Approaching Aro

Finding Our Sea-Legs

dc — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 02:02:44 +0000

Will Buckingham writes thinkBuddha, my favorite blog. Finding Our Sea-Legs: Ethics, Experience and the Ocean of Stories is his first book of “Buddhish” ethical philosophy. It is a remarkable and important work.

The book is unconventional in form: written in colloquial English with little jargon. It tells many stories: about talking fish, million-year-old princesses, and the need to lower your mast as you near the horizon, lest your boat get stuck between the sky and the sea.

Finding our Sea-Legs is also unconventional in content. It is one of very few books about a key problem in contemporary philosophy: the tension between the urgency of ethics and their inherent ambiguity.

Buckingham is, approximately, a Buddhist, and I find the book infused with Buddhist sensibility. However, it rarely makes any explicit reference to Buddhism. Its reference point is 20^th Century Continental philosophy, although it does not require previous knowledge of that tradition. (Buckingham mainly rejects its conclusions, which makes me wonder why he discusses it at all. Perhaps his editors required him to sound a bit like a conventional philosopher.)

This is an unconventional review. Rather than discussing the book in its own, Western philosophical terms, I explain why I think it is important in Buddhist terms. To do that, I will draw out what I imagine are its “hidden” Buddhist themes. (This may misrepresent the author’s intent.)

The Tibetan Book of the Undead

dc — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 02:51:44 +0000

Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)

Vetalas: what you need to know

The Sanskrit word vetala is often translated “vampire” or “zombie,” but neither is perfectly accurate. Strictly, a vetala is an immaterial spirit that enters a corpse and animates it. The undead walking corpse is then also called a vetala; and this is the common meaning of the word.

There are “wild” and “created” vetalas. Bodiless vetala spirits hang around charnel grounds, hoping to find suitable corpses to inhabit. If a body is dumped without proper precautionary rituals, it is vulnerable. These “wild” vetalas prey on the living. The translation “vampire” is most appropriate for wild vetalas. Like Western vampires, they can fly in the form of huge bats. Like Western vampires, they may have courtly manners, and uncanny insight into human motivation.

A Buddhist necromancer can raise the dead by magically binding a disembodied spirit and forcing it into a vacant corpse. It is thereby subordinated to the necromancer’s will, and serves as a slave. For such “created” vetalas, the translation “zombie” is more accurate. In fact, the term “zombie” originally designates a strikingly similar practice in Haitian voodoo.

Vetalas were hugely important in the practice of early Buddhist Tantra in India. The Tantric scriptures contain extensive descriptions of the rites needed to raise vetalas, and the purposes to which they can be put. Slaves are useful; a supernatural slave is especially useful, particularly when you need to accomplish supernatural tasks. On the other hand, raising a vetala is always dangerous: if it escapes your control, it will kill you, and probably many other people, until someone more competent subdues it.

No cosmic justice

dc — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 22:25:09 +0000

Dzogchen explicitly rejects the Law of Karma. This is the main reason Dzogchen is condemned by some Buddhists. Even for Westerners, who have no cultural belief in karma, it can be difficult to let go of hope for cosmic fairness. However, genuine ethical action is impossible if we are motivated by reward and punishment.

Three percent of the Dharma

dc — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:14:38 +0000

Padmasambhava

I have been practicing Buddhist meditation, more or less half-assedly, for upwards of twenty-five years. Recently it occurred to me that this is one percent of the history of Buddhism, since Shakyamuni Buddha is supposed to have lived about 2500 years ago.

That was a shock. Buddhism seems impossibly ancient, and for my little piece of it to have been a full percent seems far too much. But if we are lucky, and last for what counts now as a normal life-span, we will see more than three percent of the history of Buddha-Dharma. That is one thirtieth.

In the first page of this section, I suggested that we are responsible to Buddhism. Here I would like to take a deeper cut. We are not only responsible to Buddhism; we are responsible for Buddhism. We are responsible for the portion of Buddhism that occurs during our lives—three percent of it. And we are responsible for a particularly critical three percent, in which Buddhism faces both extraordinary dangers and extraordinary opportunities. Buddhism could easily become effectively extinct within this century. But Buddhism also has radical transformational potential for Western society.

Yes

dc — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 13:44:02 +0000

The endangered but stealthy Himalayan snow leopard.
Image courtesy Wikipedia

Fundamentalism and consumerism appear to be polar opposites—but both are right. Both are also wrong—but the truth is not halfway between.

Fundamentalism claims to know the ultimate Truths of meaningfulness. It says ultimate purpose lives somewhere else—with God, the sacred, or in the future. The ordinary world has no real value.

Consumerism says nothing is sacred. There are no ultimate meanings. Nothing has a purpose beyond the ordinary obvious. The best we can do in life is to gobble as many goodies as we can—material things, and also personal gratifications like fame, relationships, and experiences.

We are torn between these approaches, because each explains some aspects of our experience, while clashing with others. Most religions try to find a mid-point between these extremes—but that does not work.

