Posts tagged: buddhism
Klint Finley
Tim McGirk writes about the struggle that Tibetan Buddhist rinpoches — an honorific generally given to supposed reincarnations of past lamas — are having in the modern world:
By and large, the lineage of rinpoches survived intact for eight centuries, until the Chinese Red Army invaded Tibet, in 1950. It was easier to maintain this system when the “precious ones” were locked inside monasteries ringed by mountains, far from worldly distractions. But in exile, this tradition is fast unraveling. The younger rinpoches are exposed to all of the twenty-first century’s dazzling temptations. The irony is that while Tibetan Buddhism is gaining more adherents around the world, an increasing number of rinpoches are abandoning their monastic vows. Some are having a hard time finding their own path through the complexities of modern society and feel unable, or unqualified, to pass on much in the way of advice. Neither their early training in the monastery nor, supposedly, the good karma of their past lives as teachers is able to shield them entirely from the afflictions that the rest of us experience—desire, rage, attachment, envy, and egotism. The pull of samsara, the flow of worldly existence, can be overwhelming. One Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas has two tests for graduation: first, monks are sent out onto a snowbank wearing only a wet sheet and told to keep themselves warm by tumo, a sort of heat-generating meditation; second, those who pass the first round are sent to the monastery’s printing house in Old Delhi, a neighborhood that teems with prostitutes and myriad sensory distractions. For young monks, the stint in Old Delhi is the harder test.
Full Story: The Believer: Reincarnation in Exile
(via MetaFilter)
Klint Finley
The New York Times reports:
“People today love high-speed things,” he said in an interview. “We didn’t have instant noodles in the past, but now people love them. For the sake of presentation, we have to change the way we teach Buddhism and make it easy and digestible like instant noodles.”
He says Buddhist leaders should make Buddhism more relevant by emphasizing the importance of meditation as a salve for stressful urban lifestyles. The teaching of Buddhism, or dharma, does not need to be tethered to the temple, he said.
“You can get dharma in department stores, or even over the Internet,” he said.
But Phra Paisan is markedly more pessimistic about what is sometimes called “fast-food Buddhism.” He is encouraged by the embrace of meditation among many affluent Thais and the healthy sales of Buddhist books, but he sees basic incompatibilities between modern life and Buddhism.
His life is a portrait of traditional Buddhist asceticism. He lives in a remote part of central Thailand in a stilt house on a lake, connected to the shore by a rickety wooden bridge. He has no furniture, sleeps on the floor and is surrounded by books. He requested that a reporter meet him for an interview at 6 a.m., before he led his fellow monks in prayer, when mist on the lake was still evaporating.
Monks are suffering a decline in “quantity and quality,” he said, partly because young people are drawn to the riches and fast-paced life of the cities. The monastic education of young boys, once widespread in rural areas, has been almost entirely replaced by the secular education provided by the state.
Full Story: New York Times: Monks Lose Relevance as Thailand Grows Richer
(via Erik Davis)
Klint Finley
Christopher Vitale has been writing essays comparing Buddhism and, for want of a better term, post-structuralism. I don’t feel like I know enough about either subject to know how well he does.
Here’s a bit from the first in the series:
Meditation, then, is practice in separation from narratives and images which we have felt determine some aspect of who or what aspects of ourselves and/or our world are. As each thing comes by in our mind, we separate from it. I’m thinking that thought, but I am not that, it doesn’t bind me, I’m free from it, I can separate from it. I feel that emotion, and yet, it doesn’t control me, it is a part of me, I acknowledge it, I see it as caused by its contexts, but I am free to choose to dive into it and explore it, or let it fade, because I’m not that. I’m rather, a principle of infinite negativity, to use a Hegelian term, a site of infinite creativity. I am only limited by my relation to my contexts, and I can alter this through action, by making the world a better place, a freer place.
And this desire to free the world doesn’t mean doing what we think is best for it, to control it. Rather, it means to try to help the world free itself from its own chains, its own illusion of the necessity of the narratives and images, the essences, which imprison it. It is to want the world to self-actualize, on its own terms. A good therapist wants this both for themselves and their clients. This is what a Buddhist means by compassion.
See also: Defending Post-Modern Theory (As Always) by Adam Rothstein.
Klint Finley
Someone recently asked on Reddit: Reddit: Has a monk ever taken DMT and the results been recorded?
I like this response:
Fascinating mental states can be attained through meditation, but Buddhists don’t really go for an attitude of exploring trippy phenomena. The purpose is to get over the endless craving for pleasurable mind states. So adding more uncontrollable stimulation is basically just adding more confusion. Of course, you can turn any situation into a practice, so if you find yourself dosed with DMT, don’t panic – just actualize great prajna wisdom and stay grounded in the hara!
