Tribe: Queer Folks, God, Jesus and the Bible
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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Via Daily Dharma: Settle Into Now
The
body exists in the radical present. Paying attention to it has the
power to draw us into this present moment and to show us how to settle
into the vividness of our own experience as it is unfolding.
Thursday, October 7, 2021
Via Love is Love: // FB
Love is Love:
21 yrs old Subarna Basnet & 22 yrs old Dhiraj Basnet got married to each other following Nepali culture. Even when it's difficult for people from LGBTQ community to come out publicly in our society, these two people tied the knot together showing the world. Many people have to go through a lot of pressure as they are not accepted for who they are but many people have supported these two people. We wish them congratulations and all the best as they begin a new phase in their life. Let us learn to appreciate and accept everyone for who they are and acknowledge all forms of love.
Via Daily Dharma: Make Room for Joy
We
know that we cannot make ourselves joyful, . . . but we can learn to
make room for joy. We can begin to cultivate our capacities that we have
for receptivity, appreciation, attunement, celebrating, and undertaking
the wholesome.
Wednesday, October 6, 2021
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - October 6, 2021 ð
One of the reasons that old age is so disconcerting to many people is
that they feel as if they’re stripped of their roles. As we enter old
age and face physical frailty, the departure of children, retirement,
and the deaths of loved ones, we see the lights fading, the audience
dwindles, and we are overwhelmed by a loss of purpose, and by the fear
of not knowing how to behave or where we now fit in this play. The Ego,
whose very sustenance has been the roles it played in the public eye,
becomes irate, despairing, or numb, in the face of its own obsolescence.
It may harken back to roles in its past to assert itself, but these
strategies bring only more suffering as the Ego fights a losing battle.
As we learn to distinguish between our Egos — marked by our mind and
thoughts — and the witnessing Soul — who’s not subject to them — we
begin to see the opportunity that aging offers. We begin to separate who
we are from the roles that we play, and to recognize why the Ego clings
as it does to behaviors and images that no longer suit us. Stripped of
its roles, the Ego is revealed as fiction. But for the person without a
spiritual context, this is pure tragedy, for seekers of truth who are
aware of the Soul, it is only the beginning.
Rather than wonder what new “role” we can invent for ourselves in the
world then, the question that concerns us might be better put this way:
How can we, as aging people, make our wisdom felt in the world? By
embodying wisdom. We can find a happy balance between participation and
retreat, remembering that while it is our duty to be of service if
possible, it is also important that we prepare for our own journeys into
death, through contemplation, quiet time, and deepening knowledge of
ourselves.
-Ram Dass
Via White Crane Institute // GERALD HEARD
1889 -
GERALD HEARD, British historian, philosopher, educator and science writer, born (d: 1971); Born Henry Fitzgerald Heard, Heard was a guide and mentor to numerous well-known Americans, including Clare Booth Luce and Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1950s and 1960s. His work was a forerunner of, and influence on, the consciousness development movement that has spread in the Western world since the 1960s.
In 1929, he edited The Realist, a short-lived monthly journal of scientific humanism (its sponsors included H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Julian Huxley and Aldous Huxley). In 1927 Heard began lecturing for South Place Ethical Society. During this period he was Science Commentator for the BBC for five years.
He first embarked as a book author in 1924, but The Ascent of Humanity, published in 1929, marked his first foray into public acclaim as it received the British Academy’s Hertz Prize. In 1937 he emigrated to the United States, accompanied by Aldous Huxley, Huxley's wife Maria and their son Matthew Huxley, to lecture at Duke University. In the U.S., Heard's main activities were writing, lecturing, and the occasional radio and TV appearance. He had formed an identity as an informed individual who recognized no conflict among history, science, literature, and theology.
Heard turned down the offer of a post at Duke, settling in California. In 1942 he founded Trabuco College (in Trabuco Canyon, located in the Santa Ana Mountains) as a facility where comparative religion studies and practices could be pursued. However, the Trabuco College project was somewhat short lived and in 1949 the campus was donated by Heard to the Vedanta Society of Southern California (Christopher Isherwood’s sanctuary), who still maintain the facility as a monastery and retreat.
Heard was the first among a group of literati friends (several others of whom, including Isherwood, were also originally British) to discover Swami Prabhavanada and Vedanta. Heard became an initiate of Vedanta. Like the outlook of his friend Aldous Huxley (another in this circle), the essence of Heard’s mature outlook was that a human being can effectively pursue intentional evolution of consciousness. He maintained a regular discipline of meditation, along the lines of yoga, for many years.
In the 1950s, Heard tried LSD and felt that, used properly, it had strong potential to 'enlarge Man's mind' by allowing a person to see beyond his ego. In late August 1956, Alcoholic Anonymous founder Bill Wilson first took LSD — under Heard's guidance and with the officiating presence of Dr. Sidney Cohen. According to Wilson, the session allowed him to re-experience a spontaneous spiritual experience he had had years before, which had enabled him to overcome his own alcoholism.
