I found this video earlier today of “Zen Fighting” and found it amusing. That is all!

I must add that only 25 minutes seems to be pretty wimpy. These guys need to go to a decent retreat.

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I find it hilarious because I’m sure there are moments during meditation or retreats where everyone feels like this, at least for a moment. Of course, the grass isn’t always greener and there is “only this.” I have to remind myself of this at times, when I start engaging in various kinds of seeking behavior.

Jason also has a good point on his blog post where I found this picture called, “You cannot suck at meditation.” I have met various people over the years who said, “Oh yeah, I tried to meditate but I just suck at it.” I always wonder what they thought successful meditation was like (versus what they were getting). I have a feeling that their experiences were not markedly different than those of mine (or others) but that they expected something different.

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Once again, no photography was allowed (which is a shame, really). The exhibit was a collection of artifacts largely drawn from the Hosokawa family, who were feudal lords throughout the Shogunate (and before) and who survive to this day, its current head having been the Prime Minister of Japan. The artifacts are, for the most part, housed in the Eisei-Bunko Museum in Japan.

While the arrays of armor and swords were impressive, as were the scroll paintings of the Hosokawa lords, I was most impressed by two, smaller, sets of things. One was several paintings by Hakuin, the famous Zen master. Two of special note were a painting of an Enso by him and another of Bodhidharma, who brought Zen to China.

The other set of items of interest were those associated with Miyamoto Musashi. There was a collection of paintings, including a full set of screens, attributed to him. There was also a pair of Bokken carved by him for training in his sword style. These had been kept by a family of (historical) retainers of the Hosokawa family for the last 360 or more years. The final item was a manuscript copy of Musashi’s “Book of Five Rings” from shortly after his death, the original manuscript having been lost. I’ve been keenly interested and drawn to Musashi since my childhood exposure to Kurosawa films and read a (bad) translation of the “Book of Five Rings” while in high school. Interest in him has contributed, in part, to my love of things Japanese and of Zen.

I found the opportunity to see the Hakuin and Musashi works to be a real treat and surprise, since I had no idea that they were included in the exhibit. All in all, it was time well spent.

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I finished David Williams’ The Burning Skies the other night. This is Williams’ follow-up to his first novel, The Mirrored Heavens. Together, they form the first two parts of a trilogy but can be read alone (though I wouldn’t recommend doing so).

The Burning Skies (TBS) picks up four days after the end of The Mirrored Heavens (TMH). The setting for the novels is a century from now, 2110, in a world divided in a cold war between two superpowers, the Americans (the good ol’ USA) and the Eurasions, which are a joint power of the Chinese and the Russians (joined in loathing self-protection). TMH focused on an attack on the space elevator, a “beanstalk,” jointly built by the superpowers by a terrorist organization known as the Autumn Rain. (As an aside, Williams mentions that he started writing the first novel well before 9/11.) TBS deals with the aftereffects of that attack, focusing on a summit between the powers at a neutral (and huge) space platform in orbit and the attempts by the Autumn Rain to disrupt this summit and kill the leaders of the superpowers.

The pace of the novel is staggering. “Frenetic” is the word that I use to describe it and this applied to the first novel as well so I expect it will be a feature of the entire trilogy. The action is non-stop and Williams increases the subjective speed by using no chapters and telling the story entirely in the first person. We only know what they know, as they discover it through their trials and attempts to survive the chaos. The world of TBS is one of orbital directed energy weapons that work at the speed of light. If a weapon has line of site on you (or your cities), it can instantly destroy what it sees. Think of mutual assured destruction cubed with a high tech and nearly invisible Al-Qaeda thrown into the mix trying to disrupt things. The characters are all either soldiers, intelligence operatives, or other down and dirty sorts working for the military, which has effectively taken over the United States in a perpetual paranoid military situation. As one of the characters comments, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand was doing last week and things are so compartmentalized and factionalized within this military apparatus that double-agents, plans within plans, and schemes to take control, either directly in a coup or indirectly through leaping atop the chaos, are the constant order of the day. To add to this, the characters live in a world where memories can be erased, altered, or added and people can be conditioned with preset commands. It isn’t uncommon for characters to be on a mission where the ends are not known to them but appear as memories in their minds as the mission progresses. It is all very paranoia inducing and stressful and each of the characters reflects that.

The characters generally fall into two official types, those of “mechs” and “razors.” Mechs are the hardcore soldiers. They fight in mechanized and powered armor covered in weaponry and meshed to other mechs or their razors. Razors are normally paired with mechs in the field and are something like Gibson’s console cowboys crossed with an intelligence agent. They hack the systems and acquire the data to give their mechs a chance to survive the environment in which they find themselves.

Beyond this, I’m not going to get into the overall plot of the book as it would be fairly hard to do and avoid spoilers.

It was a very quick read and I quite enjoyed the book. There are twists upon twists as things progress at lightning speed within it. The only difficulty I really had with the book is that there are a lot of viewpoint characters. There three primary ones but a number of secondaries as well. With the changes back and forth, especially when the plot points are divergent, it can get a little complex to tell who was where and, wait, is this person a mech or a razor or whose side are they on? If I’d read TBS right after TMH, I would have had less difficulty but it had been a year, at least, and it took a while for me to reassemble some of the character backgrounds. While the book stands alone, reading them together (and in order) would really enhance the experience.

