Saturday, October 28, 2023

Via Tricycle // Why Do We Practice Buddhism?

 

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October 28, 2023

Why Do We Practice Buddhism?
 
Tricycle’s Winter 2023 issue is here! From discussions of Buddhist modernism to AI translations of Tibetan texts to teachings on gratitude, impermanence, buddhanature, and more, our new issue is sure to captivate you from cover to cover. Here’s what you’ll find between the pages: 

In his Letter from the EditorTricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, tracks down the origin of “Buddhist modernism,” reflecting on when it first appeared in Tricycle’s pages. The value of highlighting scholarly perspectives of Buddhist history, says Shaheen, lies in its ability to help us understand the Buddhist traditions, revealing “otherwise hidden assumptions, sectarian attachments, and personal biases. And isn’t shedding light on such blind spots a big part of why we practice Buddhism in the first place?”

Also in the new issue, actor Michael Imperioli discusses how his search for satisfaction led him down the Buddhist path in “No Mud, No Lotus.” Ken McLeod’s essay “A Game Changer for Classical Tibetan Translation?” tests his translating skills against ChatGPT and outlines the benefits and concerns of AI. In “Finding the Words,” beloved Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein sat down with Amy Gross to talk about his newfound love of poetry—how he started, what inspires him, and what poetry has to offer. And in his article “Why Should I Appreciate Life?” author Dale S. Wright draws comparisons between Zen master Taizan Maezumi Roshi and German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, emphasizing what each had to say about loving life—both the good and the bad.

Enjoy these and other features in the new issue, now available online and in print!
Read the new issue now »
Also this week: 
  • November’s Film Club pick is available now! Learn about Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s four-and-a-half-year wandering retreat in the film Wandering…But Not Lost directed by Paul MacGowan.
  • Our Pilgrimage to Ladakh in June 2024 is sold out, so we added a second tripJoin us on a trip to Ladakh, India from May 15-27 and explore the “Land of High Passes” alongside the Tibetan plateau.
  • Learn about the Buddhist basics—including the many traditions, practices, and teachings—on our free online learning platform, Buddhism for Beginners.
  • A new online course with Sharon Salzberg begins on November 13, 2023! Real Life will offer a path from contraction to connection, helping you to reach your full potential. 

Via White Crane Institute // THE EQUAL CREDIT OPPORTUNITY ACT (ECOA)

 

Noteworthy
1974 -

THE EQUAL CREDIT OPPORTUNITY ACT (ECOA) is a United States law (codified at 15 U.S.C. § 1691 et seq.), enacted October 1974, that makes it unlawful for any creditor to discriminate against any applicant, with respect to any aspect of a credit transaction, on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, or age (provided the applicant has the capacity to contract); the applicant's use of a public assistance program to receive all or part of their income; or the applicant's previous good-faith exercise of any right under the Consumer Credit Protection Act.

Technically, women won the right to open a bank account in the 1960s, but many banks still refused to let women do so without a signature from their husbands. This meant men still held control over women’s access to banking services, and unmarried women were often refused service by financial institutions.

The Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibited financial institutions from discriminating against applicants based on their sex, age, marital status, religion, race or national origin. Because of the act’s passage, women could finally open bank accounts independently.

The law applies to any person who, in the ordinary course of business, regularly participates in a credit decision, including banks. retailers, bankcard companies, finance companies, and credit unions.

The part of the law that defines its authority and scope is known as Regulation B, that appears in Title 12 part 1002's official identifier: 12 C.F.R. § 1002.1(b) (2017). Failure to comply with Regulation B can subject a financial institution to civil liability for actual and punitive damages in individual or class actions. Liability for punitive damages can be as much as $10,000 in individual actions and the lesser of $500,000 or 1% of the creditor's net worth in class actions.

Before the enactment of the law, lenders and the federal government frequently and explicitly discriminated against female loan applicants and held female applicants to different standards from male applicants. A large coalition of women's and civil rights groups pressured the government to pass the ECOA (and the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974) to prohibit such discrimination.

I hope it gives all of us pause to understand this is a mere 50 years ago. Something that occurred within the lifetimes of many of us. And along with other rights most of us take for granted, are under siege. VOTE VOTE VOTE (another right women only achieved 100 years ago.) 


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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 White Crane Institute // Evelyn Waugh

 


Evelyn Waugh
1903 -

EVELYN WAUGH British poet and novelist, born (d: 1966); The original "boy named Sue", Waugh was an English writer, best known for such satirical and darkly humorous novels as Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Scoop, A Handful of Dust, and The Loved One, as well as for broader and more personal works, such as Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honor trilogy, that are influenced by his own experiences and his conservative and Catholic viewpoints.

