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Post by silver on Aug 10, 2015 21:55:58 GMT -5
Once upon a time Khidr, the teacher of Moses, called upon mankind with a warning. At a certain date, he said, all the water in the world which had not been specially hoarded, would disappear. It would then be renewed, with different water, which would drive men mad.
Only one man listened to the meaning of this advice. He collected water and went to a secure place where he stored it, and waited for the water to change its character.
On the appointed date the streams stopped running, the wells went dry, and the man who had listened, seeing this happening, went to his retreat and drank his preserved water.
When he saw, from his security, the waterfalls again beginning to flow, this man descended among the other sons of men. He found that they were thinking and talking in an entirely different way from before; yet they had no memory of what had happened, nor of having been warned. When he tried to talk to them, he realized that they thought that he was mad, and they showed hostility or compassion, not understanding.
At first, he drank none of the new water, but went back to his concealment, to draw on his supplies, every day. Finally, however, he took the decision to drink the new water because he could not bear the loneliness of living, behaving and thinking in a different way from everyone else. He drank the new water, and became like the rest. Then he forgot all about his own store of special water, and his fellows began to look upon him as a madman who had miraculously been restored to sanity.
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Post by zin on Aug 11, 2015 5:27:01 GMT -5
Once upon a time Khidr, the teacher of Moses, called upon mankind with a warning. At a certain date, he said, all the water in the world which had not been specially hoarded, would disappear. It would then be renewed, with different water, which would drive men mad. Only one man listened to the meaning of this advice. He collected water and went to a secure place where he stored it, and waited for the water to change its character. On the appointed date the streams stopped running, the wells went dry, and the man who had listened, seeing this happening, went to his retreat and drank his preserved water. When he saw, from his security, the waterfalls again beginning to flow, this man descended among the other sons of men. He found that they were thinking and talking in an entirely different way from before; yet they had no memory of what had happened, nor of having been warned. When he tried to talk to them, he realized that they thought that he was mad, and they showed hostility or compassion, not understanding. At first, he drank none of the new water, but went back to his concealment, to draw on his supplies, every day. Finally, however, he took the decision to drink the new water because he could not bear the loneliness of living, behaving and thinking in a different way from everyone else. He drank the new water, and became like the rest. Then he forgot all about his own store of special water, and his fellows began to look upon him as a madman who had miraculously been restored to sanity. Once I heard that the 'only man' talked about in this story is God.
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Post by silver on Aug 11, 2015 12:02:59 GMT -5
Once upon a time Khidr, the teacher of Moses, called upon mankind with a warning. At a certain date, he said, all the water in the world which had not been specially hoarded, would disappear. It would then be renewed, with different water, which would drive men mad. Only one man listened to the meaning of this advice. He collected water and went to a secure place where he stored it, and waited for the water to change its character. On the appointed date the streams stopped running, the wells went dry, and the man who had listened, seeing this happening, went to his retreat and drank his preserved water. When he saw, from his security, the waterfalls again beginning to flow, this man descended among the other sons of men. He found that they were thinking and talking in an entirely different way from before; yet they had no memory of what had happened, nor of having been warned. When he tried to talk to them, he realized that they thought that he was mad, and they showed hostility or compassion, not understanding. At first, he drank none of the new water, but went back to his concealment, to draw on his supplies, every day. Finally, however, he took the decision to drink the new water because he could not bear the loneliness of living, behaving and thinking in a different way from everyone else. He drank the new water, and became like the rest. Then he forgot all about his own store of special water, and his fellows began to look upon him as a madman who had miraculously been restored to sanity. Once I heard that the 'only man' talked about in this story is God. Do you mean to suggest that it's because we are all 'God'?
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Post by zin on Aug 11, 2015 16:25:27 GMT -5
Once I heard that the 'only man' talked about in this story is God. Do you mean to suggest that it's because we are all 'God'? No, I didn't suggest this; but one can see it like that, too. I simply thought "yes that is possible" when I heard that comment.
