Identity Politics and Zen Buddhism

I'm using almost the exact same title of this post as one by Brad Warner, because a) it's roughly about the same topic, b) there isn't one single viewpoint on this, as you might expect, and c) Ven. Warner has of late posted a couple of rather strange things  (e.g., reposting this bit of creationist claptrap), that, in my view,  merit a response.  Regarding the creationist stuff, see my response to Ven. Warner on the comments section there.  This post, and Ven. Warner's post on identity politics,  should be read in light of the comments on Brad Warner's posting of a video of Jordan Peterson, who, with flimsy arguments, denies the existence of trans and intersex people in his refusal not to use non-traditional  3rd person singular pronouns.

I have written quite a bit on this site about identity politics before, and privilege.   Whatever I've written in the past few years, I generally still affirm as my views, although I freely admit that those posts probably adheres to Mumon's rule: In 20 years, posts about race, gender, sexuality, privilege and class will likely be cringe-worthy demonstrating some kind of form of disrespect. 

I've also written quite a few posts on this site indicating that I agree with Ven. Warner on a number of issues, and I do, and continue to do so, but here a critical response is merited. 

Ven Warner writes:

But what is identity anyhow? Lately a certain faction has emerged who believe that society has an obligation to accept and affirm whatever identity an individual has chosen for him / her / them / zem / em / hum / pehm / per / thon / ver / xem / yo / hir / mer / zhim-self (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun). But is that how identity actually works? 

For example, is Brad Warner an Enlightened Zen Master? Or is he a transphobic piece of shit who never should have been given a set of Buddhist robes? Or is he the bassist for Zero Defex (his preferred definition)? Is he white as most people assume? Or is he of mixed race, which he knows to be true given his family history? Is he an angry rebellious punk, like in his books? Or is he kind of a goofball, as he often comes across when you see him in person?

My first response is that while written language has evolved to where gender is expressed pretty much universally, it isn't uniformly so with spoken forms of the language; e.g., in Chinese, "He" is rendered  "他"  and "she" is rendered "她," and both are pronounced, in Pinyin encoding, "Tā."  For this reason native Chinese speakers speaking English often mix up "she" and "he." (The hànzì BTW, are a little sexist there, as happens in several hànzì/kanji but I digress.)  Chinese speakers mean no disrespect when they do this; they have to consciously remember to assign the right word to the right gender.  However, it's one thing to make a language error of this kind; it's another thing to be in-your-face about not calling someone as they wish to be called, because you fundamentally deny who they are as people "in the relative sense," in their flesh-and-blood quotidian existences.  I'll come back to that point.

Ven. Warner also writes:

What I think I am is often at odds with what other people think I am. Who is right? Is it useful to try to make everyone I encounter agree with the identity I have chosen for myself? Should there be a law requiring them to see me the way I see me? Or is that just a lot of wasted effort?

Ven. Warner, despite being Sōtō and all that, ought to be familiar with Bodhidharma's famous reply to Emperor Wu when he asked Bodhidharma who he was:  不識  - No knowing, often rendered in English as "I don't know."  Of course he's familiar with what Suzuki-roshi said: When you become you Zen becomes Zen.

Both Bodhidharma's and Suzuki-roshi's responses to "Who are you?" in effect point to the Absolute - Emptiness, as a response to the question, as to "keep the question" "Who are you?" is to affirm and express in a certain sense the Absolute or Emptiness.

But...I agree with these folks more or less.  It is a cop-out, a shirking of responsibility to appeal to the Absolute when there are things that need a response in the Relative world.  It is "banging the law" when one cannot bang the facts.   

I could cite a number of other kōans in this regard, which Ven. Warner must surely be aware.

But let me get to the point,  in particular regarding people who are in-your-face not calling someone as they see themselves, because you fundamentally deny who they are as people "in the relative sense," in their flesh-and-blood quotidian existences.  Ven Warner also writes:

Whenever I was unsuccessful at convincing someone else to see me as I saw myself I felt a terrible need to fix the situation. This often proved impossible and so I was left wondering if maybe I really was whatever they said I was, and if I was, in fact, wrong about myself. For me, the first step toward a more Buddhist sort of understanding of identity was seeing how much of a waste of effort it was to try to convince others to see me the way I saw myself. 