Many of Waugh's novels depict British aristocracy and high society, which he satirizes but to which, paradoxically, he was also strongly attracted. In addition, he wrote short stories, three biographies, and the first volume of an unfinished autobiography. His  travel writings and his extensive diaries and correspondence have also been published.

In 1944, American literary critic Edmund Wilson pronounced Waugh "the only first-rate comic genius that has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw," while Time magazine declared that he had "developed a wickedly hilarious yet fundamentally religious assault on a century that, in his opinion, had ripped up the nourishing taproot of tradition and let wither all the dear things of the world." Waugh's works were very successful with the reading public and he was widely admired by critics as a humorist and prose stylist.

In his notes for an unpublished review of Brideshead Revisited, George Orwell declared that Waugh was "about as good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions." The American conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr. found in Waugh "the greatest English novelist of the century," while his liberal counterpart Gore Vidal called him "our time's first satirist."

After gallantly protecting T. S. Eliot from “the specious assumption that he was homosexual,” T.S. Matthews in Great Tom, suddenly became viciously ungallant: “It is peppery, glaring little men like Evelyn Waugh who are sexually suspect – as his diaries bear witness.”

Aside from the psychologically interesting opposition of “great” Tom and “little” Evelyn, it’s perfectly clear that the former editor of Time magazine has no particularly liking for either homosexuality or Evelyn Waugh. The very word “suspect” is suspect. Many people disliked Waugh personally. He could be unkind, ungenerous and ornery. But he was one of the greatest prose stylists of the 20th century, if not the greatest, and the idea of using the word “little” on a giant such as he is at best, odd.

Indeed, his diaries do clearly reveal him as a Gay man. But then so do his novels, particularly Brideshead Revisited, in which the friendship of Charles and Sebastian, despite the limitations of what he was allowed to write in the early 1940s, is magnificently drawn.

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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 White Crane Institute // ANNA ELIZABETH DICKINSON

 

This Day in Gay History

October 28

Born
Anna Elizabeth Dickinson
1842 -

ANNA ELIZABETH DICKINSON (d: 1932) was an American orator and lecturer born on this date. An advocate for the abolition of slavery and women’s rights, Dickinson was the first woman to give a political address before the United States Congress. A gifted speaker at a very young age, she aided the 19th century Republican Party in the hard-fought 1863 elections and significantly influenced the distribution of political power in the Union just prior to the Civil War.

Dickinson was the first white woman on record to summit Colorado's Gray's Peak, Lincoln Peak, and Elbert Peak, and she was the second to summit Pike's Peak. She was the third white woman on record to climb Colorado’s Longs Peak in 1873, and was certainly the first well-known woman to do so.

She spoke publicly first in 1857 when she addressed a man who derided women at a Progressive Friends meeting. After that, she spoke regularly about temperance and abolition. In 1860, she spoke in Philadelphia at the Friends of Progress meeting at Clarkson Hall about The Rights and Wrongs of Women and then she addressed the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in the fall of that year. 

She gave her first major speech, a two-hour discussion of The Rights and Wrongs of Women, on February 27, 1861 in Philadelphia. Lucretia Mott, who delivered abolitionist speeches for decades in Quaker meetinghouses, provided leadership to sell 800 tickets for the Concert Hall event. Mott arranged for a lecture tour, sponsored by the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society, for the 19-year-old, who quickly became a popular speaker. The series of speeches helped lead the Emancipation movement.

Having heard her speak, abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison arranged for her to speak in 1862 in the Palmer Fraternity Course of lectures at the Boston Music Hall. Named "The Girl Orator" by Garrison, she spoke about The National Crisis. She visited hospitals and camps during the war to speak to the soldiers. In 1862, she visited soldiers wounded in the war, and then gave a lecture about "Hospital Life" in New England.

During the 1863 U.S. Senate elections, with the deepening of the Civil War, Dickinson campaigned for several pro-Union Republican candidates in New York, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Connecticut to audiences that included people who did not support the war. She spoke eloquently and powerfully in support of the Radical Republican's anti-slavery platform and for the preservation of the Union. She spoke to coal miners in Pennsylvania soon after draft riots in the area and converted men who had not previously supported abolition. 

No less than Mark Twain himself praised her, “She talks fast, uses no notes what ever, never hesitates for a word, always gets the right word in the right place, and has the most perfect confidence in herself. Indeed, her sentences are remarkably smoothly-woven and felicitous. Her vim, her energy, her determined look, her tremendous earnestness, would compel the respect and the attention of an audience, even if she spoke in Chinese—would convince a third of them, too, even though she used arguments that would not stand analysis.”

