Yes, it seems June is now officially "American Buddhists" month...

There's yet another article on this topic, this time in the Mormon-connected Deseret News.  This one is actually a reproduction of the article in the Washington Post though, except for this paragraph:

Our take: Although surveys have found that the number of Americans who practice the Buddhist religion is rapidly growing, the practice of the Eastern faith doesn't necessarily reflect the traditional path. In fact, a "North American sacred tradition" has sprung up that is somewhat different from "wholesale" Buddhism, but, according to some Buddhists, this is possible because of the simplicity of the faith, its broad applicability to all cultures and types of people, and because it does not rely on the belief in any deity.

Naturally, I hardly ever look at the Deseret News - the last time I looked at it, it was to see if there had been any recent coverage of a couple of Mormon Fundamentalist murderers of late, who were the subject of a book I'd been reading on a plane ("Under the Banner of Heaven," by Jon Krakauer).

The Deseret News (or these days, the Washington Post) are not particularly reliable news sources to me, or perhaps I should say they are reliable to behave certain ways given their ownership and editorial policy.  

How the Deseret News can talk about a "traditional path" of Buddhism, a "North American sacred tradition" that is "somewhat different" than a "'wholesale' Buddhism" (as opposed to retail?) I just don't know.  I realize that news media is dying because its business model is collapsing, but to stick a paragraph like the above on top of a "Sally Quinn's brother who is a scholar of Buddhism" link-bait simply reveals the utter irresponsibility of some "religion" reporters, and, as Arun would note, the invisibility of Asian-connected Buddhists in the US.

To the Deseret News: Just because Genpo Merzel married someone well-connected to the Mormons doesn't mean we're at all like him. 

What is this, Western Buddhism month in the major media?

Via Arun, I see the Washington Post is weighing in on the subject of "Western Buddhism" and the "future" of Buddhism in the West.

This article has so many issues, it's not even wrong, as the physicist said:

• Yes, William Wilson Quinn, there is a historic North American Buddhist tradition: it is compiled of the aggregate of Buddhist traditions that immigrants brought to North America.  It includes nasty things that were done to the Chinese, the Japanese, etc.  It includes the folks who first greeted and sheltered Soen Shaku, Nyogen Senzaki, and many others.  It predates by decades many of the fundamentalist Christian sects in America, for example, the Foursquare Church, the Vineyard, and many other such sects.
• "Some North American authors have suggested that North Americans might consider foregoing any such wholesale adoptions of Eastern traditions in deference to gradually developing their own. " Others, including this author, have suggested that keeping the Eastern traditions is useful in the way that it's important to have a "skill set" developed around a form of cultivation, much as one learns to play a musical instrument. 
• "Expansion of consciousness????" Really, who talks like that in Buddhist circles anywhere?  Does the author think this is some kind of highest good or something?
• It's not all meditation. There's a whole 8-fold path that includes lots of other things too! And in the Zen tradition, most recorded accounts of enlightenment most assuredly do not recount it being achieved when in meditation.  So there's that.
• "North American Buddhists are likely to create their own traditions and schools of thought, but they should do so with the awareness that they are forging a new Buddhist culture, not the ‘true’ Buddhist culture."  I'm not sure what this sentence means. I'm not even sure the author knows what it means.

What's going on in Myanmar?

I think it's important as a guy who calls himself Buddhist to try to make sure that nasty things that are done in the name of this religion are not swept under the rug. It's no more appropriate for Buddhists to remain silent when Buddhists are perpetrators of nasty acts than it is to remain silent when some other group's members are perpetrators of horrific acts.  And this time it seems the persecuted group is the Rohingya, a primarily Muslim minority living near Bangladesh.

And so there's been news lately about Myanmar, and it's not been pretty.  Although Aung San Suu Kyi is being treated like a pop star while she's on tour,  tensions between Buddhists and Muslims is increasing, according to this article published June 10th.

