Admin-kine Stuffs

For those who may think I have deserted my blog, I’m tagging my photo-site, the most boring of all possible admin tasks, and it could take over a week, because I have hundreds of graphics posted to it, most of them are untagged, or unconsciously tagged, and I just need to do this and get it over with, no matter what.

Anything for traffic, you know. To quote Poo-bah in Madame Butterfly (sticking his upturned palm straight out behind his deleted anatomy while begging for a bribe), “It disgusts me, but I do it.” It really does disgust me, because it’s SO boring, and there’s just NO way out of it for me.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping

The Houston Mahayana Dharma Realm

Check out this charming first-hand account of the Chinese Mahayana Buddhist world in Houston, by a Chinese-language blogger called Wei Dedong. This excellent piece of work contains some pretty trenchant criticism of Fo Guang Shan, to which I’ve added my own criticism. In the following case, I even wrote it first in Chinese before translating to English.

((我很明显，佛光山之特点就是为他人服务。惨的是，佛光山的方丈尼们大班还没晓得，美国人所须要的究竟是什么样的服务。她们非常好打算的 『节日』对我们往往会当成一席忍不住的困难, 华侨包括在内。为什么呢？因为她们还猜不得美国人民主义的基本性，华侨包括在内。It’s obvious to me that the distingushing characteristic of Fo Guang Shan is serving others. What’s sad is that the Abbess’ of Fo Guang Shan mostly still have not woken up to what kind of service it is that Americans need. The “Festival Days” that they so like to plan often turn into a whole scene of intolerable misery for us, Chinese-Americans included. And why? Because they still can’t guess the fundamental nature of American democracy, Chinese-Americans included. -xp))

Translation completed 16 Jun 09. This is a really great piece of work, thank you Dedong. I’d also like to take this opportunity of thanking my Blog host, WordPress, for allowing me to write Chinese here. I probably would not last 10 seconds on a Chinese-language blog, because the kind of criticism that I’ve written above would tend to be thoroughly and immediately squashed administratively by Fo Guang Shan Central’s trogdolytes.

It would be well to remember that Texas is among the top three US states in number of Buddhist Dharma Centers:

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping

For those who do not yet believe that this blog gets admin traffic from Asia

The Formosa Times on my last post

I guarantee you that Buddhist admins are that fast, but they hide the evidence, because they don’t want to give me a fat head.

Hey, whatever makes them happy, you know what I mean? They finally can’t hide from me, and they know that.

Namu Amida Butsu

Mission Redirection

I just wiped out the two articles for which the traffic exceeded this: Xing Ping on Compassionate Buddhism. That particular bilingual article is a straight-forward statement of the purpose of my birth. People who have reasons for visiting this blog that diverge from that purpose are invited to take your traffic elsewhere.

I have also deleted all posts in the “political” category, and that category itself. The time for politics has now passed. That includes both presidential politics and the dharma politics of Fo Guang Shan.

Fo Guang Shan is destined for a first-class succession crisis when Master Xing Yun drops the body, because of his fundamental mistake in establishing a line administrative structure composed completely out of nuns, in blatant violation of the Buddha’s word.

That one sentence is the last thing that I will write, or say, about that issue. From now on, everything that I write here will be either a translation of the Buddha’s word from Chinese to English, or a translation of something out of Lin Yaming’s cohort in Singapore, or an original bilingual article of my own, about the current new revolution in Mahayana Buddhism that is sweeping Asia as I write.

Namu Amida Butsu

Comment Breakthrough

I’ve added the “Comment Widget” to the bottom of the side panel, because of this comment from what appears to be Lin Mingya’s sister Meifeng:

Lin Mei Feng on Lin Mingya’s CV

What a great comment! It makes me feel like I found a missing part of my Sangha!