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Post by silver on Aug 12, 2015 12:07:17 GMT -5
The below is the first installment from an article from Tricycle magazine who interviewed 17 Buddhist practitioners: What in Buddhism have you changed your mind about, and why? (I thought I'd start out with the one whose name is mentioned in many of the books that I've read and is mentioned here on ST.org.) JACK KORNFIELD is a senior teacher and co-founder of Spirit Rock Meditation Center. His most recent book is The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology. "I have changed my mind about a hundred things. Effort in meditation is one example. I used to think that to become free you had to practice like a samurai warrior, but now I understand that you have to practice like a devoted mother of a newborn child. It takes the same energy but has a completely different quality. It's compassion and presence rather than having to defeat the enemy in battle. Here’s another thing: I used to think that sitting in meditation was enough, that it would really change everything in your life in a whole and complete way. For a few people, it might work out that way, but in general, it ain’t so. For most of us, meditation is one part of a whole mandala of awakening, which includes attention to your body, attention to your relationships, attention to right speech and right livelihood. I used to think that deeper, better meditation and practice was happening in the centers in Asia than what we could teach here in America, and that for the real thing you had to go to Thailand or Burma or India or Tibet. Many of us who studied in Asia used to think that, and maybe some still do. But now, when I go back to Asia, I realize that beautiful deep practice is happening in Burma and Thailand and India and Tibet, and the same beautiful deep practice is happening here, and I think, “Oh, that was just a delusion I had.” www.tricycle.com/buddhist-traditions/question
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Post by silver on Aug 12, 2015 12:09:37 GMT -5
MUSHIM IKEDA-NASH is a writer, community activist, and longtime literacy tutor in the Oakland public schools. She teaches meditation retreats for people of color at Vallecitos Mountain Refuge, Manzanita Village, and Spirit Rock Meditation Center, and is a core teacher at the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California.
Since I began to actually practice Buddhism, I’ve changed my mind about almost everything that I thought was Buddhism. My original Zen teacher used to talk about a monk who would sit and call out his own name, and when he answered himself, he’d say: “Don’t be fooled by anyone!” I remember in 1985 sitting in a Thai temple outside of Denver, being stared at lewdly by a chain-smoking bhikkhu who had obviously never heard of women’s liberation and who was so senior that no one dared say anything; and standing in a South Korean nuns’ temple in 1988, watching in horror as a Korean nun vigorously sprayed a spider, then grinned, and said in her best schoolbook English: “Kill.” I remember, with my teacher, climbing rickety stairs to a top-floor temple in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where a golden animal, a lamb or a ram, was enshrined on a golden altar along with bowls of oranges. Intrigued, I pulled out a camera, and several Chinese women pounced on me, ready to knock the offending instrument from my hand. During these travels I never knew what was going on, and no one ever explained anything. I realized that in Buddhism, if we believe completely what we read, hear, or think, it’s just another way of allowing ourselves to be fooled or sidetracked. The big Buddhist world is filled with real people with real struggles, and real dirt, noise, confusion, and great beauty. All of this was the best preparation I could have had to give birth to and raise a real Buddhist son.
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Post by silver on Aug 12, 2015 12:15:12 GMT -5
ANDREW SCHELLING is a poet, translator, and essayist. He is on the faculty of the Writing and Poetics program at Naropa University.
"Reincarnation is a concept I could never accept. It seems absurdly egotistic, chafes against every principle we know of natural history, and contradicts the Buddhist teachings I’ve cracked my thoughts against for thirty years. Yet in the Mumonkan, when the old man tells Pai-chang that for giving a slipshod answer to a kind of pointless question, he “was reborn five hundred times as a fox,” I feel a shiver go up my spine.
Most of my friends have aged or dying parents. Our children are no longer young. One friend shot himself last year. Others have had health concerns that could snatch them away tomorrow. I try to envision what comes after “old-age-sickness-and-death,” and find a companion’s description of tall-grass prairie much better solace than notions of rebirth.
So I change my mind about reincarnation all the time. When otherwise pragmatic friends describe Tibetan lamas getting born again, it strikes me as silly. Within a few days a fox slips past and I know it’s a girl or some old man I had relations with in a former life. And last week I read something that comes close to what I believe today: “Those who eat will be eaten.” This accords with my studies in ecology. The body will be eaten by wind, rain, earth, bacteria, corrosives, prairie grass, coyote, ravens. It will ferment, decompose, break apart into nutrients. That’s a pretty good reincarnation. Almost as good as five hundred fox lifetimes. But then I wonder, what eats our dreams, thoughts, fears, hopes, and notebooks? What will eat our changing minds?"
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Post by silver on Aug 12, 2015 12:19:28 GMT -5
2 for 1 here:
WILL STEWART has been practicing Zen for twenty-five years, or thereabouts. He sees little reason for optimism.
"I haven’t changed my mind about Buddhism; I’ve changed my mind about who I am."
ROBERT AITKEN is a retired master of the Diamond Sangha, a Zen Buddhist society in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is also a cofounder of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship.
"I haven’t really changed my mind about the dharma, but I have changed my views about how it should be presented. I am much less tolerant of the attempt to make it accessible by mixing it with Vajrayana, Vipassana, Christianity, psychology, or libertarianism.
