In
the deepest forms of insight, we see that things change so quickly that
we can’t hold onto anything, and eventually the mind lets go of
clinging. Letting go brings equanimity; the greater the letting go, the
deeper the equanimity.
Thursday, October 21, 2021
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: The Wisdom of Openness
When
we are open, we see that essentially everything belongs because it
simply is what it is, even our reactivity. We notice that when we
actually see and understand something, it drops away.
Saturday, October 16, 2021
Via White Crane Institute // Today's Gay Wisdom
2017 -
The Wit of Oscar Wilde A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally. A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her. A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction. A poet can survive everything but a misprint. A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. A true friend stabs you in the front. | ||
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|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8 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! |8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8 |
Via Daily Dharma: What Is Renunciation?
Renunciation
isn’t about taking monastic vows or exchanging your Tempur-Pedic
mattress for a pallet; it’s about the wisdom to realize that holding on
to anything impermanent only brings sorrow.
Friday, October 15, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Transform Your World
The
bigger our heart is, the more permeable the structure of our self, and
the more we can think beyond our self-interest. Slowly, our world
transforms into a place all of us, as people on the planet, can feel at
home.
—Radhule Weininger, “How to Follow the Bodhisattva Path Without Burning Out”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via Daily Dharma: Life Is Not Personal
Reminding
myself that life is not personal, permanent, or perfect has kept me
from falling into sinkholes of despair and destroying rooms with rage.
It invites me to pause and turn inward.
Via White Crane Institute // VIRGIL
| This Day in Gay History | ||
October 15Born 
0070 BCE -
VIRGIL, Roman poet, born; the author of epics in three modes: the Bucolics (or Eclogues), the Georgics and the substantially completed Aeneid, the last being an epic poem in the heroic mode, which comprised twelve books (as opposed to 24 in each of the epic poems by Homer) and became the Roman Empire’s national epic. In themes the ten eclogues develop and vary epic song, relating it first to Roman power, then to love, both homosexual (ecl. 2) and panerotic (ecl. 3), then again to Roman power and Caesar's heir imagined as authorizing Virgil to surpass Greek epic and refound tradition, shifting back to love then as a dynamic source considered apart from Rome. Hence in the remaining eclogues Virgil withdraws from his newly minted Roman mythology and gradually constructs a new myth of his own poetics: he casts the remote Greek region of Arcadia, home of the god Pan, as the place of poetic origin itself. In passing he again rings changes on erotic themes, such as requited and unrequited homosexual and heterosexual passion, tragic love for elusive women or magical powers of song to retrieve an elusive male. He concludes by establishing Arcadia as a poetic ideal that still resonates in Western literature and visual arts. Since Virgil depicted his hero Aeneus seeking advice from his father Anchises in the underworld, Dante Alighieri made the shade of Virgil his own guide for his pilgrimage through the inferno and part of purgatory in his own epic poem The Divine Comedy.
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8 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! |8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8
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Wednesday, October 13, 2021
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - October 13, 2021 💌
If I can see a soul that happens to have incarnated into a person that I
don’t care for, then my consciousness becomes an environment in which
they are free to come up from air if they want to.
That person can do so because I’m not trying to keep them locked into
being the person that they have become. It’s liberating to resist
another person politically, yet still see them as another soul.
Remember, we are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean
to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so
deeply interconnected with one another. Working on our own consciousness
is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being
love is a supreme creative act.
- Ram Dass -
Via Daily Dharma: Finding Practice
Practice
needs to be weaved into the fabric of our lives so that every moment
and place is an opportunity for practice and progression.
Tuesday, October 12, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Enjoying the Mystery
Spiritual
transformation, like love, is not a matter for abstract reason and
analysis. It partakes of mystery, of unpredictability, or grace.
Monday, October 11, 2021
Via White Crane Institute // NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY
1988 -
NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY -- National Coming Out Day was founded by Robert Eichberg and Jean O'Leary on October 11, 1988 in celebration of the first Gay march on Washington D.C. a year earlier. The purpose of the march and of National Coming Out Day is to promote government and public awareness of Gay, bisexual, Lesbian and transgender rights and to celebrate homosexuality. National Coming Out Day is a time to publicly display Gay pride. Many choose this day to come out to their parents, friends, co-workers and themselves.
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8
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
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8
Via Acesso ao Insight // Bansky
Se não podemos mudar o mundo,
podemos mudar a nossa atitude em relação ao mundo
Arte: Bansky
Via Daily Dharma: Finding Determination
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.
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 💌
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 Kōan 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 “無!”). 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) kōan 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 kōan 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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