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
The Shingon (the Japanese secret school) is nothing if not mysterious, and everything I do recently keeps leading back around to them. For example, I decide that I’m going to tag my photo site, and I come to my Mandala album, and find that there aren’t a whole lot of bona fide Buddhist mandala in there, so I decided to fix that, and dropped the Chinese roots for “mandala” into a Google image search, and voila!, a whole lot of Buddhist mandala. But in looking at these, it arrived that most of them just weren’t making a whole lot of Chinese sense. Way too much green, just for starters. (I don’t know what the Chinese have against that color. Perhaps mother nature was unfilial towards her parents, and they haven’t forgiven her for it. Who can know where some of their schticks come from?) They were also iconographically opaque, until I arrived at this:
Finally, front and center, a Buddha who is big enough to read, and clearly from the mudra, it could not be somebody other than Dainichi Nyorai, the root Buddha of the Shingon. I think this is just about the most cheerful mandala I have ever seen (It turns out to be the 金剛界曼荼羅 kongōkai mandara). It manages to have both a high level of organization and tremendous vitality, and I love the color. Somewhere in the midst of the search, I also encountered this WordPress blog page, which is remarkable because it got around to all of these mandala in a matter of paragraphs. For some other examples of the taizōkai mandara and the kongōkai mandara, see my Shingon Album The above article about the Shingon is the best thing I have seen on the subject.
Namu Amida Butsu
Xing PIng
What we’re looking at here is the top of Fo Guang Shan’s administrative hierarchy, on a trip to Xuecheng Fashi’s bailiwick in Beijing with Ven. Xing Yun in 2005. If they look worried, they should. They’re being confronted with an ilk of Buddhism in which nuns don’t rule, and in which renunciation still means that you own nothing. N.O.T.H.I.N.G. For these precious creatures, “renunciation” is a cushy life style, including virtually unlimited travel priveleges, and the ability to tell your numerous underlings anything you want, with no fear of retribution.
I am sure that if this kind of shot were taken in Taiwan, for example, the numerous underlings would have automatically suppressed it. That’s considered “meritorious action” where they come from. I consider it stupid.
For some other shots of this trip, shamelessly ripped from the Chinese web by never humble enough yours truly, including some great shots of Ven. Xing Yun, see my Xing Yun in Beijing 2005 Album.
I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my spiffy little Firefox web browser, avec le Gimp, the totally awesome open source image editor.
Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping
Read Bhikku Bodhi’s brilliant dissertation on bringing Buddhism to the West
The Ideal Form
Thus when I raise the question, “What type of Buddhism do we wish to spread?” I am not thinking of the pure canonical Dhamma, which exists as such only in the books. In actuality, Buddhism has always been expressed in concrete practices, embedded in social structures, and embodied by real human beings. Thus we have to consider this aspect of Theravada Buddhism and not merely the doctrinal formulas of the Pali Canon. So when we ponder how to bring Buddhism to the West, we have to decide which of the many faces of Theravada we want to bring. To some extent, this is premature, since if Buddhism does eventually take root in the West, it will assume forms particular to Western social and cultural conditions. But to begin we need something to serve as a seed or nucleus.
The ideal form of Theravada to present would be one that fuses all healthy aspects of the tradition into an organic whole. The transmission would have to focus on the practice of meditation, yet it should include a strong emphasis on Buddhist ethics (including Buddhist perspectives on contemporary ethical issues), textual and doctrinal study, devotional practices, and a fair share of ritual, too; but ritual would have to be integrated into the spiritual path, not pursued in compliance with mere cultural norms. The meditation practice should be the heart of the transmission. Once students experience the beneficial effects of meditation on their lives, in time they will develop keener interest in the study of texts, in devotional practices, in the precepts, and in ritual. Ritual will then serve to cement these varied aspects of Dhamma into a coherent whole, animated from within by the meditative experience.
What this very astute Theravadin monastic doesn’t seem to understand is that what he has just described here is, in fact, Mahayana Buddhism. This is how you organize it when you have the Bodhisattva ideal. This is the POV from which the Buddha spoke the Mahayana sutras, and this is the only POV which enables you to practice from them. The Mahayana is implicit in the Theravada, just as the Secret School is implicit in the Mahayana.
The Buddhadharma is wonderful, immutable, and eternally Radiant throughout all the vast reaches of space and time, and it will never, ever be supplanted. It is carved upon all of our bones, and reamed into the sub-plasmic primordial Reality of the Dharmakaya. Not even Lord Vishnu with all his Avatars can do away with it. Forsooth, He came again as Meher Baba, and said “I do not Teach. I only Awaken. Oh, and Hey, I am also silent. Dig. It.” And all the little yuppies said, “Yea God,” put His picture on their wall, and that was the end of their spiritual practice for this entire incarnation. It is simply up to us Buddhists to practice, because nobody else can get interested in it, nobody else can see the importance of it, and in reality, nobody else is capable of it, and that is God’s truth.
Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping
Read information about the history of this awesome mantra, and the mantra itself on this page.
… Wikipedia records the Pin Yin and Korean versions of this mantra, both of which differ quite starkly from the Sanskrit, but in my experience, the Chinese version still works. I suspect the hand of spirit protectors in this. Below, I record the Chinese version from the following site: dicang.org, because it is what I use personally, and for the merit of recording a mantra. After Amitabha’s name, this is probably the most widely used mantra in the broad Mahayana, and it has awesome magical powers. This should be memorized, and whatever it takes to do that, please do it. Years of practice? Hey, this one is worth it. It stands on the interface between the exoteric and esoteric schools, and although it can be used without lineage transmission, it cannot, say again, CANNOT be used effectively without the sound transmission. That is, this must hear it chanted by a Sangha that has it by sound transmission before you can chant it yourself. Or, more accurately, you can chant it, but it won’t do anything in that case. Sorry, outside way heretics, you just have to take Refuge and get yourself a Sangha before you can use this. Deal with it, please. All of your deviant subterfuges are never going to amount to anything anyway. You might as well come in and get it over with. …
I have also written further commentary.
Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping
Someone has been searching my site for this, so I decided to write about it. From the observed behavior in my Mahayana Sangha, I would say that the Mahayana way of dealing with anger has seven steps, namely and to wit:
1. Hide.
2. Hide.
3. Hide.
4. Develop an attitude.
5. Whine up the chain of command about your percieved afflictor.
6. Eat food.
7. Hide, and while hiding, break all available Precepts.
Oh, and hey, did I mention HIDE yet?
No, hey, actually, the orthodox Mahayana antidote for anger is something very skillful. It’s called (ahem) meditation. You may have heard of it. It is rumored that there was somebody called Gautama Lord Buddha, the Sage of the Shakya clan, who sat under a Bo tree and did this to Enlightenment, and that there exist Buddhists who still do this today. You may find that sitting with an angry mind, and doing absolutely nothing except observing your mental state, until you completely exhaust the capacity to be angry, can dissolve your anger completely.
If that doesn’t work, please take the Name of the Blissful Lord, exclusively and continuously, until you obtain the same result.
Vegetarianism also helps get over anger. If you eat dead animal body parts from animals that lived in stupidity and died in terror, the chances are excellent that this will suppress your life force until the only way you can express yourself is through anger.
Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping
The New York Times, 11 July 09
… Zorigtbaatar Banzar practices his own brand of magic in a round felt tent, or ger, that he calls the Center of Shaman and Eternal Heavenly Sophistication, which sits beside a karaoke bar at one of Ulan Bator’s busiest intersections. A potbellied, red-nosed man in his 50s, Zorigtbaatar says he first discovered his supernatural powers as a young soldier lost in the Gobi and then spent time in a mental hospital, he says, for telling others about his “gifts.”
Today he and his wife, who is also a shaman, have built a successful business based on the worship of Genghis Khan, the legendary Mongolian ruler who they say was the most powerful shaman of all. During their ceremonies, Zorigtbaatar channels Genghis Khan’s spirit for the benefit of the hundreds of believers they see each week.
The work, Zorigtbaatar says, is more important than that of the average shaman.
“We are close to the end of the world,” he said, pointing to a painting of the great Khan surrounded by a divine fire. “Mongolians today have lost their energy, their power, so they are lazy. I am sent by his spirit to help the people, not heal cancer or toothaches.”
Resplendent in a beaded crown and silk caftan draped with amulets, Zorigtbaatar beat his sheepskin drum and chanted incantations before an altar decorated with a stuffed bear head, Mongolian currency and a bottle of Gordon’s gin. Two dozen believers sat nearby clutching offerings of candy and cookies.
Then Zorigtbaatar led the faithful past a large eagle chained to a post and out into the parking lot toward a mound of horse skulls.
Straining to block out the blaring car horns as they focused on his drumming, they murmured prayers for prosperity and flicked drops of vodka into the air.
The ceremony ended with many of the attendees receiving a head massage from Zorigtbaatar before being sent home with a packet of sugar cubes for good luck. …
This is exactly what Guru Rinpoche took birth to wipe out, and now it looks like someone who knows what they are doing will have to go out to Ulan Bator and clean up the disgusting mess in the spirit world that these clowns are creating, again. Genghis Kahn? Hello? A lot of my cohort actually rode with Genghis Kahn, and are still dealing with the dreadful karma left over from that life. What dreadful karma? How about mental illness? How about not being able to maintain a job or a stable relationship? How about homelessness? How about drug addiction? How about criminal behavior? How about just plain incurable dysfunctitude?