Klint Finley
Scott Carney wrote a long piece for Details about “India Syndrome” — one of may place specific menal disorders (see Wired’s coverage of Jerusalem Syndrome, which mentions that the majority of people dealing with these syndromes have pre-existing psychiatric issues).
But particularly interesting is a bit about the potential negative sides of meditation (something that we’ve discussed here before):
Less discussed are the disorienting and damaging side effects of meditation. Neophytes have reported seeing walls move or rooms change color. The introspective state that is one of the goals of meditation can induce feelings of paranoia and terror. According to Willoughby Britton, a neuroscientist at Brown University who studies the effects of meditation on the brain, practitioners can perceive small sounds as cacophonies and lose the sense that they are in control of their own actions. Britton has claimed that this experience, which some refer to as the “dark night,” has caused numerous people to wind up on psych wards under suicide watch. Guided visualizations… are “designed to completely psychologically rearrange you,” says Paul Hackett, a lecturer in classical Tibetan at Columbia University. In a foreign setting, that kind of experience can be even more traumatizing, especially when you take into account the way some Westerners in India tend to snack at the country’s spiritual smorgasbord—a little Ashtanga yoga here, some Vipassana meditation there. “People are mixing and matching religious systems like Legos,” Hackett says. “It is no surprise that people go insane.”
Details: Death on the Path to Enlightenment: Inside the Rise of India Syndrome
There was also a Buddhist Geeks interview with Britton.
(both links via Contemplative Computing)
Previously: The Risks and Rewards of Yoga
Klint Finley
Yes, that’s as linkbaity a headline as they come, but it’s actually fairly accurate:
A Buddhist statue brought to Germany from Tibet by a Nazi-backed expedition has been confirmed as having an extraterrestrial origin.
Known as the ‘iron man’, the 24-cm high sculpture may represent the god Vai?rava?a and was likely created from a piece of the Chinga meteorite that was strewn across the border region between Russia and Mongolia between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, according to Elmar Buchner of the University of Stuttgart, and his colleagues.
Nature: Buddhist ‘Iron Man’ found by Nazis is from space
The paper is here, behind a paywall.
Klint Finley
Via io9, here’s what … wrote on Facebook according to io9:
All the world’s major religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether.
io9: Dalai Lama tells his Facebook friends that religion “is no longer adequate”
The Dalai Lama has been saying he hopes for a woman to succeed him and has also said it’s possible he will have no successor.
Photo by Luca Galuzzi / CC
Klint Finley
Via io9, here’s what … wrote on Facebook according to io9:
All the world’s major religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether.
io9: Dalai Lama tells his Facebook friends that religion “is no longer adequate”
The Dalai Lama has been saying he hopes for a woman to succeed him and has also said it’s possible he will have no successor.
Photo by Luca Galuzzi / CC
Books like The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel and The Information Diet by Clay Johnson examine the responsibilities of journalists and other information producers and what the public should expect, and demand, of its news and information outlets.
I just came across, via the Wikipedia entry on the Noble Eight Fold Path of Buddhism, a quote from The Abhaya Sutta on “Right Speech.” I think it has a lot to say about what we as journalists should write and what you as the public should demand:
In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be unfactual, untrue, unbeneficial, unendearing and disagreeable to others, he does not say them.
In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, yet unbeneficial, unendearing and disagreeable to others, he does not say them.
In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, beneficial, yet unendearing and disagreeable to others, he has a sense of the proper time for saying them.
In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be unfactual, untrue, unbeneficial, yet endearing and agreeable to others, he does not say them.
In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, but unbeneficial, yet endearing and agreeable to others, he does not say them.
In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, beneficial, and endearing and agreeable to others, he has a sense of the proper time for saying them. Why is that? Because the Tathagata has sympathy for living beings.
Wikipedia puts it: “In every case, if it is not true, beneficial nor timely, one is not to say it.”
Or, for modern times: Write, and/or read, things that are true, timely and informative. Don’t troll. Don’t spread rumors. Don’t read gossip. Don’t create or click on linkbait. Don’t read substanceless content just because it affirms what you already believe.
This fits nicely with “The Essence of Journalism is Verification” (from the Principles of Journalism) and Clay Johnson’s summary of his thinking: “Consume deliberately. Take in information over affirmation.”
See also: The “Elements of Journalism” issue of the Nieman Report.