Tensions in the area had been building for several months, said Chris Lewa, an expert on the Rohingya who has championed their cause. Myanmar’s government has not proposed a solution for the 800,000 Rohingya, who live in desperate conditions that resemble refugee camps and make up one of the largest groups of stateless people in Asia. There are fears inside Myanmar that the clashes could widen into a broader religious conflict. In recent days, Buddhist and Muslim groups have held relatively small separate protests in Myanmar’s main city, Yangon. In one sign that passions are running high, the Web site of the Eleven Media Group, a publisher of one of the country’s leading weekly newspapers, displayed a string of hateful comments about Muslims from readers. “Terrorist is terrorist,” wrote one reader who signed in as Maungpho. “Just kill them.” U Ko Ko Gyi, a former political prisoner who is helping lead efforts to ease religious tensions, said he was concerned by the “emotional response” to the clashes. “We have to calm down and find an intellectual solution to the problem,” he said. Muslims leaders have urged calm in recent days, and the National League for Democracy, the party of the Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, issued a statement on Saturday calling on the government to restore order. About 90 percent of Myanmar’s population is Buddhist; Muslims account for about 4 percent.

Another disturbing article appeared two days ago:

In online forums, Rohingya are referred to as dogs, thieves, terrorists and various expletives. Commenters urge the government to “make them disappear” and seem particularly enraged that Western countries and the United Nations are highlighting their plight. 

The violence in Rakhine State, which borders Bangladesh, has left 29 people dead and more than 2,500 houses burned during the past week, according to officials quoted in the Burmese news media. About 30,000 people have been displaced by the violence, according to the United Nations. 

Harder to measure has been damage to Myanmar’s complex multiethnic fabric as the government of President Thein Sein tries to steer the country toward reconciliation between the military and the people, and between the Bamar majority and the dozens of smaller ethnic groups. 

So far, the violence has been limited to Rakhine, which is relatively isolated from the rest of the country by a mountain range. But many among those who have posted angry comments on Internet sites have equated the Rohingya with other Muslims scattered around Myanmar. In Yangon, Myanmar’s main city, worshipers at mosques reported that prayer services left out traditional Friday sermons as a precaution against widening the sectarian conflict. 

The issue of the Rohingya is so delicate that even Myanmar’s leading defender of human rights and democracy, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, has been oblique and evasive about the situation. Asked at a news conference on Thursday whether the estimated 800,000 Rohingyas in Myanmar should be given citizenship, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi was equivocal. “We have to be very clear about what the laws of citizenship are and who are entitled to them,” she said in Geneva, which she was visiting as part of a European tour. “All those who are entitled to citizenship should be treated as full citizens deserving all the rights that must be given to them.”

While I haven't been a guy favoring distraction by causes in quite a while, and haven't been a big fan of the Dalai Lama, I was never in doubt about the nastiness of the dictatorship in Myanmar. I'm glad Aung San Suu Kyi is out of prison and running the country and getting a Nobel prize and all that. But this racist hatred must be spoken against; the perpetrators of such violence, regardless of their class or religion, are still perpetrators of violence, and achieve no merit from doing so as Buddhists.

Technology and our use of it as a reflection of who we are...

Because various computers in my house have aged, and because there's still things you can't readily do on a PC that you can do on a Mac after nearly 3 decades of Macs, I am the new recipient of an Apple iMac, so if this post isn't coming out the way to which you're accustomed to reading, let's just say I still don't have a few things figured out yet.  But they're not the important things to me.

There are things a PC does better today, but that's mostly because Microsoft still does things to privilege use of their machines. These are things like access of the Microsoft webmail client in Safari - though the "mail" application on the Mac handles it without incident.

But PC versus Mac isn't the whole point of this post, but it illustrates a recurring theme of this post, which is a continuation of my continuing musings on this article that appeared in February of last year about how Steve Jobs was able to capture the initiative in the consumer electronics market.

Other companies fail to do things because they've overlooked potential openings or are cutting corners to save money; under Jobs, however, every spurned opportunity is a conscious, measured statement. It's why the pundits who give Apple products poor reviews for not including industry-standard components -- for instance, the iMac's lack of a floppy drive -- just aren't getting it: Apple products are as defined by what they're missing as much as by what they contain.

To understand why, one has to remember that Jobs spent much of the 1970s at the Los Altos Zen Center (alongside then-and-current Gov. Jerry Brown) and later studied extensively under the late Zen roshi Kobun Chino Otogawa -- whom he designated as the official "spiritual advisor" for NeXT, the company he founded after being ejected as Apple's CEO in 1986, and who served as officiant when he wed his wife Laurene in 1991.