What Ven. Warner is doing is implying the appeal to the Absolute I mentioned earlier, as though the answer to the question  "How do I refer to Brad Warner's gender identity colloquially?" is 不識.  That's bullshit in the Relative sense.

We are being polite when we address people by the conventions of polite language. We are impolite when we refer to someone with profanities instead of by their names.   Ven. Warner or I may like some things a certain pundit might say, but if that pundit uses language to deny the existence of or otherwise denigrate an entire class of people then we fall short in not responding to such denigration,  and we fall even further short if our response is 不識.  

This is not to say that those who engage in identity politics don't make this same error; as noted on this blog, the folks at the Portland Buddhist festival have made the same error with respect to Falun Da Fa.   It's something we as Buddhists have to constantly be aware of: Are we shirking some view or responsibility by conflating Absolute and Relative? 

Who the hell writes this stuff?

In reading what might be an otherwise unremarkable NY Times book review on a biography on Brigham Young, I came upon this passage:

The perennial question in Mormon history is: Whose side are you on? For over a century, the church cleaved to “faith-­promoting” histories about heroic Joseph and Brigham, and the evil Gentiles who persecuted them. As recently as 19 years ago, Salt Lake’s guardians of the Saintly flame excommunicated several prominent writers and historians for what the old-line Soviets would have called “deviationist” points of view. (Some of them have since rejoined the church.)

Turner is on the side of good history, and he generally negotiates the many tripwires in the Saints’ story — the “hall of mirrors,” as he calls it — with aplomb. For example, he unflinchingly recounts the notorious 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which Mormons and their Paiute Indian allies killed a group of emigrants from Arkansas. While he writes that Young encouraged the Indians to attack the wagon trains, Turner allows that no document directly links him to the horrific murders of 120 men, women and children. Turner does note that Young cynically billed the federal government for $3,527 worth of gifts supposedly distributed to “sundry bands of Indians near Mountain Meadow.” The gifts — steers, clothing and butcher knives — had in fact been plundered from the slaughtered settlers. What Turner calls “the dark stain the Mountain Meadows Massacre” left on Young’s reputation remains to this day.

That this guy, Brigham Young, is celebrated by any segment in our society is pathological, and probably  more pathological than if any segment of our society celebrated Sonny Barger - the latter I would claim and those like him are more honest in their endeavors.  You know what the Hell's Angels are.   They don't claim to be the one true religion yada yada yada.

Of course, that a nominee for President of the United States can't bring himself to address issues such as this - that is to say, how does he square his Mormon-ness with the questionable history of this church - and that nobody wants to go there is even more pathological.

Julian Assange is no dummy and that's why they're coming after him

Via Jay Ackroyd at Eschaton,  via zunguzungu (?),  you can read why Julian Assange is doing the Wikileaks thing,  and therefore why various political and media organs have demonized him.  From a the post  by zunguzungu:

Because he thinks of the conspiracy as a computational network, he notes in an aside that one way to weaken its cognitive ability would be to degrade the quality of its information:

Since a conspiracy is a type of cognitive device that acts on information acquired from its environment, distorting or restricting these inputs means acts based on them are likely to be misplaced. Programmers call this effect garbage in, garbage out. Usually the effect runs the other way; it is conspiracy that is the agent of deception and information restriction. In the US, the programmer’s aphorism is sometimes called “the Fox News effect”.

I’m not sure this is what he means, but it’s worth reflecting that the conspiracy’s ability to deceive others through propaganda can also be the conspiracy’s tendency to deceive itself by its own propaganda. So many people genuinely drink the Kool-Aid, after all. Would our super-spies in Afghanistan ever have been so taken in by the imposter Taliban guy if they didn’t, basically, believe their own line of propaganda, if they didn’t convince themselves — even provisionally — that we actually are winning the war against Talibothra? The same is true of WMD; while no one in possession of the facts could rationally conclude that Saddam Hussein then (or Iran now) are actually, positively in pursuit of WMD’s, this doesn’t mean that the people talking about ticking time bombs don’t actually believe that they are. It just means they are operating with bad information about the environment. Sometimes this works in their favor, but sometimes it does not: if Obama thinks Afghanistan is winnable, it may sink his presidency, for example, while the belief of his advisors that the economy would recover if the government rescued only the banks almost certainly lost the midterm elections for the Democrats (and was the death-knell for so many of the Blue Dogs who were driving that particular policy choice). Whether this actually hurts the conspiracy is unclear; those Blue Dogs might have lost their seats, but most of them will retire from public service to cushy jobs supported by the sectors they supported while they were in public service. And lots of successful politicians do nothing but fail.

