南无消灾延寿药师佛 I take the name of disaster-solving and life-lenthening Medicine Buddha
Please read my Rules of Engagement page.
Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping
戒网继续下去了
在我以前标明的七天时期内，就是说10月19号到今天的26号，在发去我最大的能力， 我只念过二十五万声佛名号，成我目标之四分之一。 要达到我百万佛号声的目标的话，明显应该加上三个礼拜之不上网。然而，我还戒网到11月16号。
请求大家维持一阵佛陀性的忍耐心。 我再上网的时候，在药师佛光明之下，我一定要写一阵全面双语、精神改革的博客。
南无消灾延寿药师佛
性平
Web Restriction is Continued
In the seven-day period that I previously designated, that is from 19 Oct. until today the 26th, putting out my greatest effort, I was only able to chant the Buddha’s name 250,000 times, accomplishing one-fourth of my goal. In order to accomplish my goal of one million repetitions, obviously it is necessary to add three weeks of not going online. Therefore, I will continue to restrict my Web use until 16 Oct.
I request everyone to maintain a stream (or battle array) of Buddha-like patience. When I go back online, in the light of Medicine Buddha, I will certainly write a (stream or battle array) of an all-around bilingual and reformed-spirited blog.
I take the name of disaster-solving and life-lengthening Medicine Buddha
Xing Ping
Somebody put a “Zen Frog is gone” search term on my dashboard. Only a WordPress blog owner or previous owner would know to do that. It’s a way of twitting someone who refuses to degenerate to (gag, barf) Twitter. OK, I’m twitted! What’s your point?
I haven’t visited Zen Frog for a year, and I didn’t know that it had been bought out by idiots. It used to be the only other blog in the blogosphere which mentioned the unutterable Dragon-Elephant Xu Yun besides me, but then it degenerated to the below. This is a picture of a cache of one of its last front pages that I phished out of Yahoo. Google no longer has caches (jerks!).
Social networking? Hello? I came here to GET AWAY from a social networking site, aka (seizure, panic attack) Myspace. Socially Engaged Buddhism is the OPPOSITE of social networking. It means you never encourage idiocy, and you NEVER utter social noise. You ONLY give people what they need, and mostly what they need is to be told the truth of their existence, for once in their lives.
I’m so bummed out by this that I’m seriously thinking of going offline completely for a week to do bitter practices. That’s the only thing that can make me feel better.
Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping
Feb. 20, 2008
Dharma in dive bars: As the founder of the Interdependence (ID) Project, an East Village-based Buddhism meets activism nonprofit, Nichtern is used to translating the 2,600-year-old spiritual tradition of Buddhism — sometimes still perceived in the U.S. as a throwback to the cultural exoticism of the ’70s counterculture — to the 21st century.
He’s not the only one. Thirty-six-year-old Noah Levine, author of “Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries” and the memoir “Dharma Punx,” which spawned a 1,000-member contemplative community with the same name, is also trying to give the tradition a cultural face-lift.
Nichtern and Levine, both “dharma brats” — a term used for children of the first generation of American Buddhists — are working to inaugurate a more contemporary and secular tradition than has previously been available, making Buddhism less about co-opting Asian cultures and more about the practical benefits of meditation and its teachings of mindfulness and compassion. These days, people aren’t necessarily as interested in the mysterious Asian trappings that attracted spiritual seekers in the ’60s and ’70s. By tossing aside the rituals, chants and bowing that might make Buddhism seem impenetrable or alien, peppering their talks with pop-culture references to explain Buddhist concepts, encouraging political activism, emphasizing the practice of meditation and teaching in a way that Levine describes as “peer based” — “It’s not like, ‘I’m the teacher, so I have all the answers and you don’t have any,’” he says — they’re both attempting to distance Buddhism from its lingering hippie ethos.
They aren’t the only Buddhist teachers under 40, but the casual friends and colleagues are the first to start their own independent communities based on meditation. And while attracting younger practitioners isn’t necessarily a life mission for either Levine or Nichtern, their teaching styles definitely resonate with a younger generation. Between them, they’re reaching people — most of them 35 or under — who might never walk into a traditional Buddhist center.
It might be just what American Buddhism needs. Ever since Buddhism gained a foothold during the late ’60s and early ’70s, when Asian teachers emigrated to America, the American face of the tradition hasn’t really changed. It’s just grown older. Most members of the 230 or so American Buddhist centers are over 48 years old, according to a 2001 Baylor University survey quoted in a recent article in the pan-Buddhist magazine Shambhala Sun. (Numbers are sketchy for “convert” Buddhists, ranging anywhere from 100,000 to 800,000.)