Jobs's immersion in Zen and passion for design almost certainly exposed him to the concept of ma, a central pillar of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Like many idioms relating to the intimate aspects of how a culture sees the world, it's nearly impossible to accurately explain -- it's variously translated as "void," "space" or "interval" -- but it essentially describes how emptiness interacts with form, and how absence shapes substance. If someone were to ask you what makes a ring a meaningful object -- the circle of metal it consists of, or the emptiness that that metal encompasses? -- and you were to respond "both," you've gotten as close to ma as the clumsy instrument of English allows.

While Jobs has never invoked the term in public -- one of the aspects of his genius is the ability to keep even his most esoteric assertions in the realm of the instantly accessible -- ma is at the core of the Jobsian way. And Jobs' single-minded adherence to this idiosyncratically Japanese principle is, ironically, what has allowed Apple to compete with and beat Japan's technology titans -- most notably the company that for the past four decades dominated the world of consumer electronics: Sony.

What let me into further considerations of this was a blog post of a tech writer who wanted certain iPhone apps to go away, and news that Microsoft is announcing its own version of the iPad.

The author of the blog and Microsoft likely still don't get it. 

They don't get that a successful technology product is adapted to the way people are, and is useful to them where they are.  And it's not overly hostile to the environment.  It's deeper than that, too but I won't go further there.  What I will say is that so much problems are created by not taking these kinds of things into account in all aspects of product design.  The PC and the Mac are metaphors for how our society has approached things: the Mac, a "socialist" (or if that's too politically loaded for you "communitarian") version of the Way Things Could Be is highly integrated, (mostly) much easier to use than a PC, and works better.   A PC is made by outsourcing, and throws more power and Gigaflops at problems that result in mostly unappealing compromises for performance. 

On the Mac, if you open an ftp site, you know what happens? Folders appear on the screen.  Like they should. Try that with Internet Explorer, if you've never opened an ftp site.  To download and install Open Office on a Mac, it takes maybe 15 minutes with a decent wireless internet connection. Have you tried installing a new version of Microsoft Office lately?  Oh, and one is free and the other is what...$150 or $300 or something like that?

So it's a metaphor for how we should structure and unstructured, and interact with each other, which like many things is probably applicable in aspects of our life and families and communities beyond Stuff You Do With a Computer.

Well, I suppose I'll have to talk about the NY Times & Buddhism in the West

Here.

Dr. Paul D. Numrich, a professor of world religions and interreligious relations, conjectured that there may be as many Buddhists as Muslims in the United States by now.Professor Numrich’s claim is startling, but statistics (some, anyway) support it: Buddhism is the fourth largest religion in the United States. More Americans convert to Buddhism than to Mormonism. (Think about it, Mitt.)Many converts are what Thomas A. Tweed, in “The American Encounter With Buddhism,” refers to as “nightstand Buddhists” — mostly Catholics, Jews (yeah, I know, “Juddhists”) and refugees from other religions who keep a stack of Pema Chödrön books beside their beds.So who are these — dare I coin the term? — Newddhists? Burned-out BlackBerry addicts attracted to its emphasis on quieting the “monkey mind”? Casual acolytes rattled by the fiscal and identity crises of a nation that even Jeb Bush suggests is “in decline”? Placard-carrying doomsayers out of a New Yorker cartoon? Uncertain times make us susceptible to collective catastrophic thinking — the conditions in which religious movements flourish.Or perhaps Buddhism speaks to our current mind-body obsession...

Or it could be...it could be that there's a heck of a lot of suffering and people have figured out that Buddhism helps.  Or it could be that Buddhism is one of the few major world religions (is there any other?) where skeptical brains aren't not only not checked at the door, but encouraged.

Mr. Atlas kind of gets to that latter point, but it's kind of buried in the studied trendiness of the article.

Like any guilty pleasure, I said I would not do it...but...

I just can't help noting that I will be missing Genpo Merzel's teleconference tomorrow.

Join Genpo Roshi for a 90 minute teleconference. He will share some of the new voices he has personally been working with most recently and will also discuss the direction and vision he  sees us moving in after a year and a half, including subjects such as transmission, acknowledgments, teachings and empowerments.

 (Emphasis mine.) I could not, I could not help thinking of this:

That's karma for you.

How much effort and the origin of divisions: further conversations

Nathan, over at his place, has continued the conversation further on how much effort one should put into one's practice. I'm grateful for that. 