A monk asked Zhaozhou, “What is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the West?”
Zhaozhou said, “The cypress tree in the front courtyard.”
Can you hear the primordial echoing in that response? As much as I admire the Dalai Lama and Buddhadasa, I do not find such depth in their words.
As well as I relate to Meister Eckhart and Brother Lawrence, I don’t feel any resonance with the Heart Sutra and its presentation of utter vacancy when I read them.
As much as I have availed myself of psychological therapy, I can’t get past its purpose to enhance the ego.
As much as I sympathize with masters who warn against involvement in politics, my heart opens to the wails of widows in Detroit, Iraq, and everywhere the autocrats have imposed their imperatives—and my vows show me the Tao.
While thus I’ve come to feel that it is deplorable to try to mix the dharma with other disciplines, I’ve realized that it is even worse to remove the discipline. I see the dharma watered down everywhere. Actually, the purity of the dharma is its simplicity. It is made complicated beyond recognition by the effort to make it “new.” Let’s keep the simplicity as is!"
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Post by silver on Aug 12, 2015 13:05:31 GMT -5
ELIOT FINTUSHEL is an author, teacher, and performance artist. He lives in Santa Rosa, California.
"When I was ten, I discovered—so I thought—that no mind existed but my own. I came upon the idea in bed at night a moment before falling asleep. Why next morning, with great excitement, did I confide this to my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Lyons? After all, she didn’t exist.
It was ten more years before I found a satisfactory disproof of the solipsist position—in Wittgenstein’s proof of the impossibility of any “private language”—but only my intellect was rehabilitated. I was still a solipsist at heart.
In the meantime I had become a sort of Buddhist. I gourmandized every book in the Rochester Public Library that mentioned Buddhism. I read D.T. Suzuki and W. Y. Evans-Wentz and Dwight Goddard and Alan Watts, etc., etc., etc. I even taught myself some classical Chinese.
Naturally, at the core of my obsession was a desire for enlightenment, which was, to me, a kind of grand solipsism. Enlightenment would make me safe and fully in control: All being would be subsumed in me. Enlightenment would be a lukewarm bath of all in all.
I tried extreme psychological innovations. Trying to relax behind my conscious mind, I once wet my bed. I took psychedelics and had friends read me the Tibetan Book of the Dead while I tripped. I also tried straining to the limit and beyond the limit, limit after limit, outraging family and friends with my bizarre behavior, and twice attempting suicide. Of course.
Then came Zen. Now I had to get through the koan Mu. For five years I drilled and ground and shouted and strained till my pips squeaked. I think my solipsism just wore me out. After all, solipsism—or what is the same thing, the idea that enlightenment may be the possession of an individual person—is a big No that takes a lot of energy to sustain. It imagines boundaries between oneself and the rest of the world and then spends itself trying to efface them.
What a relief it was, at long last, to chuck it. If Mrs. Lyons were here today, I wouldn’t even bother to tell her. I mean, duh."
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Post by silver on Aug 12, 2015 13:06:59 GMT -5
STEPHAN BODIAN is a teacher in the Zen and Advaita Vedanta traditions and the author of Wake Up Now.
"When I practiced Zen as a monk in my twenties, I fervently believed what my teachers and Dogen Zenji said about the transformative, awakening power of sitting meditation. In my mind, zazen was the royal road to enlightenment, the one true dharma gate, as Dogen’s Fukanzazengi suggests. Yet after sitting devotedly for more than a decade, many hours each day, I still had experienced only the most superficial glimpse of my essential nature.
Discouraged and disillusioned, I set aside my robes to study Western psychology, and my sitting practice became more casual and sporadic, though my dedication to truth didn’t fade. Finally, six years after leaving the monastery, I met a teacher of Advaita Vedanta who insisted that meditation was not only unnecessary but could actually become a routine that habituated and dulled the mind and made it less available to truth.
The words of this teacher resonated deeply for me, and one day, while I was driving, a single phrase floated into my awareness: “The seeker is the sought.” Suddenly my world turned inside out, and the teachings of the Zen masters I had struggled for years to comprehend became crystal clear.
As a result of my experience, I no longer believe, as my Buddhist teachers insisted, that meditation is essential preparation for the transformative experience of awakening. Rather, I believe other skillful means are equally effective at revealing the illusion of a separate self: earnest self-inquiry, the pointing-out instructions of an awakened teacher, a silent gaze, a sudden crisis . . . the cypress tree in the garden. Since each individual is different, each of these has the power at the right moment to catalyze a direct insight into the nature of reality."