This is however, not where Assange’s reasoning leads him. He decides, instead, that the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make “leaks” a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s  information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the “Collateral Murder” video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire:

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat.

This is fascinating in several ways to me,  as a Communications and Information Theorist, and as a Buddhist.   As the former, it's interesting as a way to bring down a network executing a strategy, and as the latter it brings up interesting questions of right speech, action, and livelihood.  Unfortunately for Assange, though, the Prisoner's Dilemma is operative here: no government on earth will likely stand down from its power to operate in a secret and conspiratorial way, and thus he's on some Interpol list, whether justified or not. 

Is what Assange is doing right speech?  In a sense that his goal is greater government accountability to the citizens, I would suppose that his actions are laudable.  On the other hand,  - here's the paradox - the ability of the government to function on behalf of the people lies in its ability to create and  keep secrets, and transmit them in a trusted network.  

It is very difficult to achieve Assange's objective, I'm afraid, without fatally compromising the other objective.  The organ of state that deals with transmission of secrets in a network is necessary to the healthy functioning of the state, and can be used for good or for ill, just as an arm may be used to feed another or kill another. 

Assange, to my knowledge, has disclosed not a thing that has compromised the security of the United States or any other national entity.     But because he has arrogated for himself something that all states prefer to arrogate to themselves, they're going to continue to come after him. 

Buddhism and the Liquidity Trap and the Election

I have a couple of colleagues, one of whom with which I presently work (not closely) who is, um, let's say an avowed right wing extremist.  Tomorrow, right-wing groups are expected to make large gains in the American elections, which I attribute to  reasons known only to elites which don't admit Paul Krugman to their inner sancta, or perhaps naked, abject greed on the part of oligarchs playing a game (in the game theoretic sense) in which they adopt a  strategy by which they individually seem to benefit in the short term but wind up with all being harmed in the long term.

The ideologues have their reasons, and that's where I would say Buddhism enters into the picture,  though again, as a compact explanation I'm still led to think of the Tao te Ching:

When the great Tao is lost spring forth benevolence and righteousness.

When wisdom and sagacity arise, there are great hypocrites.

When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.

When a nation is in confusion and disorder, patriots are recognized.

Where Tao is, equilibrium is. When Tao is lost, out come all the differences of things.

Do away with learning, and grief will not be known.

Do away with sageness and eject wisdom, and the people will be more benefited a hundred times.

Do away with benevolence and eject righteousness, and the people will return to filial duty and parental love.

Do away with artifice and eject gains and there will be no robbers and thieves.

These four, if we consider them as a culture, are not sufficient.

Therefore let there be what the people can resort to:

Appear in plainness and hold to simplicity;

Restrain selfishness and curtail desires.

But - to put a more Buddhist spin on it, all dharmas are fundamentally empty.   In Buddhism, we start from a few positions - very few, compared with Christianity or other montheisms.   Our "noble truths" are realities, that are experienced - the aren't things that can't be really refuted from observation.  There is suffering or discomfort at least that all beings experience.  There is a a cause to that suffering, there is a way to transcend that suffering, and the eight-fold path, when followed works. 

But all dharmas are fundamentally empty, as the Mahayana tradition asserts.

Early Buddhist schools of Abhidharma , or scholastic metaphysics, analyzed reality into ultimate entities, or dharmas , arising and ceasing in irreducible moments in time. The Mahayanists reacted against this realistic pluralism by stating that all dharmas are "empty," without self-nature ( svabhava ) or essence. This was a radical restatement of the central Buddhist teaching of non-self ( anatman ). It was declared that not only ordinary objects, but the Buddha, nirvana , and also emptiness itself are all "empty." The teaching attempts to eradicate mental attachment and the perception of duality, which, since it is a basis for aversion to bondage in birth-and-death ( samsara ) and desire for nirvana, may obstruct the bodhisattva's compassionate vow to save all beings before entering nirvana himself. Wisdom ( prajna ), or direct insight into emptiness, is the sixth perfection ( paramita ) of a bodhisattva. It is stressed by both Buddhist writers and Western scholars that emptiness is not an entity nor a metaphysical or cosmological absolute, nor is it nothingness or annihilation. "Empty" things are neither existent nor nonexistent, and their true nature is thus called not only emptiness but also suchness ( tathata ).  