“I’m really interested in getting Buddhism out of the ‘Eastern religion’ section of the bookstore,” says Nichtern, whose book “One City: A Declaration of Interdependence” — which he calls “Buddhist philosophy meets ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ meets a pop culturally interested urban survival guide” — was just released by Wisdom Publications. “Buddhism is about a practice of meditation, so that an individual can develop more mental sanity and awareness of the world around her. And it’s about interdependence — which is saying that nothing on any level of our experience is happening in a vacuum. Which of those two things are either Asian or religious?”
Quantcast“A lot of people think of meditation in the same stratosphere as psychedelics,” he continues. “It still has somewhat of a tie-dye sheen to it in the collective consciousness. That’s definitely keeping some people away. But the main thing keeping people away is that it’s hard to look at yourself and your place in the world. Meditation practice is hard. And we don’t make it any easier by making it culturally exotic or inaccessible. What people like Noah and I are trying to do is to say, this is not about ‘Free Tibet.’”
“It’s not about feel-good, peace, love and granola,” says Levine. “It’s about an inner revolution.”
When I first learned to meditate five years ago, at 24, it didn’t matter to me that I didn’t see many young practitioners at the Shambhala Meditation Center of New York. I mean, I wasn’t going to become a Buddhist or anything crazy like that. I’d just read a lot about meditation, and it seemed like a new way to deal with my insanely busy mind and lifelong battle with anxiety.
I was surprised I’d even walked into the center in the first place. I liked reading about meditation, but actually go into a center? I assumed there’d be some kind of shared language or way of behaving that would automatically render me a foreigner. Wouldn’t everyone immediately notice I wasn’t a Buddhist? (Plus, Buddhism seemed so lame anyway: I was a diehard atheist and rolled my eyes at people who embraced Asian spirituality because they thought it made them seem deep or cool.) But my then roommate and her boyfriend at the time were both practitioners, and kept suggesting I go. “It’s no big deal,” she would say. “You don’t have to do anything. You just sit on a cushion and breathe.”
She was right: It wasn’t a big deal. Around 100 people were at that Tuesday night dharma talk — half of them raised their hand when the teacher asked who was new — and suddenly my paranoia seemed ridiculous. I didn’t understand why some people bowed at the door, and I certainly didn’t understand the intimidating shrine on the right side of the room, covered with tapestries and photos and bowls and incense. But sitting still for half an hour was something I never thought my restless brain would be able to do, and when the teacher, a middle-aged man, spoke, it just made sense.
Nictern IS just what American Buddhism needs. What Americans in the mainstream see Buddhist is the Dalai Lama and the intimidating architecture of Fo Guang Shan. Both of those are percepts which forbid participation. Yeah, they’ll hear the Dalai Lama speak. That’s non-threatening, because he stays so far away. The Dalai Lama even says, “Don’t convert from Christianity, I’m not here to teach religion.” So the result is that meditation, which is what really benefits Americans in the Buddhist tradition, and which Americans are going to do anyway, because it’s what they need, winds up getting taught in a purely secular context, which is a dead end, because it only leads to such things as the meditation of martial artists and athletes, rather than Enlightenment.
Ven. Xing Yun of Fo Guang Shan has recently criticized the now world-famous marital artists of Xiao Lin Temple, who are now starting to come here to teach meditation, for practicing outside the meaning of the Buddha. But the archictecture of his own lineage, which only intimidates, but does not teach, is equally outside the meaning of the Buddha. Ditto Mandarin Chinese as a language of instruction in America. That’s not what you speak in America when it’s your intention to teach. That huge pile of outre and empty architecture at Xi Lai Temple outside of LA is seen as the abode of aliens. We REALLY need to leave the Oriental trappings behind. They only hang us up.
Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping
… I take it as some cosmic law of exchange that if Disneyland pops up in Hong Kong and Tokyo, Buddhist temples can sprout up in Los Angeles, home of the magic kingdom. Indeed, it comes as no surprise to many Californians that scholars have agreed that the most complex Buddhist city in the world is nowhere in Asia but Los Angeles itself, where there are more than 300 Buddhist temples and centers, representing nearly all of Buddhist practices around the world.
Over the past 25 years, Buddhism has become the third most popular religion in America behind Christianity and Judaism, according to a 2008 report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Evidence of Buddhism spreading deep roots in America is abundant.
Last week CNN reported that, “programs and workshops educating inmates about meditation and yoga are sprouting up across the country.” There are more than 75 organizations working with some 2,500 people, most of them prisoners, and they inspired a documentary called “The Dhamma Brothers.”
This December, Thomas Dyer, a former Marine and one-time Southern Baptist pastor, will head to Afghanistan as the first Buddhist chaplain in the history of the U.S. Army. …
Um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um! Shucks, folks, we just be purely kicking samsaric butt all over the map. It’s got to the point that we even have mainstream journalists working for us anymore. Keep the faith, folks, and for whomsoever has been searching this site on the subject, Semper Fi, dude!
Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping
Left: Here are this year’s flying stars in the Nine Palaces, as they are used by Lillian Too. In a very T00-esque move, I have decided to go straight to something we can use right now, before confusing us with a discussion of why it works. If you observe, you will simply notice that it works. For example, my lucky direction is the SW. Looking at this, you can see that this is a lucky year for me, but there’s more. There’s very clearly an indication here of why my energy is like it is this year. There’s a martial star there, and it maps right on to the fact that the strongest planet in my birth chart is Mars. Suddenly I won’t take no for an answer, and this is not me having an ego. It’s fate. For those of you who can’t read Chinese yet, will you please correct that? It’s SO boring trying to explain this stuff in a linear language.
Actually, why should I even try to do all that boring stuff, when there are so many experts out there to do it for me? At left is an equivalent chart in English, and the names of all those star numbers are expained on this page: Flying Stars. These Stars are actually the seven stars in the Big Dipper or Great Bear plus a couple not in the traditional constellation for a total of nine; and these “Stars” have nothing to do with Astrology, but are a feature of Chinese fate calculation. Please note that the chart is upside down from a western point of view, and the meaning of these directions is quite literal. This is a BAD YEAR in which to go West, young man, the West side of your property probably will need attention, and so on.
Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping
Wierdly, this same Nine Palace array (九宫格) is used in a faddy Japanese numbers game, Sudoku. At left is an example of the beginning of one of these games, which are solitary like crossword, and are said to have addictive qualities. I view this game as a mental pollution. An ancient way of understanding the world has been perverted into a way to simply be entangled in your own mind.
Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping
SHAN is the Burman appellation for those races who call themselves Tai. They are probably the most numerous and widely diffused Indo-Chinese race and occupy the valleys and plateau of the broad belt of mountainous country that leaves the Himalayas and trends Southeasterly between Burma proper on the west and China, Assam and Vietnam on the east, to the Gulf of Siam.
Tai are people of mainland Southeast Asia, including:
The Thai or Siamese (in central and southern Thailand),
The Lao (in Laos and northern Thailand),
The Shan (in northeast Myanmar @ Burma),
The Dai (in Yunnan province, China, Myanmar, Laos, northern Thailand and Vietnam) and The Tai (in northern Vietnam).
It’s probably the largest group of tribals on earth. It’s what you run into when you go far enough into the mountains anywhere in SE Asia, and everywhere you find the same Chinese-derived garb, the same outre head-gear, the same independence, the same tribal culture, and the same hereditary refusal to join any mainstream, whether Chinese, Burmese, Laotian, Vietnamese, or Thai. They are either Buddhist or shamanistic. These people are cultural-interface artists. The center of their domain is all the watersheds that divide all of the above cultures and countries. They are the only human bridge that is common to all of SE Asia. I think they are truly and totally amazing, and I think that they possess an absolutely huge store of knowledge about what has gone on, and DOES go on, over all those mountain trails between all of those countries.
Oh, and hey, I almost forgot to mention: my favorite Chinese tea is Pu-erh tea from Yunnan Province in China, and guess who raises it?
Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping
This is a plug for the Royal Hawaiian Band. I regularly go to their concerts at the bandstand at Kapiolani Park on Sunday at 2:00, which have not been well attended. I go because this is really civilized music, and I also have a thing about bands in bandstands. I think it’s a great American tradition that we should carry on, and my earliest memories as a child were of my father taking me to a bandstand in Baltimore county.
This band was established during the Hawaiian Monarchy under a royal charter, and it has that royal spirit, which is great. I like royalty without formality like this in a park, particularly after dealing with a lot of incredibly formal Chinese ritual.
It seems to me that in the present the Royal Hawaiian band is not being supported by the Hawaiian people, who have lost touch with the spirit of their Ali’i by becoming rancorous. In particular, I think that they think that the band’s repertiore is not sufficiently “Hawaiian.” What they want is local Hawaiian stuff. But guess what the Hawaiian Ali’i liked? Would you believe the European classics, and Christian hymns? Today, the band’s repertoire is certainly far more diverse than that, and they even become somewhat local at times. But what they tend towards is John Philip Sousa, and that whole traditional American bandstand feeling. So I think it’s up to us American patriots, of whatever ethnicity, to support this noble institution, which performs for free, because it has a royal charter.
Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping
Just a few samples to get you started:
For more similar shots, see my Gothic collection.
For other light effects over the water such as can only be seen in Hawaii, please view my sunset, sunrise, seascape, cloudscape, and God rays collections. (These groups are not mutually exclusive). Enjoy. Oh, and hey, bloodsucking is not allowed. We’re being Buddhist around here, OK?
Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping
American Buddhist home schoolers, your lesson plan grief is over ! Dig H. S. Olcott's Excellent Buddhist Catechism.