I am very much looking forward to reading the third book when it comes out. Williams has recently submitted the manuscript to his publisher, so I expect it in a year or so. If you wish to see what he’s up to in the meantime, he has a site for the books at autumnrain2110.com and he maintains a blog there as well.

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Towards the end of helping Iranians get access to the Internet, I want to link to some resources, both specific and general.

Here are two ways to set up proxies (one for Windows, one for OS X):

1. How to setup a proxy for Iran citizens (for Windows!)
2. How To Set Up An Anonymous Proxy For Iranians Using Squid on Mac OS X

I would also suggest the easy option of setting up a Tor node. This adds to the overall goodness of the Tor network anyway.

Anonymous, strangely enough, seems to be interested in helping as well (http://iran.whyweprotest.net/). Their site has a nice forum with all sorts of information geared more towards the less skilled (which is really necessary), as well as helping people track what is going on. They are using Tor Hidden Services as well, which is a sort of parasitic Internet running within the Tor network.

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He said:

“I don’t know if Tor is the end-all-be-all, but the basic point would be: browser-based, quasi-auto-configuring anonymous darknets (that set up and tear down without a trace), and look something like other (e.g. HTTP) traffic would be a boon to free speech.

Until the government decided that it was aiding and abetting pedophilia, and banned it. Thankfully the first amendment does not apply there.”

On Twitter, Vinay Gupta, of Hexayurt fame, suggested:

“http://guptaoption.com/cheapid == identity backbone for dealing with things like distributed voting. You want timestamping and good, clear access to the HTTPS certificate chains to be able to encrypt messages to other users using client side certs.”

I had figured that I’d get more commentary than that on something that is very relevant to current news. I mean that this is blue sky territory, people. I know that there are more ideas on enabling openness and freedom through Firefox, Thunderbird, and in the platform than none at all. There have to be ideas out there on how to extend these to enable, for example, anonymous communication, routing around censorship, etc.

Meanwhile, I heard two stories while driving from work in the car on NPR yesterday relating to the use of Twitter, social networking, and the Internet in the current protests. I found the pieces immediately brought to mind the importance of the Internet and enabling openness as a core necessity.

Check out In Iran, A Struggle Over Cyberspace and The Challenges To Turning Off The Internet In Iran. The latter story even has the obligatory Jonathan Zittrain quote.

Update: Now Zittrain has posted in relation to this matter as well. I seem to be timely as this just went up: Why the PC matters.

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Watching the twitterstorm around the current situation with the Iranian elections has been fairly thought provoking. The Iranian protesters are completely shut out of the official media in the form of newspapers, radio, and television in Iran. These are under the thumb of the state at the service of a man that may (or may not) have stolen an election for himself. The only viable option is the use of the net and other direct media communication, such as SMS. Of course, the state can block access to net resources and has turned off the cell networks at various points. Like the situation in China at times, people have found ways around these blockages to continue to report and communicate with each other.

Going back to my day job here at the Mozilla Corporation, I wonder what role, if any, we, the Mozilla community, can play in enabling freedom and openness. We aren’t specifically political as a group in the sense that we have no vested interest in battling specific governments. In fact, it is often in our best interest to be and be seen as neutral in such things. That said, we are also interested in an open Internet and an open Internet, by its very nature, has a political component because it is the antithesis of the state controlled firewalls and mechanisms of control that various authoritarian regimes like to put into place.

To the end of promoting an open Internet, is there more that Mozilla could do with software to help enable that process? Opera Unite has gotten some press during the last few days for facilitating the direct sharing of information over the net, though it reminds me of the defunct AllPeers software that went away last year. I have friends that work on the Tor Project, which has the explicit goal of allowing anonymous communication between people. Tor actually targets itself to helping dissidents, bloggers, and others that need to route around state blocking and tracking.

What kind of tools could Mozilla incorporate into Firefox, for example, with its more than 100 million users, that could help people in the future? I’ve advocated for Mozilla to support the Tor Project before (which didn’t really get beyond getting more Firefox bugs fixed). I’d like to see us help create the next generation of tools or even support and build in the next generation for anonymous communication, networking, encryption and other mechanisms. I’ve pointed out before how painful it is to send and receive encrypted e-mail within Thunderbird (or through webmail services like gmail) even though it has become clear that governments routinely snoop on e-mail (even the American NSA) well beyond what people have suspected.

One of the reasons that I work at MoCo is that we aren’t driven by a profit motive, being owned by a non-profit, and have an idea of social good built into what we do. I’d like to see how that could be explicitly expanded. I’d love to hear suggestions as I have only the most basic of ideas (such as making encryption for communication easier or transparent or adding jabber support into the Mozilla platform) and I’m sure others have far better thought out ideas.

Of course, I could be out to lunch and most people don’t care about such things. I somehow doubt if this is true though.

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I encourage people to watch it. I’ve embedded it below but you can find it here as well. (The link at fora.tv is to a much higher quality streaming version.)

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R and I have been exploring various fitness activities lately. I’ve been on a bit of a fitness kick since my multi-month illness this last Winter. Last week, we joined Berkeley Ironworks. Ironworks is a climbing gym that happens to be about eight blocks from our house. Basically, they have vertical faces to climb, many with a variety of overhangs, and these have various sizes and shapes of faux rock attachments screwed down into them to make a path. They vary from little round nubs, a little large than a quarter, to scallop shapes with curves the size of two fists. A team at the gym changes a selection of the paths on a continuing basis so, over the course of a couple of months, all of the paths change. As an additional benefit, the gym also has free weights, weight machines, various cardio machines, and a selection of ongoing classes, such as yoga. All in all, it is a pretty good deal.