Politically, the state of affairs in which we find ourselves is but a singular instance of tathata amidst myriads of others.   The ignorant and greedy and hateful may yet cause a reply of the 1930s, including but not limited to a major war breaking out to decide the fortunes of those few who've been playing the game  but risk losing their piece of the Empire.   And, barring ill health or severe misfortune, folks such as myself might yet profit from it one way or the other, but at the end of the day, it is all without substance and form.  No doubt the triumph of greed, hatred, and ignorance will cause a pandemic of dukkha, rife with opportunity to help the benighted in ways which were not previously possible, simply because you words cannot really help much at the end of the day.

So there is a good chance that the American elections will bring an exacerbation of the liquidity trap - a situation where there will be no government intervention in the economy to protect people's livelihood.  And that will mean that incomes will fall, unemployment will be high and likely increase, and that most of the world will experience greater impoverishment.

Like Krugman, it is hardly the outcome I would have the world choose,  but it appears that many are hell-bent on going down this path.   But, as Leonard Cohen wrote, "Every heart to love will come, but like a refugee." 

Get ready for a flood of refugees if the pundit predictions come true.

Family Road Trip and, if cartoon violence doesn't offend, go see "Machete"

Practically no blogging til Tuesday.

I got "Dad's night out last night," thanks to my wonderful wife.

It didn't get much press attention, but if you go see the film Machete, you'll find it's probably the most overtly political film released by a major studio for mass production  in years.

Though admittedly, its over the top violence will not be conducive to the singing of the Barney theme song, its message is clear: everybody is being exploited and abused by this rash of xenophobia. To be fair to the movie though it is ridiculously cartoon violence reminiscent of cheap 60s and 70s grindhouse movies. 

Machete at IGN.com

Ok, ok, ok, here's Focus on the Family's review. I'm fair and balanced, you know.

 Machete got its start as a faux trailer targeting hard-core fans of the 2007 double-feature splatterfest Grindhouse. Then, in May 2010, a real trailer for this so-called "Mexploitation" film singled out the state of Arizona for its strict new illegal immigration law. In the trailer, actor Danny Trejo intoned, "This is Machete with a special Cinco de Mayo message—to Arizona!" The trailer that followed highlighted the film's bloody mayhem … and message.

"I simply wanted to make a special trailer that was as absurd as what was happening in Arizona," director Robert Rodriguez told aintitcool.com, "So I took some coincidentally timely lines of dialogue from the old original fake trailer from three years ago and from the new movie, reconfigured action beats, and cut it all out of context to make it look like the entire film was about Machete leading a revolt against anti-immigration politicians and border vigilantes. What can I say, it was Cinco de Mayo, and I had too much tequila."

But make no mistake: Rodriguez does have a political point to make with Machete. Volunteer border guards are sadistic racists, and illegal immigrants are heroes and martyrs. Sartana, a Latin American immigration official in the United States, is caught in between. Eventually she concludes that the "right" thing to do is scrap the badge and join Machete, an antihero who morphs into something akin to a William Wallace-like figure in his quest to fight for oppressed illegal immigrants everywhere. "If the laws don't offer us justice, they aren't laws," Sartana tells us. "We didn't cross the border—the border crossed us!"

"Rarely has the 'case' against Anglo America been made as strongly, albeit cartoonishly, as in Machete," writes James P. Pinkerton of Fox News. "In the film … all the Anglos are either evil or stupid. By contrast, the Hispanics are almost all innocent victims, until, of course, the rousing moment of liberation at the end."

 That ain't quite true, about all the Anglos. It's not about all the Anglos, just the ones that are exploiting this issue for their own ends.  Of course, this hits a bit close to home on Focus on the Family and Fox "News."

Oh, and one other thing: this is  the best performance by Robert De Niro  in years. And the best  performance by tulku Steven Seagal ever, in my humble opinion.

Not giving themselves any benefits towards their intentions with this...

I still don't get why the North Koreans thought it was a good idea to get a Youtube channel; if they wanted to convey that their country was strange and poor they couldn't have done a better job.

Just look inside those "factories" and forget about the fact that everyone's hands are clean; look at the ambient lighting, or lack thereof. This is a poor country.



Considering this post's juxtaposition with the post below, it is very difficult not to feel like an outsider to all of this, and an outsider who's damned grateful he doesn't have to endure this type of media (though George Will's no picnic, either).

What could they have been thinking?

North Korea's Officially on Youtube?

That's what this article claims.

The regime has uploaded clips praising dictator Kim Jong-il and rejecting claims it sank a South Korean patrol boat in March.

Korea's Yonhap news agency reported yesterday that 10 clips were found on the Google-owned site uploaded under the newly registered name of "uriminzokkiri", which corresponds to that of the regime's official website.

One English-language video praised Mr Kim as a "general sent by the heaven".

Another one, posted a week ago, berates South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-Hwan over his controversial gibe to disgruntled young Leftists in the South that they should try life under Mr Kim.

A third clip, also uploaded a week earlier, ridicules Seoul for its failure to prevent the UN Security Council from including Pyongyang's denial in its statement deploring the deadly March sinking of the Cheonan warship...

I wasn't able to find the English language video.  Even with noting the bloodthirsty, hateful, horribly greedy and repressive of the regime, one might suppose that this:




is their answer to this:

Politics, Buddhism, American Buddhism, and China - Tibet Policy: Barbara's Buddhism Blog Shows What Not to Do

Barbara of the About.com Buddhism Blog posted another anti-China screed yesterday.  There's really nothing else to accurately call it, in my view.  Now as I said on a previous post, it's not too surprising that there are Buddhists whose international and politics differ.  What we should try to avoid though is conflating political issues with Buddhist issues, that is, assuming a particular political question, viewed a certain way is a Buddhist question, and I think Barbara has crossed the line.  Before I  go to the tape, let me point out a few things that should be axiomatically obvious to any non-Tibetan lineage Buddhist:

• The Dalai Lama, as a manifestation of the Boddhisattva of compassion, is specifically a Tibetan Buddhist school designation and in no way encumbers anyone else to recognize that beyond that which is such in anyone else.  
• Mutatis mutandis for the Panchen Lama and Amitabha.
• The offices of the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama are political offices if they are considered as operating within the realm of Chinese/Tibetan domestic and international politics.  Strictly speaking those offices as political offices per se do not encumber any Buddhist to recognize anything.

I've been very critical of the Dalai Lama, and the conflation of attempts at international support of a political position with Buddhism  for a variety of reasons, not the least because many people speaking on this issue are utterly ignorant or dismissive of the history, geography, and geopolitics  involved.  China has asserted political control over Tibet for hundreds of years; Tibet is seen as crucial strategically to China's stability and ability to defend itself, and it's simply not useful if one is truly interested in peace to be dismissive or vituperative in response to these issues.

Now let's go to the tape...

The Panchen Lama is the second highest lama in Tibetan Buddhism. The faux Panchen Lama is Gyaltsen Norbu, son of a Tibetan Communist Party official, who was appointed to the position by Beijing in 1995 a few weeks after the legitimate tulku, Gendu Choekyi Nyima, and his family disappeared. Both boys were six years old at the time.

As I mentioned here, can't we at least recognize that the "find the kid who's the incarnation of the dead lama" game is one of those practices we can do without?  But this paragraph illustrates my point: a) we Zen Buddhists are in no position to judge who is a legitimate tulku and who is not; only those who choose to become adherents to said tulku do, and b) the office of the Panchen Lama is also a political position, and it is not accurate in the least to say that since China appointed that official (albeit in an atavistic way that is similar to what's been done before)  that he is somehow "false."

Gyaltsen Norbu lives in Beijing, and his visit to Tibet is a rare event. Xinhua tells us the pretender led a prayer service in Jokhang Temple in Lhasa  and was greeted by lamas bearing incense and silk scarves.

Beijing can be reasonably certain that no monk of Jokhang would disrupt the ceremonies, since most of the monks were removed for "re-education" during the summer of 2008. Once the Beijing Olympics were over, monks who did not have families in Lhasa were not allowed to return but were sent to their home provinces. The few hundred monks remaining in Lhasa's monasteries -- which are vast complexes that housed thousands of monks in the past -- are approved by government.

 Not just Xinhau's reported on the Chinese-chosen Panchen Lama's activities, but also the BBC (scroll to bottom of post), and The Economist (see my blog entry here; the link is behind a subscription wall, and yes, I do subscribe).  Both posts contradict Barbara's "See? Everyone hates that nasty faux Panchen Lama!" narrative. Big time.

Towards the end of the post Barbara quotes an article from The Asia Sentinel;  this article too conflates the religious and political.  Most other news sources, recognize there is a political aspect to this, even if they do conflate them.   Barbara ends her post with a quote from that article comparing the fate of the Dalai Lama-chosen Panchen Lama to Pu Yi:

"Presumably much as the famed last Emperor Pu Yi ended up working as a gardener in the Beijing Botanical Gardens," the Asia Sentinel says. However, the government remains extremely vague about Gendu Choekyi Nyima, and I still think it is unlikely the boy and his family are still alive.

The Pu Yi reference sort of gives away all the points here.  As anyone who's seen The Last Emperor knows, Pu Yi was not quite a person  one should have shed many tears over; his life was tragic, he was not the sharpest pencil in the drawer, but his life of pampering in no way prepared him for what lay ahead, and he ultimately wound up serving China best as a gardner in the Beijing Botanical Gardens.  Barbara offers no other reason for her belief  about Gendu Choekyi Nyima's demise; that is a statement of prejudice, but then by this point, we are well beyond discussing Buddhist issues, but rather geopolitical issues.

On edit: It is certainly true that there's been horrific violence done in the past few decades; in China  but that does not justify a belief that the Chinese government is currently disappearing innocent people.    Of course examining that belief, questioning it, wasn't the point of that post, and that's why I considered the stated "belief"  of the killing of these people to be prejudicial, in a similar vein as it would be to suppose that the average Mormon wants to install a Mormon theocracy in the United States, and violently defend it, based on the Mountain Meadows Massacre.  Conflating the China of the Cultural Revolution or Tiananmen Square with the China of today is not accurate either, and  Western and Chinese news outlets are reporting events in China, such as going on at Foxconn and Honda that were unthinkable just five years ago.

More on Zen, Politics, Authenticity, and "Lay versus Monastic Practice"

Evidently I am able to comment on Barbara's Buddhism blog.  She was mentioning Jack Kornfeld's schtick, and I'd had replied to Barbara's remark:

There's also the old and ongoing problem of adapting monasticism to lay life. Buddhists have been struggling with this for centuries. 

 I know once source from whence this might have come.  It is mentioned in The Eight Gates of Zen, an introductory text on Zen for the White Plum Asanga affiliated Mountains and Rivers Order, in which  I practiced for a while when I was in NYC.  I'm sure Barbara's well familiar with this book; having mentioned on her blog several thoughts that have parallels in the book (among them, that 無 shouldn't be done while driving, which is of course true).  Now don't get me wrong in the least - this is a fantastic book, and I recommend reading it, especially if you're new to Zen practice. In that book there is a great deal of space given to the "monastic versus lay" dichotomy, and while I find no problem whatsoever with those who wish to take a monastic/hermetic lifestyle, I did realize after several years of practice out here in the Pacific Northwest, with the example of my own teacher as temple and family guy, as well as learning the history of the Hakuin- Kosen Imakita  lineage to realize that this dichotomy is absolutely irrelevant to my own practice.

I remember the times I'd sit and have to interrupt it to do things for my son, and I'd feel guilty about not being able to sit longer! In retrospect it was completely absurd to worry about this!  My "teacher" needed his milk, warmed, in a sipping cup.  I JUST. DIDN'T. GET. IT.  The Whole Thing was right where I was, and I was putting John Daido Loori's words in my head, as another head, when I had a perfectly good one. Well, like they say about apps and the iPhone, there's a koan for that. (Case 39.)

So I can empathize with Barbara when she replied:

As someone who struggled for years with formal Zen training while raising two children by myself and working a full-time job to support them, I say it’s damn hard to combine lay life with anything resembling standard Zen training.

Because, like her, for years I didn't realize that there is no such thing as standard Zen training. Sure, there's koan curricula, methods for shikan taza, Zen-related arts and "athletics" (for want of a better word).  But it's all, all singular.  It's akin to that quote in the famous Zen movie, Beetlejuice.

[in the waiting room of the afterlife]
Barbara: Adam, is this what happens when you die?
Receptionist: This is what happens when *you* die.
[points at a gaunt man smoking]
Receptionist: That is what happens when *he* dies.
[points at a woman cut in half on the sofa reading]
Receptionist: And that is what happens when *they* die. It's all very personal. And I'll tell you something: if I knew then what I know now...
[shows her slit wrists]
Receptionist: ...I wouldn't have had my little accident.
[the dead people laugh] 

It's all very personal.  That's why political people don't stop being political people when they take up a practice, and non-political people don't necessarily become politically aware and engaged. Mutatis mutandis  about Barbara's recent post about Kyle.

She's spot on there. There's just about 10,000 ways that this point is true.  You do become "more authentic" with this practice, but not in a way that is intentionally more authentic...'cause that's that être-pour-soi again.

It's really easy to put another head on top of the one we already have.  There's 10,000 ways to do that, too.

And so to my final point in my comment on Barbara's blog: It does seem to me that American Zen - heck, probably all forms of Buddhism as practiced by the worlds bourgeoisie is predicated on the existence of leisure time.  As an engineer, I have been nurtured in the benefits of making stuff to give people more leisure time and use it more effectively.  However, traditionally human existence has not been this way.   If we are to be serious about our practice we have to be serious about really alleviating the sufferings of all beings. I don't know how Jordan's able to be a Marine (and I absolutely admire his practice), but I simply cannot fathom how Tom Armstrong lives his life now, and deeply respect him for it. 

I have it way, way easy, and I know I don't even know how easy I have it.  I know Bernie Glassman tried to move in the direction of helping the homeless in his Greyston thing, and maybe that's still working well; I haven't read more on it lately.  I do know there's a multitude of beings that it is absolutely critical for me to help today though, as part of my own  job and family life and career.  So while I can say I have it easy, and I have worked to cultivate skills to make it "easier" for me, I  know there are others who have it what seems to be hopelessly difficult to me. 

Polishing the tile, being political

I was thinking about Zen Buddhism and politics following this recent post by the Venerable Warner.  He said:

I also feel like Zen should not be politicized. I really hated it in the early 80s when all the televangelists used their position to push the Reagan agenda. These days I see a lot of Buddhist organizations using their positions to push left-wing politics, which I think is a similar abuse. Because I've said this some people imagine I must be a neo-Nazi. Because in certain circles the view seems to be that anyone who doesn't shout the praises of liberalism from the rooftops at every opportunity has to be a neo-Nazi. But I promise you I'm not. I just don't think Buddhism ought to get mixed up in such matters.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know the come-back. "What if the fascists come back in power??? What if your neighbors are being rounded up and sent to re-education camps???" I'll worry about that if it actually happens. For now, there's no good reason to mix the two.

It's like vegetarianism. I've been a vegetarian longer than I've been a Buddhist and I'm pretty committed to it. Yet I try very hard not to use my position as a sort-of-but-not-really-very famous Buddhist teacher-thing to push vegetarianism. This came up at one of the talks in Germany, where someone asked if it was necessary to stop eating meat to be a good Buddhist. I told him "no."

 Now if you're asking me or Brad Warner what political stripes you should have or what you should eat in order to be a good Buddhist you could be a better Buddhist simply by not asking that question.

But I want to point out that what I think Warner's trying to say is that Zen Buddhism is not representative of a single political philosophy any more than say, tennis or violin playing is in itself.  Can you use tennis or the violin or Zen Buddhism to reinforce certain political acts and aspirations?  Of course.  Should you?

This is where I must part company with the Venerable Warner: with the practice of Zen "we become more us," that is, we function more in harmony and in synch with our environment and those around us.  To those of us who are more political animals than others, our Zen will inform our political acts.   The good teacher will know when to teach, but his words will not necessarily have the baggage of Zen buzzwords intermixed with them.  The good parent will coax the children out of the burning house without religious appeals.

But it will all be Zen

Boat: Leaking. Capatain: Lied

I'm not happy with recent events in the health care reform area; people need to have a modicum of health and security to work without anxiety. It is one of the crude aspects of American culture that many people take a ridiculously simplistic viewpoint of motivation of people.

Furthermore, there are people, such as social workers, teachers, charity workers, and so forth who deserve "Cadillac" health and retirement benefits, because the pay in those fields is abysmal and will be while capitalism runs wild.

Everyone knows the boat is leaking, everyone knows the captain lied...

Glenn Greenwald's take on the health care debate is sobering, to say the least:

... In fact, it's so obviously true that no matter how dumb one might think Democrats are, they're certainly not so dumb that they failed to realize that the GOP was highly unlikely to help Obama pass health care reform no matter what the bill contained. From the start, it's been obvious to everyone -- the Obama White House and Senate Democrats included -- that the GOP would not help Obama pass health care reform. Why would the GOP want to help Obama achieve one of his most important and politically profitable goals? Of course they were going to try to sabotage the entire project and would oppose health care reform no matter what form it took. Everyone knew that from the start for exactly the reason that it was so obvious to Benen.

The attempt to attract GOP support was the pretext which Democrats used to compromise continuously and water down the bill. But -- given the impossibility of achieving that goal -- isn't it fairly obvious that a desire for GOP support wasn't really the reason the Democrats were constantly watering down their own bill? Given the White House's central role in negotiating a secret deal with the pharmaceutical industry, its betrayal of Obama's clear promise to conduct negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN no less), Rahm's protection of Blue Dogs and accompanying attacks on progressives, and the complete lack of any pressure exerted on allegedly obstructionists "centrists," it seems rather clear that the bill has been watered down, and the "public option" jettisoned, because that's the bill they want -- this was the plan all along.

The Obama White House isn't sitting impotently by while Democratic Senators shove a bad bill down its throat. This is the bill because this is the bill which Democratic leaders are happy to have. It's the bill they believe in. As important, by giving the insurance and pharmaceutical industries most everything they want, it ensures that the GOP doesn't become the repository for the largesse of those industries (and, converesly, that the Democratic Party retains that status).

This is how things always work. The industry interests which own and control our government always get their way. When is the last time they didn't? The "public option" was something that was designed to excite and placate progressives (who gave up from the start on a single-payer approach) -- and the vast, vast majority of progressives (all but the most loyal Obama supporters) who are invested in this issue have been emphatic about how central a public option is to their support for health care reform. But it seems clear that the White House and key Democrats were always planning on negotiating it away in exchange for industry support. Isn't that how it always works in Washington? No matter how many Democrats are elected, no matter which party controls the levers of government, the same set of narrow monied interests and right-wing values dictate outcomes, even if it means running roughshod over the interests of ordinary citizens (securing lower costs and expanding coverage) and/or what large majorities want.

NAFTA was supposed to work that way. How'd that work out for everyone?

Barack Obama for President

I'm not a clergyman, and have no legal constraints that keep me from advocating a change from the horrid policies of most of the past 40 years.

"Conservatism" was always about denying living beings oxygen, and convincing them it was in their best interests to suffocate, metaphorically speaking.

It's time practices associated with such a cynical and vicious philosophy were relegated to the time in which we assign events which would be unspeakably horrid if we were to do them today.

Barack Obama's far from perfect, and has articulated far more centrist positions than we need right now, but he's not going to destroy the country as quickly as the party which brings the word "repugnant" to my mind.

And don't kid yourselves. It's repugnant to fund death squads who murder union organizers. It's repugnant to destroy the middle and working classes. It's repugnant to position the military as the only "viable" career option for the youth in a country where everything is bought or sold as a result of imported petroleum. It's repugnant that in the (formerly unchallengeable) economic powerhouse of the world, we can't have a health care system that equals that of the French. Or hell, the unemployment benefits of the Germans.

The other side is not on the side of angels, but it's time this country went in a different direction. It's time people who advocated for the people were actually in charge of the government, who put into power supreme court justices that understood that ideological prohibitions of marijuana is not worth destroying someone's life.