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Post by silver on Aug 12, 2015 14:05:44 GMT -5
LIN JENSEN is senior Buddhist chaplain at High Desert State Prison in Susanville, California; his most recent book is Pavement.
"What’s changed? I’ve taken to the streets. Literally. I strap my meditation mat and cushion on the back of my bike and pedal into downtown Chico and sit an hour’s peace vigil on the sidewalk in front of Peet’s coffee shop or Chico Natural Foods or the post office. I do this as a witness for peace in a nation that’s increasingly given over to the exercise of social, economic, and military violence. I’ve been going downtown like this most every day for nearly three years now.
I’m a Zen Buddhist, and “Zen” has pretty much dropped out of the picture for me as a philosophy or belief or even as a “spiritual practice” of any sort. Zen has simply become what I do, and the doing of it is all that matters now. I’m no longer much interested in anyone’s state of enlightenment, including my own. I’m interested in how you and I might bring a little sanity, kindness, and compassion into the world. I don’t go to retreats anymore, I go to the prison instead, preferring to save the retreat fee to buy zafus for the prison inmates I work with. I go to city council meetings as well, most recently to protest a shopping mall that threatens to bury a historic burrowing owl colony under a parking lot. I write books on the defense of the earth and in promotion of fairness and social justice. Though my days are anchored in my morning sitting meditation, I’ve pretty much dropped out of the entire contemplative aspect of Zen. I’ve thrown the whole of my life into the marketplace these days."
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Post by silver on Aug 12, 2015 14:33:22 GMT -5
A little dance intermission
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Post by psychoslice on Aug 12, 2015 21:57:34 GMT -5
Gee that's something you don't see every day, ......but their not true Buddhist I just found out, damn!!.
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Post by silver on Aug 13, 2015 1:28:27 GMT -5
Gee that's something you don't see every day, ......but their not true Buddhist I just found out, darn!!. Neither are these guys, but I love what they do: (just in case you hadn't seen it on Let's Get Physical thread.)
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Post by silver on Aug 13, 2015 10:47:10 GMT -5
Middle Way Manager Think your teacher is not competitive? Think again. Shozan Jack Haubner At night I lie in bed, unable to sleep. Worst-case scenarios run through my head—and then I remember that they’re not worst-case scenarios at all. I’m living them. My teacher died, our community has torn itself apart in his absence, and I’m 42, single, and still not totally sure what I want to do with my life. Plus I have the prostate of a 70-year-old man, which is not as fun as it sounds. At night I pee in an old plastic mozzarella cheese bucket I keep by the side of the bed, because I pee a lot and the bathroom is too far down the hall. I mean, it’s not in another zip code or something, but the stone hallway tile is really hard and cold, and anyway, don’t judge me. One man’s sad little habit is another man’s life hack. I live at and manage a city temple founded by my teacher 50 years ago. The halls are haunted by his absence. The place is full of ghosts. At night they all seem to take up residence in my room—in my head. I can’t stop worrying. Mostly I worry about how the temple will survive on my limited charisma and Cracker Jack insights. Who will want to come study with me? Is it my job to be spiritually impressive, to draw in new students, or is this just ego? I never wanted to make a career out of Zen. I simply wanted to find a way to live. Making a living at being wise seems to come so naturally to some people. They write a few books, smile from a few lifestyle magazine covers, and suddenly they’re filling auditoriums. Bastards. I belong to a different class. Not a spiritual superstar, but not a freshman practitioner either. Not enlightened, but I can help a rookie upgrade her practice. I deal in small volumes of local dharma. I’m a middle way manager. After my suiji-shiki, or priest/teacher ordination ceremony, they put me in the temple tearoom as a kind of dharma show pony. There I stood, in 30 pounds of hand-sewn garments, trying to make sense of my new red and gold fan, when a Japanese woman, about 50 years of age, approached me, went down on her knees before me, and began bowing and saying “Shozan-san! Thank you! Thank you!” “Okay,” I said, bowing my head, “Yes, thank you.” “Thank you! Thank you Shozan-san!” She stayed down there an awfully long time and I began to go red in the face. “Okay, yes, thank you too. Okay . . . ” “Thank you Shozan-san! ” There were tears in people’s eyes. Everyone looked so in love with their idea of me just then. And who was I to argue? Much of your job as a new Zen priest involves pretending that you actually are the kind of person that people keep mistaking you for. You are constantly walking the thin line between growing into your new role and faking the part. That being said, whatever you do, don’t try to hide your weaknesses. This is the spiritual equivalent of the guy who combs the hair down by his ears up over the shiny bald spot on the top of his head. No one’s fooled. The only thing worse than trying to look younger than you are is trying to look wiser than you are. Of course you can’t win, because once you’re open about your