I think this converation has aspects of the cultural and generational divides of so-called American convert Buddhism (which, as I'm sure one would point out, might still have ethnic faultlines considering that there might be Asian convert American Buddhists...etc...but I'll let the danger of overgeneralization on that point hang there to proceed on one of my larger points.)  Or maybe I'll just list them as bullet-points:

• I think one of the bigger cultural divides that I see has to do with "-isms."  While it is true that many of us adhere under Buddhism,  the Buddhism of the school from which I hail does endeavor to truly not exclude all.  And so I would aspire  to be just as jaundiced in looking at anti-capitalism and anti-sexism as I do anti-comunism and sexism.   It's more of a kind of a convergence of John Lennon and the Lotus Sutra though than any kind of a centrist politcal philosphy though. (I. e. "If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow" meets the Burning House parable which teaches skillful means.)   I mean in fact when it comes to politics and "skillful means" in politics (i.e., to acquire political ends purely and amorally)  I'm more of a kind of a fan of the guy who wrote "Carthage must be destroyed." And if someone's playing that zero sum game - the "Carthage must be destroyed" game, that may indeed be a convergence of Buddhist skillful means with political skillful means.  But all other things being equal, that is, when it's not presumed to be a zero sum game,  avoid the "-isms" is how I've been acculturated.
• But before I depart from that point, re: Michael Roach,  how the hell do people afford to go on a 3 year retreat?   Is it like the Catholic Church of a hundred or so years ago, which offered the equivalent of castration without the surgery (i.e., celibacy)  as a quid pro quo for lifting boys and girls out of poverty?  Or is this a fancy of the ultra-wealthy?  Clearly there's class and cultural issues that are outside mine right there.  I mean, I'm not poor by any means, but I could not afford to do a 3 year retreat until, geez, I'm like 68 or something...that's about 13 years from now.
• How much effort? It might be a Rinzai/Soto thing, but from a Rinzai perspective, "right effort" should be unceasing through the day.  In that sense I do not put in enough effort. But as far as Rinzai/Soto divides, we Rinzai can do that because there's ways of doing koan practice during the day that don't involve sitting in zazen.   Soto folks have mindfulness practice, which someone should have said is "just sitting without sitting."  I hope someone did, because it'd be a shame if that phrase were only attributed to me.
• And in the Rinzai tradition, at least Hakuin realized that the average people busted their buts and that effort was quite substantial. And that the Way could be realized that way. 
• Even when Hakuin wasn't in sesshin, he did a lot of sitting each day, oftentimes.
• So "right effort" and "arduous practice" are not something to be lightly dismissed. Despite what everyone said about "Geez, that's extreme what those folks did out there," Bodhidharma was arduously meeting the cave wall face to face, without "-isms."  Now the trick is to bring that ardor to being stuck in traffic, faulty plumbing, failed expectations and other beauties of our brief dwelling here.

The effort thing and resolution in practice...

In reading what Brad Warner wrote here about the Geshe thing (ugh, I can't believe people fell for this nonsense), it reminded me of a side comment that Nathan wrote here:

In the minds of many Buddhist men historically, and even some still today, enlightenment was a man's domain. And any man who wanted it better "man up" in his practice. The obsession with marathon meditation retreats and hardcore, "balls busting" koan studies you see in some convert Zen communities reminds me a lot of this ancient mud. 

 I had lots of other issues with Nathan's post as well; but I've made related points (w.r.t. those other issues) in the past and I'll make related points (w.r.t. those issues) again.   To bring out the point I want to make, though, I want to go to Ven. Warner's post:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, when you’re getting into meditation practice you’re dealing with some serious mojo. This is not to be taken lightly. And if you think you need a more intense or extreme practice to get you into the deeper stuff faster… you most assuredly do not. It’s absolutely crucial to take this stuff slowly. If you try to rush it, bad things will happen. We’re all full of lots of bad stuff. If you think you can push right through into the great enlightenment of Lord Buddha without first dealing with your own accumulated negative shit, you’re dead wrong.

I've seen unbalanced people in those places...they have them in Christian churches too.  It happens.

Ven. Warner has a point. People with issues shouldn't push themselves beyond their limits. It happens, and it will continue to happen, if only because this sort of guidance is guided towards generation of actions from which there are no words - "how much effort" or "what is my resolution to practice" begins - before there is a verbally expressible idea. I'm trying to say that, for at least the reason of how ideation is verbalized,  that someone with a less than titanium composure might commit to more than effort than he is able to commit, because he can't ideate the notion of "too much."  If you don't like that,  there's one of those quotes from William Blake, about how you never know how much is enough until you know how much is too much.