I climbed a tiny amount when I was a child during classes one summer when I was seven but hadn’t gone near it since then. While I’ve enjoyed the gym so far (we’ve been there three times together), I’m not sure if I will ever wind up climbing outdoors though it is always possible once I know what the hell I’m doing. The main reason to do it is that it is good exercise, it is interesting (you have to actually think about what you’re doing), and we do it together since you climb in pairs, with one person belaying for the other to keep you from falling 40 feet to your doom when you (inevitably) slip while climbing. R and I don’t have a lot of activities like this that we can do together and it is easy to say, “Hey, let’s go!” in an evening with it being so close. I’m also planning on taking yoga classes there.

I’ve recently been looking at Kendo since Berkeley Kendo, the local dojo, has a sensei who has been teaching for over 45 years. It is hard to commit to a twice a week activity (which you would need to make real progress) right now with my doctoral program starting up this Fall and my continuing issues with insomnia, which can make my energy levels rather hit or miss on many days. The drop-in nature of climbing at the gym seems a bit better suited for us right now.

On a plus note, with my illness earlier this year and my four times a week aerobic workouts since then, my weight is 38 pounds or so lighter than it was a year ago. I lost 20 pounds while I was sick, and some before and after that as well. My resting heart rate is also about 15 beats a minute better and my blood pressure is significantly better (when I get sleep). All in all, I’m probably the healthiest that I’ve been in ten years outside of the chronic insomnia and left over neurological effects from the illness in the form of minor active muscles tremors at times. You have to look on the bright side of these things and getting sick finally gave me the impetus to start working out and get healthier.

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I encourage people to go take a look at them if they are interested in this sort of thing.

You can see the Other Al doing his presentation on the use of Real Names below (unless you’re reading this through a Planet, which nukes embedded video…):

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In the appalling/weird/Japanese department, this was found on CNET UK today:

“You read correctly. The Odin 99 has landed on the streets of Japan, and a single tap of the phone’s dedicated lotus-leaf button will load a private, customisable, animated altar.

The idea is to allow Buddhists to perform their dedications and rituals conveniently when away from home. You can simulate incense burning, purification rites and play music to help you meditate wherever you happen to be. “

This is a real Dharma Burger.

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Today, the Supreme Court of California decided to upload Proposition 8. Prop 8 amends the constitution of the state to define marriage as being between a man and a woman only, blocking marriage between same sex couples.

Last year, for a brief time, it was possible for same sex couples to be marriage. R and I have two friends, Kirstyn and Lisa, who took advantage of this to marry. This has actually been on our minds recently because they have a much grander wedding planned for this year. They married last year, as far as I understand it, because of the fear that what happened today would come to pass. They wanted to get married while they had the chance. It turns out to be very smart that they did so. All of the same sex couples who did get married are grandfathered by the ruling today, so they won’t be stripped of their civil rights and their legal marriage (though they are never allowed to remarry if they divorce…).

I am disappointed, appalled, and flabbergasted that the state of California, of all states, actually managed to pass this proposition and to have it upheld by the state supreme court. So much for the “loony lefty” image of California.

As far as I am concerned, this is completely a civil rights issue. I don’t buy self-serving and bullshit arguments, usually led by conservative Christian clergy, that marriage has “always” been between a single man and a single woman (history proves that terribly, terribly incorrect, even in Europe). Beyond this, marriage confers significant social and economic benefits that are upheld by state and federal governments. If some cleric doesn’t want to marry a gay couple, he or she is free not to do so. That said, it isn’t the government’s business to discriminate against gays and lesbians simply because of the agenda of Christianity (because, let’s be franks, they aren’t doing it because Jewish or Islamic clerics don’t like it either).

I am 100% committed to equal rights, in all ways, for gays and lesbians. Those rights should include the right to marry and all the privileges that go with it, along with many other rights that straight people enjoy.

This fight isn’t over.

Update: I applaud the clergy and staff at the Pacific School of Religion for being willing to stand up for their beliefs today. (PSR is a member school at GTU, where I am doing my doctorate.)

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The chanting of the Heart Sutra is a core practice in many, if not most, Mahayana schools of Buddhism. The Five Mountain Sangha does it twice a day, morning and evening, for example. Keisho, the Tendai priest who has been running a meditation class in Berkeley, has had us chanting it in Japanese. He pointed out that if you memorize the Heart Sutra in Japanese, you can walk into just about any temple of any sect in Japan and be able to join in as it is the one common denominator amongst all of them.

My friend, Jayarava, posted an essay back in 2007 discussing whether the Heart Sutra was even originally a Sanskrit text. There is evidence, which he discusses, that it is actually a Chinese composition that was then translated into Sanskrit and that it draws on the much larger Perfection of Wisdom (Prajnaparamita) Sutra as a text specifically meant to be chanted. If that is the case, then it has fulfilled its role immeasurably over the centuries, being chanted daily all over Korea, China, and Japan (and now much further).