Yes, shamanism works in the sense that it gets some of the results that are sought, but it’s not worth the destruction of your karmic integrity. There is plenty of magic in orthodox Buddhism, in all branches of the Mahayana, and every single stroke of it is orders of magnitude more powerful than this filthy banality that gets going so easily anywhere in Central Asia. All of the same spirit powers have long since been submitted to the Buddhadharma, both by Guru Rinpoche and by Guan Yin directly.
Namu Amida Butsu
Xin Ping
The Dharma is the greatest of all possible gifts. The world is full of people and institutions which are constantly giving us gifts, good and bad, and every single one of those gifts, without exception, tends to bind us further to the terrible wheel of rebirth. Dharma is the only gift that liberates us. The Buddhist Path, when actually trod the way it was spoken by the Buddha, is very simple, very straight, and very short, and anyone can tread it to Enlightenment in this very life. Anyone. The Pure Land Sutras speak of the liberation, in the current life, of people who have committed such offenses as the murder of pure renunciates. The Buddha has this power, and anyone can call on it. Anyone.
On 1 Mar 09, I received the Five Buddhist Lay Precepts at Fo Guang Shan, Honolulu. This ceremony is an empowerment. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy about results backed by the power of a lineage. It is an opportunity to coincide one’s personal will with the unlimited Will of the Buddha for our liberation, and by doing this, one can drop the beginningless ignorance that obstructs every single one of us from Enlightenment from birth. Left to our own devices, this could never happen. Without our personal dedication to it and desire for it, it could not happen. The egg-shell of Avidya must be simultaneously pecked, from the outside by the parent, and from the inside by the chick, and then Avidya (beginningless ignorance) can fall away. And what comes out in that case? Something wet, ugly, and powerless, no? NO! What comes out is the beginningless Light of the Buddha, aka Fo Guang (佛光）. It only may look, to start with, kind of like it might not belong here yet.
In Chinese, I could use three roots － 成功了 － meaning “it has succeeded,” and everyone would know what I was talking about. Some of them might not agree with it, but they would know what I was talking about. They would know the implied war, because they would have at least attempted it in their own case. In English, it becomes a huge hairball from lack of cultural context, and it was for the purpose of cutting through this hairball that I took birth in the West in this life. I have kept pure Precepts for 108 days. That is enough time to forsee that I can keep them indefinitely, and that fact constitutes a huge step forward on my Path. It is not the prized stage of non-retrogression yet; I can still screw up and fall back into another perfectly stupid birth, but it means that if I only do what I am already doing, I can be forseen to attain that stage, and even Enlightenment itself, in this very life. This is not because I am so extraordinary, please. It is because the Buddha-Way is so effective. If I can do it, anyone can do it.
The three obstructions that I personally had to cut through to keep the Lay Precepts were smoking, eating meat, and sexual thoughts. The worst of these, of course, is the latter. Even St. Francis of Assissi, who was God’s Perfect Saint, was bugged by sexual thoughts. Occasionally they still come back, typically at 3:30 AM, and I am blessed to be able to let them go by. At 4:30 AM I rise, take a cold shower, and do walking Buddha Recitation. This goes back to Meher Baba’s instructions for his intimate circle, and I doubt that it will become automatic any time soon. It is a fresh decision every single day, dreaded by every single cell in the carcase, every single day. And all of this needs to be anchored by my attendance at Temple on most Sundays. Otherwise, it would become not orthodox, and that would be dangerous. The detailed metaphysics of this are another subject for another time. Suffice it to say here that I’m not going blind in this. I know exactly what I’m doing and where it leads. And this is pretty arrogant, some of you are thinking, and that alone bodes ill for continued keeping of Precepts. NO, that’s not what this is. In my culture, at this stage, to hide my attainments would be arrogance. What I’m doing is to enact Bodhisattva vows brought forward from previous lives. If it looks arrogant, then so be it. I have no choice in this.
It should be understood that there is no compromise with respect to sexual thoughts. You either live by them implicitly, or you set your entire mind against them irrevocably, seek help in doing that, and live a life of free renunciation. I was a renunciate by previous attainment at birth, and I have returned to that birth-right. I am also 62 years old, which is to say in Hinduism, the mother-culture of Buddhism, I am of the age at which it is permitted to take renunciate vows, called Sanyas in that culture, and to spend the rest of my life in service to my own final renunciation and the teaching and transmission of Dharma to others. This is undoubtedly my choice. The lay vows are the root of the Dharma, and this is also true of Sanatana Dharma, aka Hinduism. If you can keep these, you can keep them all.
May all beings bound to the terrible wheel of rebirth be freed in this very life. And having attained again in this life, may I return again as a fully Enlightened and fully Empowered Boddhisattva, to take my birth in America in every succeeding life, until the Lion’s Roar of Buddhadharma is heard continuously from one end of my beautiful homeland to the other.
By my vow.
GATE, GATE, PARAGATE, PARASAMGATE, BODHI, SVAHA !
Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping
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
American Buddhist home schoolers, your lesson plan grief is over ! Dig H. S. Olcott's Excellent Buddhist Catechism.