But the other comment, well, I think that comment is not informed by the experience of which I know.

The fact of the matter is, the historical Buddha himself went to extremes in his practice. Eventually he realized a middle-way course of action, but not before hitting the rails.   Typically that's the way practitioners work.  Again, you can't say "how much is right" without addressing areas from which motivation comes.   Note: the point is not to go anywhere near the rails! The point I'm trying to make is without an ongoing commitment, a resolution to effort no fruits of effort are ever realized.  

Yeah, Soto folk: I'm saying even to just sit that requires effort. At the very least the effort required to make the commitment to do so. 

But...how much effort?

Well, I'll get to that, but  first off, but in the spirit of Bill Maher, I'd like to posit a new rule: Soto folks shouldn't opine about koan ( 公案) practice.  Seriously folks, what is your point about writing about it if you don't know what it is, and  if you haven't practiced it. And just because a Soto teacher "told you" about 公案 practice doesn't mean that teacher knows anything about 公案 practice.   Brad Warner's a Soto VIP (how about that instead of 老師?) and even he's written things that were uninformed about 公案 practice.  And I can say this and stand by my point above about just sitting requiring effort because there are places where 公案 practice is 只管打坐. And yes, there are schools - White Plum, the Yasutani-based, but also Rinzai temples, where both 公案 and 只管打坐  practices are cultivated, not to mention those outside of the Japanese tradition, especially the Chinese and Vietnamese traditions, where something else entirely is going on.  I'm talking about Soto purists here, and especially those who'd rather come uncomfortably close in their practice to the notion of buji zen (無事禅.)

Oh, yes, wait, I know, the comment in question was only denigrating the "balls busting" 公案 studies. It may be that there are 老師 and such that promote unrealistic   コブラ会 ("Cobra Kai") types of practices...but a useful teacher will be getting you to have this practice as it arises from you, yourself.

And any useful giver and evaluator of 公案 practice will encourage very strongly effort to be made to get to a resolution of the 公案 - at the very least one must have the resolution to resolve the 公案.

So all of the above means that one's resolution to practice should be cultivated as much as one can without going superego on one's self. (Yes that's a self-referential statement - one shouldn't be bothered if one's going too much in one direction or the other, just resolve to practice. And then follow through.) 

Yes, 3 year silent retreats are hoo-hah. No, it's not sexist or damaging to learn how to make a great effort via resolution.   In fact it's vital for the practice of living one's life.  And don't forget Soto folks: those vows to help other sentient beings are vows.  And they come with a high barrier.  For a reason.

They'd like me to come home to this?

In my random internet surfing, perhaps as a result of reading this or this, I came across the site of the (relatively new) local Roman Catholic Church, which features a link to a site called "Catholics Come Home."  The Roman Catholic Church, as anyone who follows anything knows, has contemporaneously been hijacked by callous conservatives, as well as been engaged in bizarre sexual scandals inextricably correlated with their  clergy's own sexual problems manifested as a war on other people's sexuality.

I submit the morality of the Roman Catholic Church is intrinsically disordered. I'm not being cute; I'm dead serious.  Don't believe me?  Check out the "Catholics Come Home" site on "moral issues."  With the exception of Euthanasia, which I suppose would, if I explored it, reveal a steamy sewer of something immoral there, it's otherwise 100% sexytime.

Think of that: the "morality" of today's Roman Catholic Church is primarily concerned with sexytime.

Is it just me or does anyone else have a problem with that?  

It is thus probably why, on another part of the site, they have a guy saying that he came back to the Catholic Church apparently, because he didn't know what his faith was.  What kind of crazy Rube Goldberg logic does it take to think in your head that you "don't know what your faith is?"  (By that it is clear from the context he meant, he didn't know what others wanted him to say he believed.) Now you could interpret "I don't know what my faith is" as  "I don't know what I believe," - a reasonable enough way to get through life to be sure, and quite in line with the way reality presents itself moment to moment- but in that case what is wrong with that, and why would that be a problem for any kind of religion that presents itself as a some kind of moral force?  It's the opposite of any kind of moral force, actually, because such as statement is the expression of freedom of conscience itself.

The people who run that site want to tell people: this is what you should believe.  Because they say so.