Buddhism—in some forms, at least—is a religion of methods, not Truths. It is immune to consumerism’s skeptical critique, because it has no ultimate claims to defend. The New Age, which also defends no ultimate truths, does that by abandoning reality altogether. Buddhism is realistic, and recognizes pragmatic, non-ultimate truths.

The Buddhist understanding of the non-duality of form and emptiness shows clearly what is right and wrong about both fundamentalism and consumerism.

Meaning, like everything, has inseparable aspects of emptiness and form. Meaninglessness and meaningfulness are entwined in an endless dance.

A Dzogchen-shaped hole in the culture

dc — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 08:37:13 +0000

I want a God / That stays dead / Not plays dead

God is undead

It was not Nietzsche who killed God.

He was severely bruised by Copernicus, who found that the earth revolves around the sun, and so threw God out of heaven. He was emasculated by Darwin, who found that humans evolved from apes by accident, and so made the Creator redundant. He was blinded by Heisenberg, who found that the universe is inherently random, so even God could not see the future.

But it was consumerism that killed God. God’s job, before he died, was to provide form. If you want form, consumerism has a better product: 628 channels of high-definition digital entertainment; 13 million knick-knacks you can buy on e-Bay; 373 squintillion web pages full of dubious factoids. God fed on our desire for form; when we switched to mass entertainment, he finally died of starvation and neglect.

God’s carcass walks. Fundamentalism is driven by fear of emptiness. That uncanny fear artificially animates the mindless zombie. His colossal corpse, a blind idiot god, staggers across the earth, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.

Buddhism, by celebrating the inseparability of form and emptiness, can put the corpse of God to rest, and can dissolve the twin demons of fundamentalism and consumerism into thin air.

Stealth Dharma

dc — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 18:25:32 +0000

“Stealth Dharma,” or “stealth Buddhism,” means Buddhists teaching aspects of Buddhism to non-Buddhists, without the word “Buddhism,” without Buddhist jargon, and without presenting the entire Buddhist framework.

Why would anyone do that?

Concepts and methods from Buddhism are escaping into the “thought soup” of our global culture. Their origin in Buddhism is being forgotten. Millions of non-Buddhists now practice Buddhist meditation techniques. Non-Buddhist teachers, like Eckhart Tolle, teach fragmented Buddhist concepts to non-Buddhist students. Meanwhile, the word “Buddhism” is becoming unattractive for some, having been presented as sugary, weak, hypocritical, and unrealistic.

As Buddhists, we might prefer that everyone learn Buddhism as a complete system. And, of course, Buddhist teachers will continue to teach it that way. But, we also need to face facts. In a consumerist age, fewer and fewer people are willing to accept any system whole. Most would rather choose and combine a personal mixture of bits from here and there. We cannot stop this “shattering” of Buddhism.

What we can do is influence the process. We can actively work to introduce parts of Buddhism we consider essential to general consciousness. That may be the best hope for preserving them, if Buddhism as a system faces extinction. Distasteful as it may seem, we might be more useful in the long run by actively helping to make fragments of Buddhism available to potentially billions of non-Buddhists, than by saving Buddhism intact for perhaps only a few million.

Consumerism, Fundamentalism, and Buddhism

dc — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:06:33 +0000

Tyrannosaurus rex skull; image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

We live in a time in which the main approaches to life are empty consumerism and militant fundamentalism. These are mirror images of each other. Most people recognize, dimly at least, that neither is workable. However, alternatives are scarce. The middle position has become increasingly untenable.

Every religion faces extinction at the hands of the global consumer culture. Every religion has to figure out how to respond to the accelerating pull toward the opposing poles of fundamentalism and consumerism. This page explains three common survival strategies, and why I think they will fail—for Buddhism, at least. On the next page, I suggest that Buddhism can adopt an alternative approach—one that sidesteps these problems—one that is not available to other religions.

Buddhism shattered

dc — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 17:21:08 +0000

Here are three facts about Eckhart Tolle that, together, might shock you:

What he teaches is Buddhism, more than anything else; both Buddhist view and Buddhist meditation.
He does not call it Buddhism, and he mashes it up with bits of various other religions.
His books have sold more than ten million copies in the past few years. That is probably more than all explicitly Buddhist books (in Western languages) combined.

By that measure, Tolle by himself is more successful, or appealing, than all of Buddhism. Shouldn’t that bother us?

Thought soup

dc — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:56:21 +0000

In Buddhist meditation, we discover that we do not originate our own thoughts. In meditation, we allow thoughts to come and go under their own power. They do that without our making them happen. We find that they come from empty space and return to emptiness. There is nothing personal about thoughts, when we experience them without involvement.

I find this discovery compatible with a pretty recent Western perspective: that almost all of our thoughts are taken over from our culture. Our wording may be a bit different, but almost everything we think simply repeats ideas we have heard or read or heard on TV. It is unusual and difficult to think an original thought.

We swim in a sea, or soup, of talk. These are the messages we receive from the media, and also the ways our friends explain themselves and their lives. Our thoughts mainly recycle this talk, and we propagate it when we talk ourselves.