Here is one version that the Kwan Um School uses in English:

Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva
when practicing deeply the Prajna Paramita
perceives that all five skandhas are empty
and is saved from all suffering and distress.

Shariputra,
form does not differ from emptiness,
emptiness does not differ from form.
That which is form is emptiness,
that which is emptiness form.

The same is true of feelings,
perceptions, impulses, consciousness.

Shariputra,
all dharmas are marked with emptiness;
they do not appear or disappear,
are not tainted or pure,
do not increase or decrease.

Therefore, in emptiness no form, no feelings,
perceptions, impulses, consciousness.

No eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind;
no color, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch,
no object of mind;
no realm of eyes
and so forth until no realm of mind consciousness.

No ignorance and also no extinction of it,
and so forth until no old age and death
and also no extinction of them.

No suffering, no origination,
no stopping, no path, no cognition,
also no attainment with nothing to attain.

The Bodhisattva depends on Prajna Paramita
and the mind is no hindrance;
without any hindrance no fears exist.
Far apart from every perverted view one dwells in Nirvana.

In the three worlds
all Buddhas depend on Prajna Paramita
and attain Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi.

Therefore know that Prajna Paramita
is the great transcendent mantra,
is the great bright mantra,
is the utmost mantra,
is the supreme mantra
which is able to relieve all suffering
and is true, not false.
So proclaim the Prajna Paramita mantra,
proclaim the mantra which says:

gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha
gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha
gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.

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Buddhist Geeks has finally crossed streams into my own past. They’ve posted an interview but not with a Buddhist this time but, instead, a practitioner of Western Magic (I have and always will refuse to use “magick” as a word). The interview is The Great Work of Western Magick (sic) and the interview is with Alan Chapman, whom I don’t know. He is co-running a site, Open Enlightenment.

If you go to the site, Buddhist Geeks has begun adding transcripts so you can either listen to the audio or read a transcript of it. I found the interview a little superficial, with its focus on the Holy Guardian Angel and Crowley, but the Buddhist Geeks admit that this is really outside of their area of knowledge. I would have preferred to see more discussion of Neoplatonism, Theurgy, and contemplative practices, which do exist in Western Magic, if often overshadowed by the robes, wands, and candles bit.

As my longer term friends and readers know, I spent a lot of years involved in this sort of thing before, effectively, walking away to focus on Buddhism and my spirituality there. This was a gradual process that took some time. I did so because I found the Western Mystery Tradition (as it is often called) unfulfilling (spiritually) for myself over time and because, as a completely broken tradition in terms of lineage, people are often just making it up as they go along. This has its positive points in the level of freedom and creativity that people have but the negative is that its practitioners are not, generally, receiving an organized body of knowledge and technique that has been tried, found to work, and then passed on to another generation over hundreds or thousands of years. In my opinion, this leads to a lot of people (not all) spending much of their time recreating the wheel and mired in their own neuroses as they make stuff up to do out of what appeals to them. The exceptions to this would be, not surprisingly, within some of the Christian traditions that preserve aspects of this kind of spiritual work but then one has to be a monotheist (or a theist at all) to get much value from it. The more directly Neoplatonic contemplative work seems much closer to home but, again, people are forced to re-invent it from a body of texts, rather than from personal transmission, mouth to ear.

Also, while the Western Mystery Tradition has something akin to the Bodhisattva ideal with the concept of adepts and their ultimate role, it is very much in the background for a lot of people instead of front and center, as it should be. A lot of the WMT work eventually suffers from the “now what?” phenomena after basic skills are mastered.

There is quite a body of people who have come into Buddhism from this sort of background but, for the most part, they keep fairly quiet about it because of the cultural stigma attached to these sorts of “weird” spiritual practices. It was really only meeting fellow travelers with a similar background that I realized that Buddhism was really for me and, eventually, it allowed me to let that stuff go by the wayside.

In any case, it is interesting to see the Buddhist Geeks branching out but I find their interviews with Buddhists to be much more interesting to me.

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Luckily, I found a great team to work on – I’ll be working in the Developer Division (a first for me), on the team that works on JavaScript but also has a broader charter to help make the open web platform great.

What does this mean? From the outside, some things will certainly change – I’m no longer an appropriate person, for example, to give talks on specifically about IE – but a lot of things won’t. I still expect to attend and participate in a fair number of web conferences, and still plan to speak at a number of them – but not just about IE. I still intend to continue as HTML WG chair, at least for the time being – in fact, as part of focusing more holistically on the web platform as a whole (and defocusing on IE product delivery), I expect I’ll start participating more in a couple of other groups.

I’m not sure what to make of this. I like Chris a lot. He’s a good guy and I’ve known him for about 13 years. Part of me wishes that he’d leave Microsoft but contribute to the open web somewhere else, unencumbered by Microsoft’s issues or agenda and visibly separate from IE and its history. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.

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Fennec has hit a nice milestone today. As Brad mentions on his blog, Alpha 1 is available for Windows Mobile now. This is a big step as we’ve only previously shipped versions for Nokia’s Maemo platform based on Linux. Given the installed based of Windows Mobile for cell phones, the amount of people able to try out Fennec has gone up by a couple of orders of magnitude. Brad gives instructions on his blog for installation but I wanted to include Madhava’s video below demonstrating Fennec on Windows Mobile. I’ve been quite pleased with our switch to a CSS-based user interface in the last two weeks. There is a lot of work ahead but this is a big step.