I would submit also that it is this morality that created the child abuse scandal in the first place.

And their political activity invalidates any claim to  a tax exempt status.

The Way is found in the tiny bits in your everyday life.

In retrospect, it seems sort of obvious that this Michael Roach story would take the turn it did.  A Japanese girlfriend from long ago advised me that her family were "just Buddhists," never mind the crazy Aum Shin Rikyo cult.

The thing is, many practitioners, at a relatively small level of experience, get into thinking that what they're doing is going to have some rather grand results in terms of "universal enlightenment" or the "emerging Buddhism," or some utopian notions of re-making society or what-not.  I too have had such notions from time to time in a time long ago.   It's the kind of thing that makes one fodder for a spiritual huckster.  These notions and wants encourage one to want to glue to a "teacher" one's  notions of what they want their existence (and the existence of everyone they know)  to be. 

But

it

is

not

the 

Way.

A guy with more cred than me once said "Everyday mind is the way."  

You don't need to do anything special to find the path in which to go; it's right the heck in front of you.  You don't need to go into the desert for a year, you just have to get yourself to work in the morning.  Woody Allen said something to the effect of "Eighty percent of success is showing up."  It's generally not a good idea to make one's case with a guy that ran off with his 19 year-old adopted step-daughter to be sure, but this was said before the auteur did that fateful deed.

I'm still planning to get back to writing about the story behind this post here.  But one of the points behind that post is apropos for this post: everyday life is the Way, and doing something in everyday life can help transform the rest of your life, as long as it's not taken to extremes.

Here's a reference about which I'll post sometime in the future:

 There's points here to which  I'm very eager to respond, to say the least, especially the issue of "spirituality" and the martial arts, but, as I've said, I'll save that for another post.

Still not enough time...

There's just SO much to respond to and SO little time...I'm hoping it gets better this week.  Soon the vacation will come...

Seriously, I've seen so much over the past few days worth responding to, as previous posts show.

And there's so much more out there.

But...no...time...for now.

Just practice.

"A scheme is not a vision..."

Well, I'm finally back sort of kind of ...that is at the moment I have an ability to write a blog at home, which was absent for about a week after I got back, much to my extreme frustration.

Yes, yes, yes, the frustration was transcended, as well as my frustration at my frustration.

Some guy once realized enlightenment when he stubbed his toe.

Do you get that one?

It hurt when he stubbed his toe.

I was going to write about many things over the past few days, but now there's no time.  The title though refers to one post I may write about how the Catholic Church sees ex-Catholics - I cannot believe it. (Heh heh.)


Have a relatively pain-free day.

When Form and Emptiness Mix

I have now returned from Prague. I have the usual jet that wipes out about two days of usefulness. The trip was very instructive though. Especially telling to me was the Kafkaesque nature of Czech society at least as I experienced it from television and a few on personal interactions - it explains something about my family as I have common ancestry with those folks. It is rare for a western or you can now to see how meanest your television and wonder about it. Are you watching a horror show with a very festive mood are you watching the variety show with undertones of menacing sinister threats sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. On my arrival home I noticed my house is in a state of repair that was entirely unexpected while on travel. So it goes. So pretty much an unusually large portion of things are out of balance right now in my immediate world to say the least. That's why this blog entry may contain references to dogs or hyenas or chickens or water bottles; it's being written with the help of a voice recognition mechanism and I can't trust my proofreading skills entirely at this moment. What a unique opportunity for us all!

Tricycle interviews the Angry Asian Buddhist

I'm really glad to see Tricycle publishing an interview with arunlikhati,  which deals with some of the issues of culture and ethnicity that tend to distort some of the way in which "Buddhist media" portrays "Buddhism."

As I commented over at arunlikhati's place, I tend to experience these issues too in odd ways.  The other night before my trip I was practicing Wing Chun with a Vietnamese professional guy.  His French was impeccable, but yes, I was (slightly)  surprised that he was illiterate in 漢字.  (Yes I know Vietnamese has been Romanized since the French, and yes I know Vietnamese isn't a Sino-Tibetan languague, but just because an Asian language has loan-words from Chinese, and just because there are non-Sino-Tibetan 漢字 languages not written in 漢字 whose users are literate in 漢字 doesn't mean that all educated speakers of non-Sino-Tibetan Asian languages know 漢字. )

So it's good to see this kind of dialog taking place.

What does it mean to have no rank?

