Saturday, June 10, 2023

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Via Tricycle // Celebrating Buddhism’s Inclusivity

 


 
Celebrating Buddhism’s Inclusivity
By Wendy Biddlecombe Agsar
In honor of Pride Month, these 12 articles from Tricycle’s archive highlight stories of queer Buddhists across history. 
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Via Tricycle // Meditation Isn’t Magic

 


Meditation Isn’t Magic
By Christina Feldman
When we sustain intention in every moment of our lives and not just on the cushion, that’s when samadhi can be truly developed.
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Via Tricycle // Bringing Life to Statues

 


Bringing Life to Statues
By Brooke Schedneck
Buddhist statues don’t hold power until they are consecrated using the Buddha’s words.
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Via Daily Dharma: Suffering Is in the Eye of the Beholder

 

It is the perspective of the sufferer that determines whether a given experience perpetuates suffering or is a vehicle for awakening.

Mark Epstein, “Shattering the Ridgepole”


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Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Effort: Maintaining Arisen Healthy States

 

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RIGHT EFFORT
Maintaining Arisen Healthy States
Whatever a person frequently thinks about and ponders, that will  become the inclination of their mind. If one frequently thinks about and ponders healthy states, one has abandoned unhealthy states to cultivate healthy states, and then one’s mind inclines to healthy states. (MN 19)

Here a person rouses the will, makes an effort, stirs up energy, exerts the mind, and strives to maintain arisen healthy mental states. One maintains the arisen mindfulness awakening factor. (MN 141)
Reflection
One form that effort takes in Buddhist practice is the rousing of latent tendencies and dormant traits, encouraging them to rise into conscious awareness as active mental and emotional states. The more frequently you do this, the more likely these states are to become the natural inclination of your mind. And once aroused, healthy states such as mindfulness need to be reinforced and maintained by deliberate choice. 
Daily Practice
Throughout the day, remind yourself often to be mindful, to be consciously aware of what you are doing or feeling or thinking. And once you establish the presence of mindfulness, make a further effort to sustain it over time. Mindfulness, once established, needs to be reestablished moment after moment. Each moment is a new beginning and a new opportunity to bring clear awareness to all you experience.
Tomorrow: Establishing Mindfulness of Mental Objects and the Fourth Jhāna
One week from today: Restraining Unarisen Unhealthy States

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Questions?
 Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.
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Friday, June 9, 2023

Via Daily Dharma: Perfecting Our Love

Loving ourselves involves accepting this truth that we are imperfect, and once we realize this, we can shift away from perfection and instead move toward perfecting our love toward our imperfect selves.

Mark Van Buren, “Joyfully Covered in Mud”


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Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Living: Abstaining from Intoxication

 


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RIGHT LIVING
Undertaking the Commitment to Abstain from Intoxication      
Intoxication is unhealthy. Refraining from intoxication is healthy. (MN 9) What are the imperfections that defile the mind? Negligence is an imperfection that defiles the mind. Knowing that negligence is an imperfection that defiles the mind, a person abandons it. (MN 7) One practices thus: “Others may become negligent by intoxication, but I will abstain from the negligence of intoxication." (MN 8)

Gain and loss are two of the eight worldly conditions. These are conditions that people meet—impermanent, transient, and subject to change. A mindful, wise person knows them and sees that they are subject to change. Desirable conditions do not excite one’s mind nor is one resentful of undesirable conditions. (AN 8.6)    
Reflection
The conditions of gain and loss are the first pair of the eight “worldly winds” described in the texts, and they constitute the Buddhist equivalent of the phrase “You win some and you lose some.” The idea is that some things are inevitable in life, and the appropriate strategy in such cases is not to hope for them not to happen but rather to adjust yourself to them in a way that is skillful and conducive to overall well-being.

Daily Practice
Notice how natural it is to feel good when you gain something you value and to feel bad when you experience loss. Notice also how, in such circumstances, you allow yourself to be buffeted by the worldly winds of gain and loss. See if instead you can remain firm, grounded in equanimity rather than in favoring or opposing what happens. This is one way to remain clearheaded when facing intoxicating conditions. 

Tomorrow: Maintaining Arisen Healthy States
One week from today: Abstaining from Harming Living Beings

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Questions?
Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.



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Via White Crane Institute // ALAIN LEROY LOCKE

 

Died
Alain Locke
1954 -

ALAIN LEROY LOCKE died on this date (b: 1885); Locke was an American, writer, educator, and patron of the arts, distinguished as the first African-American Rhodes Scholar in 1907.  Locke is widely cited as the philosophical architect —the acknowledged "Dean"— of the Harlem Renaissance. On March 19, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaimed: "We're going to let our children know that the only philosophers that lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W.E.B. DuBois and Alain Locke came through the universe."

Alain Locke was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 13, 1885  to Pliny Ishmael Locke and Mary Hawkins Locke. He was the only child of a well-to-do family with significant pedigree. His mother Mary, who was a teacher, and with whom he lived until her death, incited in him his passion for education and literature. In 1902, he graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia, second in his class. He also attended Philadelphia School of Pedagogy.