Many Technoccult readers have probably seen Hermetic.com. Maybe you even got your first taste of Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare or Hakim Bey there. What you might not know is that the site’s founder, Al Jigong Billings has given up the site to focus on what he calls “Open Source Buddhism.” I recently talked with Al about what Open Source Buddhism is, how it differs from other contemporary the Pragmatic Dharma movement and the secular mindfulness movement, and how he gravitated from Neopaganism to Buddhism.
Klint Finley: I know readers can check out your blog post explaining what you mean by “Open Source Buddhism,” but can you give us a quick “elevator pitch” for the idea?
Al Billings: Yes, I can do that. The basic idea is that if you are not part of a traditionally Buddhist culture or one in which Buddhism plays a role, you are not part of an inherited complex of ideas surrounding what is or is not “Buddhism” or the “Dharma.” This leaves those of us, in the “West,” for example, in a bit of a quandary. What is Buddhsm? What is the Dharma? What is essential to it? What is optional? What does Buddhism in the 21st century here in America look like if you haven’t inherited it as part of your culture?
My proposal, or really just an idea or thought experiment, is that we embrace aspects of the open source ethos, as exhibited in software projects like Linux or Firefox, in how we approach the Dharma. We don’t need to model ourselves or the Dharma as we practice it necessarily on how Japanese, Chinese, Tibetans, Thai or anyone else does it within their context. That evolved there over hundreds and thousands of years. While many folks make themselves, to some extent, into faux Tibetans, dressing in Tibetan robes, taking Tibetan names, adopting elements of Tibetan culture (to pick on one group as an example), this is not really adapting the Dharma to our situation. I propose that people collaboratively receive teachings and techniques and even texts and recombine or use them as makes sense, as a kind of skillful means, even if it means going across different Buddhist cultures or even traditional kinds of Buddhism or lineages of it that often seem incompatible in ways. The end result is a Dharma that works in our culture (hopefully).
How and when did you become a Buddhist? I originally knew you as the webmaster of hermetic.com, and I think that’s how a lot of Technoccult readers will know you as well. But you gave that site over to another curator. Did you give that up to focus on Buddhism?
I was a practicing Neopagan, of various sorts, from age 18 until around age 34 or 35. In many ways, I consider myself culturally pagan still and think of myself as a “Pagan Buddhist” just as there are “Jewish Buddhists” out there. During the first part of this last decade (after the year 2,000) I grew more and more interested in Buddhism. I’d had an intellectual interest since college but had not pursued it.
I got involved with a number of other magicians online who also happened to have connections to the Dharma, such as Jason Miller. When I started attending some Tibetan Vajrayana events, I found a certain resonance in it and took refuge at the Sakya Monastery in Seattle. This was in 2002.
At that time, I was a leader of an Astrum Sophiae/Aurum Solis group with friends and had been helping run a lodge for years. I just found that my interests were not as strongly pulled in that direction. I had also been in the Ordo Templi Orientis for a number of years, mostly socially, which is where I met my wife.
I’ve never been much of a theist, having a hard time maintaining the suspension of disbelief necessary to see deities as lived, objective entities.
Vajrayana was, in many ways, a way of bridging my Neopagan/Occult background to move into the Dharma. With my online magician friends who were also Buddhists, I found a small community to explore this.
Eventually, I just decided that I was going to make an explicit break with my past affiliations. I quit my lodge, which still exists and is run by a friend, and quit the OTO. I am on actually fairly good terms with members of the OTO leadership, who I consider to be, by and large, wonderful and sincere people. I also realized after a while that hermetic.com needed a real owner to update and maintain it, maybe even improve it. John Bell, who took it over, and I knew each other through the old BBS scene back in the day and wound up reconnecting. I wanted to give the site to someone largely unaffiliated with any organizations in order to maintain its neutrality.
Is Vajrayana the main sect of Buddhism that you practice? (I’m not sure how else to phrase that.)
No. I was initially involved with Tibetan Vajrayana but one of the primary aspects of Vajrayana is the Guru/Disciple relationship. This is core to Tantra. Additionally, Tantra is complex in both practical and philosophical ways. I wound up bouncing around between a number of Seattle area groups, where I lived at the time, for a few years but there were almost no groups with resident teachers or training programs.
Because of this, I could not really find a teacher with which to work directly. I felt that I had a “taste” of tantra but no real training in it and books cannot really supply this. I went as far afield as doing week long retreats in Wisconsin with a teacher and group there and in New Hampshire with Namkhai Norbu’s Dzogchen Community, accompanied by Jason Miller. I even did a short retreat with John Reynolds, who has contacts in both the Occult and Dharma communities.