I also want to call out to Joel Maher and Clint Talbert for their excellent QA work on this Alpha. They’ve been working like crazy on this for a while.

Fennec – alpha 1 for Windows Mobile from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

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Woodenfish English Sutra Translation for free download http://www.woodenfish.org/sutra

For the past three years the Woodenfish Sutra Translation Project has distributed nearly 100,000 English translations of Chinese Buddhist sutras in hand-held size paperback editions for free. To make these translations even more easily accessible, as of 2009 our publications are available for free download at the Woodenfish website.

These publications include:

T 235 * Vajra Prajnaparamita Sutra * 金剛般若波羅蜜經
T 251 * Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra * 般若波羅蜜多心經
T 366 *Amitabha Sutra * 阿彌陀經
T 412 * Sutra on the Past Vows of Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva * 地藏菩薩本願經
T 685 * Yulan Bowl Sutra * 盂蘭盆經
T 684 * Sutra on the Difficulty of Repaying the Kindness of Parents * 父母恩難報經
T 2887 * Sutra on the Profound Kindness of Parents * 父母恩重經
—- * Sutra on the Difficulty of Repaying the Profound Kindness of Parents * 父母恩重難報經
T 1670 * Nagasena Bhiksu Sutra * 那先比丘經
* Nagasena Bhiksu Sutra * – endnotes 那先比丘經註解

This series of translations include:

• Facing bilingual Chinese-English pages to encourage language training
• Introduction to the history of the particular sutra
• Glossary of terms found within the sutra
• Catalogue of other English translations of the same sutra

The Woodenfish Sutra Translation Project works in collaboration with Buddha’s Light Publishing to make these publications available to the public at no cost. Your comments on the project or the contribution of your translation work will be appreciated.

Please visit www.woodenfish.org click on “sutra translation” for more information pertaining to this translation project.

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With the move top openbuddha.com, I’m changed the name and byline of the blog. The name is now, obviously, “Open Buddha,” and my byline is “Open Source Buddhism” for it.

That begs the obvious question: What the hell is open source Buddhism?

For some people, it seems like sticking the head of a horse on a cow or some other horrid metaphor. “Open Source” as a term is generally applied to software. Specifically, it is applied to the software that is defined in such a way that its source code (the computer source of the eventual program) is available to anyone and that people interested in it can contribute to the source code, improving it. Popular examples of this are the Linux operating system, the Apache web server (that operates the majority of web sites), and Firefox (which I work on for a living). Open Source software has licenses that enshrine its openness by explicitly requiring this access to source code and allowing people to take the code and fork it, creating an alternate version, if they so desire.

This is the more specific version of what open source is when it comes to software. It also, especially today, has connotations of “crowdsourcing” and open contributions in general through the “open content” movement. Look to the example of Wikipedia for a non-software example of open source principles. (Of note, as well, is that the software that Wikipedia runs upon is also an open source wiki program.)

How does this apply to Buddhism? In one sense, not directly at all. Buddhism is both an individual and group endeavor, especially for Mahayana Buddhists. While there is the group aspect of the Sangha, of fellow Buddhists, much of Buddhism is focused through the work of the individual to the end of the enlightenment of that individual and, eventually, of all sentient beings. For those of us who meditate, at the end of all things, we are sitting with ourselves (or lack of self) on the cushion.

How it does apply is when it comes to philosophies, texts, techniques, or approaches to Buddhism. We live in a potential Golden Age (or perhaps a Silver Age) of Buddhism. While much of the world cares even less about spiritual matters than at any point in history, for those of us who practice, there has never before been a time where it was easily possible for every form of Buddhism to encounter each other. In Buddhist history, the transmission of Buddhism to new cultures or societies has often passed through a few key individuals who had been exposed to only specific traditions of practice, techniques, or texts. When Saicho and Kukai came back to Japan from China, they brought Buddhist texts and objects with them, along with what they had learned during their training in China, for example. The Chinese, in term, had received kind of a grab bag of Buddhism over the years as Buddhist missionaries with texts arrived from India. Much of these came without overall organization, which forced various great Buddhist figures to make sense of what came to them (often very creative and inspired sense!).

As we exist now, we can see what of these traditions survives to this day in China, Tibet, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Burma, and other nations. We can also see the preserved texts and stories of earlier traditions that are no longer practiced. Never before has it been possible (or even common) for a Pure Land Buddhist, a Chan practitioner, a Tibetan Lama, and a Theravadan monk to be in the same room together or to be directly exposed to the teachings of these disparate traditions that each claim to be Buddhism.

When I think of “Open Source Buddhism,” I think of the potential for Buddhism and the overall goal of freeing people from suffering that this exposure represents. To this we can add what philosophies and science that have developed in the last few centuries. There are Zen Buddhists out there experimenting with Theravadan Vipassana techniques focusing on the Jhana states. There are people, like Shinzen Young, who are Vipassana teachers but who were trained as Shingon priests in Japan’s own version of Tantric Buddhism. While we should be extremely cautious and not simply throw everything in a blender, we have an opportunity to look at the entire body of Buddhist teachings and schools, compare and contrast them with one another, and potentially come up with newer forms of Buddhism. This is not a weakness as long as it is done responsibly. This is the potential of Open Source Buddhism. Rather than being confined to the strictures of only a single school with its specifically favored sutras and techniques, we have a rich trove to draw upon. All that it takes is for us to do it and to share what we find, discussing what works, what doesn’t work, what no longer makes sense, and what really does make sense in our quest to reduce suffering and free all sentient beings.