Locke returned to Harvard in 1916 to work on his doctoral dissertation, The Problem of Classification in the Theory of Value. In his thesis, he discusses the causes of opinions and social biases, and that these are not objectively true or false, and therefore not universal. Locke received his PhD in philosophy in 1918.

Locke returned to Howard University as the chair of the department of philosophy. During this period, he began teaching the first classes on race relations, leading to his dismissal in 1925. After being reinstated in 1928, Locke remained at Howard until his retirement in 1953. Locke Hall, on the Howard campus, is named after him.

In 1907, Locke graduated from Harvard University with degrees in English and philosophy, and was honored as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and recipient of the prestigious Bowdoin Prize. After graduation, he was the first African-American selected as a Rhodes Scholar (and the last to be selected until 1960). At that time, Rhodes selectors did not meet candidates in person, but there is evidence that at least some selectors knew he was African-American. 

On arriving at Oxford, Locke was denied admission to several colleges, and several Rhodes Scholars from the American South refused to live in the same college or attend events with Locke. He was finally admitted to Hertford College, where he studied literature, philosophy, Greek, and Latin, from 1907–1910. In 1910, he attended the University of Berlin, where he studied philosophy.

Locke promoted African-American artists, writers, and musicians, encouraging them to look to Africa as an inspiration for their works. He encouraged them to depict African and African-American subjects, and to draw on their history for subject material.

He was the guest editor of the March 1925 issue of the periodical Survey Graphic titled "Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro", a special on Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance, which helped educate white readers about its flourishing culture. In December of that year, he expanded the issue into  The New Negro, a collection of writings by African Americans, which would become one of his best known works. A landmark in black literature (later acclaimed as the "first national book" of African America), it was an instant success. Locke contributed five essays: the "Foreword", "The New Negro", "Negro Youth Speaks", "The Negro Spirituals", and "The Legacy of Ancestral Arts".

Locke was Gay, and encouraged and supported other Gay African-Americans who were part of the Harlem Renaissance. However, he was not fully public in his orientation and referred to it as his point of "vulnerable/invulnerability", taken to mean an area of risk and strength in his view.

Locke died at Mount Sinai Hospital, of heart disease. Howard University officials initially considered having Locke's ashes buried in a niche at Locke Hall on the Howard campus, similar to the way that Langston Hughes' ashes were interred at the  Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City in 1991. But Kurt Schmoke, the university's legal counsel, was concerned about setting a precedent that might lead to other burials at the university. After an investigation revealed no legal problems to the plan, university officials decided the remains should be buried off-site. At first, thought was given to burying Locke beside his mother, Mary Hawkins Locke. But Howard officials quickly discovered a problem: She had been interred at Columbian Harmony Cemetery in Washington, D.C., but that cemetery closed in 1959 and her remains transferred to National Harmony Memorial Park—which failed to keep track of them. (She was buried in a mass grave along with 37,000 other unclaimed remains from Columbian Harmony.)

Howard University eventually decided to bury Alain Locke's remains at historic Congressional Cemetery, and African American Rhodes Scholars raised $8,000 to purchase a burial plot there. Locke was interred at Congressional Cemetery on September 13, 2014. His tombstone reads:

1885–1954  - Harlem Renaissance -  Exponent of Cultural Pluralism

On the back of the headstone is a nine-pointed Baha'i star (representing Locke's religious beliefs); a Zimbabwe Bird, emblem of the nation Locke adopted as a Rhodes Scholar; a lambda, symbol of the Gay Rights movement; and the logo of Phi Beta Sigma, the fraternity Locke joined. In the center of these four symbols is an Art Deco representation of an African woman's face set against the rays of the sun. This image is a simplified version of the bookplate that Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas designed for Locke. Below the bookplate image are the words "Teneo te, Africa" ("I hold you, my Africa")

A new biography of Locke by Jeffrey Stewart "The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke," was released in February 2018.

Alain Locke: Baha'i Philosopher - Bahá'í Library Online

de C BuckCitado por 8Abstract: African American philosopher Alain Locke is arguably the most profound and important western Bahá'í philosopher to date. Except for Ernest Mason's ...
Bahá'u'lláh `Abdu'l-Bahá Shoghi Effendi: world ...
PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY: IDEAS
20 de jul. de 2021Initially attracted to the Baha'i Faith because of its advocacy of race amity, Alain Locke believed that distinctions because of skin color ...
12 de jan. de 2020The Baha'i philosopher Alain Locke has emerged back into the limelight, since his latest biography won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Biography ...
Alain LeRoy Locke (1885-1954), the first black Rhodes Scholar and a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance, became a Bahá'í in 1918. Dr. Locke received a ...
20 de ago. de 2016He received a PhD in philosophy from Harvard in 1918, was the first black Rhodes Scholar and played a major role in the flowering of the Harlem ...
“What the contemporary mind stands greatly in need of is the divorce of the association of uniformity with the notion of the universal,” wrote the American ...
He was born into a Christian (Episcopalian) family but converted to the Bahá'i religion in 1918. Attracted by that religions teachings on the equality of races, ...
Avaliação: 3,6 · ‎2 comentários · ‎US$ 35,15
Locke identified himself as a Bahá'í throughout the last half of his life (1918–1954). He declared his belief in Baháʼu'lláh in the year 1918. Due to the lack ...


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