I’m going to translate this Curriculum Vitae. It could take a while.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping

欢迎东方朋友们飘到我这儿来！Welcoming Visiting Friends from the East

昨天的击次当过本站存在的最大、是因为许多东方朋友们飘到了！ 恐怕我这个小站有点儿太偏英文的。 可是，宝贵的东方交通量要那么重要的话，我一定要多注重双语文章。誓言的了！

南无阿弥陀佛
性平

That yesterday’s hit-count was the greatest in the history of this site was because quite a few easterners drifted over. I’m afraid that my little site is too weighted towards English. But, if valuable Asian traffic is going to be that important, I will certainly put greater emphasis on bilingual material. Promise!

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping

Traffic Patterns

The most hit items on this blog are: The Geshe Michael Roach “Controversy”, (this content was unintentionally deleted and I have rewritten it from memory) and Meher Baba’s Response to my Buddhist Practice.

This is the kind of traffic I want. What these two posts have in common is other ways, besides traditional Asian ones, to derive authority in Buddhism.

Geshe is the most prominent case of an American Buddhist who practiced to fruition without being recognized by his Asian lineage, and that non-recognition is the result of the cultural and racist agendas of his lineage head. Geshe has done at least three times as much actual practice as the head of his Asian lineage, and was pretty close to Enlightenment when he started. “By their fruits shall ye know them.” At some point, we just stop listening to Asians with cultural and racist agendas. Geshe is the tip of the iceberg. In my opinion, there now exist literally thousands of non-recognized attained American Buddhists.

Meher Baba is an example of a modern-era Spiritual Master (the current Avatar of God, in fact), who pulled the basics out of the often self-contradicting mass of presenting Asian cultural assumptions about Buddhism. According to Baba, “Broad Buddhism” is one of five “highroads to God,” the particular one which “succeeds when driven to its extremes.” Baba asserted Himself to be the Incarnation of the same Person who was Gautama Lord Buddha and also Jesus Christ, among many others. All of His writings are consistent with Buddhism, as well as all the other major religions. And as a follower of Meher Baba, the only value in Buddhism is what was actually spoken by the Buddha. The innumerable changes to the actual teaching of the Buddha that were wrecked on it, mostly by well-intentioned individuals simply trying to survive in hostile Asian cultural environments, have no value to such persons, of which yours truly is an unutterably never-humble-enough example.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping

Administrative Decisions

After being chaotic about it for a while, I have decreed that there shall exist these categories on this blog, and that each blog entry will be assigned to exactly one category:

American Buddhism
Asian Buddhism
East Asian Language and Culture
Politics
Hawaii
Other

I’m forcing a choice between Asian and American Buddhism, because we’ve all already made that choice by our birth. The American Buddhism category is where I am placing material which is critical of Asian Buddhism, as well as articles about the indigenous American product. The reason for that is that my critical attitude is a result of an American point of view about Asian Buddhism applied to people to whom it cannot belong.* If you look at the “Category Cloud” in the sidebar, which shows the relative sizes of the categories, you will see that most of what I’ve written here is non-critical material about Asian Buddhism.

However, I consider the dominance of a site called American Buddhism by material about Asian Buddhism to be inappropriate, and I will now seek to equalize these categories by adding to the American Buddhist category. But most of that will not be criticism. I feel that I’ve voiced all the criticism that is necessary. I need to survey the state of the web on American Buddhism, which I haven’t done for several years.

*An example of this is the last bilingual post. Fo Guang Shan’s liturgy is not wrong in an Asian context. What makes it wrong is its presence in America, together with unrealistic pretensions to be transmitting to the American mainstream. The only thing that can transmit is orthodox doctrine, and this just doesn’t cut it. The only kind of doctrine that can survive systematic political oppression is also orthodox, and that is what now exists on the Chinese mainland, in a vital new modern-era mainstream society form. For that reason, I find more to the issue of American Buddhism in what now exists on the Chinese mainland than in what is coming out of Taiwan, including Fo Guang Shan. Like Taiwan culture in general, Taiwan Buddhism is comparatively reactive and subjective.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping

Thanks to the bloghost for letting me write Chinese

This is the first site I’ve ever owned which lets me write Chinese.  I’m to the point where I’m starting to THINK in Chinese, and if I can’t write it, it just makes me stupid and crazy.

Namu Amida Butsu,
Xing Ping