Dickinson was named the "Civil War's Joan of Arc” for her promotion of the Union. When she spoke at Cooper Institute in New York City more than 5,000 people attended the event. It was reported that she "could hold her audience spellbound for as much as two hours. She gave the impression of being under some magical control.” She earned a standing ovation in 1864 for an impassioned speech on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. In attendance were President Abraham Lincoln and civic and military leaders. Invited by Republican leaders, she was the first woman to speak to Congress.

After the Civil War, she remained one of the nation's most celebrated speakers for nearly a decade. She made as much as $20,000 (equivalent to $397,514 in 2017) a year, making a speech every other day on average, and gave most of her earnings away to charity, friends, and relatives. She also maintained a townhouse in Philadelphia, with expensive personal possessions, for her mother and sister.

She was a friend of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Quaker lecturers Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony. In her letters, Anthony sometimes addressed Dickinson as "Chickie Dickie". Benjamin F. Butler, a Civil War general and a politician, pursued her romantically and in futility. Nevertheless, he remained her friend, a legal advisor, and source of money over many years. Unpublished correspondence with a woman named Ida caused one late-20th century author to claim that she was a Lesbian


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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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Friday, October 27, 2023

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)

When I look on with equanimity, some particular sources of suffering fade away in me; thus that suffering is exhausted. (MN 101)
Reflection
We saw last month how some sources of suffering diminish with effort. Now we hear that other sources of suffering are resolved when we simply look upon them with equanimity. In other words, some things are better handled by not striving to change them overtly but simply by changing your relationship to what is happening. Desire can be a form of intoxication, and equanimity can transform negligence into clarity.
Daily Practice
Knowing when to step forward to try to change things with effort and when to step back and allow them to change by natural processes is a skill to be learned and a practice to be developed. Never underestimate the transformative power of equanimity. Sometimes it is our own desires, our wanting and not wanting, that cause problems; in such cases learning to look on with equanimity can make all the difference. 
Tomorrow: Maintaining Arisen Healthy States
One week from today: Abstaining from Harming Living Beings

Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel

Questions?
 Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.
Tricycle is a nonprofit and relies on your support to keep its wheels turning.
© 2023 Tricycle Foundation
89 5th Ave, New York, NY 10003

Via Daily Dharma: Respond to Life with Wisdom

 

Respond to Life with Wisdom

By cultivating skillful attitudes of mind, we will respond to more and more of life with awareness and wisdom.

Steve Armstrong, “Got Attitude?”


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Thursday, October 26, 2023

Via LQBTQ Nation \\ America’s first out elected officials were two civil rights warriors you’ve probably never heard of

 




Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Action: Reflecting upon Social Action

 

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RIGHT ACTION
Reflecting Upon Social Action
However the seed is planted, in that way the fruit is gathered. Good things come from doing good deeds; bad things come from doing bad deeds. (SN 11.10) What is the purpose of a mirror? For the purpose of reflection. So too social action is to be done with repeated reflection. (MN 61)

A person is content with any lodging places they may get, speaks in praise of such contentment, and does not try to obtain these things in improper or unsuitable ways. Not getting these things, one does not worry, and getting them, one makes use of them without being greedy, obsessed, or infatuated, observing such potential dangers and wisely being aware of how to escape them. (AN 4.28)
Reflection
Just as you can practice contentment by appreciating whatever you eat or wear, so too can you take this approach to where and how you live. For monks and nuns, who in the early days wandered from place to place, this meant adjusting to a different lodging situation almost every night. The practice of feeling content wherever you are can be extended to laypeople as well. Contentment is a mental state that can be cultivated.
Daily Practice
It is not difficult to find the flaws in any situation. However, this leads to discontent, which is a state of mind conducive to suffering. Practice instead finding the benefits of things in your life, such as your living situation. It could always be worse. There is always something in any situation that can be noticed, raised in awareness, and appreciated. Practice doing this whenever you can; contentment contributes to your well-being.
Tomorrow: Abstaining from Intoxication
One week from today: Reflecting upon Bodily Action


Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel

Questions?
 Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.
Tricycle is a nonprofit and relies on your support to keep its wheels turning.
© 2023 Tricycle Foundation
89 5th Ave, New York, NY 10003

Via Daily Dharma: Wake Up to How Life Is

 

Wake Up to How Life Is

When we wake up to how human life on this planet actually is, and stop running away or building walls in our heart, then we develop a wiser motivation for our life.

Ajahn Sucitto, “From Turning the Wheel of Truth: Commentary on the Buddha’s First Teaching”


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE