Teachers, teaching, instant enlightenment, etc.

I've been spending entirely too much time in the comments section of Hardcore Zen lately, mostly because I share Brad Warner's...how is it we say in le monde de la société...ah yes, concern about Genpo Roshi.

Especially here.


Many of the Soto folks think we Rinzai folks expect that with ridiculously rigorous training we can "speed up" "getting enlightened."

It doesn't work that way.

See here, for example.

The instructions to the first koan (公案） couldn't be clearer. No, really.

You have to build up to the point where the "enlightenment" happens.

And nowhere does it say you have to shell out $50K to do it.

Monkeys and public speaking

Josh Marshall delves into primate anthropology.

I just heard Bernie Sanders on the radio saying...

The richest 400 families in the USA made about $679 billion during the current Bush regime.

I understand that financial crisis might cost upwards of $700 billion.

見性

I appreciate all the good work some folks are doing on the net for the Buddhist stuff & the idealism & spirit of folks such as Danny Fisher, but there's been some trillions of dollars of net worth lost so a few lucky duckies can pocket billions, and I'd just note that it kinda causes lots of suffering in its own right...

Update: Danny Fisher: no blank check for Wall St.

Yes. Sign the petition.

I did.

Why the bailout is bad for dummies...

a) no oversight for treasury department, b) no way to tell how much is the "right" amount to pay for these toxic securities...


This Naked Capitalism article is worth reading.

Void bless 'em

This type of story used to be the kind to get blood boiling. Now I think it inspires envy more than anything else:

To understand what it’s like to work on the railroad — the Long Island Rail Road — a good place to start is the Sunken Meadow golf course, a rolling stretch of state-owned land on Long Island Sound.

During the workweek, it is not uncommon to find retired L.I.R.R. employees, sometimes dozens of them, golfing there. A few even walk the course. Yet this is not your typical retiree outing.

These golfers are considered disabled. At an age when most people still work, they get a pension and tens of thousands of dollars in annual disability payments — a sum roughly equal to the base salary of their old jobs. Even the golf is free, courtesy of New York State taxpayers.

With incentives like these, occupational disabilities at the L.I.R.R. have become a full-blown epidemic.

Virtually every career employee — as many as 97 percent in one recent year — applies for and gets disability payments soon after retirement, a computer analysis of federal records by The New York Times has found. Since 2000, those records show, about a quarter of a billion dollars in federal disability money has gone to former L.I.R.R. employees, including about 2,000 who retired during that time...

“Short of the gulag, I can’t imagine any work force that would have a so-to-speak 90 percent disability attrition rate,” said Glenn Scammel, long one of Capitol Hill’s top experts on railroads. “That defies both logic and experience.”

Why should Carly Fiorina be the only one to _____?

Seriously, yeah, yeah, yeah, but public sector employees aren't the ones ripping me off.

Incidentally:

Regarding this comment on this other article: My work - intellectual property created by me - appears in more cell phones than either Brad Warner or Gempo roshi have sold books by about a factor of geez, I dunno, somewhere between 100 X and 1000X.

It doesn't mean much, Buddhism-wise, of course. On the other hand, if you want your cell phone to work...

I too have quibbles about "Big Mind"

If you can find this spot in Chiba prefecture:






You will come to a temple complex founded by Tetsuo Sokatsu Zenji Daiosho:



He was a Dharma heir of Shaku Soen, and a Dharma brother of D. T. Suzuki, and it is in this lineage of Rinzai Zen in which I train. Not well, mind you, but it is my lineage.

And in this lineage in which I train we don't do any kind of mind-games. We definitely don't have instant enlightenment, but when things are going it's



just.




無。

And now for something completely different...

I used to think Brad Warner was a bit gimmicky for my taste, but I'm changing my opinion.

I'm Mumon and I approve this ad...

It's so nice to see a campaign being fought hard

John McCain: Anti-child.

What else can I glean from his new ad? (See E. J. Dionne, I'm not going to link to it.)

The Republicans are so greedy and drunk with power that they will risk even more kids be molested by lying about progressives who propose such legislation in order to keep their stranglehold on power.

Oh, and Sarah Palin?

Child abuser.

You learn something new every day... and today

it's about the works of Suzuki Shosan (鈴木正三), samurai Zen priest who lived 1579- 1655.

Turns out he was highly critical of Christianity, publishing a book (evidently the government liked it enough to publish it), called Ha Kirishitan (破切支丹), which has the nice passive title "Crush Christianity."