Heard is also responsible for introducing the then unknown Huston Smith to Huxley. Smith became one of the preeminent religious studies scholars in the United States. His book The World's Religions is a classic in the field, sold over two million copies and is considered a particularly useful introduction to comparative religion. The meeting with Huxley led eventually to Smith's connection to Timothy Leary.
In 1963, what some consider to be Heard's magnum opus, a book titled The Five Ages of Man, was published. According to Heard, the prevalent developmental stage among humans in today’s well-industrialized societies (especially in the West) should be regarded as the fourth: the "humanic stage" of the “total individual,” who is mentally dominated, feeling him- or herself to be autonomous, separate from other persons. Heard writes this stage is characterized by "the basic humanic concept of a mankind that is completely self-seeking because it is completely individualized into separate physiques that can have direct knowledge of only their own private pain and pleasure, inferring but faintly the feelings of others. Such a race of ingenious animals, each able to see and to seek his own advantage, must be kept in combination with each other by appealing to their separate interests."
In modern industrial societies, a person, especially if educated, has the opportunity to begin entering the “first maturity” of the humanic “total individual” in his or her mid teens. However, according to Heard — based on his decades of studies, his intuition, and his many years of reflection — a fifth stage is in the process of emerging: a post-individual psychological phase of persons and therefore of culture. According to Heard, the second maturity can be one that lies beyond "personal success, economic mastery, and the psychophysical capacity to enjoy life" (p. 240)
Heard termed this phase 'Leptoid Man' (from the Greek word lepsis: "to leap") because humans increasingly face the opportunity to 'take a leap' into a considerably expanded consciousness, in which the various aspects of the psyche will be integrated, without any aspects being repressed or seeming foreign. A society that recognizes this stage of development will honor and support individuals in a "second maturity" who wish to resolve their inner conflicts and dissolve their inner blockages and become the sages of the modern world. Further, instead of simply enjoying biological and psychological health, as Freud and other important psychiatric or psychological philosophers of the “total-individual” phase conceived, Leptoid man will not only have entered a meaningful “second maturity” recognized by his or her society, but can then become a human of developed spirituality, similar to the mystics of the past; and a person of wisdom.
But collectively and culturally we are still in the transitional phase, not really recognizing an identity beyond the super-individualistic fourth, "humanic" phase. Heard's views were cautionary about developments in society that were not balanced, about inappropriate aims of our use of technological power. He wrote: "we are aware of our precarious imbalance: of our persistent and ever-increasing production of power and our inadequacy of purpose; of our critical analytic ability and our creative paucity; of our triumphantly efficient technical education and our ineffective, irrelevant education for values, for meaning, for the training of the will, the lifting of the heart, and the illumination of the mind."
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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Via Tricycle // The Issa Wilderness
 The Issa Wilderness
By Leath Tonino |
|
Via Daily Dharma - Mindfulness Isn’t a Thought
Mindfulness
isn’t a thought. It’s a full-bodied sensory experience. The language of
the body is sensation, and feeling is the way we listen.
Tuesday, October 5, 2021
[GBF] new GBF talks
Enjoy 600+ free recorded dharma talks at www.gaybuddhist.org
| New talks have been added to the audio archive at the GBF website: | |||
Via White Crane Institute // JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
This Day in Gay History
October 05
Born
1840 -
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS, English poet and literary critic, born (d: 1893); Another of the great forefathers of Gay Liberation. To be a homosexual in Victorian England meant membership, if one dared, in an underground fraternity. For to speak candidly of one’s tastes was to open oneself to criminal prosecution, if scandal, or one’s enemies felt inclined to claim a pound of flesh. One of the few Englishmen of the day who came closest to crusading for public acceptance of “inversion,” as he called it, was John Addington Symonds. Homosexuality was his obsession.
It was the “problem” in modern ethics that most deeply touched on his life, and he refused to hold back both questions and intelligently considered answers. In 1877 he lost his chair of poetry at Oxford because he was openly “familiar” with boys and left England for Italy, dedicating the rest of his life to exploring the problem. The result of his labors was A Problem With Greek Ethics (1833) and A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891), pioneering works of sexual apology.
Symonds was a painfully honest man. Walt Whitman, who for reasons of his own, was not, was hounded for 20 years by Symonds who wanted to know whether the author of “Calamus” was Gay. The poet, to his eternal shame, said no. Had Whitman not died shortly after his response, Symonds would undoubtedly have asked again. He was not the kind to take no for an answer.
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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Via Tricycle // The McMindfulness Wars
The McMindfulness Wars
By Ira Helderman
|
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