What could be a more exciting endeavor for a Buddhist? While some may wish to follow a tradition and school in a strict manner, specifically as it has been handed down within that school, there is a place for a potentially wider (if more difficult) scope of study and practice. This is a possibly controversial stance but one that reflects an implicit reality that already exists. I know Vajrayana practitioners that engage in Theravadan practices (and vice versa). People go from school to school, teacher to teacher, not simply because they are dilettantes but because they are trying to understand their path and the possibilities. I believe that this exploration, when done thoughtfully and carefully, should be encouraged and communicated. As fellow travelers in the sangha, we can help each other along the way by sharing what we have learned with each other, regardless of the school of origin of the knowledge. I believe that this embodies the principles of openness of the open source world.

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That being said, people really do need to calm down. Even if the worst case scenarios are true, turning to panic isn’t going to save anyone. Even at its worst, the Spanish Flu of 1918 was only caught by slightly more than a quarter of the population. Of that group, the vast VAST majority survived it fine.

While this flu could be milder or could be worse, we definitely have developed better medical techniques for dealing with epidemics during the last 90 years.

People should take wise precautions and be ready to treat people in their families if they become sick and to stay home from work if necessary.

If we’re lucky, this will die out on its own. More likely, we’ll have a nasty flu go around but it may not turn as fatal as it has been in Mexico. If we have a lull until Fall, as happened in the Spanish Flu, and a vaccine becomes available, I would urge people to consider getting vaccinated when it is possible.

I’ve only had the flu once in my life so it is hard to know what to make of this personally.

Vinay Gupta has also suggested the Flu Code for at-risk areas as a guideline for action:

Flu Code 0.1Beta English – A Public Service from The Institute for Collapsonomics.

1) If I have any signs of possible flu infection I will stay at home.

2) I will stay away from crowds whenever possible and always wear a mask while in public places.

3) I will cleanse my hands at the doorway when I arrive at my destination.

4) I will encourage other people to follow these rules to protect us all.

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I’ll be redirecting all traffic to arcanology.com to openbuddha.com in an affort to not entirely break my existing google rank and trackbacks.

As a side benefit, my e-mail is now on openbuddha.com instead of arcanology.com (with the same username). I’ll be notifying people of the change but I am forwarding all of my e-mail to the site address.

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These days, as people no doubt notice, I tend to blog about Buddhism, my future academic work (…in Buddhism), or geek stuff such as tech or science fiction.

I’ve owned openbuddha.* (com, net, org) for a while and haven’t been using it since my failed attempts to start a web community on the site. I also own onesangha.org, which is the failed attempt to start a group blog (I can’t even get my own teacher to write posts for it) with four or more other people. Out of these various other domains, only the recent Zen Community site is really doing well and it really does so simply by the fact that 25 bloggers are cycling posts through it.

Given my larger focus on Buddhism and the fact that it will continue while I do my doctoral work, I am going to move my blog over to OpenBuddha.com. I’ll have to figure out how to do the redirection of my feeds so those subscribed to the arcanology.com feeds don’t have their feeds broken. Assuming that I can do this, it should be pretty transparent as a move. I expect to get the new site up in the next week, assuming that I have time.

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As some people may remember, I started up an aggregation blog (also called a “planet” within the open source world) of various Zen and Zen-related blogs a short while ago. This is called “The Zen Community” and is up at http://community.zen-sangha.org.

Currently, 25 blogs are syndicated on the site (including the Buddhism posts from this blog). I’d like to have more of a cross section of the Zen community. Most of the current set came when I promoted the blog on Zen Forum International, a new online Zen forum, or when I wrote to the blog authors directly. I’m sure that there are a lot more out there that would be an excellent addition to the site.

I’d like people to leave comments with suggested sites to add or to e-mail me as ‘albill@gmail.com” (if you’d prefer).

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It discusses the Eastern Christian churches, most of which are fairly unknown to modern Christians (to my dismay given their tenacity in non-European regions). I’ve been reading a little lately on the Japanese Christians of a few hundred years ago (who have interested me ever since I say how they hid their Christian items by making them look Buddhist).

One little bit from the article was particularly interesting. I’d love to see an academic source that backed this up as it was news to me. I expect that is correct since the author is a professor at Penn State but I’ve never heard of it before:

“One story in particular suggests an almost shocking degree of collaboration between the faiths. In 782, the Indian Buddhist missionary Prajna arrived in Chang’an, bearing rich treasures of sutras and other scriptures. Unfortunately, these were written in Indian languages. He consulted the local Nestorian bishop, Adam, who had already translated parts of the Bible into Chinese. Together, Buddhist and Christian scholars worked amiably together for some years to translate seven copious volumes of Buddhist wisdom. Probably, Adam did this as much from intellectual curiosity as from ecumenical good will, and we can only guess about the conversations that would have ensued: Do you really care more about relieving suffering than atoning for sin? And your monks meditate like ours do?

These efforts bore fruit far beyond China. Other residents of Chang’an at this very time included Japanese monks, who took these very translations back with them to their homeland.”