Eventually, I found a teacher who had a similar background to mine but his practice was largely based on a Japanese form of Vajrayana, Tendai. We began working together in 2006 and I’ve been with him ever sinse. In that time, through an evolution of our practice and working with others, we both wound up in the sphere of Korean Zen (or Seon), where we both were ordained as priests.
My practice at this point is largely focused on Korean Zen though I have influences from all over and do maintain some of my tantric practices.
It seems a lot of occultists, especially chaos magicians, end up being very involved with various types of Buddhism (Joel Biraco is one of the most notable examples). Why do you think that is?
I’m not familiar with his situation so I can only speak about the folks I know and my impressions of their (and my) situation. Buddhism is not a unified landscape. There are many different groups, lineages, temples, etc out there. More than most people realize, probably. There is a healthy ethnically based community composed of Asian immigrants and their descendants, which supports the traditional Buddhism of their ancestral homes (sort of like Catholics and the Irish at one point).
Then there are the various communities, like the Vipassana centers and many Zen centers, which are mostly composed of White American converts with little traditional presence.
I think many magicians and pagans are attracted to ritual, energy work, visualization and the like. The “smells and bells” end of things. Because of this, I think and have seen a lot of people get involved with Vajrayana in its Tibetan form, which is common enough in decent sized cities. If that doesn’t work, they move on (and this applies more broadly than just pagan or magician types). I think those of us with a pagan or occult background are used to sampling the waters in places and changing what we do a lot. Staying with one tradition and having a deep connection strikes me as much rarer for that group, as a whole.
I know what you mean about occultists sampling a lot of waters, though it does seem to me that most people end up “settling down” eventually. Buddhism seems to be a common thing to “settle into.”
As to why… well, I think people are looking for a certain depth or feel a certain lack in their practice or connection to the world. I know that I became a Buddhist because the Four Noble Truths, the fundamental teaching, resonated with my experience. I felt there was a certain dissatisfied basis to my experience of the world, that something was missing, even in a Matrix-like way, if you want to be cute. Neopaganism wasn’t really addressing this and occultism and magic, as well as the groups within these camps, didn’t really do so either.
How is this related, if at all, to the “hardcore” or “pragmatic” Dharma movement?
That is an interesting question. I think that they are cousins in a way though they may wind up being the same thing in the end. It is hard to say.
The emphasis in the Pragmatic Dharma movement, as I think they like to be called now, is on awakening as a lived experience possible in this lifetime, not in future lives and so forth as is often taught. To that end, they are willing to use “whatever works” as far as methods. In that sense, I would say it is compatible. In another sense, they tend to model themselves very explicitly on just one model, the one that comes from Theravadan Buddhism. So their methods focus on the maps and techniques from a certain subsegment of that school (and this is not a criticism).
That also sounds like a particularly tantric approach - enlightenment within our lifetime - and that might not need to be the goal of everyone in Open Source Buddhism?
I think that if you aren’t driven to achieve awakening, which I prefer over “enlightenment,” in this lifetime, you are in many ways just wasting your time. Being focused on some kind of “achievement” in some other lifetime misses the very here and now approach that the Dharma offers. It is about lived experience, right now, not some future reward. That said, the Pragmatic Dharma folks seem to be very goal oriented.
What do you think of the secular teaching of meditation and mindfulness in a scientific or clinic context, as opposed to cultural or sacred, context?
I think it is a great idea. The techniques are useful in a number of contexts and I do not think that the techniques, in and of themselves, are Buddhist. They are simply techniques that work with people regardless of cultural content. If they can be used to help people who are suffering or to promote awareness, they should be taught. There are experimental programs to teach such things to troubled youth or even elementary school age children in my area and I think that is wonderful. They aren’t the Dharma but they are useful.
Do you think there are any dangers inherent in exploring these sorts of techniques? I recently linked to an article on a study that found that finding the right style of meditation for an individual is important for maintaining practice, and someone left a comment suggesting that there might be dangers in pushing these techniques in a materialist context - that someone could end up stuck in the Dark Night of the Soul, for example, without any knowledge of what was happening to them.
I saw the same article on different meditation techniques and found it interesting. As to dangers, there clearly are dangers in these techniques as a whole.
One thing I wonder about is whether people are ending up in these sorts of states, in these sorts of experiences, anyway, whether they’re meditating daily or not.
There are a number of separate issues here. I’ll go through them briefly.
Meditative techniques bring up a lot of things that are often buried. In our culture, we’re trained, in many ways, to not be terribly still and reflective. We bounce from thing to thing without dwelling deeply on what is going on. There are quite a few people who will get very distraught or anxious if they have nothing to do or nothing to distract them. Most of us know people like this. They need people around, or TV, or games or they don’t know what to do. When these people are forced to be still and sit and do nothing with their minds, just paying attention but nothing else directed, it can be very anxiety making. All the stuff they are ignoring or hiding from in their minds or lives, well, there it is, bubbling up as they sit.