From the tiny snippet I've been able to read online, though, it's as harmless as Dawkins in its arguments.

Except for that "Southern Barbarian" thing. But evidently we were all barbarians to them.

Oh.

Wait.

Anyhow, evidently he's buried near Takao-san, near Hachiohji, which happens to be a suburb of Tokyo.

And he's noted at that website for his publication of 破切支丹.

They don't make 'em like they used to...

The Groove Tube, c. 1974.

In case you forgot they were bad guys...

Amy, Friggin' Goodman?

C'mon do they want to be stereotyped as thugs?

Daily Kos McCain’s Abramoff Problem: CliffNotes Edition...

If you missed this Kos diary, you might still think McCain's some kind of "reformer."

Yakchun-sa Temple Jeju Island, Korea...

Because I'm there. I'm a bit concerned about the "Zen Temple in the Faux Tropics" thing, but goddamit, it's certainly more authentic than the Teddy Bear Museum, and I'm here on business, and one thing I've learned in life is don't mess with the locals...

Update: I changed the title because it seems to be the spelling they use. Here's the temple's website.

You can stay there, too.

Putin's not a nice guy, and Russia isn't all huggy kissy...

Read this article on him in the NY Times.

This man is the guy in which our guy, Bush, found a soulmate.

I tried to find a place on the Russian embassy website where I could lodge a protest.

Couldn't find one.

But if you want a hoot - a real Bush hoot, and real insight into Russian culture as it really exists, look at the visa application for US citizens, and compare it with the one for non-US citizens.

They want to know, for us Americans, a) if you've ever been arrested (sorry, Arlo Guthrie, that trip to the dacha is out), b) all professional, civil and charity organizations which you are (were) a member of, or contribute (contributed) to, or work (worked) with (I don't remember that!), c) information about your last two places of work, excluding the current one (But, I think one ex-boss is dead!), and d) all countries you've been to in the past 10 years, and the year of visit (I lost count at 12 countries, and the space is roughly 4 postage stamp sizes).

I think none of that crap is on the non-US citizen visa.

I have a theory: you can tell a lot about an organization by its forms.

I submit as evidence the visa application for the Russian Federation.

Oh, one more thing on the US application I'd almost left out: look at the first question on the form:

Present citizenship (if you formerly had USSR or Russian

citizenship, please indicate when and why you lost it)

Did someone in, say, Armenia or Moldova "lose" USSR citizenship?

The fact that the 2 citizenships are implicitly equivalent here raises all kinds of questions...do they think all those USSR countries are really part of the Russian Federation?

Yet another reason we shouldn't be playing with stuff like this...

From Jonathan Taplin at TPMcafe...

In September of 2001, Bruce Ivins was just an unappreciated bio terror researcher in a lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland. He lived just off the base and many days walked to work. Though we now know he was probably suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, he had access to the most dangerous toxins in the U.S. Army's unrivaled storehouse. Ebola, Anthrax, smallpox, you name it, Bruce could get his hands on it. And then Bruce probably realized he didn't have to be the mousy nerd any more. And he carefully sent out some anthrax letters...

Two take-aways for me.

1. How the fuck did this nut case get access to these labs? And what did we do in reaction?

   We added 10 times as many University and corporate labs that have access to this deadly stuff. This is insane.
   

2. The lures to get in on the Homeland Security Gravy Train, a major topic of The Cost Of Empire, might move a truly mentally ill patient like Ivins, to kill people to get his patent taken seriously. It's like a Batman villian. But for every truly crazy guy who made big money in the Military Industrial Complex(MIC) in the last 30 years, there are 100 Jack Abramoffs--just short of being institutionalized--we'd call them ambitious, who've made far more than Bruce Ivens, as readers of this blog well know.

I can't but agree; it seems kind of crazy keeping stuff like this around folks who might be crazy...

Why do certain people get on television???

Really; why does J. Z. Knight get to be on Larry King, and dozens of folks I know from the blogosphere don't get to be on Larry King?

Call me a bigot, call me whatever you will

But I find the dust-up between P.Z. Myers and the Catholic Wingnuttium quite amusing. Maybe it's because of the abuse these "religious" people subjected me to in Catholic school.

Here's the latest bit.

And here's the post that started it all.

And here's the post where the "Great Desecration" is described.

BTW, Seung Sahn, no saint he, had a koan on what happened if someone came into a temple with a lit cigarette and flicked ashes onto the Buddha statue. Acting like Bill Donahue was not the answer to the koan.