Food for thought, at the very least. The article also mentions the “Jesus Sutras” found in the caves at Dunhuang. I read a copy of these a few years back and found them interesting. As someone who was a childhood Christian and is a student of history and religion, I always find this kind of potential interplay fascinating.

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My post on whether Vajrayana can survive seems to have gotten more attention than many recent posts. I should poke the anthill more often, it seems.

A question related to my last post is “what is a successful model for Buddhism in the West?” By this, I mean organizational model. Now, certain die-hard purists will point out that the Buddha personally established a model, that of the monastic sangha that begs for alms and receives donations of land or other property. My reply to that is that many forms of Buddhism have not actually followed that model, either altering it somewhat (such as the spread of Buddhism in China and Korea) or much more severely, such as the Buddhism of Japan, where Vinaya-based monasticism really doesn’t even exist and hasn’t for quite a while.

It has been noted by religious scholars that many religious groups in America undergo an organizational shift that renders them somewhat similar to the congregational model used by Protestant Christianity. (I’m sure there is a term for this but I don’t have the sources handy for this.) This is done as either a conscious or unconscious means of cultural assimilation to the model that is familiar to most of us here in the United States. I’m not sure if it happens as much in Europe but I would expect that it does. This process leads to a “church” model in which one has a congregation led by one or more religious specialists, often called “ministers” if not “priests.” I believe that, for example, the Jodo Shinshu sect chose this model for the Buddhist Churches of America partially because of concerns about seeming too foreign as a largely immigrant Japanese church, especially around World War II when there was much anti-Japanese animosity. (I’m sure one or two of my blog readers will correct me if I’m grossly wrong.)

There is nothing inherently wrong or incorrect about this church model, so please don’t read this as a criticism of it. It is a response to the question of how to organize. You see this in other, non-Buddhist, religious traditions as well. I’ve seen a number of Neopagan organizations set themselves up as churches led by a priest or a priestess, having a board of directors, etc. It seems to happen as a default choice for some when things grow to the point of requiring organization. Even if we call the churches, “Dharma Centers,” they are still effectively following the same model and may be carrying hidden assumptions on the part of members as they function within the structure.

(As an aside, the matter of people going to Buddhist priests or monks for counseling and on certain life issues has been commented on as a phenomena that happens here that does not necessarily occur elsewhere. People expect priests to minister to a group and to act as guides because of historical expectations from Christianity, I feel.)

There are other models though. If nothing else, there is the “living room” model of fellow travelers meeting together in each others’ homes. There is the traditional Buddhist model of setting up a monastery with celibate monastics (if funds can be raised and maintained). There is the temple model, much like a parish church, with hereditary priests overseen by a larger organization for a sect.

I’m not sure which of these, if any, is the best model in the longer term. Natural selection will play a role as we see what survives over time but as someone who is a priest within a larger organization, how we organize and what the role or roles of a priest may be (and of non-priests, for that matter) is something that I’ve been thinking about off and on.

Also, reading books like “Shoes Outside the Door” about the crisis at the San Francisco Zen Center reminds me that these questions are very important, as is the relationship between various roles in an organization and the expectations people have for their teachers or priests. (For those that haven’t read the book, it deals with a specific sexual scandal, the issues around it, and how the community did and did not address it before and after it became a crisis. It has been required reading within my teacher’s organization in the past.)

I’m curious as to what models people reading this are working within, if they are Buddhists. What do you think will work best and why? How do you see see yourselves organizing to practice the Dharma? How do you want to pass it to the next generation?

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This post is based around a loaded question, “Can the Vajrayana survive?”. It invites polemic debate to even ask this question and I’m sure a number of friends of mine have the immediate answer, as Vajrayana practitioners, of “Of course it can!!” It does require some consideration though.

I’m using “Vajrayana” in a loose sense in that I am including all forms of Esoteric or, if you prefer, Tantric, Buddhism. This is the Buddhism that developed rather late in India, following on the development of Mahayana forms of Buddhism, and that had its development there ended, rather abruptly, with the conquest of Northern India by Muslim armies. (These armies had an unfortunate tendency to burn down monasteries or monastic colleges and slaughter the monks residing within them, making it difficult to practice.) Most people are familiar with its Tibetan forms, which actually go rather wider than Tibet into a number of Himalayan kingdoms, such as Nepal, Mustang, or Bhutan. It was imported in China during the T’ang Dynasty and went from there to Korea and Japan. It died out as a separate school in China after the T’ang and it is no longer practiced as a separate school in Korea, though elements of it survive. Within Japan, it survives to this day as practiced by the Shingon and Tendai schools, though the latter maintains non-esoteric practices as well. (And one must not forget the Mongolians, whom the Tibetans converted to their form of Buddhism and where it is practiced to this day…)

Since the Tibetan Diaspora (which is a nice way of saying “Since the Tibetans, especially monks, fled for their freedom and their lives from the Chinese in 1959″), it has been taught in the West in the Tibetan form. Japanese immigrants brought Shingon and Tendai to Hawaii and Shingon to the continental United States during the last 100 years as well. For some reason, until the 1990s, there was no official Tendai organized mission outside of Hawaii. Because of either the lack of presence or inclination within the existing presence, there has been almost no teaching of Shingon or Tendai on the mainland and most people are quite unaware of their existence even though both are important historical traditions in Japan. Good luck finding a book on either of these, for example.