It is very common on longer (or even some shorter) retreats for someone to have issues. They are often mild. People have crying jags, overcome with emotion, that sort of thing. Every now and then, people have much worse reactions. This was actually something that came up a bit in discussion at the Buddhist Geeks conference last Summer.
Now, in the secular techniques, these same things could probably happen. They aren’t terribly different, just having a different setting or context. It is important that people, especially if they are a bit unsteady, to have others to help them, to act as guides or support, for when this kind of thing may happen.
I generally wouldn’t tell people to “go read a book and do these things without ever talking to anyone.” It might be fine. In fact, it will probably be fine. If it gets too intense, people would back off on their own normally.
The thing is that, in the end, you have to find a way through that. You can’t run away from your mind after all and all of that intensity is in there somewhere. You can’t bottle it up forever. So, secular or Buddhist, that doesn’t make much difference. In both cases, you’ll usually have a community and a teacher or guide, a sangha.
That’s sort of what I was getting at - even if you’re not taking up mindfulness or meditation or whatever, you’re going to end up being confronted by, for lack of a better word, psychological ugliness at some point in your life and you’re going to need to find a way through it.
Absolutely.
I’m a secular meditator (and “ex-occultist”) myself. I sit daily. I honestly don’t know much about “real” Zen Buddhism (and of course there are lots of different types of Zen Buddhism), but to my limited understanding there’s not a lot else to Zen practice other than, well, zen. In other words - how dangerous could zazen be as a secular practice?
Or, put another way, what are secular meditators missing out on that a “religious” Zen Buddhist is getting?
Well… it can have the same problems and not all Zen is zazen, to be pedantic perhaps.
If you sit, say in zazen, and you are still. You are aware, hopefully, and paying attention. That’s zazen in a nutshell. Many people will have a reaction to that if they aren’t comfortable with what they aren’t acknowledging. My retreat experience these days is mostly with people doing sitting meditation and koan (or kong-an) work. Kong-an work is a different sort of frustrating.
As to what secular meditators are missing, it is a difference in goals. The goal (and I don’t care for that word) of Buddhist practice is the realization of Buddhahood or, to be less cute, to wake up. The goal of secular meditation is, usually, to deal with pain and stress. These are not unrelated but one is a bit broader than the other and I think you know which I would think of as the broad one.
Sitting to deal with stress. That’s very good. I think most people could really use that. I think that can act as a bridge to going “Now what? What’s the point of all of this?”
This is leaving aside that there are probably a half dozen “other” meditative techniques as well (or actually many more).
So Open Source Buddhism still deals very much with awakening, while secular mindfullness is focused more on day to day goals like managing pain and stress and improving concentration.
Yes, I think so. My idea of Open Source Buddhism as a kind of proposal or thought experiment is still, at the end of the day, the Buddhadharma. It is rooted in the Buddha’s teachings. The problem of the dissatisfactory nature of human experience, the cause of this problem, and the ways of solving it.
The Tibetans have a useful teaching that I learned from Namkhai Norbu in his popular Dzogchen book but which I’ve heard repeated elsewhere. I believe it is a Tibetan Nyingma school teaching. It is about “base, path, and fruit” or “view, meditation, result” (they are the same thing). The key here is that the view or mindset of practice combined with the techniques of practice (or the path) produce its result or fruit. In other words, you can use the exact same methods are someone else but if you go into this usage with a different mindset or worldview, you will not achieve the same results.
To use the mountain analogy, you will have started your climb at the base of different mountains, even if you climb the same way, using ropes, picks, etc. to get to the top. I think this is an important teaching to keep in mind when talking to people of different schools of thought that use very similar, and probably universal, techniques of practice.
So in this view someone probably wouldn’t “accidentally” achieve awakening through practice?
You can’t rule anything out. I think that people have an innate capacity for awakening and it isn’t trapped in a straightjacket with the label, “Buddhadharma” on it. People can awaken in spite of techniques, using techniques, or with no techniques. Can everyone do that? Probably not.
There is a common teaching in China, which you find a version of in Japan and in Korea. It is rediscovered time and again. The Tibetans teach it as well. This is the idea that we don’t “make” or “create” or “achieve” awakening. We really are liberated beings already. You don’t create the capacity for it. The analogies are made to clouds obscuring the sun or mirrors being polished so they can be clearly used but, at the end of the day, awakening is inherent in all of us and we are simply looking for ways to perceive what is right in front of us.