I travel a lot, as regular readers on this blog know.  At the end of this week I'm traveling to Prague, which is sort of an ancestral homeland of mine (I'm of Polish, Slovak, & German descent, and have relatives in Prague). 

As I often do when I travel, before I go I usually do an internet search to find the "state of Buddhsim" where I'm going.  It's how I found Chan/Son/Zen Temples in Xi'an, Tianjin, Jeju, Seoul...

So I look to see if there's any kind of Zen in Prague. And there is. There's the Kwan Um folks' Prague office. I kind of have a grudging admiration for the Kwan Um folks.  And then there's this guy.

Master Sando Kaisen – Alain Krystaszek was born in 1952 in Noyon in the Oise region of France. He spent his first years in his hometown, and left it at the age of eight, when his father decided to take him to Poland, his father´s home country, to be brought up there. Here in Wroclaw, he received strict education, and the repressive atmosphere of communism of that time left sorrowful feelings inside him. As he was growing up, he kept on thinking more and more intensively about the issues of injustice, anger and human ignorance. The Christian education, he received in Poland while he was ministering for an old bishop, provided first answers. When he returned to France in 1967, he became a guardian of a Noyon cathedral and a guide in the John Calvin Museum. He was even thinking of becoming a priest. But at that time he started to ponder about other things too. He could not accept the idea, that peace and happiness of the spirit could only exist inside the church walls, and that the outside world would be filled with suffering and ignorance.

He ceaselessly continued searching for answers, and he wandered from one group to another. He started to make his living as a musician playing drums. At that time, at the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s, France was a place where eastern philosophy was flourishing. Fascinated by martial arts, which he had started to learn in Poland with teachers coming from beyond the Caucasus, he decided to go to China in 1972 where he could practice martial arts in their place of origin. His journey led him through the Himalayas, all across the communist China to a small temple, lost in the mountains of Wei-fang-shan. He practiced kung-fu here and meditated under the tutoring of an old Chinese master, who taught him both the mastery of controlling his body and mind and the traditional Chinese medicine.

When he got back to Paris, he met a Japanese Master Taisen Deshimaru, who had arrived to spread the zen teachings in Europe. He finally found in him a living example of what he had always been looking for, and he decided to become his disciple...

In 1979, he received an ordination for a monk from the hands of his master. His monk´s name became Sando Kaisen, meaning “a lonely hermit”. He devoted himself completely to the practice and transmitting of the zazen position. He studied ikebana (the Japanese art of arranging live flowers), calligraphy (the Japanese art of writing-painting) and growing bonsai. For over twenty years, he pursued his interest in Chinese medicine and kept on improving his kung-fu, up to the point when he realized, that the quiet sitting position surpasses all other practices and leads directly to the realization. That is when he definitively stopped practicing martial arts.

Full of energy, Master Sando Kaisen kept on drawing more and more disciples to himself, he founded one association after another and established many dojos, centres for practicing zazen...   ...© Master Sando Kaisen’s Zen

Of course the name Taisen Deshimaru was kind of a dead giveaway as to why this oddly flattering praise appears here.  It is really hard  to get past that - does this kind of schtick help beings in Central Europe? Maybe it does.  I find it kind of hard to believe however, yet, I'm sure this guy's got "followers." 

I guess the point of this whole thing is Alain Sando Kaisen really has his poop together, and you don't.  I guess.  I mean, the guy can walk on water and swim on land, it seems.

But what possible kind of Zen could you learn from a guy like this? 

You might learn, I suppose, how to meditate in the Soto kind of way (I'd hope at least that.)  But this kind of wording can't but encourage some kind of attachment to Sando Kasisen that is unhealthy.  Someone in the position of authority should maintain some difference from their "students" (clients? partners?), but ultimately there are no kings; nobody is by virtue of whatever karma or effort untouchable, fundamentally and irretrievably separate; there is no divine right. 

Anyway, "Master" Sando Kaisen's Zen is rather unfamiliar to me; it doesn't look very much like Zen from its web presence.

New Post on Zen & the Martial Arts Coming...

I recently came across a few corners of the internet's martial arts areas...and hoo boy do they kind of not get certain things related to martial arts. It's not quite like they're the  コブラ会 ("Cobra Kai" - I wonder if it was ever written that way before...) or something like that ...but they really don't get the premises of 功夫.

Mother's Day

It's a good day to focus on the Mothers out there.