flaws, students judge you every bit as harshly as you used to judge the teachers in your own life. They even compare you to your own spiritual heroes, often with a look on their face as though they’ve eaten a bad piece of fish, and suddenly you realize that those deep souls who inspired you are somehow now your competitors—and you go from admiring to envying them. Envy is born from insecurity. We often think that insecurity comes from a weak ego, but in my experience it is the result of an inflexible ego that has mistaken itself as the center of the universe, which keeps contradicting it on this key point. Whatever its origin, envy is not the proper response to spiritual decency in others. Yet there it was, rising up in me just the other night after I had peed in my cheese bucket. I lay back down and started thinking about how many truly extraordinary Buddhist teachers there are in this world, and how lucky I am that they all live so far away. I mean, how could I compete for students with the Dalai Lama? I tried to puff myself up by thinking about the book I wrote and its dozens of fans. Then I remembered who is shelved next to me at Barnes & Noble. Thich Nhat something or other. There are about 500 titles in the Eastern religions section, and at least one thousand of them are written by him. Who writes this many books? How does he do it? I went on in this vein until the sun started to rise and I had to pee again. I stumbled out of bed and stepped right into my bucket of urine—at which point I utterly freaked out. I thought I’d fallen into a frigid pool of death or something. I screamed and kicked my foot, and the pee bucket shot right through my paper shoji screen and across the room, where it hit the wall and landed with a thud. I cleaned up my mess, cursed a great deal, crawled back in bed, and lay there like the middle-aged ersatz Eckhart Tolle I am. No way I was falling asleep now. I replayed the pee bucket incident again and again in my head, audibly groaning each time. The worst person to be embarrassed in front of is yourself, because out of everyone you know you’re probably the least willing to forget any of the stupid things that you do. Humility, however, brings clarity. Sometimes you’re just too busy thinking about yourself to really see yourself clearly. That’s when life puts a banana peel—or a pee bucket—in your path. That morning I clearly saw just how heavy I had grown with the burden of trying to be someone who I am not. I needed to go back to the core of Zen practice: doing simple things completely, not trying to do big things for a large audience. I’m a monk, not Tony Robbins. If people get something out of practicing with me, great. But I can’t carry anyone into the zendo with me, either through charisma, insight, or marketing. That’s just not what this path is about. People have to bring themselves to the practice. And when they do, I’m there to practice with them. My job as a middle-aged middle manager of the middle way is the same as that of any lay practitioner, right on up to the most enlightened being on the planet: we all must commit wholeheartedly, moment after moment, to the life we have, instead of fantasizing about a different life while putting down or envying those who are supposedly living it. When I start feeling jealous of others, it’s a warning sign that I’ve become a little bit too entranced by some idea of myself and have lost touch with the reality of my life. Someone else seems to better represent this idea of myself than I do, and suddenly I want his life instead of my own. Zen practice, however, teaches you to completely be yourself—if you don’t, who will? Someone’s got to hold down your corner of the universe, and no one else is qualified. If you are not fully present in your life, there will be an absence in the world where you should be. That absence won’t be big or small, it will be the exact same size as your presence: perfectly you-sized. After the Japanese woman finally got up from her knees that day in the tearoom, a tall, funny-looking monk friend of mine took her place before me. He saw my expression and growled. “Don’t forget the most important thing about being a Zen priest—wear your responsibilities lightly!” It was one of those rare moments where someone says something that you didn’t know you needed to hear, and it makes all the difference. A well-put spiritual phrase usually happens like this, by accident or chance, in response to some particular need. Genuine teaching arises in small moments, person to person. At least that’s always how it’s been for me. When you’re fully present in your life, the teachings have a way of finding you—and when you’re not, a bucket of piss becomes the Buddha and wakes you up. Shozan Jack Haubner is the pen name of a Zen monk. Haubner is a humor writer and the winner of a 2012 Pushcart Prize. He is the author of Zen Confidential: Confessions of a Wayward Monk. His last article for Tricycle was “Expiration Date,” Summer 2015. www.tricycle.com/special-section/middle-way-manager*** I always try to leave you the link so you can read the comments from readers of the article. Just like in my first BB thread, I rarely comment on the articles because I like the idea of them speaking for themselves, because I find them complete all by themselves. I guess I only like reviews of movies and books. (I wouldn't post an article unless it had some impact on me, or found it humorous...oftentimes the articles from Tricycle do both, and I like that very much, and hope you do, too.)
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