All of this history means that if you encounter any form of Vajrayana in the United States and it isn’t part of your family history, you are generally encountering Tibetan Vajrayana. Otherwise, most convert Buddhists encounter Zen or one of the Theravadan-derived Vipassana schools. Both of these latter are well established in the West now. You can’t throw a rock in a major city on either coast, it seems, without hitting a Zendo. Tibetan Vajrayana isn’t doing too badly either, with Dharma Centers in many cities. There is one key difference though: Most Zen centers are run by American teachers who were, in turn, taught by other Americans. I can name a few that are run by Japanese teachers and there have been, quite recently, Korean and Chinese teachers here, but these are the exception, rather than the rule. Tibetan Buddhist centers, on the other hand, are generally run under the guidance of a Tibetan teacher. In most instances, that teacher doesn’t actually live at the center either but lives in India and visits periodically. When they do come, they teacher for a few weeks or months and then move on to another center and do the same before eventually returning to their home overseas.

There are many reasons why this is the case but I want to focus on one, which applies much more broadly than to just Tibetan Vajrayana. That is the level of complexity associated with Vajrayana. While Zen isn’t as simple as many make it out to be (nor are any of the traditions, I assume), Vajrayana has a high degree of complexity built into it. It has the multitudes of actual tantras, commentaries on tantras, mandalas, deities, and practices associated with all of these. It also has a more than thousand year history of elaboration by its practitioners who continued to develop what they had been taught in the nations where it has been practiced. An encyclopedic level of knowledge would be necessary to master just the intellectual knowledge. Because of this, in the Tibetan tradition, you have monks who go to monastic colleges from their childhoods and follow up this training with a three year retreat just to be in the position of teaching the tradition. All of this comes from an era with many less distractions than our own as well (no television, newspapers, quick communication or movement of people).

Now, it can be argued (and has been) that one doesn’t have to master all of this material in order to practice. That is entirely true. People generally focus on a specific tradition and a specific subset of practices. It is quite possible to practice Vajrayana without knowing the entirety of the tradition. When this becomes an issue is when the tradition needs to be passed on to another generation (and the one after that and so on). It needs people that are fully trained in the tradition in order to do so. The question then arises, especially here in the West, of who is going through this training and who is going to do this teaching. Outside of other considerations, this is probably why there are so few fully empowered Western teachers of the Vajrayana. Most Buddhist practitioners are householders, with careers, families, and lives full of distractions. The Buddhist Geeks podcast had an interview recently with Sarah Harding, a lama and teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, called “The Traditional 3-Year Retreat: Intensive Training for a Nonexistent Job“. Harding, who underwent the first three year retreat done in the West in the 70’s, talks about this issue in passing. She wonders how many people are really able to engage in this sort of time away from family and jobs necessary to be able to teach and where the resources come from to do so. Obviously, there are a few that have done it but the numbers are small compared to the number of practitioners.

I was reminded of this during Rev. Keisho’s class last week on meditation within Tendai. During discussion, he mentioned that while Tendai priests are trained in four core practices as part of the training to become a priest, almost no one engages in all four once the retreat is over. Since the goma (fire) ceremony contains the first practice and is in demand by the community, most just do the goma. The two other practices, which are associated with the two primary mandalas used within Tendai and Shingon, are not regularly practiced after training. He also mentioned that while there used to be 18 different schools of practice in Tendai, it is now down to three. Out of those three, almost everyone practices just one (Homan Ryu). He mentioned that the esoteric tradition was so complex that there are very few individuals, if anyone, these days who have mastered the entire tradition. There is just too much there, even if one is raised in the tradition within a priestly family. This brought to mind the same complexities within the Tibetan tradition.

I then look around and think about how many centers there are for non-esoteric schools of Buddhism and how, on one level, they are so much more successful in the West in creating the basis for continuing practice. Western teachers who have learned the Dharma, like Aitken Roshi mentioned in my previous post, who have then taught others, who have become teachers and taught others, etc. The same goes for the Vipassana centers. When I look at this, I wonder what Buddhism will look like in 100 years in the United States, at least amongst those of us who weren’t born to it. Will there be widespread Tibetan temples, Shingon temples, or Tendai temples in 100 years? I assume that they will survive but I do wonder if the overall complexity of esoteric Buddhism is going to be its downfall in this busy (possibly degenerate) age with all of its distractions. I am fairly confident that Buddhism will survive within the Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and other Asian American communities (just as it has done for over 100 years for many of them). I am also confident that the traditions of practice that have “jumped the gap”, so to speak, and have a strong collection of non-Asian Western masters will be present and doing well. (This is not addressing the complexities of the Asian-American experience of Buddhism, I realize.)

One of my frustrations when I was within the Tibetan Vajrayana community was around these issues, though not focused on the future. It was so very difficult to find teachers and a community with a teacher as a new Buddhist that, eventually, I wound up gravitating to other schools where I could actually work one on one with a teacher, especially during retreats. These teachers have wound up being Americans, like myself, as well. Looking at it in retrospect, I wonder if my experience is really that different than so many other people. It must be common to encounter these barriers and, even when a person can get past them, very few Americans, for example, are going to be in a position to teach the next generation. It just doesn’t scale well and this leads to the question of whether the Vajrayana will survive or not.

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