Bows to all of you. 

There are no words to acknowledge your difficulties.

Shorter version of the last post:

I know that I know what I know.
They know that they know what they know.
I don't know what I don't know.
They don't know what they don't know.
I know some of  what they don't know.
I know some of what they know.
They don't know that what they don't know
includes some of what I know.
I don't know that what I don't know
includes some of what they know.


(Apologies to R.D. Laing)

On not having much to say...or being older...

Well, it seems the Buddhist blogosphere is becoming a little thinner of late.  The Precious Metal blog is closing up shop.   The Reformed Buddhist is really kind of dormant.

And this blog hasn't had that many posts of late.  My rate of posting has gone from a deterministic constant rate process to one more bursty and Poisson-like.   That's my way of saying though it's been 6 days since I wrote a post on this blog it might be that tomorrow you might find thirty or forty posts here, but don't bet your life savings on it.

I'm not  running out of things to write about, but rather these days there are higher priorities.  My 10 year old  is becoming slowly but surely a rather skilled young violinist who knows about Shakespeare.   My wife is doing several things business related. I've got major work things to do, bursts of creativity.  Plus sitting practice, swimming, and 詠春券.

And I could be writing  posts not just on Buddhism.  If you look at the early pages of this blog, way back some 8 years ago (yes, this is one of the oldest, still functioning blogs by an American Buddhist of European descent) it had many political pages.   I don't write many political blog posts anymore, on this blog, and when I do, it might appear on Daily Kos instead of here.  (I've been meaning to do a post over there on Russia Today; remind me to do so.  The post would be about how come the English language version can talk about problems in the US, and how come they don't talk the same way about problems in Russia, and how propaganda is propaganda is propaganda.  But, despite its propaganda issues, RT is a guilty pleasure, unlike the BBC or Fox News or CCTV-9.)

The thing is, there's much I could write about but various things prevent me from doing so.  For example,  much of my current work is practice more and more, but much of it I am not at liberty to do so because of commitments to my employer.  It's because of those commitments that I feel a bit frustrated at times, because I can't tell folks how Buddhism in the marketplace is really like and practiced. Maybe when I retire I can write a book about it. 

But I for one, for now, plan to continue writing on this blog; I think there are important things that should be said, and it seems as long as no one else is doing it, and as long as I can do so without treading on other commitments I've made, I might as well be the guy.   I wouldn't deign to call the perspective I've acquired some kind of "wisdom," because I had to wade through quite a lot of my own stupidity to get where I am now.  A grandfather of mine was reputed to have said, "You'd have to sit three days up a donkey's ass to know what I know," or something like that.   It wasn't quite a boast, but an admission of the kind Zimmerman sang:

An' here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice.

I especially think those things need to be said when I see a raft of posts in the Buddhist blogosphere that tend toward the uninformed - at least uninformed by what I've been informed by.   It is a cliche that experience brings perspective, and I hate to trot out that cliche as any kind of an argument from authority.   But it remains a fact that so many of those with less experience just don't get "it" -  they don't know what they don't know, and I, myself, know so damned little myself, including, but not limited to the fact that I don't know what I don't know.

 

I do hope those who are continuing in the Buddhist blogosphere continue to continue - I need to hear others' perspectives, too.  If anyone knows of any blogs to be added to my list of blogs to read please let me know. 

Assorted quick comments on things in the Buddhist blogosphere.

• Arun, as usual, has an interesting article on the use of the term "ethnic Buddhism," and he's got a point.  Frankly, until I moved out of New York, I always wondered at the white-bread-and-mayonnaise culture portrayed in the media - I didn't realize there was such a culture and it's still rather foreign to me. 
• Corollary: I wish Charles Prebish's published works were more accessible; as I wrote in a comment, I bet his writings were unintentionally exclusionary decades ago and now could stand to be updated. It's not a great problem.
• Mental illness is a big problem, compounded by the fact that it resides in a nexus of individuals.  I'm not qualified, I feel bad that Brad Warner feels obliged to comment in this area, and I feel worse that a great deal of mental health professionals are faced with the problems they have, with a paucity of tools and approaches.
• I could write to Nathan quite a few posts on intellectual property.   But the short answer would be: much IP should be compensated. Some shoudn't be. And as the old saw goes, that which is worthy of compensation is like pornography - you know it when you see it.
• Watch out for cults.